IV. DIDEROT AND THE FRENCH TRANSITION…

IV. DIDEROT AND THE FRENCH TRANSITION

THE POSITION OF DIDEROT—DIFFICULT TO AUTHENTICATE—BUT HARDLY TO BE EXAGGERATED. HIS IMPRESSIONISM—THE RICHARDSON ÉLOGE—THE ‘REFLECTIONS ON TERENCE’—THE REVIEW OF THE ‘LETTRES D’AMABED’—THE EXAMINATION OF SENECA—THE QUALITY AND EMINENCE OF HIS CRITICAL POSITION— ROUSSEAU REVISITED—MADAME DE STAEL— HER CRITICAL POSITION—AND WORK— THE ‘LETTRES SUR ROUSSEAU’—THE ‘ESSAI SUR LES FICTIONS’— THE ‘DE LA LITTÉRATURE’—THE ‘DE L’ALLEMAGNE’— HER CRITICAL ACHIEVEMENT: IMPUTED—AND ACTUAL— CHATEAUBRIAND: HIS DIFFICULTIES—HIS CRITICISM— INDIRECT—AND DIRECT—THE ‘GÉNIE DU CHRISTIANISME’— ITS SATURATION WITH LITERARY CRITICISM—SURVEY AND EXAMPLES— SINGLE POINTS OF EXCELLENCE—AND GENERAL IMPORTANCE— JOUBERT: HIS REPUTATION—HIS LITERARY αὐτάρκεια— THE LAW OF POETRY—MORE ON THAT SUJECT— ON STYLE— MISCELLANEOUS CRITICISMS— HIS INDIVIDUAL JUDGMENTS MORE DUBIOUS— THE REASON FOR THIS—ADDITIONAL ILLUSTRATIONS— GENERAL REMARKS—THE OTHER ‘EMPIRE CRITICS’— FONTANES—GEOFFROY—DUSSAULT—HOFFMAN, GARAT, ETC.— GINGUENÉ—M.J. CHÉNIER—LEMERCIER—FELETZ— COUSIN—VILLEMAIN—HIS CLAIMS— DEDUCTIONS TO BE MADE FROM THEM—BEYLE— RACINE ET SHAKESPEARE—HIS ATTITUDE HERE— AND ELSEWHERE—NODIER.

[Sidenote: The position of Diderot.]

One of those judgments of the Common Sense which, while sometimes finding it necessary to contest or correct them, we have also found in the main not untrustworthy, has long ago decided that for good or for ill, the weakening of the neo-classic tradition in its great stronghold, France, is due originally to Denis Diderot more than to any one else— nay, that the Germans themselves owe him a heavy quit-rent. With this decision we shall have no quarrel here; on the contrary, a long familiarity with the writings[161] of this voluminous and disorderly genius, has made the present writer one of its very strongest supporters. There is not the slightest need to engage either in controversy or in compromise with others, or to hark back upon our own demonstrations that in Fontenelle, in La Motte, and elsewhere, there are seeds and germs of a critical calculus very different from Boileau’s. We may at this stage take these things for granted. Far be it from us to say that “there’s nothing new or true, and it doesn’t matter.” But we may very modestly, but very unflinchingly say that there is nothing wholly new or old; that there are at least very few things wholly true or false; and that it matters very much that it should be so.

[Sidenote: Difficult to authenticate.]

Therefore, or however (for either link of the argument would be defensible) it is reasonable or convenient to start this chapter with Diderot. Yet he can hardly have, in mere space, a treatment proportionate—as proportion has been in other cases observed—to his importance. It is an importance rather of attitude and suggestion than of explicit pronouncement; and the explicit pronouncements are so many, and so various, that to summarise and discuss them would require far more than the utmost room that we have given to our very greatest authorities. Moreover, that inadequate universality, that flawed all-round-ness, which every competent critic has noticed in Diderot, would make wildernesses of proviso and commentary necessary. It is not quite safe to leave unread a single page of the twenty big octavos of his works, in arriving at an independent estimate of his critical, as of his general quality: and those who do not care to undertake so considerable an investigation, must take the word of those who have undertaken it, to some extent on trust. Further, though Diderot is by no means a mere general aesthetician—though his very critical value consists largely in the fact that he flies upon the corporal work of art like a vulture—yet his utterances in different arts concern and condition one another after a fashion, of which, before his time, there was hardly any example. We cannot possibly here bestow space on the Paradoxe sur le Comédien and the vast and tempting assemblage of the Salons. Yet the person who attempts to examine Diderot’s purely literary pronouncements without examining these, will do so at his peril certainly, and almost certainly to his damage. Le Neveu de Rameau is imperative: nay, the much-abused Jacques le Fataliste itself must not be neglected.[162]

[Sidenote: But hardly to be exaggerated. His Impressionism.]

Diderot is the first considerable critic—it would hardly be too much to say the first critic—known to history who submits himself to any, to every work of art which attracts his attention, as if he were a “sensitised” plate, animated, conscious, possessing powers of development and variation, but absolutely faithful to the impression produced. To say that he has no theories may seem to those who know him a little, but only a little, the very reverse of the truth: for from some points of view he is certainly a machine à théories as much as Piron was a machine à saillies. But then the theory is never a theory precedent; it never (or so seldom as to require no correction of these general statements) governs, still less originates, his impression; it follows the impression itself and is based thereon. Not seldom the substructure, if not even the foundation, of the impression itself may seem to us quite disproportionate to the originating work of art—be it book, or play, or picture; but that is not the point. Constantly, the enthusiasm which had made Diderot give himself up to the fascination of his new subject may seem to lead him into all sorts of extravagances. The best known and perhaps the best example of these extravagances, the almost famous éloge of Richardson, has been drawn

upon by nearly everybody who has written on Diderot, and by most who have written on Richardson, for examples.

[Sidenote: The Richardson éloge.]

This marvellous dithyramb[163] really exceeds, in the superlatives of its commendation of a work of originality and genius, the most “azure feats” of a modern reviewer on a tenth-rate novelist or minor poet. Richardson puts in action all the maxims of all the moralists: and yet all these maxims would not enable one to write a single page of him. Diderot was constantly going to cry out [He does constantly cry out “O Richardson!”] “Don’t believe him! Don’t go there!” to the characters, and especially to Clarissa. This author sows in the mind whole crops of virtues, which are sure to come up sooner or later. He knows every kind of life, and scrutinises its secrets infallibly. He preaches resignation, sympathy, justice. He has made Diderot so melancholy that his friends ask him tenderly “What is the matter?” But Diderot would not be cured for anything. To think that there should be pedantic, frivolous, insensible wretches who reproach Richardson with being long-winded! He must be read in the original. He should be discussed in society. Richardson is a new gospel: he will always be popular, though thoroughly appreciated only by the elect. He is truer than history; his intense interest hides his art; a friend of Diderot, who had only read the French translation, omitting the burial and will of Clarissa, wept, sobbed, abused the Harlowe family, walked up and down without knowing what he was doing, on perusing the original. Richardson simply haunts Diderot, stifles his genius, delays him from work and effort. Ye Ages! begone and hasten the full harvest of the honours due to Richardson!

Very extravagant, no doubt; rather absurd, if anybody likes. But fair and softly; let us, as usual, examine the nature and the circumstances of this extravagant, this absurd, critical fact.

In the first place, we have to remember that it was a work of genius— whatever its faults—that was brought under Diderot’s notice; in the second, that as at least a majority, if not a consensus, of competent critics has long ago decided, it was an example or collection of examples of genius applied in a new way—that without going to the pedantic extremes to which some have gone in their definition of the novel, it has been found impossible to discover before Richardson the necessary mixture of incident and character-interest, the unity (not necessarily a dramatic or even an epic unity) of plot, the mingled appeal to, and play upon, passions and manners. Then let us ask ourselves whether the systems of criticism and the critics, with which and with whom we are up to this point familiar, have as a rule proved themselves equal to cope with new geniuses and new kinds of composition— whether their tendency has not rather been distinctly to frown upon such things; at any rate, to give them the coldest and most distrustful welcome. Let us remember that Hurd, about the same time as Diderot,[164] and in the very act of defending the older and more poetical romance, was throwing cold water on prose fiction as a clumsy upstart. And finally, let us ask ourselves whether all Diderot’s exaggerations are not, after all, exaggerations of the truth—owing their weak points to an excitable nature and a prevalent fashion of expression, their strong ones to a genius, and a perception of truth itself, not unfairly comparable in their way to Richardson’s own in his.

[Sidenote: The Reflections on Terence.]

Side by side in the Works with this effusion there are some Reflections on Terence[165] written within a year of the other. In the famous Roman dramatist there is neither novelty, nor intense sentiment, nor multiplicity of individual character, nor volume of story. He was the darling of those critics from whom Diderot differed most. His faults—at least his shortcomings—are obvious to infinitely less acute, restless, and rapid judgments than that of the great Encyclopædist. His excellences are of the kind which might seem least likely to appeal to Diderot. Yet Diderot is not merely just to him, not merely bountiful, but not in the least clumsy or haphazard in his bounty. He will not have the time-honoured (or _dis_honoured) putting off of the praise of Terence on Scipio and Lælius. Admitting his “lack of verve,” he gives him full credit for its compensation of even humanity, for his “statuesque” and quiet perfection. He adds remarks on translation which are excellent; and if he may have taken the idea of holding up Terence and Molière together for admiration from La Bruyère,[166] he escapes La Bruyère’s mistake of suggesting the mixture of the immiscible.

[Sidenote: The Review of the Lettres d’Amabed.]

Take a third example of a very different kind. We have a short review[167] by Diderot (first extracted by M. Assézat from MS.) of Voltaire’s Lettres d’Amabed. This book, it is hardly necessary to say, is anti-religious: and Diderot was violently anti-religious himself. It is saturated with Voltaire’s sniggering indecency: and Diderot was the author of Les Bijoux Indiscrets.[168] Lastly, it was by Voltaire, of whom Diderot, though an independent, was an eager and faithful champion. But it is “without taste, without finesse, without invention; a botching up of stale blackguardisms about Moses and Christ and the rest; it has no interest, no fire, no verisimilitude, but plenty of dirt and of clumsy fun.” This is the plain critical truth about the Letters of Amabed, and it is Diderot who says it in so many words, and says it moreover in MS.—which could curry no favour with, and obtain none from, public hypocrisy and cant.

[Sidenote: The Examination of Seneca.]

Turn the examining instrument from these short pieces to the long critical examination of Seneca,[169] which forms the second part of the Essai sur les Règnes de Claude et de Néron. It is open to any one to agree or disagree with Diderot’s uncompromising, though by no means indiscriminate, championship of the usurious philosopher-statesman; as a matter of fact, though it is a matter of only argumentative importance, I am, except on the head of style, one of those who disagree with it. But agree or disagree as he may with the conclusion, no competent critic, I should suppose, can fail to admire the thoroughness with which Diderot has taken in and digested his complicated literary subject, the range and extent of literary knowledge with which he illustrates it, the readiness of his argumentation and exposition, and, above all, the craftsmanlike and attractive fashion in which he combines analysis and criticism. Again, I doubt whether there is an earlier example of what we may call “freehand” criticism—the criticism which is not tethered to the necessity of applying or expounding rules in reference to its subject, but can take that subject in, can deal with it on its own plan and specification—can, in fact, appreciate, without being bound to refer to and obey some official book of prices. There are some two hundred pages of this appreciation, and one’s only reason (itself rather uncritical) for qualified satisfaction with it is that it does not handle some writer of greater intrinsic value and wider artistic appeal.

[Sidenote: The quality and eminence of his critical position.]

I should be prepared to multiply the citation and discussion of the critical “places” in Diderot to almost any extent, if such multiplication were reconcilable with my plan; but, as has been said, to do so would be as superfluous logically as it is methodically impossible.[170] Diderot’s commanding position, in criticism as well as in aesthetics, is due not more to the number and variety of his individual utterances than to the fact that he certainly obtrudes, and in all probability conceals, no general æsthetic “preventions” (as the French would say, and as Dryden very wisely does say) whatsoever. One of the great resources and one of the great charms of his criticism is the way in which he draws it from, and returns it to, all the arts without letting any of them interfere with the other. The pedants of art-criticism have of course said that his is too literary; but the pedant is always pedantic, and always negligible, whether he draws his principles from French classrooms in the seventeenth century or from French studios in the nineteenth and twentieth. No matter whether he is talking of writing or of acting, of painting or of sculpture, the work of art is for Diderot something which ought to give the human sense and the human soul pleasure, which, if it does so, is to be welcomed and extolled, not without (if anybody feels thereto disposed) inquiry into the manner and the causes, rather mediate and immediate than ultimate, of that pleasure. He can everywhere display a really encyclopædic “curiosity,” in the good sense. He can be extremely inventive and subtle, as in the famous Paradoxe;[171] he can enter into infinite detail and yet never lose grasp of principle, as in the essay De la Poésie Dramatique;[172] he can glance and digress in lightning fashion as he does everywhere, but especially in the Salons. As good an instance of this as any is the admirable excursus on Mannerism in the Salon of 1767,[173] which is applicable to literature quite as much as to painting.

Certainly, if any devout Arnoldian says that Diderot’s greatness is due to his “fertility in ideas,” no contradiction will be thought of here. But then we have the old difficulty as to what “ideas” mean. I do not remember that Mr Arnold himself makes much reference to our Denis; and, indeed, Diderot must have been, from some points of view, nearly as horrible—let us lay cards on table and say as incomprehensible—to him as to his friend M. Scherer. But it may be that the critical “idea” is neither more nor less than the result of that contact of subject and critic which has been glanced at before—a contact intimate, physical, uninterrupted, and resulting in conception and birth. This, if anything, is the “idea” of modern criticism; and while few have been more prolific of such results than Diderot, none before him and hardly any since have so invariably and consciously guided themselves by its law. I do not know that he has ever positively stated this law; I really do not know that it ever has been explicitly laid down by any of the constituted, or even the non-constituted, critical authorities. But his whole work is an exemplification of it.

And the result is, that this whole work, wherever it approaches criticism, is alive; and that he cannot help its becoming alive, even if he has apparently given hostages to Death by attempting set dissertations on cut-and-dried subjects, or by dallying with science, or atheism, or what not. It is a further reason why even such contemporaries as Lessing, and later, Goethe, found in him such an extraordinary stimulus. The dead, mechanical deductions of too many critics under the older system could produce nothing but copies, even more dead and more mechanical than themselves, though, as we have seen in many a figure of our gallery, the principle of life in human nature made the greater critics of the older dispensation sometimes quicken under it. But Diderot’s fecundity was contagious: his “cultures” have propagated themselves from generation to generation directly, have set the example of a similar creation of critical entities to fit subjects ever since. From a formula you will never get anything but formulas: from the living contact of critic and subject you will get live criticism.

[Sidenote: Rousseau revisited.]

I was so severely rebuked by an excellent and friendly critic for dismissing Rousseau, with but a reference, from the last volume, that I thought it my duty to reconsider the matter, though the principal plea of the rebuker, that M. Texte had devoted some hundred pages to Jean-Jacques, appeared to me nihil ad rem. But I might have committed an error as to the res itself, and so I took down the four quartos, and went through them to see if my memory had played me false, as that faculty sometimes does when one is walking in the browner shades. I need not have alarmed myself; but it is perhaps worth while to spare a page to put the pièces actually before the reader. There is in Rousseau practically no literary criticism at all from the first line of the “Confessions” to the last of the “Correspondence.”[174] No writer known to me abstains with such an inevitable and tell-tale deflection from “judging of authors.” His attitude is that of his favourite Plutarch heightened to a Jean-Jacquian intensity. It is always of the moral, never of the literary, character and effect of a book that he is thinking. His fervid sensibility to the fascination of women, of scenery, of mere food and wine (for he admits this), does not seem to have extended to literature at all. By an extremely humorous coincidence (I do not know whether any one has noticed it before me, but probably some one has) he writes from Venice—the very place where he had just received, or was just to receive, the withering advice, “Zanetto! studia la matematica!”—to order books from Paris; and they are nearly all mathematics. The famous Discours about arts and sciences blinks the literary point of view altogether. The famous Letter to D’Alembert on Plays would almost adjust itself to plays in dumb show, except that spoken words have an additional moral or immoral effect. When Saint-Preux writes to Julie about her studies, he never so much as glances at the literary value of books: nor is this touched in all the talk about Education in Emile. The everlasting moral has dinned the Muses out. So it is in the two only less famous letters to Voltaire; so everywhere. I replace my four quartos, having found just one really critical sentence, in allocation and application only, for Jean-Jacques, probably, was not thinking of literature at all. But when he asked himself, “Serais-je damné?” and replied, “Selon mes Jansénistes la chose était indubitable, mais selon ma conscience il me paraissait que non,” he does mutatis mutandis suggest the revolt of the Romantic conscience against the Neoclassic.

“Ah, but,” they say, “Rousseau’s influence on the mind of Europe counted for so much in its changes of critical and creative taste.” A la bonne heure! and I have recognised this, and shall recognise it in the proper places. But the agencies that bring about changes of critical and creative taste, proper to be mentioned, are not also as proper to be worked out here. Of such influences the capture of Constantinople is a famous and undoubted one. Was I bound to tell the story of Byzantine decadence, and the story of Mussulman progress? It has in innumerable instances, if not universally, influenced a man’s criticism, a man’s creation—whether he is in love at the time; whether he has arrived at that right and happy point, which Mr Thackeray would not call “a pint” in the drinking of good wine; whether he has been under the soothing influence of the Indian weed. Am I therefore bound to insert in this History a treatise on “Feminine Attraction,” a book on “The Wines of the World,” and an “Anti-Counterblast” to King James? In all seriousness, it may, I think, be requested once more of readers and of critics that they will “look at the bill of fare.” If the meat and the wine suit them, well and good; if not, are there not, in this particular instance, M. Texte and his hundred pages to make quaere aliud diversorium no merely churlish or vindictive dismissal? While, as to such remarks as are proper to be made here on the general critical temper and tendency of the Romantic movement, they were deliberately postponed in the last volume, and will find their proper place, not here, but in the Interchapters of the present.

This indirect influence of Rousseau, with the direct influence of Diderot, no doubt cast a mighty leaven into the mind of France during the later decades of the eighteenth century; and it is noteworthy that, of the three remarkable writers with whom we shall next deal, while Madame de Staël directly and Chateaubriand indirectly express the first, Joubert was much in contact with Diderot during his youth. But the dominant criticism of the last twenty or five-and-twenty years of the century remained neo-classic; and we have accordingly dealt with it[175] in the last volume. Nay, the dominant criticism of the first twenty or so of the next abode in no very different state. Here we shall deal with what has not yet been handled of this half century, or nearly so, in France, isolating more or less the three great figures above mentioned, and dealing more in group with these “Empire Critics,” who in different ways reflect the transition to Romanticism.

[Sidenote: Madame de Staël.]

Of the interest, the influence, the significance, and, in so far as these important things go, the importance, of the work of Madame de Staël[176] in criticism, there can, as to their mere existence, be no two well-formed opinions. I wish that I could think this statement—made frankly in intention, and with deliberate consideration of the weight of every word—likely to obtain for the examination which follows the credit of impartiality which I think it deserves. Unfortunately, we are now approaching closely matters which are distinctly cinis dolosus. At every step the apparently irreconcilable difference between those who mean by criticism the judging and judicial enjoyment of literature, and those who mean by it theorising about the ultimate causes of such judgment and such enjoyment, is likely—is sure—to interfere. Nor does it seem possible for the philosophers to agree to keep these points of law for the appropriate tribunal, and to let the rest of the case be stated on its own merits.[177]

[Sidenote: Her critical position.]

Now “Corinne” is about the first person in whose case this difficulty and this difference become acute and annoying. She is not quite so popular with the critics of “ideas” as she used to be; they have, belike, discovered at last her rather awkward sciolism of fact; her very theories are not theirs; the “hideous hum” of “Madame de Staël : ideas; Chateaubriand : images,” ceases to tire the weary ear quite to the same extent as it used to do in histories of literature and critical discussions thereof. But historically she is not to be denied; there is no doubt that no one has ever done the popularising of “metacritic” throughout Europe as she did.

[Sidenote: And work.]

But if the painful historian were only left to his own hod-and-trowel work instead of having to draw the sword and don the helmet against metacritical raiders, his task would not be a difficult one. Madame de Staël, unlike her countryman and in some sort master, Rousseau, is a critic, not merely indirectly, conjecturally, and by dint of the “must have,” but frankly, plainly, in honest straightforward deliverances ad hoc. The documents of her criticism are mainly four: the early Letters on Rousseau himself, the later but still early Essay on Fiction, the famous De La Littérature, and the more famous De l’Allemagne. In all, but in increasing measure as they come, we see the curious and interesting development and production of a temperament originally no doubt possessing some masculine gifts of thought, as well as many feminine ones of feeling, excited and almost irritated to the highest activity by the word-fencing of the philosophe salons, and presented with all the current doctrines or fancies in regard to literature and its precincts, by contact with the most active minds of Geneva, Paris, and Germany. With her half-masculine vigour and her wholly feminine receptivity, she absorbs and reproduces, tant bien que mal, all or a large part of the ideas which had been fermenting in all countries more or less, but especially in Germany, for the great part of a century,—French-Godwinian perfectibility, the æsthetic of Lessing and Winckelmann, the historical theories of Herder, as much as she could of the applied criticism of Goethe and Schiller and the Schlegels. Her different works show her of course at different stages of this influence. They show also—with equal necessity and undisguised by a system of explanatory and supplementary notes in the later editions—what actual knowledge of literature she had, what stock of material to expose and submit to all this complicated apparatus, all this varied range of reagency.

[Sidenote: The Lettres sur Rousseau.]

The very early work on Rousseau is of course the most immature, and it meddles the least with purely literary criticism, but it is, for reasons obvious à priori, not the least interesting, and it is perhaps not the least satisfactory on acquaintance. The contrast between the modest (but not fairly to be called mock-modest) brevity of the original Preface, and the pomp and cant and claptrap of the second, twenty-six years later, may raise a sigh in amiable breasts. But the text, whether one agree or disagree with its sentiments and estimates, by no means lacks merit. The writer is well acquainted with the actual matter of discussion (which was by no means always the case with her later): she is in intelligent as well as emotional sympathy with it. She does not indeed take the purely literary side very strongly; she had her master’s own practice as warrant for not doing so. But her remarks (some of which are perhaps innocently borrowed from Longinus) on Rousseau’s style, and the inapplicability of the word “perfection” to it are not despicable: and the characterisations of the various works, though always tending to the moral and material side, are very far from negligible. It may be worth noting that while objecting, not without reason, to “les plaisanteries de Claire,”[178] she does not seem to know that they are only a corrupt following of Richardson. But the whole is a very fair début in criticism, inclined as we should expect to the moral side, but not illegitimately so.

[Sidenote: The Essai sur les Fictions.]

The Essai sur les Fictions, a sort of after-thought introduction to the three little stories, Mirza, Adelaide et Théodore, and Pauline, is a slight and rather curious defence of the novel of actual life moralised, as the most useful of fictitious or imitative writings, by means of a survey of such writings under three heads: “Marvellous and allegorical fictions,” “historical fictions,” and “natural fictions,” i.e. novels proper, where nothing is true, but everything true-like. The first two are very insufficiently treated, and her condemnation of the historical novel is deprived of all weight by the fact that she wrote too early to know any really good example of it. Perhaps the same may be said of the third.

[Sidenote: The De La Littérature.]

The Rousseau, however, is but the work of a novice, and the Sur Les Fictions is still something of an essay-piece: yet in both one may observe a nisus towards large generalising, which was the natural result of the author’s time, temperament, and education. This nisus turns into a full spread of wing in De La Littérature, published as the centuries met, and when the author was four and thirty. Its avowed central principle is a transformed “Modernism,”—the application of the favourite philosophe doctrine of perfectibility to literature, with an inflexible determination that though Greek literature may be better than anything before it, Roman shall be better than Greek, and (though there is hiatus valde lacrimabilis about mediæval), that modern literature shall be greater than either. To those who are not pure “ideologists,” and who do not think that an ounce of generalisation, however silly, however demonstrably false, is better than a ton of sober consideration and array of fact, this theory condemns itself at once. Here, at any rate, we may legitimately echo Mr Burchell and his “Fudge!” Yet Corinne’s attempts to prove it are interesting, and would be more so, if she had had skill enough to hide her ignorance of the facts themselves, or knowledge enough of them to gild her paradox. Her actual method is not merely characteristic of time and person, but has a certain ingenuity: indeed, it no doubt deceived herself. She will not take literature per se, but she takes it in its relations with “virtue,” “glory,” “liberty,” “happiness,” first in the abstract, and then under these categories as illustrated by Greek, Roman, “Northern,” “Southern,” and individual national literatures, paying special attention to English, and defending it from the objections of French eighteenth-century critics. It is, of course, easy to see how, by showing, or trying to show, that virtue, &c., is, according to her, better displayed in literature as it goes on, she proves, or attempts to prove, her general point.

Unfortunately, in the course of the argument, the most enormous errors of fact, the most startling assertions, which cannot take the benefit of de gustibus, simply pullulate. The book nearly drops from one’s hands when one reads “Eschyle ne présente aucun résultat moral”: and the reference to the Prometheus by which this statement is supported, suggests very forcibly that the writer knew nothing else, and did not understand this. More allowance must be made, no doubt, for the point of view, when we read further that “les héros (of Greek tragedy) n’avaient pas cette grandeur soutenue que leur a donnée Racine”; but what a point of view it is![179] We are in full topsyturvydom with the statement[180] that “la philosophie des Grecs me paraît fort au-dessous de celle de leurs imitateurs les Romains,” and we do not get out of the country as long as the contrast of Greek and Roman continues. But here, it may be said, we are in the region of opinion. The plea cannot be urged for the astounding statements which diversify the defence of our own barbarous poetry. In believing Ossian genuine, as in admiration for it, she, of course, had respectable companions: but the person who could say[181] “les poètes Anglais qui ont succédés aux bardes écossais ont ajouté à leurs tableaux,” &c., could have possessed neither the faintest knowledge of literary, or even political, history, nor the least extensive acquaintance with actual examples. The note,[182] “le docteur Blair n’aurait pu juger en Angleterre Shakespere avec l’impartialité d’un étranger,” betrays the most obvious and complete ignorance of what le docteur Blair had actually said. The description in the text[183] of Falstaff as a charge, a “caricature populaire,” a “plaisanterie grossière,” speaks the lady’s critical competence with a voice of doom. But the most utterly damning page is that[184] which denies inventive imagination to English poetry; airily dismisses Waller and Cowley as unsuccessful imitators of the Italians; adds je pourrais y joindre Downe (sic), Chaucer, &c.; and a moment later despatches at a blow, as showing this want of inventive imagination, The Rape of the Lock (full of faults of taste), The Faërie Queene (the most tiresome thing in the world), Hudibras (witty, but dwelling too long on its jokes). Admit (it is a good deal to admit) that there may be faults of taste in the Rape; admit that more than one Englishman has been unfortunate enough to find Spenser tedious; admit that there is even some justice in the charge against Hudibras. How (except by the easy method of having never read them) can you leash these three books together? and, most of all, by what prank of her own elves does “that Elfish Queen” find herself between Trulla and Belinda? I have myself not the slightest doubt that though Madame de Staël may have glanced at the Rape, and disliked the sylph machinery, she had never so much as opened “Downe” or Chaucer, Butler or Spenser, and I should not be surprised if she knew nothing, save at second-hand, of Waller or Cowley.

I could multiply examples ad lib., from the German chapters especially, but the “matter of Germany” had better be dealt with under the book exclusively devoted to it. As for general strictures on the Littérature, they also will best be postponed till the De l’Allemagne has been dealt with.

[Sidenote: The De l’Allemagne.]

That this book is, as far as criticism goes, her masterpiece, there can be no doubt, and it would be surprising if it were not so. She was older; she had read more; and she had enjoyed very distinguished “coaching.” This kept her fairly straight in matters of fact within the comparatively limited range which she here allowed herself as far as literature is concerned. German literature had taken itself by this time pretty seriously for a couple of generations: and the German men of letters whom she interrogated or “led about,” were perfectly competent and apparently not unwilling[185] to keep her from such absurdities as we have just been noticing. Very much of the book is plain, straightforward compte rendu, and generally très bien rendu, whatever minor faults one may find here and there. Above all, the expressed and very fairly carried out purpose of comparative study which made Napoleon so angry, and with such good reason,[186] gives the book an honourable place as a precursor, if not, indeed, an absolute origin, in a new way which had to be trodden. If Napoleon’s innate and colossal vulgarity had not been constantly tripping up his immense cleverness, he might have perceived that here was a new feather of some consequence to stick in his sham crown-imperial. The analyses and précis of such short things as Lenore and the Braut von Korinth are rather excessive for a book: but neither piece is easily translatable into French, and Madame de Staël probably knew very well that few of her dear quasi-countrymen were likely to learn German, in order to read them.

The old leaven of French and philosophe taste and culture shows itself at intervals interestingly. She cites[187] (a little generously perhaps in any case) the line in Raynouard’s Les Templiers, when the reprieve arrives too late to save the knights who have been chanting hymns on the pyre

“Mais il n'était plus temps; les chants avaient cessés,”

in connection with the yoke of the unities. But, strangely enough, she does not seem to notice the weakening and watering down of what she calls l’un des mots les plus sublimes qu’on puisse entendre au théâtre, by its being made part of the speech of a messenger. The voices of the warrior-priests ceasing one by one in agony, and the reprieve coming on the silence of the last, would be, though a rather melo-dramatic, a really dramatic moment. The recital of the situation is a little less ordinary than talk “of the rain and the fine time,” and that is all.

This, however, is succeeded by some really acute, and in French quite novel, criticism of Shakespeare as too subtle, too impartial, &c., for the stage—criticism which she had probably learnt from Schlegel,—and the whole chapter[188] is important; as is that on “Comedy,” though the definition[189] from Schlegel himself, with which it starts, is very nearly galimatias.

There is much good sense in the criticism of German romance, though the old leaven once more appears in the statement that “verse is required for the marvellous; prose will not do.”[190] Always on Goethe she is good, and, “philosophess” as she is, she has some very sensible remarks on the over-dose of metaphysic in Schiller’s criticism. On most of her subjects, indeed, from Wieland to Jean Paul, she is still worth reading.

[Sidenote: Her critical achievement—Imputed.]

Her admirers, however,—or the partisans of the school of criticism, which, as has been said, she did so much to “vulgarise”—would no doubt regard this matter as merely, in Luther’s famous epithet of contempt, “stramineous.” It is on her attempt to grasp the principles not merely of kinds but of literatures, to identify or at least connect these with national characteristics, and to extend the definition and comparison beyond even the bounds of nations to national groups—that they would base her claims. Here, perhaps, we may find ourselves in a distressing inability to follow. Certainly, no one will deny that there are some apparent national characteristics in literature; certainly no one will say that it is useless or idle to attempt to separate the national and the generic from the individual. But, in the first place, there was nothing absolutely new in this, though it might be for almost the first time used as a frequent implement, and as a fertile store-cupboard, in literary research. Even the despised Middle Ages had had national tickets for the different states of the European republic—had discovered that the Englishman had a proud look and a high stomach, that he took his pleasure sadly, and so forth. And had it been newer than it was, it might still have been distrusted. After all, the literature of a nation, though we talk of it as if it were something existent per se, is merely the aggregate of the work of individuals. It is the work of those individuals that you have to judge; and it is open to the very gravest doubt whether, in trying the several cases, the general inductive-deductive ready-to-hand estimate of the national quality is not more of a snare than of a help. At any rate, experience proves that those who have been readiest to use it, from Madame de Staël to M. Taine and M. Texte—to name no living examples—have been more snared than helped by it. Your preoccupation with the idea that the Englishman will be insular and rebel to ideas, the German unpractical and “inner-conscious,” the Frenchman logical, witty, tasteful, may very likely, according to the weaknesses of the poor but constant creature Human Nature, rather lead you to dispense with inquiry into the fact whether he, the individual Briton, Teuton, or Gaul, does really exhibit these characteristics. It will tempt you in the same way to exaggerate what tendencies he may have to them—to force them on him if he has them not—or even to leave him out of consideration if he is so impudent as too incontestably not to have them.

And there is also the gravest possibility of doubt whether, even in themselves, they have sufficient truth to make them of more than the slightest value. After all, a man is a man before he is an Englishman or a Frenchman; it is scarcely too paradoxical to say that he is himself before he is even a man. The very greatest men of course carry this disconcerting triumph of individuality furthest; all but the very smallest help to flaunt its banner now and then. And when the hasty generaliser generalises still more hastily, and talks about Literature of the North and Literature of the South, the Rebellion of Fact is more inconvenient still. You lay it down that the literature of the North does not busy itself with frank youthful passion, and you have to settle matters with Romeo and Juliet; that the Italian is a light-hearted being whose only wants are sunshine, an olive or two, a flask of red wine with a wisp of tow in it, and a donna leggiadra, and there rises before you the Divina Commedia.

[Sidenote: And actual.]

But this argument would tempt ourselves out of the way; and, even in so far as it is legitimate here at all, is rather for the Interchapters. Let it suffice that Madame de Staël is undoubtedly a notable figure in the mere History of Criticism, and that, like nearly all such figures, she has by no means lost her actual critical value; that she is no “shadow”; that she is still, dead as she is, a speaking voice of some of the perpetual forms and phases of criticism itself. That her intellectual ability, if only of the receptive and transmissive kind, was somewhat extraordinary, there can be little question. She frequently claims for herself the invention of the word “vulgarity”: and though she lived to be so unfortunate as to apply it[191] to Miss Austen—though it has perhaps been more misused than any other single word of criticism—it was needed. Nor was she herself much the dupe of words, though she often was of supposed ideas. She has somewhere quoted from Rousseau, and expanded, a wise protest against the requirement of a pedantic adherence to definition in terminology. It was unlucky for her, no doubt, that to some extent she came at, and could not but represent, one of those rather unsatisfactory transition periods which are neither quite one thing nor quite another. She has touches of classic “dignity” and of philosophic cant, harlequinned with others of Romantic sehnsucht and “naturalistic” passion. Or rather she is like one of the picture-cleaners’ sign-portraits—half in eighteenth century shadow, half in nineteenth century light—or the other way about, if anybody chooses.

Yet the ill-luck is not total, and may perhaps even seem to be but apparent. For it is precisely this bariolage, this partition, this intermixture, which gives her not merely her historical position, but even, I think, her intrinsic attraction as a critic. She helps us by giving a fresh “triangulation,” a fresh aspect, a midway stage. Her perfectibilism keys on as interestingly from the literary side to the old Ancient-and-Modern dispute as on the political side to the Republican manias of the time. Her struggles to retain some conviction of the supremacy of Racine make more interesting, and are made more interesting by, her admiration for Shakespeare and the Germans. Her assimilations, or her attempts to assimilate, the new aesthetic, the new historical theories, the new wine generally, would have far less interest if she had put away all fancy for the old bottles. And so she figures worthily and interestingly in what we have called the French Transition, with a quaint enough contrast to Diderot, who opens it, and who taught her German teachers. She is a figure of far less originality, strangeness, and charm, but she has a more definite gospel, she is much less diffused and dissipated over the orbis scientiarum, she points more clearly to a clearly marked out path, and so she is much more likely to be followed by the multitude, if not by the elect.

[Sidenote: Chateaubriand: his difficulties.]

But she does not figure in her place alone: for side by side with her, and with a face looking still more forward, is another figure, not less curious, not less blended in its composition, but to some at least far more interesting and far greater. Chateaubriand is one of those literary personages to whom it is peculiarly difficult to do justice, and to whom accordingly justice has very seldom been done. I admit that it was long before I could myself regard him through glasses sufficiently achromatic, or divest him of his accidents with a satisfactory thoroughness. His personality—that troublesome and disturbing factor from which we are so fortunately free in the case of most ancient writers, and with which we are so teasingly confronted in the case of most modern—is a little enigmatic and more than a little unsympathetic. He trails with him the trumpery of two different times—Classical emphasis, arbitrariness, even to some extent prejudice, Romantic tawdriness, inconsequence, gush. He has curious adulteries of pedantry and foppishness—strange and indecent communions of ignorance and knowledge. And yet he is, in literature, so great a man that one sometimes hardly knows how to construct any definition of greatness which shall keep him out of the highest class. He has, and has by anticipation, all the gifts of Byron except the gift of writing verse: he can write prose which is hardly inferior to Byron’s verse in the qualities where verse and prose touch nearest, and not much below all but Byron’s best in some where they are farther apart. And he has other gifts to which Byron can lay no claim.

[Sidenote: His Criticism,]

The chief of these gifts is criticism—a department in which Byron, for all his shrewdness, simply does not count, because of the waywardness, egotism, and personal prejudice which tinge every one of his critical utterances, eulogistic or depreciatory. Now Chateaubriand counts in criticism for a very great deal. By those who allow indirect critical influence to rank Rousseau as a great critic, Chateaubriand ought to be ranked as a critic infinitely greater; by those who observe a more rigid and legitimate calculus, he can, as we shall shortly show, be ranked almost, if not quite, in the first class. When a French critic or historian[192] pronounces him the father of modern criticism, the first to start the comparative method, and so forth, he is, as we are all inclined, and as French critics used to be extravagantly, and are still rather excessively inclined to do, speaking as if what is true of his own nation and literature were true universally. We must, of course, go a long way back in time, and some way afield in place—to the middle of the eighteenth century in the one case, to England and Germany in the other—for the real first appearances (“origins” is always a misleading word) of these things, and even if we cling to France we must deal with the vaguer but far older claims of Diderot. But Chateaubriand represents them powerfully. He represents them practically before Madame de Staël, in a much more literary fashion, and with much more literary power, and he represents them with a magic, with a contagious influence, to which she cannot pretend. Further, he possesses that claim which is the first, if not the sole claim for us, though it seems to be regarded by some with jealousy, and almost with resentment, the claim of having actually written criticism, and a great deal of it.

[Sidenote: Indirect]

The champions of the Indirect have, it must be confessed, not a little to rely upon in Chateaubriand. He was so much more intensely literary than Rousseau, and even than Madame de Staël, that Atala, René, Les Natchez, Le Dernier Abencérage still more, Les Martyrs most of all, and even not a few things in the Mémoires d’Outre Tombe, may without violence be twisted into a literary bearing. All, in their different degrees and ways, exhibit the author’s insatiable curiosity as to the literature of different times, countries, religions, languages, and his indefatigable industry in staining and twining his own literature with the colours and the threads of these others. But it is quite unnecessary to twist and infer, to force the “this must have” and the “we can see,” when we have two such documents before us as the Essai sur La Littérature Anglaise, and, above all, the Génie du Christianisme.

[Sidenote: and Direct.]

As a matter of fact, by far the larger part of this latter famous book, the revanche for Voltairianism, the manifesto of the whole earlier, and not a little of the later nineteenth century, the main pillar of its author’s fame,[193] is literary criticism pure and simple. It is so odd a place to look for this that it sometimes escapes. Accounts of Chateaubriand have been written (I am, I fear, guilty of one myself) in which it has had no adequate recognition. But when we have once sighted our panther,[194] she cannot escape us; and we may try here to do justice to the real sweetness of her breath.[195]

[Sidenote: The Génie du Christianisme.]

So odd a place: and that, too, in more ways than one. At first sight—and perhaps too hasty or not thoroughly informed readers permanently—the Génie[196] may appear an inextricable tangle, or a frank flinging together of fragments without even the connection of being tangled. It would be improved (and perhaps such a thing has been done) by a table like that which Burton wisely prefixed to the Anatomy. One has to realise the utter terrassement in France of Christian doctrine and practice—the all but total triumph of that purely secular education and atmosphere for which a hundred years later some of our Nonconformists pant—to appreciate the real art and the practical necessity of the fashion in which Chateaubriand “lets everything go in” against Philosophism. It seems temerity, but was probably wisdom, to begin, as he begins, with the altitudes of faith and dogma. And he glides off from them, cunningly but most naturally, to those ceremonies, sacramental and other, for which the Republic had substituted unmeaning and unaffecting civil functions. Then he once more attacks the philosophes on their own ground—on the subject of morals and that “virtue” which they had so tediously dinned into the

public ear, but of which they had made so little private exhibition,—and grapples courageously, though perhaps not rashly, considering the extreme sciolism of most of his adversaries, with cosmology and teleology, with physic and metaphysic, with Hell and Heaven themselves. In all, his rhetoric serves him admirably, if nothing else does; but we have as yet little or nothing to do with literature or with criticism. It is quite different when we come to the “Second Part,” Poétique du Christianisme, and here Chateaubriand begins to present his credentials as a critic. Nor, with some digressions, does he again drop the character throughout the book.

[Sidenote: Its saturation with literary criticism.]

The proceeding[197] was probably more logical than it seems. On the one hand the attack on religion had been overwhelmingly, and the attack on civil order very largely, literary in its own character and weapons. In the second, the everlasting philosophe-republican chatter about the Greeks and the Romans had more than reconstituted the old classical and “ancient” prejudice. Madame de Staël had not shared this latter; but she had failed to share it principally because of her perfectibilism, which had put down the merits of the ancients chiefly to their republican constitutions. Here were a whole host of things for Chateaubriand to deal with; and in every case the literary way was an obvious line of attack, as well as one intensely congenial to the new champion. He is no perfectibilist, of course; in fact, one of the appendices of the Génie is a Letter to Fontanes[198] on the second edition of the De la Littérature, combating its views. But his championship of “modern” literature is based upon its Christianisation, and he compares famous ancient with famous modern poets on purpose to show first, how Christianity has enabled the latter to rise to nobler heights; secondly, how some at least of the best points of the ancients themselves are to be found in contact with Christian ethics. Like his feminine opponent, he has some not quite cleanly rags of classicism and Gallicism about him. A too sanguine hope may be dashed when it finds him talking about the “bad taste” of Dante, and the “defects” of his age. But Romanticism, no more than its far-off godmother Rome, was to be built in a day.

[Sidenote: Survey and examples.]

And we very soon see that for all these remains of “the old man,” and for all a certain necessary ignorance (he thinks there is nothing mediæval before Dante but “a few poems in barbarous Latin),” despite also such antiquated arbitrarinesses as the admission as a fault in the Milton whom he so much admires, and in the Dante whom he admires rather less, that “the marvellous is the subject and not the machine of the poem”—we very soon see on what side Chateaubriand is fighting. He hazards at the very opening the doctrine—shocking to the whole French eighteenth century, and contrary to Aristotle—that the Epic is not only larger in bulk, but higher, greater, more varied, more universal indeed, in kind and range, than the drama. And perhaps this is as much a dividing principle of criticism as anything else. I hold myself, as has been made obvious, with those who think that the drama is only accidentally literary, though it has been so now and again, for long periods, in the very highest degree; while the epic is literary or nothing—it is, with lyric, the beginning of all literature. But, however this may be, the whole drift of his criticism is anti-neoclassic. Again and again he contrasts passages and long scenes from Homer and Milton,— not to show how superior Homer is, as the French neoclassics would have done, as Addison had done—not even to show how superior Milton himself is—not to defend Milton by Homer’s example,—but to show how they are differently excellent. A most interesting and novel critical suggestion is that of trying to realise how a modern poet would have done what an ancient poet has done, the whole lesson of the comparative method being here in little.

I shall hardly be expected, though I should much like, to analyse and represent the whole of these twelve books, to which something has even to be added from the six last. The turning of the tables on the Henriade[199] (which is treated most politely), with a sincere lament that, while the finest places of its author’s poems are inspired by religion, he has not more fully inspired himself therewith in this particular poem (the subject of which so obviously requires it!) is ingeniously malicious. We may take mediocre interest in the contrasts of Lusignan and Andromaque, Guzman and Iphigénie,[200] but they are full of delicate and acute critical observation, which shows itself again in the comparison of Virgil and Racine.[201] So too we may dispute the epigram that “la barbarie et le polythéisme ont produit les héros d’Hómère; la barbarie et le Christianisme ont enfanté les chevaliers du Tasse”;[202] but the whole passage where this occurs is connected with the all-important devotion to Chivalry. When he comes to passion we may again desiderate something different from the comparison of Dido and Phèdre.[203] But this was what was wanted “for them”; and there is no fault to find with the treatment of Pope’s handling of Héloise.[204] With the author’s ecstacies over Paul et Virginie,[205] few people now living can sympathise; but once more Paul et Virginie was good “for them.” Virginie is only a victim of nasty prudishness when you compare her to Nausicaa, but she might easily be taken for a mirror of purity in the age of Madame de Warens and Madame de Puisieux. The fine passage on “Le Vague des Passions” which serves to introduce René is of great critical importance, though it may have been partly suggested by Bossuet.

The paradox of the beginning of the book on the Marvellous[206]—that mythology belittled nature and made description abortive—is at least exceedingly ingenious, as is what follows on Allegory; but Chateaubriand’s account of the history of modern descriptive poetry itself suffers from want of knowledge.[207] Still, in attacking the position that pagan mythology was a more poetic subject than Christian, it must be admitted that he is excellent on Angels,[208] and that his comparison of Venus in the Carthaginian woods and Raphael in Eden, is one of the best of those companion-pieces in which he so delights, and which are such engaging criticism. We cannot follow him through dreams and through “machines,” through Hell and through Tartarus; nor even give much space to the bold, elaborate, and often admirably critical comparison of Homer and the Bible.[209] But these things, like the others mentioned before, all illustrate the range, the height, the Pisgah quality—or rather that still higher quality of the mountain view in Paradise Regained—to which Chateaubriand’s criticism can justly pretend. These thirty pages are perhaps his most elaborate and ambitious critical attempt, and they deserve to be thoroughly studied.

Hardly less remarkable is the Third Part, which deals with a sort of clash of influences—that of Christianity on the Fine Arts, and that of the Fine Arts, Christianity, and Literature on each other. The wonderfully prophetic instinct of the writer is shown in what he says of the Gregorian chant, as well as of Gothic architecture, and he brings them very close to letters; but of course he comes closer still in dealing with History, Oratory, and the like. And he manages, in a surprising fashion, not to keep very far from it, even in his last part, that of “Worship.”

[Sidenote: Single points of excellence,]

These exercitations are diversified and illustrated by constant expressions and aperçus of real critical power, showing, if, as we have said, necessarily not complete, yet very considerable, and for the time remarkable knowledge. Chateaubriand knows all about Ossian; and he corrects Madame de Staël’s amiable and ignorant enthusiasms with a politeness which must have been insufferable to the good lady. He has the right phrase exactly[210] for that singular failure of a genius the Père Lemoyne—a phrase which may not improbably have suggested Flaubert’s gorgeous Tentation, and which is, as it were, a keynote or remarque-index in relation to the critical imagination of modern times. He has not merely this altered tone in excelsis, but also in details:—as witness the very remarkable note at i. 260, on the effects of a particular vowel (whether “first discovered” or not does not matter). On the very same part his open-mindedness is shown in the warm and just praise given to André Chénier—dead and unpublished—and a little later in a delicate protest against the inconsistency of Rivarol’s translation of Quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante. The characters of the ancient historians are sketched with a masterly brevity in III. iii. 3, and there is an astonishing moderation and justice, as well as a sort of chivalry, in his frequent encounters with Voltaire.

[Sidenote: and general importance.]

But the greatest glory of Chateaubriand is that he is, if not the creator, the first brilliant exponent of what we have called above the Critical Imagination—the first great practitioner of imaginative criticism since Longinus himself. Lessing and Diderot had no doubt shown the way to this, but the first was not quite enthusiastic enough, and the second was enthusiastic to and over the verge of dithyramb. The Schlegels and Goethe had practised in it; but the two former were not great enough men of letters, and the most ambitious attempts of Goethe, such as that in Wilhelm Meister, are spoilt by deplorable longwindednesses and pedantries. Chateaubriand is one of the very first to take the new stream, remis atque velis, plying the oars of the intellect, and catching the wind of the spirit. His occasional delinquencies in the use of the phrase mauvais goût; his deference to the old opinion that the hero of tragedy must necessarily be what we called then in English “a high fellow”; other things of the same kind; do not matter in the very least. Every one of them could be set off against a corresponding expression of freedom from neo-classic prejudice; and there would remain a mighty balance of such utterances on the credit side.[211]

[Sidenote: Joubert—his reputation.]

The critical position of Joubert, acclaimed soon after the posthumous publication of his work[212] by the greatest critical authorities, has sometimes been questioned in later days, but quite idly. Readers of these pages must have seen, if indeed they did not know it long before, that a large body of critical, as of other opinion, is merely negligible. It does not rest upon any solid knowledge or argument; it is in many cases not even the expression of a genuine personal preference, illusion, or impression of any kind. Sometimes the critic does not like the other critics who have expressed approval of the author; sometimes he does not like some individual utterance or group of utterances of the author’s own; more often he simply wishes “to be different”—to blame where his predecessors have praised, and to extol to the skies what they have disapproved or left unnoticed. In all such cases the verdict need not even be seriously fought before any court of cassation; it is self-quashed.

The remarkable body of judgment by French critics[213] from Sainte-Beuve downwards, which is prefixed to the usual editions of the Correspondance, especially if it be supplemented by Mr Arnold’s famous essay, is almost “document” enough of Joubert’s worth; but we cannot here avoid full examination of him, especially as hardly one of these critics has taken our exact point of view. We can neglect the great body of Joubert’s miscellaneous Pensées and concentrate ourselves on those affecting literature, which practically begin[214] under the heading De l’Antiquité, appear both here and in the subsequent headings with general titles, and of course constitute the substance of “On Poetry,” “On Style,” “On the Qualities of the Writer,” and “Literary Judgments.”

[Sidenote: His literary αὐτάρκεια.]

In literature, with an exception to be noticed presently, his time exerts remarkably little influence on Joubert. This is not the case elsewhere; in his religious, political, moral, social judgments we feel— and it could not be but that we should feel—the pressure, and the shadow, and the sting, of the Revolution everywhere. But the literature is—as literature is but too seldom and ought always to be—presented (except in one way) with a sort of autarkeia. Joubert was born in mid-eighteenth century, and he died just as the Romantic movement was in full bud and had begun to burst, with the Odes et Ballades. But he is neither a hard and fast classic, nor a revolter of the extreme kind against classicism, nor, like those not uninteresting contemporaries of his whom we shall group after him, blown hither and thither by the wind of this or that doctrine. He betrays, indeed, the enfranchising and widening influence of Diderot; but he has worked this out quite independently, and with a “horizontality” and comparative range of view in which the early Romantics themselves (except Sainte-Beuve) were conspicuously lacking, and which even Sainte-Beuve never fully attained. [Sidenote: The Law of Poetry.] The famous, the immortal, ninth “Pensée” of the Poetry section,[215] “Rien de qui ne transporte pas n’est poésie: La lyre est en quelque manière un instrument ailé,” is positively startling. It is, of course, only Longinus, dashed a little with Plato, and transferred from the abstract Sublime to the sublimest part of literature Poetry. But generations had read and quoted Longinus without making the transfer; and when made it is en quelque manière (to use the author’s judicious limitation, which some people dislike so much), final. Like other winged things, and more than any of them, poetry is itself hard to catch; it is difficult to avoid crushing and maiming it when you think to catch it. But this is as nearly perfect a definition by resultant, by form, as can be got at.

[Sidenote: More on that subject.]

Of course all the utterances are not at this level. The fault of the “Pensée” itself in general, is that, in human necessity, it will miss, or only go near ten times (perhaps a hundred) for once that it hits; and it is easy enough for a hostile critic in turn to hit the misses. But it is the hits that count; and, as for them, how astonishing is it to come across at this date (No. xxv.), “Les beaux vers sont ceux qui s’exhalent comme des sons ou des parfums,” where you have, put perfectly, all the truth that exists in the “symbolist” theory of some seventy years later! Again (xxxviii.) “Dans le style poétique chaque mot retentit comme le son d’une lyre bien montée, et laisse toujours après lui un grand nombre d’ondulations”—where the great quality of the best nineteenth-century poetry, of that poetry of which hardly anything had been written in France and Germany, and of which Joubert could hardly know what had already been written in England—the contingent, additional music superadded to meaning,—is hit off perfectly once more. Then there is the second best known and most famous passage (xli.), forbidding the “lieu trop réel,” the “population trop historique,” and enjoining the “espèce de lieu fantastique,” in which the poet can move at pleasure; and that other fatal saying (xlvi.), “On ne peut trouver de poésie nulle part quand on n’en porte pas en soi,” and the reiteration (xlix.) of the capital doctrine as to the beauty of words—of words even detached from context. Taking them together, these ten pages of Joubert contain more truth—more stimulating, suggestive, germinal truth—about poetry, than any other single treatise from Aristotle down to the present day. This is the way a man must think of poetry if he is to be saved; though not every clause of the Joubertian creed is thus Athanasian.

[Sidenote: On Style.]

The Style section is equally astonishing. I think I first read Joubert about thirty years ago; I know his ancestors and his successors much better now; but he astonishes me just as much as ever. In another rather longer[216] stretch you have the best things in Aristotle, Longinus, and others—some at least of which he pretty certainly had neither read nor heard of—revised and applied; you have the principles and the practice of Hugo, Gautier, Saint-Victor, Flaubert, of Ruskin, Arnold, Pater, put plumply or by suggestion beforehand in eighteen pages.

Here is everything: the necessity of choice which is the condition of good style, and which works so differently in ancient and modern times; the powers of “the word” in all their varied bearings; the excellence of archaism rightly understood, and the occasional charms of the kuria as a rest and interval for refreshment; the right to reinvest an old word with new meaning; the “science of names”; the placing of words; the freedom which the reader possesses of improving on his author by keeping his word and adding to his sense; the difference between musical and pictorial style; the impossibility of literature when words are used with an absolutely fixed value; the unpardonable sin of mere purism; the natural and justifiable idiosyncrasy of dictionary and even grammar in good writers, with the due guards against its excess; the variety of degree in which ancient authors are to be followed; the value and the danger of idioms. These and a hundred other things will all be found, sometimes of course (the fault of the form again) put too absolutely; sometimes, though very rarely, intermixed with things more dubious—but always present at short, at all but the shortest notice. Never, I think, did any critical writer enter so much into the marrow of things in so limited a space: the section is a sort of Tinctura Fortior, as the pharmacopœias say, or even like those older “drop-cordials” of story, where a vial the size of the little finger contained the virtue of a whole pharmacy.

[Sidenote: Miscellaneous Criticisms.]

These two sections form the aureus libellus of Joubert—if I knew a wealthy and sensible, intelligent and obliging bibliophile, they should be printed on vellum and adorned by the greatest decorative artists of the age, and bound in the simplest but the most perfect coat obtainable. We decline slightly with the two remaining chapters—though there is still plenty of gold to be found—and the decline is continuous. In the section “Des Qualités de L’écrivain et des Compositions Littéraires” we once more approach the merely philosophic side, and it is Joubert himself who has left us, apropos of Corinne, the memorable proposition that sometimes “un besoin de philosopher gâte tout.”[217] A fine distinction (not so expressed) between realist and idealist literature[218] is an instance of the consolation which is constantly occurring; but we must look for relapses. What do we learn by being told[219] that “Homer, Euripides, and Menander” (O groves of Blarney!) had more facilité pour le beau than Hesiod and Sophocles; Æschylus, Dante, and La Bruyère less than Fénelon and J. J. Rousseau? The context indeed shows (not by any means in so many words) what gloss is to be put on facilité and what on beau to get out Joubert’s meaning; but the result is not worth the trouble. And when we find afterwards that la facilité est opposée au sublime we agree, but, recurring, ask whether Homer is less sublime than Hesiod? The sub-sections on criticism (§ cxl. sq.) are excellent, and a fairly severe winnowing would leave a residue not much less valuable than in the other two: but the winnowing is necessary.

[Sidenote: His individual judgments more dubious.]

The fact may prepare the wary reader for some further inequality in the last section of “Jugements Littéraires,” with which should be taken certain letters to Molé in the Correspondance. To prevent disappointment and even puzzlement it is here necessary to remember Joubert’s “time, country, and circumstance.” He was a man, let it be repeated, of the mid-eighteenth century by birth; a Frenchman, and not, it would seem, by any means widely acquainted with foreign languages and literatures, except classics. He always speaks as if he could only read Milton in translations; his knowledge of Shakespeare, though he admired him, is derived from the same untrustworthy source; of any large part of English literature he necessarily knows nothing at all. Accordingly—in a fashion which is nearly unique in this history, but which is priceless in its unicity—the disadvantages which have been powerless to affect his general conceptions recover their hold upon him, to some extent, in particulars. He is still sound on what the general merits of poetry and of literature should be; but he sees those merits in the wrong place. At first sight, to an English reader who is not thoroughly broken to the ways of our difficult art, it may seem impossible, inconceivable, a bad joke, that the author of the aphorisms above quoted as to the necessity of “transport,” the power of words, and all the rest of it, should admire Delille and not admire Milton. But remember, he understood the words of Delille—they had, feeble as they were, the power to excite, according to his own true and profound theory, that poetry which was ready to answer and magnify them in his own soul. He did not understand the words of Milton, and they could not touch him; while he is certainly not to blame for not being touched by the words of Louis Racine.

[Sidenote: The reason for this.]

This is the most striking instance, the most astounding at first, the most illuminative afterwards; and it will give us a key to all the rest. It must for instance be a fresh stumbling-block, and no small one, to find Joubert, who could prefer Delille to Milton, quite cool, almost harsh, to Racine, saying that Racine is “the Virgil of the ignorant,” that those whom he suffices are “poor souls and poor wits.” But the way round the obstacle is perfectly clear to the practised traveller in our country. Racine’s was not the poetry of Joubert’s own time and generation; Delille’s was. His language, his words, his imagery could convey whatsoever of poetry was in them—though it might not be very much—to Joubert’s ears and wit and soul better than Racine’s could. And once more, as those ears and wit and soul were exquisitely sensitive to even a trace of poetry that did reach them, the difficulty becomes no difficulty at all, but, on the contrary, a real paradox of the most illuminating and helpful kind, constantly to be remembered, and especially good against those estimable doctrinaires who will have a hard and fast hierarchy in poetry, a “best, better, good, not so good, bad,” arranged in rigid classes. That is poetry to a man which produces on him such poetical effects as he is capable of receiving. The reader takes it, as the writer makes it, poeticamente. You may possibly—it is not certain, but it is possible—educate his poetic sense; say to it, “Friend, come up higher.” You may certainly remove merely mechanical obstacles, such as Joubert’s ignorance of English. But until something of this kind is done, it is better that the man should even excessively admire Burns or Béranger, Macaulay or Moore, than that he should simulate admiration of Shelley, or Hugo, or Heine. It would be pleasant to dwell on this, which has never, I think, been dwelt upon, or expounded fully before; but words to the wise must be here, as always, our motto: the hints given can easily here, as elsewhere, be expanded by those who have the wits and the inclination.

[Sidenote: Additional illustrations.]

Some further instances, however, may and must be given of the working of this curious state of things, which makes a critic equal to the very greatest we have met in abstract appreciation of poetry and literature, the inferior of many we have met—if not of most who were good critics at all—in his appreciation of individuals. There is the germ of a most important general censure on “Naturalism” (a thing once more far ahead) in his remark on Boccaccio, that he “adds nothing to the story,” that he “respects the tale as he would respect a truth,” a position interesting to compare with the constant protests of the Goncourts and their fellows against what has been called “_dis_realising.”[220] “Boileau est un grand poète, mais dans la demi-poésie,” though a little epigrammatic, is true enough. His few remarks on Molière argue, as we should expect, a rather lukewarm admiration; but he is among the highest praisers of La Fontaine, ranking him as (of course this is before the nineteenth century) fuller of poetry than any other French author. (Note again that this means, “fuller of poetry which can bring itself into contact with Joubert’s mind.”) He admits that his beloved Delille has only “sounds and colours” in his head, but then they are the sounds and colours that Joubert can see and hear, and he knows rightly that sounds and colours make more than half of poetry. As for the ancients, he remarks with great truth, that Cicero, whom nevertheless he admired much, has “more taste and discernment than real criticism.” And then we find the moralist in the remark, that Catullus unites the “two things which make the worst mixture in the world, mignardise and coarseness,” and that “ses airs sont jolis, mais son instrument est baroque,” another curious instance of the inability of the Latin race to value the second greatest poet of Latin. Joubert, you see, did not like the indecency of Catullus, and he did not like his “bitterness,” as Quintilian calls it; and the dislike barred the poetic contact. On the other hand, he could see and feel Tacitus. That Pascal is “exempt from all passion” seems an odd judgment, though I could, I think, explain it. He is excellent on Bossuet and Fénelon: less so, I think, on Malebranche.

On his own eighteenth century one turns to him with much interest, but the utterances are too detailed for us to linger on them. They have the perspicacity (if sometimes a little of the injustice) of an escaped pupil of the philosophes. He is very valuable on Rousseau, but that “a Voltaire is good for nothing at any time,” though he had acknowledged many literary gifts and graces in this Voltaire, is not merely unjust, but saugrenu. Still it certainly raises the point of law, whether “good for nothing” literature, which is good literature, is not good for something.

[Sidenote: General remarks.]

A few more general remarks may perhaps be made on this critic, who contrasts so remarkably with all the rest of the critics of the Empire, and not least remarkably with his friend Chateaubriand and with Madame de Staël, beside whom alone of this numerous group he can be placed. It will be seen that while he is free from “Corinne’s” hasty generalisations and indigestible “philosophy of literature,” while he has a less extended knowledge of literatures (though probably a much more accurate one) than hers, he actually far transcends her in real philosophy of view, that he takes a sight of all poetry, all literature, and their qualities, which is aquiline alike in sweep and searchingness. Further, that though his knowledge is again more accurate than Chateaubriand’s, it is more circumscribed, and that he cannot relish some particular things which Chateaubriand could, yet that once more he excels his friend in clearness, ideality, comprehension, and depth. That finally (though the matter of this is to come), in comparison with all the other Empire critics, from Fontanes and Geoffroy downwards, a similar distinguendum has to be observed. One Joubert—the Joubert of the general views and of the sections on style and poetry—is far over their heads, out of their sight and reach. The other Joubert—the Joubert of the particular judgments—is very much nearer them, though he is sometimes, not always, their superior.

What is certain, however, is, that this particular kind of doubleness (we have seen others more common) is extraordinarily rare—that though faint touches of it may appear here and there, they are not more than faint. Joubert’s descriptions of poetry and his admiration of Delille are no parallel to Longinus’ definitions of the Sublime and his failure fully to admire the Odyssey. There is no conflict of the higher and the lower rule, but only an unexampled—yet when we come to think of it, perfectly natural—inability to get the higher rule into play. If one could have had not merely the gift of tongues, but the gift of conferring it, it would have been perhaps the most interesting experiment possible in the critical sphere to have made Joubert a thorough proficient in English, and then to have seen whether he failed to see the beauties of Milton. Meanwhile he remains isolated. I do not think Mr Arnold’s comparison of him to Coleridge a very happy one, though there are no doubt certain resemblances—the Coleridgean depreciation of French poetry in relation to the Joubertian of English is the most striking of these, and might seem sufficient. I do not think Coleridge depreciated French poetry because he could not hear it: Mr Arnold himself practically admitted that he did, and he is therefore himself a better parallel. And Coleridge had the excuse, which Mr Arnold had not, that French had, in literature accessible to him, hardly tried the whole compass of its lyre at all. But this is a digression, only excused by its helping to point the assertion that there is no one like Joubert—for Mr Arnold himself knew French very well indeed.

[Sidenote: The other “Empire Critics.”]

To all these three remarkable writers the term “Empire Critics,” which has obtained a certain solid position in critical history from the use made of it by Sainte-Beuve,[221] might, as far as chronology goes, be applied. But they are not the writers who are generally denoted by the term, these being rather a group extending from Fontanes through Ginguené, Garat, Geoffroy, Dussault, Feletz, Lemercier, Marie-Joseph Chenier, Hoffman, and others, down to Villemain and Cousin, who belong in part even to the Second Empire, but still represent an older tradition than the men strictly of 1830. They have been of late somewhat forgotten and neglected, despite Sainte-Beuve’s weighty pleas for them;[222] and perhaps in hardly a single case (I am not forgetting the once mighty name of Villemain himself) do they supply us with a critic of the highest class. But they are extremely important to history; we cannot really understand the criticism of the last seventy years itself without them. And I do not regret the time that I have myself spent on them, though I do not propose, as Agamemnon would say, to equal my treatment of them to that time itself.

[Sidenote: Fontanes.]

The novice in these matters who goes from Sainte-Beuve’s repeated and respectful notices of Fontanes to the latter’s Œuvres[223] may be a little puzzled, even if he take due heed to the fact that these Works are, as far as the criticism goes at any rate, only “selected.” There is not very much in bulk; and what there is may not seem, according to the severe Arnoldian standard, “chief and principal.” An introduction and some notes to his translation of the Essay on Man, articles on Chateaubriand, on Madame de Staël, on the “emphatic” Thomas, &c.:—“we can do all these for ourselves if we want them, which we mostly do not,” is likely to be the verdict of the impatient.

But it should not be allowed to stand. Fontanes shows us, in a manner made more historically important by the fact that for a long time he was a sort of Minister of Literature to Napoleon, that turning, that transition, which is the subject of this whole chapter. He still, and naturally, has a great deal of the eighteenth century in him; but he can see the vacuity and the frigidity of eighteenth-century “emphasis.” He is responsible[224] for teaching Victor Hugo that Voltaire taught us to admire Shakespeare, one of the most remarkable mare’s-nests in critical history. But, his eyes perhaps sharpened a little by personal friendship, he perceived to a very large extent, if not fully, the importance of the Génie du Christianisme. So there may have been mixed motives in his different reception of Madame de Staël’s theories; but there is a singular and satisfactory compound of eighteenth-century good sense and nineteenth-century catholicity in his dealing with her fantasticalities about North and South. He is himself rather rhetorical at times, but seldom to the loss of sobriety; and he is altogether a good sample, a good tell-tale, of the attitude of the inhabitants of a landslip—as we may call it—who see their old marks changing relation and bearing, who do not wholly like it, but who are capable of adapting themselves, at any rate to some extent, to the change.

[Sidenote: Geoffroy.]

Another interesting and representative person is Geoffroy,[225] who incurred the strictures of Joubert, and has had them “passed on” by Mr Arnold. Geoffroy—the pillar for many years of the Année Littéraire and of the Débats, the “Folliculus” of Luce de Lancival—has received from Gosse (M. Etienne, not Mr Edmund) the praise of having “toujours marché dans la même route et à la lueur du flambeau qu’il avait choisi dès le commencement.” In other words immutatus et immutabilis—an attribution magnificent in some relations of life; not, perhaps, as we have before noted, in criticism. Geoffroy’s road and torch might have been better chosen.

He, too, feels his time—if he is by no means a Romantic before or at the birth of Romanticism, he is hardly more of a Voltairian. But he is first of all “against” everything and everybody—a child of Momus.[226] He is doubtful about Corneille and Molière; even Racine is not “perfect” for him. But his most characteristic passage is perhaps one which occurs at page 137, vol. ii., of his work cited below. It is a real point de repère, because it is one of the last authoritative expressions of a sentiment—no doubt not yet extinct, but for a long time kept to some extent in check—the French belief in the absolute superiority of French literature and the impossibility of a foreigner being a judge of it—the impertinence even of his attempting to judge it. Geoffroy rates Blair in the most approved pedagogic fashion for expressing the opinion—now probably entertained by the majority of Frenchmen themselves—that Phèdre is a greater play than Iphigénie, and for assigning the reason that Iphigénie is too French. He blames the Edinburgh professor roundly for “meddling with our authors”; the opinions are not disputable opinions merely—they are “errors”; Blair and Edinburgh “ought to be ashamed” of them; they show that the critic “knows nothing about the matter.” Similar things are, of course, said to-day in England as well as in France; but they only show the temper of the particular critic, not the theory of prevailing criticism. Yet Geoffroy, if only from cross-grainedness, helped in the unsettling of the merely traditional view of literature: and so did service.

[Sidenote: Dussault.]

His contemporary and fellow-worker on the Débats, Dussault, is of a different type.[227] He is much more amiable in his judgments—has, indeed, the credit of being a sort of maker of things pleasant all round; but he is in principle much more reactionary—he is perhaps the most so of this group of critics, till they were exacerbated by the Revolters, to whom he himself refers as anarchistes littéraires. He is a staunch Bolæan; and if he has to admit (as with the growth of literary history it was by his time almost impossible for any one not to admit) that the Art Poétique is not complete, c’est du moins bien écrit. But he goes far beyond this elsewhere; and on the 26th of April, 1817— the very year when a certain enfant sublime presented himself as a competitor for an Academic prize—he asks, undoubting of the fact, “Pourquoi la constitution du Parnasse est elle si solide et si durable?” That the disciples of the Greek and Latin Muses should have anything to learn by going to “Runes” and such like things is nullement possible. Fairy tales are “absurd.” Even the avant-courriers of the French classic age meet with no mercy; and Balzac himself is credited merely with “bad taste.”

[Sidenote: Hoffman, Garat, &c.]

Of another member of the staff of the Débats in its early days, Hoffman, I know less than of these.[228] He was, like most of the group, a dramatist, and as might be expected, and as was the case with all of them, the double employments reacted not quite beneficially on each other. Like Geoffroy (with whom, however, he was at variance, and who told him in effect, with characteristic sweetness, to go back to his dramatic gallipots and leave criticism alone) he frowned on the youth of Romanticism, and seems generally to have been of the race and lineage of Rymer. Garat, not very weighty as a politician, possesses little more worth, if any, as a critic, though he had vogue as an éloge-writer. Daunou, who wrote noticeable notices on Ginguené and others, began his career by a critical essay, two years before the Revolution, on the influence of Boileau, and was during all his life more or less concerned with criticism. But he was more of a historian and student of the political sciences than of a literary critic of the pure breed. Etienne, Fiévée, Legouvé the elder, the two Lacretelles, Andrieux,[229] and others, we must also pass by, though I have matter for speaking of all of them: but Ginguené, M. J. Chénier, Népomucène Lemercier, and Feletz are not to be thus dismissed.

[Sidenote: Ginguené.]

The first was an older man than most of the group—in fact, he was over forty at the date of the Revolution, from the tender mercies of which he was only saved by Thermidor. But he ranks in literature, and especially in critical literature, chiefly by his Histoire Littéraire d’Italie,[230] which did not begin to appear till the second decade of the nineteenth century had opened, and was one of the earliest of these comprehensive surveys of literature—other than the writer’s own or than that of antiquity—which have had almost more to do than anything else with the formation of modern criticism. He has been accused of relying too much on Tiraboschi for his material; but the vice of looking rather at the commentators than at the texts was an old one, inherited from classical scholarship, and is by no means extinct a hundred years after Ginguené's time; and he is rather less tinged with it than we might expect. His judgments on such—to a Frenchman of the eighteenth century— dangerous writers as Dante and La Casa have considerable merit.

[Sidenote: M. J. Chénier.]

Marie-Joseph Chénier, in other respects besides his relations to his ill-fated and illustrious brother, appears to have been an unpopular and disputable person: nor, putting his considerable satiric power aside, can he be called a great man of letters. But, I think, his Tableau de la Littérature Française depuis 1789,[231] has been rather undervalued. It is not, of course, free from the common defects of these surveys, especially when taken à bout portant; it notices much that we do not want noticed at all, belittles important things, takes refuge in stock phrases and clichés so as to get the business over. But it is often acute and very much less one-sided and hide-bound than La Harpe or Geoffroy—recognising, for instance, in opposition to the latter, that Blair is “always just” to French writers. And it supplies us, written as it was just before the dawn of Romanticism (for Chénier died in 1811), with some interesting and necessarily unbiassed views. People, he says,[232] do not read Le Bossu at all, and they read Bouhours very little. He greatly prefers Diderot and Marmontel (though he thinks them “paradoxical”) to Batteux; and if he is complimentary to Voltaire and even to Thomas, rejoices in Fénelon and Corneille. He cannot, or will not, understand Chateaubriand;[233] but he takes frequent opportunity, under the guise of noticing translations, to refer to and estimate English and German literature. In short, he is open to the reproach of “not knowing where he is,” but the very evidences of this are useful to us.

[Sidenote: Lemercier.]

Still more relatively, and very much more intrinsically interesting, is Népomucène Lemercier—that singular first sketch of a Victor Hugo, who, naturally enough, would have none of Victor Hugo himself when he appeared, and who, in a cruel trick of Fate and Death, was actually supplanted by Hugo in his Academic Chair. It is unfortunate that Lemercier’s Cours de Littérature Générale[234] is not a very common book. It has something of the excessive generalisation of the eighteenth-century—men were struck by the effect of measured sounds and wrote poetry, &c.; and he still sticks to Kinds a good deal. But his independence is unmistakable. He slights the unities superbly; has what is, I think, the finest passage on Shakespeare written by a Frenchman up to his day, on “The English Aeschylus;” condemns la pernicieuse manie de critiquer opiniâtrement; qualifies and redeems his tendency to begin “in the air” with “the chimerical,” “the marvellous,” “the allegoric,” &c., by invariably condescending upon particulars in the true critical way; and, as became the author of the Panhypocrisiade and Pinto, defends Aristophanes against La Harpe. Unfortunately he followed (intentionally or not) Aristotle in confining himself to Drama and Epic. But he is a really stimulating and germinal writer, and represents the morrow among his own contemporaries.

[Sidenote: Feletz.]

Our last critic, before we come to those who in a way stand for both Empires, is a curious contrast both to the critic of the type of Geoffroy and to the critic of the type of Lemercier. Charles Marie Dorimont, Abbé de Feletz,[235] who died in the very middle of the nineteenth century at the age of eighty-three, was with Geoffroy himself, Dussault, and Hoffman, one of the Débats Four, and like them was something of an anti-Romantic. But he was a man of amiable temper, of many friends and of much addiction to society, so that he rather flicked than lashed. His information as to the foreign subjects which he often affected was not exhaustive, and the praise, as well as the blame, of his not quite novel remark that in the pièces difformes et barbares of Shakespeare there are beautés veritables, are both weakened by the fact that he thinks Falstaff is hanged on the Stage in the Merry Wives. But he reviews novels obviously by preference, can like Joseph Andrews, and can enjoy Miss Edgeworth. In which things a door, great and effectual, is opened, though Feletz doubtless knew it not.[236]

[Sidenote: Cousin.]

Of the remarkable pair[237]—united in their lives, their careers and their reputation—who, being first known under the first Empire, died in the same year a little before the close of the second, Cousin concerns us less than may be generally thought. He touched not a few literary subjects,[238] but always preferably, and for the most part exclusively, from the philosophical, social, or some other non-literary side. [Sidenote: Villemain:] With Villemain it is different. He, too, was a politician, a historian, and what not, but he was a man of letters, and a man of critical letters, first of all. His second Academic prize, as a very young man, was gained by a paper on “The Advantages and Disadvantages of Criticism;” of the fifteen volumes of his collected works[239] the greater part consists of literary history or estimate; he was Professor of “Eloquence Française,” that is to say French Literature; he was for a long period of years almost autocratic in the distribution of prizes and promotions at the Academy, of which he was “Secrétaire Perpetuel;” and it has long been, and to some extent still is, the correct and orthodox thing to speak of him as having initiated the modern critical movement in France, and shared with the Schlegels the credit of initiating that of Europe generally.

[Sidenote: his claims:]

From all this men must come to the fifteen volumes with high expectations—a little chequered perhaps in the case of the wary by some cautions of Sainte-Beuve’s.[240] To describe the result as unmixed disappointment would be unfair. The mere dates and contents of the books taken together establish the fact that the debt owed by literary and critical history to Villemain is great, and one of those which will never be written off the grand livre of the subject. That between 1816, the year of his appointment as Professor, and 1828, that of the first publication of his Cours de la Littérature Française, French students first, and then French readers, had presented to them for the first time a survey of their literature, which included a historical view of its own origins and earlier achievements, and something like a comparative view of the achievements of other nations, is a thing the greatness of which is not likely to be denied or minimised here. Villemain’s style is always correct and agreeable, and he did much to establish, for French criticism in the nineteenth-century, that repute for “honeying the cup,” which has become something of a superstition. Sainte-Beuve, in the passage just referred to, may give him a little too much credit for acuteness and wit in his individual observations, but he has both.

[Sidenote: Deductions to be made from them.]

Unluckily, however, the entries on the other side of the sheet are numerous and grave. There is not merely the fault, which his great successor justly brings against him—a fault from which, by the way, Sainte-Beuve himself was by no means free—that Villemain is afraid of concluding, that he seldom or never gives you a clear, “grasped,” summed-up view of his whole subject or man. Very few critics do. But in details also his work is too often unsatisfactory. His numerous “Reports” on academic competitions, which give opportunity for excellent criticism, are elegant, but hollow and rhetorical, as is his rather famous Tableau de l’Eloquence Chrétienne au IVème Siècle. His notices of various ancient and modern writers are much boiled down from others, with the result, not usual in physical boiling-down, of being not thick but thin—those of Lucretius, and of the tempting and almost virgin subject of the Greek Romances, especially so. Comparative and liberal as he is, his judgment of Shakespeare will not stand beside Lemercier’s (he says definitely that Shakespeare does not provide, in the same proportion as the Greeks, “universal beauties”), and his estimate of Milton is beggarly beside Chateaubriand’s. With all his reputation for rehabilitating mediæval literature, he seems to have known it little: he is not merely very superficial on Chaucer, which might be pardonable in a Frenchman, but actually sweeps the mighty volume of the Chansons de geste away at one stroke by the words “we had no poetry at once rude and vigorous.” He is sound upon Ossian—that craze was dying and could survive even rudimentary comparative study of literature in no one of talent; and his thirty-ninth and fortieth lectures in the Cours on Criticism itself deserve to be very well spoken of. But on the whole he is disappointing. We must, of course, make allowance—very large allowance—for a pioneer who begins early, who finds others, during the course of his long life, extending his own explorations far beyond his own limits, and who, from other engagements, from routine, or from sheer disenchantment or worse, declines to follow them; we must increase it for his industry in other matters; we must give him his just part and royalty in the accomplishment of those who followed, and not a few of whom he actually taught, while all owed him something indirectly. But intrinsically and absolutely I do not find him a very great or even a very good critic. He is deficient in enthusiasm, in originality, in grasp: nor does he quite make up the deficiency by erudition and method.

[Sidenote: Beyle.]

Two remarkable persons, one standing apart a little—as he, like his disciple Mérimée, always and in all things did—the other a polyhistoric talent just short of genius, have yet to be mentioned: and these are Henri Beyle and Charles Nodier. Beyle was, in a sense, nothing if not critical; and the spirit of criticism pervades all his work, both the earlier and better known novels and nondescripts, and the posthumous volumes (deserving very much the same alliteration), which have more recently been made known by the devoted labours of M. Stryienski. But the “place” for his literary criticism is, of course, Racine et Shakespeare, published in 1822, ere yet the Romantic party (to which Beyle himself never belonged) was fully formed, but when the principles “atmosphered” by Diderot, and held in various ways and degrees from Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael onward, had already begun to influence Frenchmen at large.

[Sidenote: Racine et Shakespeare.]

The book itself[241] is a very curious one. Originally making its bow as a couple of review articles, it received all sorts of accretions, internal and appended, and, in its latest form especially, is something of a potpourri. The title so far applies to the whole that the author is generally supporting the methods of Shakespeare against the methods of Racine: but a very small portion of the book is directly occupied with either. And an unwary reader, expecting to find a straightforward and consistent Romantic propaganda, may be almost hopelessly puzzled, not merely by Beyle’s zigzag digressions striking in all directions like forked lightning, but by such things as his constant and sustained polemic against Molière, who has generally been the one writer of the grand siècle (or with Corneille one of the two writers) taken under Romantic protection. In fact no book can better illustrate the confusion and yeastiness of thought in that early Romantic period, and the unconquerable, even when perverse, idiosyncrasy and individuality of Beyle himself. Much of the piece is an attack upon verse-tragedy as verse, for here, as elsewhere, this partisan of the greatest of all poets distinctly frowns on poetry as such. He bases himself on Scott almost as much as on Shakespeare, yet he is terribly disturbed by Sir Walter’s politics, and recurs again and again, more in sorrow than in anger, but with singular lack of humour,[242] to the story of the glass that George IV. drank out of, and that Scott first pocketed and then sat upon. Politics, indeed, run very high throughout, and one is never quite sure that Beyle’s dislike of Racine and Molière is not mainly (he would himself admit it as partly) based on dislike of an absolute monarchy and a courtly state of society. Here he divagates into a long controversy with the unfortunate perruque Auger: elsewhere into an almost totally irrelevant excursus on Lord Byron, Italy, and the wickedness of the English aristocracy. Yet he cannot help being critically valuable almost everywhere, and he generally “says true things,” though he constantly “calls them by wrong names.” How forcible and original is the definition of Scott’s[243] form of novel as “a romantic tragedy [or, we may add, ‘a romantic comedy’], with long inserted descriptions.” His battle[244] early in the piece with a “Classic” on the dramatic illusion parfaite and illusion imparfaite, is conducted in a masterly and victorious manner, though some of us would like to challenge the victor to another duel, on the point whether theatrical illusion is not always, and of necessity, even less than “imperfect,” and whether to obtain perfect “illusion” you must not read and read only.[245] Excellently acute too, for his time, though to ours it may seem a truism, is his attribution of most critical errors to l’habitude choquée:[246] and though there is both exaggeration and undue restriction in saying that “Romanticism is the art of giving people themselves pleasure, Classicism that of giving them what pleased their grandfathers,”[247] we know what he means. He is very sound on taste and fashion; and his severity on Voltaire is refreshing, because it cannot be attributed, as it is the fashion to attribute severities on that patriarch, to the odium theologicum. The whole, even in its singularities and shortcomings, is an invaluable testimony to the set of the current at the time:[248] but its words are not lightly to be taken as other than “words to the wise,” and they are not invariably the words of the wise.

[Sidenote: His attitude here]

Beyle’s attitude in this tract has been commented on in a fashion very illuminative (if you apply the proper checks in each case) by two persons of unsurpassed competence, but not of quite unsurpassed disinterestedness, Mérimée and Sainte-Beuve. The former[249] says plumply, “Pour lui la poésie était lettre close,” and quotes the famous boutade in De l’Amour, that “Verse was invented as an aid to memory.” His objection, says his disciple, to Racine (who “met with his sovereign displeasure”) was that he had no character or local colour: his reasons of preference for Shakespeare, that poet’s knowledge of the human heart, the life and individuality of his characters, his command of the nicest shades of passion and sentiment. Sainte-Beuve, on his side,[250] affects rather to pooh-pooh the whole matter, as if it were a battle of kites and crows, where the blood (if any) has been long absorbed, the torn feathers blown away, and the dust settled to quietness. Beyle was a fairly early, but excited and not quite judicious partaker in it. He was unjust to La Harpe (Sainte-Beuve defending La Harpe is rather good!), too much on the side of the Edinburgh Review (this is better,[251] the “Blue and Yellow” as a Romantic organ!). One remembers, of course, at once that both these great men of letters were, if not exactly deserters and traitors in regard to Romanticism, at any rate Romantics whose first love had grown pretty cold. Yet we must not forget to notice that Sainte-Beuve practically confirms Mérimée on Beyle’s “exclusion of poetry” in judging even Shakespeare.

[Sidenote: and elsewhere.]

Nor do we need these great accuser-compurgators. The singular self-revelations which have been communicated so lavishly of late years, tell us, sometimes on every page, sometimes at longer, but never at very long, intervals, of Beyle’s abiding interest in literature, and of its curious character, Most part of the letters[252] which he, as little more than a boy, wrote to his younger sister, Pauline, is occupied with literary and educational advice, nearly as surprising in its meticulous and affectionate pedagogism as the writer’s almost contemporary Journal is in very different ways. In both, and elsewhere, we find the ever-growing passion for Shakespeare, from the dramatic and psychological side, the ever-growing distaste for Racine, the admiration of Corneille, and the contempt of Voltaire—the latter an excellent subject for separate and careful study, inasmuch as we have in it Beyle’s Romanticism engaging and overcoming his anti-religiosity. Among the most curious documents noted here—where I think I have noted some that are curious—is the letter to Pauline of May 12, 1807, from Berlin, where Beyle has just discovered Lenore “across the veil which covers the genius of the German tongue from” him, and thinks it very touching.

Indeed Beyle in point of criticism is polypidax: though the streams are, as it were, underground for the most part, they gush out in the most apparently unlikely places. I have dozens of noted passages, for instance, in that singular and most readable book the Mémoires d’un Touriste,[253] certainly not a probable title-source of our matter, and some even in the Promenades dans Rome. He resembled Hazlitt in the way in which his criticism was liable to be distorted and poisoned by extra-literary prejudice, more particularly of the anti-clerical kind. I never knew a man so tormented with the idea of something in which he did not—or said he did not—believe, as Beyle is with the idea of Hell. It sometimes makes him very nearly silly, and constantly makes him lose occasions of combined magnanimity and pure literary judgment, as wherever he speaks of Joseph de Maistre.[254] But, as in Hazlitt’s case also, you seldom or never find a literary judgment of Beyle’s, free from prejudice, which is not sound.

[Sidenote: Nodier.]

For those who like Vitae Parallelae, with a spice, or more than a spice, of contrast, Nodier[255] makes an excellent pendant to Beyle: and while his influence was much more rapid, it was wider also, if not deeper. Nodier began his romantic and “xenomaniac” excursions with the century, writing on Shakespeare in 1801 and on Goethe in 1802. I have chased in the catalogues, but without bagging, a collection of early reviews of his, published by Barginet of Grenoble in 1822, which ought to be of very considerable interest for our purpose. It is well known how, especially after his appointment to the librarianship of the Arsenal in 1823, his abode became a rallying-place, and he himself a sort of Nestor-Ulysses of Romanticism, while his delightful fantastic, or half-fantastic stories (the best of them to my thinking is Inès de las Sierras), which are Sterne plus Hoffmann plus something else, form no small part of the choicest outcome of the movement. But in criticism proper, Nodier, though a great propelling and inspiring force, has left rather inadequate recorded examples of this force in application. This is partly due to the fact that his intense interest in pure bibliography, and in the “curiosities of literature,” drew him, as similar interests have often drawn others, a little away from that severer altar on which burns the fire of pure literary and critical appreciation. His principal book of this kind, perhaps his principal non-creative work, Mélanges tirés d’une Petite Bibliothèque,[256] shows this very clearly: and it may rather be feared that Nodier would have preferred a perfectly worthless book, of which he possessed an unique copy, or an extremely eccentric one, of which hardly anybody had ever heard, to the greatest work which everybody knew and had on their shelves. But still he did like much of the best of what was known, and, fortunately, directed his liking most to that of the best which was not so well known as it ought to be. And so there are few more characteristic names—and few names of more power—than his in the French Transition.

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V. ÆSTHETICS AND THEIR INFLUENCE

THE PRESENT CHAPTER ITSELF A KIND OF EXCURSUS—A PARABASIS ON “PHILOSOPHICAL” CRITICISM-MODERN ÆSTHETICS: THEIR FOUNT IN DESCARTES AND ITS BRANCHES-IN GERMANY: NEGATIVE AS WELL AS POSITIVE INDUCEMENTS-BAUMGARTEN-‘DE NONNULLIS AD POEMA PERTINENTIBUS’-AND ITS DEFINITION OF POETRY-THE ‘ALETHEOPHILUS’-THE ‘ÆSTHETICA’-SULZER-EBERHARD-FRANCE: THE PÈRE ANDRÉ, HIS ‘ESSAI SUR LE BEAU’-ITALY: VICO-HIS LITERARY PLACES-THE ’DE STUDIORUM RATIONE’-THE ’DE CONSTANTIA JURISPRUDENTIS’-THE FIRST ‘SCIENZA NUOVA’-THE SECOND-RATIONALE OF ALL THIS-A VERY GREAT MAN AND THINKER, BUT IN PURE CRITICISM AN INFLUENCE MALIGN OR NULL-ENGLAND-SHAFTESBURY-HUME-EXAMPLES OF HIS CRITICAL OPINIONS-HIS INCONSISTENCY-BURKE ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL-THE SCOTTISH ÆSTHETIC-EMPIRICS: ALISON-THE ‘ESSAY ON TASTE’-ITS CONFUSIONS-AND ARBITRARY ABSURDITIES-AN INTERIM CONCLUSION ON THE ÆSTHETIC MATTER.

[Sidenote: The present chapter itself a kind of excursus.]

It was announced at the very opening of this History that it would not deal, except incidentally and under force majeure, with those vaguer problems of general Criticism or metacriticism which, during the last two centuries, have taken the general name of Æsthetics. [Sidenote: A parabasis on “philosophical” criticism.] But some of my critics have not been content with this announcement, and it is perhaps permissible in this place to notice certain exceptions which have been taken to the absence of—or rather to the pretty definite abstention from— “philosophical” discussions and speculations in this book. For while in Italy I have been pronounced digiuno di filosofia, the huntsmen have been up in America against my “confusion of thought” and my writing about Criticism without defining what criticism is.

As for the first point, I may perhaps be allowed to say that “divine Philosophy” has been by no means such a stranger or stepmother to me as some of my critics seem to suppose. I have duly sojourned in her courts, and have found them the reverse of unamiable: I have eaten of her bread and found it both palatable and nourishing. But it is Philosophy herself who teaches us, by the mouth of not her least but, as some have thought, her greatest exponent, not to shift or mix the Kinds. And, to my possibly heretical judgment, the “kind” of Criticism seems one into which such “general ideas” as my critics desiderate can only be introduced by a most doubtful and perilous naturalisation. I suppose it would be generally granted that no “philosophical” critics stand higher than Plato and Coleridge: Aristotle himself has, in comparison with them, but contented himself with middle axioms and empirical observation. And the result of this is that—again to my possibly heretical thinking—Plato has actually left us nothing in pure criticism but an often mischievous theory: while Coleridge is just so much the more barren in true criticism as he expatiates further in the regions of sheer “philosophy.”

Nor should I, if I chose to take up the quarrel, in the least lack other arms or armour of offence and defence, sufficiently proofmarked by Philosophy herself. I hold that the province of Philosophy is occupied by matters of the pure intellect: and that literary criticism is busied with matters which, though not in the loosest meaning, are matters of sense. I do not know—and I do not believe that any one knows, however much he may juggle with terms—why certain words arranged in certain order stir one like the face of the sea, or like the face of a girl, while other arrangements leave one absolutely indifferent or excite boredom or dislike. I know that we may generalise a little; may “push our ignorance a little farther back”; may discover some accordances of sound, some rhythmical adjustments, some cunning and more or less constant appeals to eye and ear which, as we coolly say, “explain” emotion and attraction to some extent. But why these general things delight man he knows no more than, in his more unsophisticated stage, why their individual cases and instances do so. I do not think that my own doctrine of the Poetic (or the literary) Moment—of the instant and mirific “kiss of the spouse”—is so utterly “unphilosophical”: but I do know that that doctrine, if it does not exactly laugh to scorn theories of æsthetic, makes them merely facultative indulgences. And just as physiology, and biology, and all the ’ologies that ever were ’ologied, leave you utterly uninformed as to the real reason of the rapture of the physical kiss, so I think that æsthetics do not teach the reason of the amorous peace of the Poetic Moment.

But I began this book with no intention of writing a treatise on Momentary (or Monochronous) Apolaustics, and except that it might have seemed discourteous to offer no explanation of (I can hardly call this any apology for) a feature, or the lack of one, which has disturbed well-willing readers, I should have preferred to keep such questions out altogether. Nor can I see that there is any “confusion of thought,” any contradiction, or even any want of “architectonic” in the plan which I have actually pursued. A man may surely write a History of England without including in it an abstract treatise on politics, and describe an interesting country without philosophising on the architecture of its buildings, the family story of its tribes, or the chemical constitution of its natural products. I set before myself and my readers at the outset the promise of a simple survey of the actual critical opinions, actually expressed, in “judging of authors,” by the actual critics of recorded literature. To the survey of these I have added another of the chief reasons which they alleged for their tastes when they alleged any: and when, as naturally happens, these opinions and tastes, and the attempted explanations of them, appeared in groups or schools, I have adapted my survey, by means of the Interchapters of the book, to the summary consideration of these also. I have not thought it incumbent on me either to express, or to refrain from expressing, agreement or disagreement with their views: but where (as in the case of the Subject theory, of Boileau’s Good-Sense-worship and other things) it seemed to me that certain views and theories could be actually demolished by argument, I have endeavoured to show how. Where it is a simple question of taste, my own Haupt-theorie forbids my attempting anything of the sort.

I am, I confess, unable to see that either Logic or Architectonic is outraged by this preannounced and methodical limitation of proceeding. I have given, or attempted to give, my “Atlas” of the actual facts with what accuracy and clearness I could. The complement of Theory I do not pretend to supply, and I cannot see that anybody has a right to demand it. Whoso wants to take it let him make it: my facts ought to help him in the making, and if they do not, he and not the facts must bear the blame. This book has attempted to provide, in an orderly arrangement, and, as far as might be in the space, exhaustively, what has called itself and has been called Criticism (certain varieties being, for reasons given, excluded or less fully treated) from the beginnings of Greek literature, as we have them, to the present day. Of these provisions I think I may say—without prejudice to any further use of them that any one may choose to make—his utere mecum: and I will just add that had anybody offered me the same provision thirty years ago, I should have been profoundly thankful, and have been spared many a weary hour of gleaning here and groping there.

I shall even be so very bold as to say that what I have actually done, or attempted to do, seems to me in the true sense both philosophoteron and spoudaioteron than what my censors would have liked me to do. Any tolerably clever undergraduate, reading for Greats, could sketch (in after-life amusing himself, and perhaps impressing others, by accumulating arguments in support, or in destruction, of his undergraduate hypothesis) explanations of the distaste of the ancients for “appreciative” criticism, of the critical silence of the Middle Ages, of the French and English attitude of sixteenth-seventeenth century criticism and sixteenth-seventeenth century creation, of the time of bondage to Good Sense, of the avatars and phases of Taste. I would undertake myself to make a complete set in a Long Vacation, with arguments pro and con in the “best and most orgilous” manner. But I should not believe one of them, and I should mutter O vix sancta simplicitas! if anybody were taken in by them. In what I have given there is no possibility of taking in, and no need to believe or disbelieve. Here are the simple facts, disengaged by a certain amount of hard labour from their more or less accessible sources and quarries, and ranged, whether ill or well, yet at any rate with some system, and in such a fashion that they must be reasonably easy to master. I may not be an architect, but think I may claim to be a tolerable quarryman and a purveyor of the stone in fairly convenient arrangement, workably rough-hewed. And your most gifted architect will find himself put to it to make his Beauvais or his Batalha, his Salisbury or his Strasburg, from stone unquarried or unshaped to his hand. I have, in short, endeavoured to give a tolerably complete collection of facts which have never been collected before. If my facts are inconvenient to any philosophy, so much the worse for it: if they are convenient, let it take them and welcome.

At any rate—with what results of success or failure, of advantage or disadvantage to the work, the reader, not the writer, must judge,—my initial undertaking of abstinence has, I think, been fairly discharged. The point, however, at which we have arrived is one of those where the force majeure makes itself felt. In the Book where we aim at exhibiting the process of change which is so noticeable as between the general criticism of the eighteenth and the general criticism of the nineteenth centuries, and at examining to some extent the causes of that change, we could not possibly omit an influence so powerful for good or for evil as that of the constitution—as a regular branch of philosophy— of inquiries into the principles of Beauty, into the æsthetic sense, into the psychological aspects of the appeal of art generally. We shall still deal in the most economical and temperate fashion with these matters: but we cannot here abstain from them entirely. Indeed it might be open to anybody to urge that large passages occurring elsewhere in this volume, and even to some extent in the last, properly belong to the present chapter—that Lessing, Diderot, Du Bos are strayed sheep of this fold. But one remarkable person in France, another in Italy, and two still more remarkable groups in Germany and England, will find better place here than anywhere for something like individual notice: and others must be at least the subject of reference and glance.

[Sidenote: Modern Æsthetics: their fount in Descartes and its branches.]

With the minor differences which, occurring in all matters of opinion, nowhere multiply so fast and subdivide themselves so minutely as in questions of philosophy, there has been of late a general agreement to trace the germ of the modern division of Æsthetics to Descartes.[257] To discuss this at any length would be quite improper here: but no one who has the least acquaintance with the Cartesian philosophy can fail to see how naturally—nay, how inevitably—both the general principle of that philosophy in its reduction and rallying of everything to conditions of abstract idea and thought, and its particular insistence on clearness of definition and the like in Method, should lead to a reconsideration and further exploration of the idea of Beauty, literary and other. There is also no doubt that, in the next generation or generations, the developments of Cartesianism and the revolts against it might, nay, must, affect powerfully these applications of abstract thought to the remoter principles of literature. We have seen that Locke in England, Philistine as he himself was in regard to letters, and especially to poetry, had a very strong influence upon Addison,—an influence which he continued to exercise, both through Addison and independently, almost throughout the English eighteenth century. There is no doubt that in France the Père André, whom we shall mention presently, was a direct descendant of Descartes through Malebranche. In Italy the singular and solitary figure of Vico, though it exercised at first no influence, has been claimed as having a new and powerful influence to exercise in this direction as in others. And it is not disputable that Descartes begat Leibnitz or that Leibnitz begat Wolff, to whose philosophical system almost all competent judgment agrees in tracing the direct origin of German æsthetic, in Breitinger, in Baumgarten, and the rest.

[Sidenote: In Germany: negative as well as positive inducements.]

It is, I think, Herr von Antoniewicz, the very learned and able editor of J. E. Schlegel, who accounts[258] for the strong abstract and æsthetic tendency of German eighteenth-century criticism, both then and since, by the fact that the originators of it had nothing to look back upon, nothing to “tie themselves on to,” and that they therefore struck out into the deep, ripæ ulterioris amore, as we may say, to tag his saying. This is ingenious, and it becomes more illuminative when we compare the facts with the corresponding facts in English criticism. We, too, though we had in Dryden and Jonson a good deal more than the Germans had, possessed little critical starting-point. But we had, what the Germans had not, abundance of really great writers upon whom to fix practical and real critical examinations. It is half pathetic and half ludicrous to see the efforts that Bodmer and Gottsched and their contemporaries make to provide themselves with subjects of the kind out of people like Besser and Neukirch and Amthor, like Lohenstein and Hofmanswaldau, even like the excellent Opitz: and we cannot wonder that they, or at least others, dropped off these unsucculent subjects into the pure inane. But the fairer Callipolis of English criticism could feed and grow fat on Chaucer, and Spenser, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Dryden always, and by degrees on all the recovered wealth of older English literature. The Germans had nothing (save Luther and a few more not of the absolutely first class or even a very high second) but that mediæval literature and those ballads which naturally they did not reach at once. And even these, much good as they did them, had not the inestimable alterative value of older as compared with newer English literature.

[Sidenote: Baumgarten.]

On the other hand, they had, as we have said, an unconquerable desire and a dogged determination to learn and to improve themselves: the very poverty of their own literature drove them to compare and abstract others; and they possessed, in the Wolffian philosophy, a strong and serviceable instrument of method. Breitinger, with whom we have dealt sufficiently in his general critical aspect, may perhaps have the credit of the first distinct and extensive attempt to busy himself with the theory of art and letters: to Baumgarten is always attributed that of having put the name “Æsthetic” into currency, and of having got the thing—if it may be called a thing—into formal and regular shape. He used the word in a thesis, De Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus,[259] as early as 1735, about midway between the time when the Zürich men turned their attention seriously to poetry and imagination in the abstract, and the issue of their main body of work in 1740-41. But it was not till fifteen years later, at the exact middle of the century, that he began to publish his Æsthetica,[260] redacted from lectures delivered in the interval.

[Sidenote: De Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus,]

The thesis itself is to the expert a sufficient announcement of the new departure, which of course is only an old one re-fashioned. Baumgarten takes us right back to the most abstract criticism of the Italian Renaissance—the “idea of a poem,” the skeleton of poetic thought, method, expression, strung together by a new science of the sense of beauty. A poem is oratio sensitiva perfecta. What is poetical is that which contributes to this perfection.

[Sidenote: and its definition of poetry.]

The most fatal, and I am sure the most unintentionally fatal, criticism of Baumgarten, and incidentally of the entire division of critical or quasi-critical literature to which his work belongs, is contained in a remark of Herr Braitmaier’s (ii. 9) that part of the thesis “is written with very little understanding of poetry.” The question is whether the whole is not—whether this and other things like it might not have been said by a man who could not distinguish between Tupper and Tennyson, between Hugo and Delille. Look at this oratio sensitiva perfecta—which sent the good Herder into ecstasies as a new poetic spell, germ, and what not. Like other abstract definitions, including that of Coleridge himself, to which we shall come later, it omits or misses the differentia of Poetry altogether. It lets in the prose-poetry or the prose-better-than-poetry heretics by a wide and unclosable door:[261] it excludes the very quality which some of those who love poetry most love in it. What is “perfection” but the attainment, in the highest degree, of that which is elsewhere attained in degrees high, less high, low, or lowest? There are therefore orationes sensitivæ which have the qualities of poetry but are not poetry. This is hard to admit. Poetry should be itself: not a “bestment” of something else.

[Sidenote: The Aletheophilus.]

In the Aletheophilus, which followed (1741), Baumgarten expanded and, at the same time, condescended a little. A poem is now a “lively” oration instead of “sensitive” words, and so lively that it demands metrical expression. Herein he seems to his severer critics to have derogated. “Liveliness,” they say, was in sensitiva, only better: “metre” was in perfecta by implication. One can only say that we prefer to take it explicitly. And Baumgarten, like all other theorists with hardly an exception, grudges the admission of metre after all. He calculates that it gives only a very small proportion of the charm of poetry. True, the admission of it at all—with the further prescription of “thoughts that burn,” “brilliant order,” “regular,” that is to say, pure, neatly adjusted, adequate, and charming “expression,” does something to dress up the bare skeleton of the perfecta sensitiva oratio. But it does more to show what a bodiless skeleton it is. [Sidenote: The Æsthetica.] The Æsthetica itself,[262] which had been preceded by a sort of pilot-engine in the shape of a redaction of Baumgarten’s professorial lectures by his pupil, G. F. Meier,[263] expands, after a rather Vossian pattern, the principles of the two earlier books, dwelling much on “perfection,” on the innate disposition of the soul towards beautiful thoughts, and the like. He is perhaps most justly thanked for his insistence on sensitiva—on the sensual as well as intellectual appeal of poetry. But his illustration from actual ancient poetry is not rich: and that from modern almost non-existent.[264]

To Baumgarten we have given some place as to a pioneer even in a branch of criticism which we do not intend to pursue. His followers, Sulzer and Eberhard, must have less room, and Moses Mendelssohn, between them, is elsewhere treated.

[Sidenote: Sulzer.]

The well-known Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste[265] of Sulzer, to which the often quoted Zusätze of Blankenberg belong as supplement, is in reality a painful compound of Dictionary and Bibliography, wherein you go from Copiren to Corinthische Ordnung, and from Menuet to Metalepsis. Such things, invaluable for their time, are almost necessarily thrown into the wallet at his back by Time himself. But they serve as a text for a repetition of the sober truth that the immense reputation and the really solid achievement of Germany since have been not a little due to the provision of them by her eighteenth-century writers. Mere knowledge will not do everything: and it is peculiarly liable to degenerate into a simple rag-bag and marine-store accumulation of things that are not knowledge. But the average man can do very little without it; he can sometimes do quite surprising things with it. And while the less than average man is without it mainly negligible, it would be wofully easy to provide examples in which persons, certainly or possibly much above the average in ability, have made shipwreck by neglecting it.

[Sidenote: Eberhard.]

The Handbuch der Æsthetik[266] of Eberhard may deserve a line here, because, though beginning in the orthodox æsthetic manner with general Principles of Beauty, it works them down to specific Rhetoric and Poetry with rather more condescension, and a great deal more ingenuity, than usual.

[Sidenote: France: the Père André, his Essai sur le Beau.]

To pass to France, the Essai sur le Beau of the Père André[267] is almost a famous book, and undoubtedly exercised a great deal of influence over the time; nor must we deny that that influence had literary effects. But even a not hasty reader might be excused—if he came across the book having never previously heard of it—for saying that its connection with Literature is almost non-existent. The very word does not occur in the Index, which is rather fuller than in most French books of the time: and though “Eloquence” and “Poetry” do, the remarks in reference to them are of the most meagre character. There must be Unity: and the poet must please the imagination (Addison had at least taught them to use the word) as well as the intellect. Even “pleasure” is to be used with jealous care as a criterion of Beauty—the love of this is to be “disinterested.” But beyond these vague, as one might have thought barren, and in the last case theoretical generalities, André has next to nothing for the student of Literary Criticism, who may make what he can of the table of the Beautiful, as—

Arbitrary, Moral, National, Spiritual, Essential, Musical, Sensible, Visible.

And it is well if this student has the grace to refrain from amplifying this table after the pattern and in the spirit of the twenty-eighth chapter of the Third Book of Rabelais.

[Sidenote: Italy: Vico.]

In Italy, the illustrious author[268] of the Scienza Nuova[269] had, before Baumgarten, before even Breitinger, and long before André, turned the powers of his profound and original thought to the question of sapienza poetica. He lays at least as much stress as Baumgarten himself upon the sensitiva: discerns natural and diametrical opposition between Metaphysics and Poetry; but still admits a Science, “new” in this as in other respects, of Poetry, or at least a logica poetica which compares curiously with Breitinger’s “Logic of Imagination” and other things. There does not appear to be any suspicion or any likelihood of indebtedness: it is only one of the innumerable instances of things being “in the air” and of the birds of the air carrying them to different places and persons. With him, poetry, like everything else, is an item or factor in human history, though, following his strong metaphysical turn, he deals largely with the relations to soul and sense, &c.

[Sidenote: His literary places.]

In arranging, according to our usual fashion, the actual deliverances of Vico as actually presented, we find them in four successive places presenting as many stages of his thought—the De Studiorum Ratione (1708), the Constantia Jurisprudentis (1721), the first Scienza (1725), and the second (1730).

[Sidenote: The De Studiorum Ratione.]

The first named is early, and it presents the author’s thought in a somewhat embryonic condition, but as true to the future development as an embryo ought to be. Its importance for us consists first in the starting[270] from Bacon, which of itself will give us something of an inkling of Vico’s attitude to literature, though the Italian fortunately discarded whatever was contemptuous or hostile in the Englishman’s position. More important still is the erection[271] of a “Nova Critica” which is opposed and preferred to “Topica” in relation to literature itself. “Critica est ars veræ orationis; Topica [here evidently used in one of the full senses of ‘Rhetoric’] autem copiosæ.”[272] And most, the paragraph[273] on Poetry itself, where Vico, deserting Bacon, proclaims it not a vinum dæmonum but a “gift of the Most Highest,” declares the great characteristic of the Poet to be Imagination, but (true to his own line) insists on Truth being still most necessary to him. That the new Physic will be very convenient to Poetry by supplying it with fresh and accurate images may raise a smile: but after all it has not proved quite vain.

[Sidenote: The De Constantia Jurisprudentis.]

De Constantia Jurisprudentis may seem a surprising title; but Vico was thoroughly of the opinion of a later jurist, Mr Counsellor Paulus Pleydell, about the necessity of “history and literature” to his profession, and the sub-title De Constantia Philologiæ takes away even the titular shock. Philology is here no mere charwoman, with the charwoman’s too frequent habit of doing even the mean work she does badly; but a mighty goddess of knowledge, presiding over not merely the history of words but the history of things. History was Vico’s real darling: and that view of poetry as the earliest attainable history, which, true enough in a way, was to lead him into heresy afterwards, distinctly appears here. It is only at the twelfth chapter of this section[274] that he comes to talk “De Linguæ Heroicæ sive de Poeseos Origine,” and handles his subject very much as we should expect from his text, that “Poetry is the first language of men.” Still, he goes into a good deal of detail, and his description[275] of the iamb as the “middleman” (tradux) between heroic verse and prose, though not likely to be historically correct, has a certain truth logically. And he appends to this, in a very long note, a discussion of Homer himself, which is not yet polytheist.

[Sidenote: The first Scienza Nuova.]

These earlier treatises take away almost all oddity from the appearance in the first Scienza of an entire Book,[276] the Third, occupied with New Principles of Poetry. Hotch-potch as this book may seem—ranging as it does from theogony to chronology, and from both to heraldry and the science of medals, from elaborate discussions of “fables” generally to a discovery of the Laws of War and Peace in poetry itself, from the greatness of Homer to the truth of the Christian Religion,—all these apparent oddities are waxed if not welded together by Vico’s general idea of the Poet as the earliest and truest historian, philosopher, and authority for the New Science of Humanity. Indeed he often reminds us of Shelley in the Defence of Poetry, and I daresay Shelley really knew him.[277]

[Sidenote: The Second.]

It is not, however, till the second Scienza that these sketches and studies take the form of an elaborate treatise, Della Sapienza Poetica, filling one whole book on the general subject, and another, Della Discoverta del Vero Omero, no less than three hundred pages.[278] Here Vico becomes more than ever “Thorough.” After preliminaries on science generally, on poetical science, and on the Deluge, we have a Metaphysic of Poetry, a Logic of Poetry, an Ethic, Economic, Politic, Physic (specified down as Cosmography, Astronomy, Chronology, and Geography)—all of Poetry!

In these bold speculations many striking and really critical sayings occur. That it is the first principle of poetry to give life, and its own life, to everything[279] nobody need deny; nor that poetry is at once “impossible and credible,”[280] a near coasting of the Coleridgean Land of Promise, the explorer starting of course, as Coleridge did, from the Aristotelian doctrine of the “plausible impossible” and the absurdity rendered imperceptible by poetic speech. That “too much reflection hurts poetry”[281] is less unmixedly true, though most certainly not unmixedly false.

[Sidenote: Rationale of all this.]

All this is extremely interesting, but with an interest so different from that of purely literary criticism that I can quite understand how a man like Signor Croce, taking his start from it, ostracises purely literary criticism itself. Of this last indeed[282] there is little or nothing in Vico. He does not conduct—I am not aware of any one who ever has conducted—the argument for Homeric disintegration on literary grounds: his occasional comparisons of Dante with Homer are equally unliterary. I have not yet found a place where he deals with any author in a purely literary spirit. The zeal of his New Science of Humanity has eaten him up. A poem is a historical document, a poet is not merely an early historian but an early theologian, philosopher, jurist, moralist, panto-pragmatist, panepistemon, panhistor. Very like; but for most of these purposes a Tupper would be quite as valuable as a Tennyson, and we see that a cloud of unsubstantial Homerids were quite as valuable to Vico as the One Poet of Helen and Nausicaa, of Achilles and Odysseus.

[Sidenote: A very great man and thinker, but in pure Criticism an influence malign or null.]

For us, therefore, the main importance of Vico, though undoubtedly great, is of a dubious not to say a sinister character. It establishes him in a position by no means dissimilar to that of Plato,—a position of enormous influence, epoch-making and original, which influence has chiefly spent itself in ways outside of, or counter to, that which we are pursuing. If Vico had contented himself with developing, in the direction of literature, the theory of cyclical progression which he in common with other great thinkers held, and if he had had literary knowledge enough to apply it, the results might have been wholly good. But it does not appear that he had this knowledge, and, whether he had it or not, he used what he had in very different lines. I think that Professor Flint has established beyond all doubt Vico’s claim to the anticipation of the so-called “Wolfian” method with Homer.[283] But, as I have explained from the very outset, this so-called criticism also is not the species of criticism with which we here busy ourselves at all: and its methods are entirely separate and partly hostile. Yet there is no question about the importance which this so-called criticism has assumed in the last two centuries, and in this, as in other matters, Vico is an origin.

So is he, I think, likewise in the extension of literary criticism by including in it investigations into psychology, not merely individual but national, into manners, religion, and what not. This extension, continued by the Germans of the later eighteenth century and immensely popularised and developed during the nineteenth, of course now seems to some the orthodox and only legitimate process of the kind. To me, as my readers by this time must be well aware, it does not seem so. I therefore deplore the exercise of Vico’s genius in this direction, and I do not purpose to admit its results into these pages more than I can help. But once more I recognise his greatness, if in some respects as that of a great heresiarch. And it would be really “unphilosophical” to leave him without pointing out, what has not, so far as I know, been pointed out before, how noteworthy he is as exemplifying the corruption of a thing accompanying quite early stages of its growth. We have throughout maintained that the Historical method is the salvation of Criticism, and in this very period we are witnessing its late application to that purpose. Vico is the very apostle, nay, more, the prophet, of the Historical method itself. Yet here, as elsewhere, the postern to Hell is hard by the gateway of the Celestial City.

[Sidenote: England.]

We may give a somewhat full account of some English writers whose criticism trembles on the verge of æsthetic or oversteps it, partly on the general principles announced in the preface to the last volume, partly because some of them at least do touch actual criticism rather more nearly than, say, Baumgarten and Vico; but also because, in the great prepollence of English literature during the eighteenth century, some of them likewise—notably Shaftesbury and Burke—exercised a very considerable influence upon foreign countries. As for Hume, he is a particularly interesting example of a man pushing freedom of thought to the utmost limit in certain directions, but apparently content to dwell in the most hide-bound orthodoxy of his time as to others.[284]

[Sidenote: Shaftesbury.]

There are few writers of whom more different opinions have been held, in regard to their philosophical and literary value, than is the case with Shaftesbury. His criticism has been less discussed, except from the purely philosophical or at any rate the technically æsthetic side; but difference is scarcely less certain here when discussion does take place. It is difficult to put the dependence of that difference in an uncontentious and non-question-begging manner, because it concerns a fundamental antinomy of the fashion in which this curious author strikes opposite temperaments. To some, every utterance of his seems to carry with it in an undertone something of this sort: “I am not merely a Person of Quality, and a very fine gentleman, but also, look you, a philosopher of the greatest depth, though of the most elegant exterior, and a writer of consummate originality and agudeza. If you are sensible people you will pay me the utmost respect; but alas! there are so many vulgar and insensible people about, that very likely you will not.” Now this kind of “air” abundantly fascinates some readers, and intrigues others; while, to yet others again, it seems the affectation, most probably of a charlatan, certainly of an intellectual coxcomb, and they are offended accordingly. It is probably unjust (though there is weighty authority for it) to regard Shaftesbury as a charlatan; but he will hardly, except by the fascination aforesaid or by some illegitimate partisanship of religious or philosophical view, escape the charge of being a coxcomb; and his coxcombry appears nowhere more than in his dealings with criticism.[285] From the strictest point of view of our own definition of the art, he would have very little right to entrance here at all, and would have to be pretty unceremoniously treated if he were allowed to take his trial. His concrete critical utterances—his actual appreciations—are almost Rymerical; with a modish superciliousness substituted for pedantic scurrility. “The British Muses,” quoth my lord, in his Advice to an Author,[286] “may well lie abject and obscure, especially being as yet in their mere infant state. They have scarce hitherto arrived to anything of stateliness or person,” and he continues in the usual style with “wretched pun and quibble,” “false sublime,” “Gothick mode of poetry,” “horrid discord of jingling rhyme,” &c. He speaks of “that noble satirist Boileau” as “raised from the plain model of the ancients.” Neither family affection, nor even family pride, could have induced him to speak as he speaks of Dryden,[287] if he had had any real literary taste. His sneers at Universities,[288] at “pedantick learning,” at “the mean fellowship of bearded boys,” deprive him of the one saving grace which Neo-classicism could generally claim. “Had I been a Spanish Cervantes, and with success equal to that comick author had destroyed the reigning taste of Gothick or Moorish Chivalry, I could afterwards contentedly have seen my burlesque itself despised and set aside.”[289] Perhaps there is not a more unhappily selected single epithet in the whole range of criticism than “the cold Lucretius.”[290]

On the other hand, both in the more speciously literary parts of his desultory discourses de quodam Ashleio, and outside of them, he has frequent remarks on the Kinds;[291] he is quite copious on Correctness;[292] and there can be no doubt that he deserves his place in this chapter by the fashion in which he endeavours to utilise his favourite pulchrum and honestum in reference to Criticism, of which he is a declared and (as far as his inveterate affectation and mannerism will let him) an ingenious defender. The main locus for this is the Third Miscellany, and its central, or rather culminating, passage[293] occurs in the second chapter thereof. The Beautiful is the principle of Literature as well as of Virtue; the sense whereby it is apprehended is Good Taste; the manner of attaining this taste is by a gradual rejection of the excessive, the extravagant, the vulgar.[294] A vague enough gospel, and not over well justified by the fruits of actual appreciation quoted above;[295] but not perhaps much vaguer, or possessing less justification, than most metacritic.

[Sidenote: Hume.]

The position of Hume in regard to literary criticism has an interest which would be almost peculiar if it were not for something of a parallel in Voltaire. If the literary opinions of the author of the Enquiry into Human Nature stood alone they would be almost negligible; and if he had worked them into an elaborate treatise, like that of his clansman Kames, this would probably, if remembered at all, be remembered as a kind of “awful example.” In their context and from their author, however, we cannot quite “regard and pass” Hume’s critical observations as their intrinsic merit may seem to suggest that we should do: nay, in that context and from that author, they constitute a really valuable document in more than one relation.

[Sidenote: Examples of his critical opinions.]

It cannot be said that Hume does not invite notice as a critic; on the contrary, his title of “Essays: Moral, Political,[296] and Literary” seems positively to challenge it. Yet his actual literary utterances are rather few, and would be almost unimportant but for the considerations just put. He tells us criticism is difficult;[297] he applies[297] (as Johnson did somewhat differently) Fontenelle’s remark about “telling the hours”; he illustrates from Holland the difference of excellence in commerce and in literature.[298] He condemns—beforehand, and with the vigour and acuteness which we should expect from him—the idea of attempting to account for the existence of a particular poet at a particular time and in a particular place.[299] He is shocked at the vanity, at the rudeness, and at the loose language of the ancients.[300] He approaches, as Tassoni[301] and Perrault[302] had approached, one of the grand cruces of the whole matter by making his Sceptic urge that “beauty and worth are merely of a relative nature, and consist of an agreeable sentiment produced by an object on a particular mind”;[303] but he makes no detailed use or application whatever of this as regards literature. His Essay on Simplicity and Refinement in Writing[304] is psychology rather than criticism, and he uses his terms in a rather curious manner. At least, I myself find it difficult to draw up any definitions of these qualities which will make Pope the ne plus ultra of justifiable Refinement, and Lucretius that of Simplicity; Virgil and Racine the examples of the happy mean in both; Corneille and Congreve excessive in Refinement, and Sophocles and Terence excessive in Simplicity.[305] The whole is, however, a good rationalising of the “classical” principle; and is especially interesting as noticing, with slight reproof, a tendency to too great “affectation and conceit” both in France and England—faults for which we certainly should not indict the mid-eighteenth century. The Essay On Tragedy is more purely psychological still. And though On the Standard of Taste is less open to this objection, one cannot but see that it is Human Nature, and not Humane Letters, in which Hume is really interesting himself. The vulgar censure on the reference to Bunyan[306] is probably excessive; for it is at least not improbable that Hume had never read a line of The Pilgrim’s Progress, and was merely using the tinker’s name as a kind of type-counter. But this very acceptance of a conventional judgment— acceptance constantly repeated throughout the Essay—is almost startling in context with the alleszermalmend tendency of some of its principles. A critic who says[307] that “It is evident that none of the rules of composition are fixed by reasonings a priori,” is in fact saying “Take away that bauble!” in regard to Neo-classicism altogether; and though in the very same page Hume repeats the orthodox cavils at Ariosto, while admitting his charm on the next, having thus set up the idol again, he proceeds once more to lop it of hands and feet and tumble it off its throne by saying that “if things are found to please, they cannot be faults; let the pleasure which they produce be ever so unexpected and unaccountable.” The most dishevelled of Romantics, in the reddest of waistcoats, could say no more.

In his remarks upon the qualifications and functions of the critic, Hume’s anthropological and psychological mastery is evident enough: but it is at least equally evident that his actual taste in literature was in no sense spontaneous, original, or energetic. In comparing him, say, with Johnson it is not a little amusing to find his much greater acquiescence in the conventional and traditional judgments. Indeed, towards the end of his Essay[308] Hume anticipates a later expression[309] of a perennial attitude of mind by declaring, “However I may excuse the poet on account of the manners of his age, I never can relish the composition,” and by complaining of the want of “humanity and decency so conspicuous” even sometimes in Homer and the Greek tragedies. That David, of all persons, should fail to realise—he did not fail to perceive—that the humanity of Homer was human and the decency of Sophocles was decent, is indeed surprising.

[Sidenote: His inconsistency.]

Such things might at first sight not quite dispose one to regret that, as he himself remarks,[310] “the critics who have had some tincture of philosophy” have been “few,” for certainly those who have had more tincture of philosophy than Hume himself have been far fewer. But, as is usually the case,[311] it is not the fault of philosophy at all. For some reason, natural disposition, or want of disposition, or even that necessity of clinging to some convention which has been remarked in Voltaire himself, evidently made Hume a mere “church-going bell”—pulled by the established vergers, and summoning the faithful to orthodox worship—in most of his literary utterances. Yet, as we have seen, he could not help turning quite a different tune at times, though he himself hardly knew it.

[Sidenote: Burke on the Sublime and Beautiful.]

At the close of Burke’s Essay[312] he expressly declines “to consider poetry as it regards the Sublime and Beautiful more at large”; but this “more” refers to the fact that his Fifth Part had been given to the Power of Words in exciting ideas of the kind. Most of what he says on this head is Lockian discussion of simple and compound, abstract and concrete, &c., and of the connection of words with images, as illustrated by the cases—so interesting in one instance to the English, and in the other to the whole, eighteenth century—of Blacklock the blind poet, and Saunderson the blind mathematician. There is, however, a not unacute contention[313] against the small critics of that and other times, that the exact analytical composition necessary in a picture is not necessary in a poetic image. But one may doubt whether this notion was not connected in his own mind with the heresy of the “streaks of the tulip.”[314] It serves him, however, as a safeguard against the mere “imitation” theory: and it brings (or helps to bring) him very near to a just appreciation of the marvellous power of words as words. His remarks on the grandeur of the phrase “the Angel of the Lord” are as the shadow of a great rock in the weary glare of the Aufklärung, and so are those which follow on Milton’s “universe of Death.” Nor is it a trifling thing that he should have discovered the fact that “very polished languages are generally deficient in Strength.”

In the earlier part there are interesting touches, such as that of “degrading” the style of the Æneid into that of The Pilgrim’s Progress, which, curiously enough, occurs actually in a defence of a taste for romances of chivalry[315] and of the sea-coast of Bohemia. Part I. sect. xv., on the effects of tragedy, is almost purely ethical. In the parts—the best of the book—which deal directly with the title subjects (Parts II. and III.), an excellent demonstration[316] is made of the utter absurdity of that scheme of physical proportion which we formerly laughed at:[317] but the application, which might seem so tempting, to similar arbitrariness in judging of literature, is not made. Still more remarkable is the scantiness of the section on “The Beautiful in Sounds”[318] which should have brought the writer to our proper subject. Yet we can hardly regret that he says so little of it when we read that astonishing passage[319] in which the great Mr Burke has “observed” the affections of the body by Love, and has come to the conclusion that “the head reclines something on one side; the eyelids are more closed than usual, and the eyes roll gently with an inclination towards the object; the mouth is a little opened and the breath drawn slowly with now and then a low sigh; the whole body is composed, and the hands fall idly to the sides”—a sketch which I have always wished to have seen carried into line by the ingenious pencil of Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe.[320] A companion portrait of the human frame under the influence of poetic afflatus, in writer or in reader, would indeed have been funny, but scarcely profitable. In fact, the most that can be said for Burke, as for the generality of these æsthetic writers, is that the speculations recommended and encouraged could not but break up the mere ice of Neo-classic rule-judgment. They almost always go directly to the effect, the result, the event, the pleasure, the trouble, the thrill. That way perhaps lies the possibility of new error: but that way certainly lies also the escape from old.

[Sidenote: The Scottish æsthetic-empirics: Alison.]

The trinitarian succession of Scottish æsthetic-empirics—Gerard, Alison, Jeffrey—could not with propriety be omitted here, but the same propriety would be violated if great space were given to them. They connect with, or at least touch, Burke and Smith on the one hand, Kames on the other: but they are, if rather more literary than the first two, very much less so than the third. All, in degrees modified perhaps chiefly by the natural tendency to “improve upon” predecessors, are associationists: and all display (though in somewhat decreasing measure as a result of the time-spirit) that sometimes amusing but in the end rather tedious tendency to substitute for actual reasoning long chains of only plausibly connected propositions, varied by more or less ingenious substitutions of definition and equivalence, which is characteristic of the eighteenth century. Gerard, the earliest, is the least important:[321] and such notice of Jeffrey as is necessary will come best in connection with his other critical work. Alison, as the central and most important of the three, and as representing a prevailing party for a considerable time, may have some substantive notice here.

[Sidenote: The Essay on Taste.]

The Essay on Taste, which was originally published in 1790, and which was sped on its way by Jeffrey’s Review (the original form of the reviewer’s own essay) in 1811, had reached its sixth edition in 1825, and was still an authority, though it must by that time have begun to seem not a little old-fashioned, to readers of Coleridge and Hazlitt. It is rather unfortunately “dated” by its style, which—even at its original date something of a survival—is of the old “elegant” but distinctly artificial type of Blair: and, as has been hinted already, it abuses that eighteenth-century weakness for substituting a “combined and permuted” paraphrase of the proposition for an argument in favour of the fact. There is a very fair amount of force in its associationist considerations, though, as with all the devotees of the Association principle down to Mill, the turning round of the key is too often taken as equivalent to the opening of the lock. But its main faults, in more special connection with our subject, are two. [Sidenote: Its confusions] The first is a constant confusion of Beauty or Sublimity with Interest. Alison exhausts himself in proving that the associations of youth, affection, &c., &c., cause love of the object—a truth no doubt too often neglected by the Neo-classic tribe, but accepted and expressed by men of intelligence, from the Lucretian usus concinnat down to Maginn’s excellent “Don’t let any fool tell you that you will get tired of your wife; you are much more likely to get quite unreasonably fond of her.” But love and admiration, though closely connected, are not the same thing, and love and interest are still farther apart. Another confusion of Alison’s, very germane indeed to our subject, is that he constantly mixes up the beauty of a thing with the beauty of the description of it.

The most interesting point, however, about Alison is his halting between two opinions as to certain Neo-classic idols. His individual criticisms of literature are constantly vitiated by faults of the old arbitrariness, especially as to what is “low.” There is an astonishing lack of critical imagination in his objections to two Virgilian lines—

“Adde tot egregias urbes, operumque laborem . . . . . . . . Septemque una sibi muro circumdedit arces”—

as “cold,” “prosaic,” “tame,” “vulgar,” and “spiritless.” As if the image of the busy town after the country beauty were not the most poetic of contrasts in the first: and as if the City of the Seven Hills did not justly fire every Roman mind![322]

[Sidenote: and arbitrary absurdities.]

These, however, might be due to “the act of God,” to sheer want of the quality on which the essay is written. A large part of the second volume exhibits the perils of that Castle Dangerous, the “half-way house,” unmistakably and inexcusably. Alison is dealing with the interesting but ticklish subject of human beauty, and, like Burke, is justly sarcastic on the “four noses from chin to breast,” “arm and a half from this to that” style of measurement. But he is himself still an abject victim of the type-theory. Beauty must suit the type; and its characteristics must have a fixed qualitative value—blue eyes being expressive of softness, dark complexions of melancholy, and so on. But here he is comparatively sober.[323] Later he indulges in the following: “The form of the Grecian nose is said to be originally beautiful, ... and in many cases it is undoubtedly so. Apply, however, this beautiful form to the countenance of the Warrior, the Bandit, the Martyr, or to any which is meant to express deep or powerful passion, and the most vulgar spectator would be sensible of dissatisfaction, if not of disgust.” Let us at least be thankful that Alison has freed us from being “the most vulgar spectator.” Why the Warrior, why the Martyr, why the deep and powerful man, should not have a Grecian nose I fail to conceive: but the incompatibility of a Bandit and a straight profile lands me in profounder abysses of perplexity. The artillery and the blue horse must yield their pride of place: the reason in that instance is, if not exquisite, instantly discernible. But nothing in all Neo-classic arbitrariness from Scaliger to La Harpe seems to me to excel or equal the Censure of the Bandit with the Grecian Nose as a monstrous Bandit, a disgustful object, hateful not merely to the elect but to the very vulgar.[324]

[Sidenote: An interim conclusion on the æsthetic matter.]

Let us hear the conclusion of this whole æsthetic matter. Any man of rather more than ordinary intelligence—perhaps any man of ordinary intelligence merely—who has been properly educated from his youth up (as all men who show even a promise of ordinary intelligence should have been) in ancient and modern philosophy, who knows his Plato, his Aristotle, and his neo-Platonists, his Scholastics, his moderns from Bacon and Hobbes and Descartes downwards, can, if he has the will and the opportunity, compose a theory of æsthetics. That is to say, he can, out of the natural appetite towards poetry and literary delight which exists in all but the lowest and most unhappy souls, and out of that knowledge of concrete examples thereof which exists more or less in all, excogitate general principles and hypotheses, and connect them with immediate and particular examples, to such an extent as the Upper Powers permit or the Lower Powers prompt. If he has at the same time—a happy case of which the most eminent example up to the present time is Coleridge—a concurrent impulse towards actual “literary criticism,” towards the actual judgment of the actual concrete examples themselves, this theory may more or less help him, need at any rate do him no great harm. Mais celà n’est pas nécessaire, as was said of another matter; and there are cases, many of them in fact, where the attention to such things has done harm.

For after all, once more Beyle, as he not seldom did, reached the flammantia mœnia mundi when he said, in the character of his “Tourist” eidolon, “En fait de beau chaque homme a sa demi-aune.” Truth is not what each man troweth: but beauty is to each man what to him seems beautiful. You may better the seeming:—the fact is at the bottom of all that is valuable in the endlessly not-valuable chatter about education generally, and it excuses, to a certain extent, the regularity of Classicism, the selfish “culture” of the Goethean ideal, the extravagances of the ultra-Romantics. But yet

“A God, a God, the severance ruled,”

and you cannot bridge the gulfs that a God has set by any philosophastering theory.[325]

Yet although all this is, according to my opinion at least, absolutely true; although literary criticism has not much more to do with æsthetics than architecture has to do with physics and geology—than the art of the wine-taster or the tea-taster has to do with the study of the papillæ of the tongue and the theory of the nervous system generally, or with the botany of the vine and the geology of the vineyard; although, finally, as we have seen and shall see, the most painful and earnest attention to the science of the beautiful appears to be compatible with an almost total indifference to concrete judgment and enjoyment of the beautiful itself, and even with egregious misjudgment and failure to enjoy,—yet we cannot extrude this other scienza nuova altogether, if only because of the almost inextricable entanglement of its results with those of criticism proper. And it is more specially to be dealt with in this particular place because, beyond all question, the direction of study to these abstract inquiries did contribute to the freeing of criticism from the shackles in which it had lain so long. Any new way of attention to any subject is likely to lead to the detection of errors in the old: and as the errors of Neo-classicism were peculiarly arbitrary and irrational, the “high priori way” did certainly give an opportunity of discovering them from its superior height—the most superfluous groping among preliminaries and foundations gave a chance of unearthing the roots of falsehood. As in the old comparison Saul found a kingdom when he sought for his father’s asses, so it was at least possible for a man, while he was considering whether poetry is an oratio sensitiva perfecta, or whether there is a separate Logic of Phantasy, to have his eyes suddenly opened to the fact that Milton was not merely a fanatic and fantastic, with a tendency to the disgusting, and that Shakespeare was something more than an “abominable” mountebank.

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

VI. THE STUDY OF LITERATURE

BEARINGS OF THE CHAPTER—ENGLAND—THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE—OF SPENSER— CHAUCER—ELIZABETHAN MINORS—MIDDLE AND OLD ENGLISH—INFLUENCE OF ENGLISH ABROAD—THE STUDY OF FRENCH AT HOME AND ABROAD—OF ITALIAN— ESPECIALLY DANTE—OF SPANISH—ESPECIALLY CERVANTES—OF GERMAN.

[Sidenote: Bearings of the chapter.]

Both in the last volume and in the present Book, repeated notice has been taken of the importance, as it seems to the present writer, of the widened and catholicised study of literature during the earlier eighteenth century. Not a few of the persons who have had places of more or less honour in the foregoing chapters—the twin Swiss schoolmasters, Lessing and the Germans almost without exception, almost all the English precursors, and some, though fewer, in other countries—have owed part of their position here to their share in this literary “Voyage round the World.” Some further exposition and criticism of the way in which the exploration itself worked may be looked for in the following Interchapter. Here we may give a little space to some such explorers who, though scarcely worthy of a place among critics proper, did good work in this direction, and to the main lines and subjects on and in regard to which the explorations were conducted.

[Sidenote: England.]

The most interesting and directly important of the great literary countries in regard to this matter is undoubtedly England. Curiosity in Germany was much more widespread and much more industrious;[326] but in the first place the notable German explorers have already had their turn, and in the second, the width too often with them turned to indiscriminateness, and the industry to an intelligent hodman’s work. France, by providing such pioneers as Sainte-Palaye, and by starting the great Histoire Littéraire, contributed inestimably to the stimulation and equipment of foreign students; but it was some time before this work reacted directly on her own literature. We have spoken of Spain, where for a time the adherents of the older literature were, like their ancestors in the Asturias, but a handful driven to bay, instead of as in other countries an insurrectionary multitude gaining more and more ground; and the traditional Dante-and-Petrarch worship of Italy did at this time little real good. Both directly and indirectly—at home and, chiefly in the Shakespeare direction, abroad—England here deserves the chief place.

Her exercises on the subject may be advantageously considered under certain subject-headings: Shakespeare himself, Spenser, Chaucer, minor writers between the Renaissance and the Restoration, Middle English, and Anglo-Saxon. It is not necessary here to bestow special attention on Milton-study,[327] despite its immense influence both at home and abroad, because it was continuous. From Dryden to the present day, Milton has always been with the guests at any feast of English literature, sometimes, it is true, as a sort of skeleton, but much more often as one whom all delight more or less intelligently to honour.

[Sidenote: The study of Shakespeare.]

It is not mere fancy which has discerned a certain turning-point of importance to literature, in the fact that between the Fourth Folio and the first critical or quasi-critical edition (Rowe’s) there intervened (1685-1709) not quite a full quarter of a century. The successive editions of Rowe himself, Pope, Theobald, Hanmer, Warburton, and Johnson not merely have a certain critical interest in themselves, not merely illustrate the progress of criticism in a useful manner, but bring before us, as nothing else could do, the way in which Shakespeare himself was kept before the minds of the three generations of the eighteenth century.[328]

[Sidenote: Of Spenser.]

Spenser’s fortunes in this way coincided with Shakespeare’s to a degree which cannot be quite accidental. The third folio of the Faerie Queene appeared in 1679, and the first critical edition—that of Hughes—in 1715. But the study-stage—not the theatrical, considering a list of adapters which runs from Ravenscroft through Shadwell up to Dryden—had spared Shakespeare the attentions of the Person of Quality.[329] Before Hughes he had received those of Prior, a person of quality[330] much greater; but Prior had spoilt the stanza, and had travestied the diction almost worse than he did in the case of the Nut-Browne Maid. He would not really count in this story at all if his real services in other respects did not show that it was a case of “time and the hour,” and if his remarks in the Preface to Solomon did not show, very remarkably, a genuine admiration of Spenser himself, and a strong dissatisfaction with the end-stopped couplet. And so of Hughes’ edition: yet perhaps the import of the saying may escape careless readers. At first one wonders why a man like Prior should have taken the trouble even to spoil the Spenserian stanza; why an editor like Hughes should have taken the much greater trouble to edit a voluminous poet whose most ordinary words he had to explain, whose stanza he also thought “defective,” and whose general composition he denounced as “monstrous” and so forth; why all the imitators[331] should have imitated what most of them at any rate seem to have regarded as chiefly parodiable. Yet one soon perceives that mens agitat molem, that the lump was leavened, that, as in one case at any rate (Shenstone’s), is known to be the fact, “those who came to scoff remained to pray.” They were dying of thirst, though they did not know how near the fountain was; and though they at first mistook that fountain and even profaned it, the healing virtues conquered them at last.

[Sidenote: Chaucer.]

The same coincidence does not fail wholly even with Chaucer, of whom an edition, little altered from Speght’s, appeared in 1687, while the very ill-inspired but still intentionally critical attempt of Urry came out in 1721, Dryden’s wonderful modernisings again coming between. But Chaucer was to wait for Tyrwhitt, more than fifty years later (1775) before he met any full scholarly recognition, and this was natural enough. There had been no real change in English prosody since Spenser, any more than since Shakespeare: and the archaism of the former was after all an archaism not less deliberate, though much better guided by genius, than that of any of his eighteenth-century imitators. To the appreciation of Chaucer’s prosody one simple but, till turned, almost insuperable obstacle existed in the valued final e, while his language, his subjects, and his thought were separated from modern readers by the great gulf of the Renaissance,—a gulf indeed not difficult to bridge after a fashion, but then unbridged.

[Sidenote: Elizabethan minors.]

Invaluable as the study of Shakespeare was in itself, its value was not limited to this direct gain. Partly to illustrate him and partly from a natural extension, his fellow-dramatists were resorted to,—indeed Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher had never lost hold of the acting stage. A few of the greatest, Marlowe especially, were somewhat long in coming to their own; but with others it was different, and the publication of Dodsley’s Old Plays, at so early a date as 1744, shows with what force the tide was setting in this direction. Reference was made in the last volume to the very remarkable Muses’ Library which Oldys began even earlier, though he did not find encouragement enough to go on with it,[332] and the more famous adventure of the Reliques was followed up in the latter part of the century by divers explorations of the treasures of the past, notably that of the short-lived Headley.[335]

[Sidenote: Middle and Old English.]

Nay, about the close of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth it looked as if early Middle English and Anglo-Saxon themselves might come in for a share of attention, as a result of the labours of such men as Hearne and Hickes. But the Jacobite antiquary was interested mainly in the historical side of literature, and Hickes, Wanley, and the rest were a little before their time, though that time itself was sure to come. And before it came the all but certain forgeries of Macpherson, the certain forgeries of Chatterton, the sham ballads with which, after Percy’s example, Evans and others loaded their productions of the true, all worked (bad as some of the latter might be) for good in the direction of exciting and whetting the literary appetite for things not according to the Gospel of Neo-Classicism.

[Sidenote: Influence of English abroad.]

The study of English literature abroad was somewhat limited in range, but it had an almost incalculable effect. That German criticism would have been made anyhow is certain enough; but in actual fact it would be impossible to find any actual influences in its making more powerful than the influence of Milton upon the Zürichers, and the influence of Shakespeare upon Lessing, and all men of letters after him. These two great (if not exactly twin) brethren, from the date of their introduction by that strongest of ushers Voltaire, exercised, as we have seen, in France an influence constantly (at any rate in the case of Shakespeare) increasing, though rejected again and again with horror and contumely by those who seemed to be pillars. Of older English writers few except Bacon and Locke had much influence abroad—and what they exercised was not literary. But the writers of the eighteenth century were extremely powerful. Callières very nearly lived to see the time when France herself, forgetting all about the trinity of nations polies, respectfully read, and even sedulously imitated, the people to whom he had thoughtfully given permission to write in Latin in order that they might have some literary chance. Nor was this a mere passing engouement: nor was it limited to the great Queen Anne men, Addison, Pope, and Swift, who were themselves (at least the first two) in many ways germane to French taste, and had borrowed much from France. Thomson, an innovator and sower of revolution in his own country, was warmly welcomed in France: about Richardson the whole Continent went mad. Sterne excited the strongest interest both in France and Germany. The odd French taste for the lugubrious sententiousness of Young was rather later, and so was the well-known and slightly ludicrous adoration of Ossian. But throughout the century, until the French Revolution, English literature was not merely the subject of respectful study and imitation in Germany but of quite lively interest in France, of an interest almost startling when it is contrasted with the supercilious blindness (for a man who cannot use his eyes may use his eyebrows) of the age of Boileau.[336]

[Sidenote: The study of French at home and abroad.]

For the moment—and the fact connects itself sharply and decisively with the delay of their critical reconstruction—the French busied themselves less, at least in appearance, with the exhumation and investigation of their own literature. Nowhere was more solid work really done; nowhere were the foundations of mediæval study, in particular, laid once for all with such admirable thoroughness. But for a long time the workers cast their bread upon the waters: and the waters in turn cast it mostly upon alien shores. The mighty industry of Ducange—in method and quality as well as time of the seventeenth century, in effect scarcely to bear full fruit till the nineteenth—had been entirely included within the seventeenth itself. That of Sainte-Palaye, which has been alluded to, dates from the third quarter of the eighteenth. The magnificent Histoire Littéraire de La France, not finished yet, but unresting as unhasting, was begun as early as 1733; of the Frères Parfait we have also spoken; Barbazan’s invaluable collection of the Fabliaux appeared in 1756. But, except it may be here and there on a man of genius like Fontenelle, those publications had no general literary effect. How little they had may perhaps best be gauged by the fact that the travestied and rococo Corps d’Extraits de Romans of the Comte de Tressan, published long after all of them, had such an effect, and did rather more harm than good. Still, the two giants of the French Renaissance, earlier and later, Rabelais and Montaigne, always kept a hold, and did for France something, though less, of the good which the great quartette—Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton—did for England. Ronsard, as we have seen, kept, in the worst of times, the respect and the appreciation of men so different in date and character as Fénelon and Marmontel: while, if the celebrated “worship of Lubricity” had something to do with the resuscitation of others by Prosper Marchand, &c., let this be counted for righteousness even to the slippery goddess who has so little!

With the eternal exception of Germany, French literature during this time was not much studied abroad in its older divisions, and had not much assistance to offer, in the direction of which we are now speaking, in its more modern. When a man like Sterne touched the former, it was probably for the reasons so handsomely palliated in the last sentence of the last paragraph: and few others touched it at all. The influence of the modern literature of France, exaggerated as it may have been, had yet been considerable enough to deprive it of all value as an alterative save in the cases of exceptional and outlying writers like La Fontaine and Fontenelle, and to some extant Marivaux, the last of whom had himself already derived much from England, if he was to give much back to her.[337] In other parts of Europe this influence was no doubt still very great: it conditioned, as we have seen, the powerful action of Lessing, both in the way of attraction and in that of repulsion. But of the persons who attracted and inspired Lessing, Diderot, however unlike Bentham, had something of the Benthamic fate of requiring transportation and transformation before he could be really operative; and the gospel of Marmontel was altogether too inconsistent and transitional to be very effective. Rousseau, of course, to mention him yet once more, is epoch-making enough in himself. But Rousseau is, on the purely literary side, rather an immense propelling force than an origin: and it is not to be forgotten, though it often has been, that the Confessions and the Rêveries, the most important of his works as literature, did not appear till after his death. As for La Nouvelle Héloïse, it is a question whether it is nearly so much a literary origin as Manon Lescaut, its elder by a generation.

[Sidenote: Of Italian.]

The effect of Italian literature in Italy was, it has been said, not at the time great; the contrast between the study of Shakespeare at this time in England and the study of Dante in Italy has, I have no doubt, defrayed the expense of many a literary-historical comparison.[338] But Italian—though it had lost something of the prerogative importance which it had once, and justly, and for a long time held—retained a great, and, as regards the products of its best time, a wholly salutary, influence over the rest of Europe. That rather treacherous turning of French critics on their Italian masters, which Hurd so acutely noticed, had, like other things evil, its soul of goodness in it. Ariosto, and Tasso, and Petrarch, though not Dante, had entered so thoroughly into the corpus of European literature that they could not be driven out by any scoffs of Boileau or scorns of Voltaire. And when people began to examine them for themselves there was, with the different set of tide and wind which we have seen throughout this book, a very good chance, almost a certainty, of a healthy voyage back. There was all the more chance of this that the strong Renaissance admixture in the authors of the Orlando and the Gerusalemme, the at least not strongly mediæval character of Petrarch, made them more suitable for eighteenth-century consumption than the pure milk of the mediæval word. The argument which Hurd himself put about Spenser and Milton—“These were no barbarians; these were men of real learning, of polished and statesman-like society; and they liked romance”—was applicable with even greater force to the Captain of the Garfagnana and the friend of Leo X., to the familiar (if also victim) of princes and princesses at Ferrara, and the Laureate elect of Rome.

[Sidenote: Especially Dante.]

There can indeed be no doubt that throughout the eighteenth century it was from these two poets that men drew most of their ideas of Romance itself. Dryden, on the eve of that century, betrays the fact in his own case by his designation of our own Guenevere under her Italian name of Ginevra. Scott, at its close and far beyond it, wide as was his knowledge of the true and real mediæval romance itself, is still haunted by the Italians. While as for Petrarch (to put out of question the fact that he is of all time, if not of the highest of all time), he means the sonnet; and the sonnet is anti-classical from centre to circumference. Even if Dante was somewhat neglected, the fact of Gray’s attraction to Nicholls at their first meeting, because he found that the young man read that Florentine, is evidence for exception as well as for rule. At any rate, a man who studied Italian, whether he were Englishman or Frenchman, German or from Mesopotamy, might always, and must certainly not seldom, be brought into contact with the Commedia. And when that contact is established in a fitting soul, “A drear and dying sound, Affrights the Flamens” of Neo-classicism “at their service quaint.” You read no more in Boileau that day, nor any day thereafter by preference and as a disciple.

[Sidenote: Of Spanish.]

So also in Spain the home study of the home literature—though as above noted its results were not by any means nugatory—was far inferior to the effect of the study of that literature abroad. The general and half-blind impulse towards collection and reproduction, however, was especially important,—hardly even in England, putting the works of the very greatest out of the question, did anything appear more precious than the Poesias Anteriores: and Spain had, in three different divisions and directions, inestimable and inexhaustible treasures for the foreign student, especially for the foreign student who felt the gall and the cramp of the classical strait-waistcoat and wished to cast it off. The first of these in order of time was the ballad matter provided by the Cancioneros. The second was the Spanish drama, and the reflections which it had drawn from native poets and critics. The third was the work of Cervantes and the picaresque novel.

The first of these were valuable not only as all the ballads of Europe were valuable, not merely because of the diametrical opposition of their tone and spirit to that of the “classical” poetry, but because of their remarkable differentia as ballads themselves. In the first place, they[339] are the only Southern ballads available,—for Italy, though not infertile in folk-song, does not appear to have had any ballads proper, and those of Modern Greece are of very doubtful earliness, and were not known till long afterwards. In the second place, the part-Oriental part-African admixture, which makes cosas de España so interesting and so powerful, appears in them to the full. And, lastly, there is a certain largeur about them—a national quality, whether excited by conflict with Charlemagne or by conflict with the Moors, which is lacking in all other ballads known at least to the present writer. Even the split between North and South Britain is a case of mere family misunderstanding, compared with the secular stand of the great Peninsula, at bay against Christian invaders from the North and Paynim foes in the household. And it is not unnoteworthy that, with the exception of Chevy Chase, not one of the very best of ballads in English is inspired by the quarrel of Englishman and Scot.

The influence of the Spanish drama and of the more or less conscious fight waged in Spain itself over its principles had also, especially in Germany, great play, and should have had greater. It reached a climax no doubt in the somewhat capricious and ill-informed, the certainly intemperate, will-worship of the Schlegels, which we have not yet discussed: but as we have seen, Lessing was aware of it, and there is no doubt that it had great effect on at least the “Sturmers-and-Drangers.” It ought, we say, probably to have had much more influence than it actually exercised; but with the decay of Spanish political power the study of the Spanish language had been steadily going out in Europe, never, as yet, to revive. The valuable and interesting Spanish critical discussions on the subject were almost unknown; and the theatre itself was never thoroughly studied, till the investigations of Schack, a German, and Ticknor, an American, in the middle of the nineteenth century. Yet it is not necessary to spend many words on showing the immense germinal and alterative power which this study had, and in particular the value which it possessed as seconding the influence of the English drama, with just sufficient difference to make the seconding a real reinforcement, and not a mere repetition of attack by the same troops. The obsession of the sealed pattern, the illusion of the undeviating rule, might in a Frenchman (for strongest instance) survive the reading, or at least the hearing, of the “barbarian” Shakespeare: but it must have been seriously shaken by such writers of a “polished” nation as Tirso, and Lope, and Calderon, not to speak of minors like Alarcon and Rojas.

[Sidenote: Especially Cervantes.]

Yet there can be no doubt that the greatest debt owed by the eighteenth century, at least, to Spanish goes to the credit of one great man in the main, and of a compartment of literature to which that great man, though transcending it, belonged, in the second—in other words, to Cervantes and the Spanish novel. The “picaresque” variety of this novel had early affected both France and England: and it had virtue enough in it to affect successive generations, directly or indirectly, from that of Scarron and Head, through that of Le Sage, down to that of Smollett. Abundance of things may be said against the picaresque style: but of one credit nobody can possibly deprive it—that it was the first kind in Europe to combine the ordinary life of the fabliau (and in part the novela) with the length, the variety, the quasi-epic conformation and powers of the Romance. And while all the best of this quality appeared in Don Quixote itself, that mighty book left out almost all the bad and weak concomitants, and added merit and powers of which the Lazarillos de Tormes and the Marcos de Obregon had not a vestige. As we have seen, Cervantes was something of a Neo-classic himself in critical principles, and something (though not so much as has been thought) of an enemy of Romance in purpose. But his performance was fatal to his teaching in more ways than one or two: while he certainly gave Fielding the idea of the modern novel even as a matter of theory and schedule.

[Sidenote: Of German.]

If we say less here of Germany it is not because there is less to say, but because, in the first place, much of it has been and much more will be said, elsewhere; and because, in the second, we should have to give an abstract of the German literary history of the century. It was not till very late—till almost the eve of the nineteenth—that German literature had much effect abroad, or indeed that there was much German literature to have any effect. But quite early the Germans began to study their own older writers; and early and late they, as we have seen, simply flung themselves on the literature of other countries. It is indeed open to any one to contend that from the first (some century and a half ago) to the present day they overdosed themselves with this as with other studies,—that, taking to it before Germany had really acquired a continuous and important literary idiosyncrasy of its own, they have always lacked the pou sto, and have wasted their labour in consequence. But this is another and for us an irrelevant question. That they form no exception to the rule illustrated in this chapter, and that they not only took the medicine in huge doses themselves, but prepared it and handed it on to others, as if they wished to be the literary apothecaries of Europe, this is undeniable.[340]

INTERCHAPTER VII.

It becomes somewhat more difficult to twist and twine the threads of our Interchapters as we come to the complexity and diversity of modern times; but, in the same proportion, each web or yarn becomes more important as link and guide-rope of the whole History.

The present period—or stage, for it has more logical than chronological unity—may seem at first sight extremely confused; composed as it is of constituents separated from their countrymen, their contemporaries, and in some cases even their fellow-workers, whom we have dealt with formerly. But these constituents have in reality the greatest of all unities, a unity (whether conscious or unconscious does not matter a jot) of purpose.

“One port, methought, alike they sought, One purpose hold where’er they fare.”

The port was the Fair Haven of Romanticism, and the purpose was to distinguish “that which is established because it is right, from that which is right because it is established,” as Johnson himself formulates it. And now, of course, the horse-leeches of definition will ask me to define Romanticism, and now, also, I shall do nothing of the sort, and borrow from the unimpeachable authority of M. Brunetière[341] my reason for not doing it. What most of the personages of this book sought or helped (sometimes without at all seeking) to establish is Romanticism, and Romanticism is what they sought or helped to establish.

In negative and by contrast, as usual, there is, however, no difficulty in arriving at a sort of jury-definition, which is perhaps a good deal better to work to port with than the aspiring but rather untrustworthy mast-poles of “Renascence of Wonder” and the like. We have indeed seen, throughout the last volume, that the curse and the mischief of Neo-classicism lay in the tyranny of the Definition itself. You had no sooner satisfied yourself that Poetry was such and such a thing, that it consisted of such and such narrowly delimited Kinds, that its stamped instruments and sealed patterns were this and that, than you proceeded to apply these propositions inquisitorially, excommunicating or executing delinquents and nonconformists. The principal uniformity amid the wide diversities of the new criticism was that, without any direct concert, without any formulated anti-creed, they all tended to remove the bolts and the bars, to antiquate the stipulations, to make the great question of criticism not “What have you proposed to do, and how have you proposed to do it?” but “What is this that you have done? and is it good?” But they never, in any instance, formulated the abolition of restrictions, as, for instance, we shall find Hugo doing in the Preface to the Orientales. They had almost invariably some special mediate or immediate object in view—in Hurd’s case to get rid of the disqualification of the “Gothic,” in Lessing’s to get rid of the domination of French. Even Diderot’s Impressionism—the most important and pregnant phenomenon of the whole—is a matter of practice, not of theory, of infinite local explorations, not of a Pisgah-sight. The whole tendency, as we have indicated in the sub-title of the book, is rather to dissolve what exists than to put anything definite in its place.

The survey of their actual accomplishment,[342] therefore, may be best executed, for the purpose of corresponding with and continuing those formerly given, by first considering more generally the main new critical engines—Æsthetic inquiry and the Study of Literature—which have formed in detail the subjects of the last two chapters; then by summarising, as usual, the most significant performances of national groups and individuals; and, lastly, by indicating, as best may be done, the point to which the stage has brought us.

The advantages and importance of the wider and more abstract æsthetic inquiry in reconstituting or reorganising criticism should be pretty obvious. The worst fault of the later Neo-classicism, in its corruption, was that it tended to become wholly irrational—a mere reference to classification; that even its appeal to Nature, and to Reason herself, had got utterly out of rapport with real nature, with true reason. Now the construction of a general theory of the Sublime and Beautiful— however partial or however chimerical the inquiry into the appeals of different arts and different divisions of the same art—could not but tend—however indirectly, however much in some cases against the very will of the inquiry—to unsettle, and sometimes to shatter, the conventional hypotheses and theories. “Why?” and “Why not?” must force themselves constantly on such an inquirer; and, as has been said more than once or twice, “Why?” and “Why not?” are battering-rams, predestined, automatic, irresistible, to conventional judgments of all sorts. It was, indeed, not impossible for a person sufficiently stupid, or sufficiently ingenious, to construct an æsthetic which, somehow or other, should fit in with the accepted ideas.[343] But what stupid people do does not count for much in the long-run, despite the proverbial invincibility of stupidity for the time. And the ingenious person, unless his perverseness were truly diabolical, must sometimes hit upon truth which would explode all his convention.

At the same time Æsthetics have proved, and might by an observer of sufficient detachment have from the first been seen to be likely to prove, a very dangerous auxiliary

to Criticism, if not even a Stork for a Log. In the first place, there was the danger—present in fact from the first, impending from before the very first—of fresh arbitrary rules being set up in the place of the old ones,—of the old infinitely mischievous question, “Does the poet please as he ought to please?” being juggled into the place of the simple “Does he please?” No form of abstract inquiry can escape this danger: and that is why, save in matter of the pure intellect, abstract inquiries should always be suspected. Form your theory and conduct your observations of the æsthetic sense, of “the Beautiful,” of the mediate axioms of this or that literary kind, as carefully, as impartially, with as wide a range and view, as you may—these perilous generalisations and abstractions will always bring you sooner or later into contact and conflict with the royal irresponsibility, or (as some may hold it) the anarchic individualism of the human senses, and tastes, and artistic powers. You will hamper your feet with a network of axioms and definitions; you will burden your back with a whole Italian-image-man’s rack-full of types. It is somewhat improbable that you will be a Lessing: yet even a Lessing loses himself in inquiries as to what “a jealous woman’s” revenge will be, what “an ambitious woman’s revenge will be.” Shakespeare (for that Shakespeare had very much to do with the whole portraiture of Margaret, from the first gracious and playful scene with Suffolk to the sombre and splendid triumph over Elizabeth Woodville, I at least have no doubt) has shown us in Margaret of Anjou the revenge and the other passions of a woman who is at once ambitious, jealous, the victim perhaps not of actually adulterous but certainly of rather extra-conjugal love, yet loyal to her husband’s position if not to himself, a tigress to her enemies and to her young alike, a rival in varying circumstance, an almost dispassionate sibyl reflecting and foretelling the woes of her rivals. You can no more disentangle all these threads, and get the passion of this type and the passion of that separate, than Psyche could have done her task without the ants. Yet, early and crude as is the work, it is all right, it is all there. And Æsthetics are not the ants.

A much more dangerous result of addiction to the æsthetic side of criticism, mainly or exclusively, is that you get by degrees away from the literary matter altogether, and resign yourself to the separation with all the philosophy of Marryat’s captain, when he gave orders first that he should be called when the last ship of his convoy was out of sight behind, and then when the first hove in sight again. I remember once hearing a lecture, and a very interesting one, on Hegel’s idea of tragedy as illustrated in Shakespeare, delivered by a most admirable scholar, then professor in one great University, and now professor in one than which there is no greater. It was very ingenious, very stimulating; but I remember thinking at the close of it that it might have been delivered just as well if we were in such an infinite state of misery as to have not a line of an actual tragedy of Shakespeare, but only abstracts and arguments, as with some of the ancients. In the attraction to the æsthetic, the moral, the dramaturgic side and the like, an absolute break of contact with the literary may come about. We have seen that this is the case even with Lessing, and it is constantly the case with German critics and with their English followers. The “word,” the “expression,” sinks out of the plane of the critic’s purview. His Æsthetics become Anæsthetics, and benumb his literary senses and sensibilities.

Recurrence to one example of this may suffice. When I see Lessing called “the King of Criticism” I always think, great as is my opinion of him, of that judgment of Soliman the Second. Here is a thing which, on its own lines and specification, is, and is practically allowed by the critic to be, a masterpiece. But he will not accept those lines. It is a satiric criticism of life, of the actual nature, morals, mœurs, mores, ethe, of men; he wants it to be a didactic exhortation to what those morals ought (according to him) to be. He does not find Soliman’s butterfly veerings from the sentiment of Elvire to the mere courtesanship of Delia, and from this latter to the grisettish or soubrettish minxery of Roxelane, attractive or excusable. He does not like this minxishness; there are even signs that he has a private antipathy towards the petit nez retroussé which plays so great a part in the story. His criticism is in consequence not a criticism at all; it is a mere explosion of unreasoning dislike—at best one of “nervous impression,” as Flaubert said to Sainte-Beuve. And if, by a juggle of words, it be retorted that Lessing is a dogmatic not an æsthetic critic, this retort will fall blunted from the simple rectification that he is a dogmatist of æsthetics and an æsthetician in dogma.

The benefits, therefore, of the rise of Æsthetics as a special study were far from unmixed, though the influence of that rise was very great. It is otherwise with the Study of Literature, to which we have also given a short and summary chapter above. Here it was all but impossible that extension of consideration—from modern and classical to mediæval, from certain arbitrarily preferred modern languages to others—should fail to do good. Prejudice, the bane of Criticism, received, in the mere and necessary progress of this study, a notice to quit. This notice took various forms and was exhibited and attended to in various ways. England, France, and Germany exhibited these differences with a difference itself very interesting. But they can be reduced to a few heads with very little difficulty.

The first of these is the attempt to judge the work presented, not according to abstract rules, derived or supposed to be derived from ancient critical authority, nor according to its agreement or disagreement with the famous work of the past. To some extent this revolutionary proceeding was forced upon our students by the very nature of the case—it was one of the inevitable benefits of the extension of study, and especially of the return to mediæval literature. To attempt to justify that literature, as Addison, with more or less seriousness, had done, by showing that its methods were after all not so very different from those of Homer, or even Virgil, was in some cases flatly impossible, in most extremely difficult; while in almost all it carried with it a distinct suspicion of burlesque. There was no need of any dislike of the classics; but it must have been and it was felt that mediæval and later literature must be handled differently.[344] And so—insensibly no doubt

at first—there came into Criticism the sovereign and epoch-making recognition of the “leaden rule”—of the fact that literature comes first and criticism after—that criticism must adjust itself to literature, and not vice versa. Very likely not one of the men we are here discussing would have accepted this doctrine simpliciter:[345] indeed it is the rarest thing to find it accepted even a century and a half after their time, except in eccentric and extravagant forms. But it lay at the root of all their practice.

Further, that practice, deprived of the crutches and go-carts of rule and precedent, was perforce obliged to follow the natural path and play of the feelings and faculties—to ask itself first, “Do I like this?” then, “How do I like it?” then, “What qualities are there in it which make me like it?” Again, these questions may not have formulated themselves quite clearly to any of our group. Again, it would be hard to name many critics since who have at once fearlessly and faithfully kept them before their eyes. But, again also, these were the questions which, however blindly and stumblingly, they followed as their guiding stars, and these have been the real questions of criticism ever since.

Postponing the discussion of the relationship of this new criticism to the old, we may turn to another point of its differentia. This is that students of mediæval literature especially were—again perforce and whether they would or no—driven to make excursions into the region of Literary History, and, what is more, of Comparative Literary History. They found themselves face to face with forms—the ballad and the romance being the chief of them—which were either not represented at all or represented very scantily and obscurely in classical literature, while they had been entirely and almost pointedly neglected by classical criticism. They could not but see that, both in mediæval literature proper and in modern, there were other forms and subvarieties of

literature, in drama,[346] in poetry, in prose, which differed extremely from anything in ancient letters. In examining these, with no help from Aristotle, or Longinus, or Horace, they could not but pursue the natural method of tracing or endeavouring to trace them to their origins, and in so doing they could not but become conscious, not merely of the history— so long interrupted by a mist like that of Mirza’s vision—of English or French or whatsoever literature itself, but also more dimly of the greater map of European literature, as it spread and branched from the breaking up of the Roman Empire onwards. And this study of Literary History was in the main, this study of Comparative Literary History was almost absolutely, again a new thing.

Nor were the actual critical results which, either expressly or incidentally, came from the exercitations of these critics of less importance. The turn of the tide may nowhere be seen so strongly as in Joseph Warton’s audacious question whether Pope, the god of the idolatry of the earlier part of the century in England, was a poet, or at least a great poet, at all; in Lessing’s proposition to call the great Corneille, just re-habilitated as he had been by Voltaire himself, Corneille the Monstrous. These things indeed were, like all revolutionary manifestos, extravagances, yet the extravagance was not only symptomatic but to a great extent healthy. It was probably impossible as a matter of tactics—it would certainly have been unnatural as a matter of history and human nature—to refrain from carrying the war into the enemies’ country, from laying siege to the enemies’ stronghold. And this was invited by the ignorant and insulting depreciation which had long been, and long continued to be, thrown upon one of the most charming and precious divisions of the literature and thought of the world.

But there were more sober fruits of the revolt. Hurd might

indeed have developed further that doctrine of Romantic as independent of Classical Unity, which is one of the most important discoveries or at least pronouncements of any time, which practically established a modus vivendi between all rational Neo-classic and all rational Romantic criticism, and which has never yet been worked out as it deserves. Percy’s Essay on Alliterative Metre, despite the comparative narrowness of its basis, is both acute and successful; and falls in interestingly with that more intelligent devotion to Prosody which has up to the present time given better results than any “metacritic,” and has plenty yet to give. Thomas Warton, though often a fanciful and sometimes an insufficiently equipped critic, was a critic both alert and sound. Diderot might with advantage have concentrated that “encyclopædic head” of his on fewer subjects, have been less anarchic, more subject to harmless convention. But there are few better examples in literature of the “strong young devil shut up in an iron box” and made to do work—as the Bulgarian peasant defined the locomotive to an English engineer who went to the Balkans after the war of 1878. We have not feared to speak of Lessing’s shortcomings, but though it is possible to speak indiscreetly and unadvisedly of his merits in kind and point, who shall overpraise them in degree? And the bent of almost all of them turned, and turned most beneficially, especially in the case of Warton, to History.

The necessary retrospect of the achievement of groups and countries can be given at no excessive length. The Germans had begun criticism later than any other of the great nations; and they had hardly passed the mere “rhetoric” stage of it when France was leading Europe in the later Neo-classic phase; when England was already, under the half-unknowing leadership of Dryden, sighting the modern conditions; and when Italy and Spain were passing into a sort of temporary dotage or trance on the subject. But during the seventeenth century the influence of England had been exchanged for that of France, and this latter, itself originally recommended by Opitz with a view to the exhibition of Pléiade medicine, had got this prescription changed, by a sort of legerdemain of Time the Conjurer, for the very different one of Correctness à la Boileau. Yet the doses of Ronsardism had had great effect already, and the strong romantic leaven in the Germans, their pupillary state, their philosophical leanings—above all, that restless, irresistible, unwearied craving for knowledge which characterised them—prevented them from abiding in the faith of Gottsched for any length of time. We have traced the gropings and tentatives, the successive stages of Bodmer and those about him, the arrested promise of J. E. Schlegel, that Marcellus of German criticism, and we saw how Enfin Lessing vint.

There can, for once, be no harm in attributing part at least of the deserved prominence of this critic in German criticism to the fact that he not only exhibited eminently the two great characteristics of his countrymen in the department,—unwearied industry in study and philosophic disposition of his results,—but combined with this exhibition merits which they much more rarely possess—an intimate though irregular appreciation, a great intellectual alacrity, and, above all, a really good and pleasant style. He did not, unfortunately, help to propagate these latter qualities so much as he helped to establish and corroborate the former: but with the limitations noted above, he did a great deal in almost all ways. The opinion which assigns to him, everywhere in literature more or less, but in criticism most of all, the principal share in that enormous dead-lift of German letters which marks the middle of the eighteenth century, and which, exceptis excipiendis, may be said to have made Goethe and Schiller possible, is unquestionably right. And though he did not quite live to see the time when Germany had begun to repay the enormous debts which, before his lifetime and during its earlier part, she had accumulated towards the rest of Europe, he almost saw this: and he had almost more to do than any other with the counter-accumulation of the necessary funds.

Yet he himself was, as we have seen, a debtor: and to the old creditor, France. The critical history, during this period, of France herself is the most curious of the three divisions which here suffice. In Germany, Neo-classicism, which had taken no deep root, was easily uprooted. In England, though various causes, and especially the immense influence of the “dead hand” of Addison and Pope, and the living one of Johnson, kept back the Romantic growth in a salutary fashion, that growth itself was as steady as it was slow. In the very year after Gray died, Coleridge was born: and the lives and work of these two men mark one unhasting, unresting line of Romantic progress. But in France (as the two parallel views given in the second chapter of the last book, and the fourth chapter of this, will have shown), although there is no real confusion, the strands are most puzzlingly twisted during the whole of this selfsame period, till those of the classical colour break and ravel away into almost nothing just before the close. This is due, no doubt, in part to the extreme strength of what we may call the Neo-classic establishment in France—to the fact that the strong places of literature are held by classical garrisons, who take good care to let no unorthodox recruit set foot in them if it can possibly be helped. But it is due also to that essential classicality which has been noticed, and fully acknowledged, in the French literary temper. It certainly exists: and it accounts not merely for the stubborn resistance, until its sudden débâcle, of Classicism itself, but also for the peculiarities of the various greater critics whom we have noticed.

Of the three greatest of these (for Madame de Staël cannot, I think, really make out her right to cut in) Joubert excels in aphoristic and perennial quality, somewhat (not wholly) independent of time, and Chateaubriand expresses more fully than any one the tendencies (even in him much chequered by others) which he was to live to see triumphant without being quite glad thereat. But Diderot is, in principle and motive force, however eccentrically working, if not in actual expressed example, the most considerable of the three, and perhaps the most considerable single figure included in this Book. For in him, as was said above, we first see as a pervading and guiding, if not explicitly asserted, principle that Impressionism which (though the word has been variously used[347]) is, in its simplest and most natural meaning, perhaps more

appropriate to “Modern” criticism than any other single term. As we have seen and put from many different sides, the general tendency of ancient and of Neo-classic critics was always to separate the work as much as possible from the worker, and (except as regarded oratory and partly drama) still more from the hearer and reader—this being done for the freedom of considering it, not so much in and by itself, as in relation to ideal and a priori schedules of its kind, quality, and appurtenant rules. There had been partial and half-conscious revolts or declensions from this in individuals, from Longinus to Castelvetro, and from Castelvetro to Fontenelle. But Diderot is almost the first person who habitually, naturally, as a matter of course, isolates the work with himself, considers it in its form and pressure as printed on him. And this is almost, or altogether, a new Covenant of Criticism.

The performance of England here was not so fruitful of great critical personalities—for her greatest, Johnson, was in intention, though by no means wholly in performance, on the other side. Nor, though the English Æsthetics were influential abroad as well as at home, can they be ranked very high. In the other chief branch, however, of that practical operation which has been noticed, the rediscovery and revaluation of the capital of the literature for critical purposes, England takes the most important position of all—less by the excellence of the workers (though this was not inconsiderable) than in consequence of the richness of their material. The French, except from the antiquarian side, were still neglecting, and even for the most part despising, their own old treasures, which were themselves scarcely so great as those of England: and the Germans, though not neglectful of what they had, had less, and dealt with it in a less thoroughly literary spirit. But Gray, Percy, Hurd, the Wartons (especially Thomas), and all the painful and meritorious editors from Theobald to Tyrwhitt, were engaged, independently in intention, but in fact systematically enough, not merely in clearing away rubbish and bringing treasures to light, but in combating the prejudices and doing away with the delusions and ignorances which had led to the neglect and contempt of those treasures themselves.

Even those other nations which directly contributed little or nothing[348] to criticism during the time, contributed, as we have seen, something also under this head by examination of their own literatures, and something more by their adoption and following of English, or of French, or (towards the end) of German also. Towards any wide comparative study of literature, indeed, this period made but a far-off approach: that could not come till later, though it is the glory of Germany, in the second division of the time, with which we shall deal presently, to have begun the attack itself, and made it something more. But the study of the individual literature at different periods has very much the same kind of widening and altering power as the study of different literatures, and this at least was vigorously pursued.

For after all it is History which is at the root of the critical—as of almost every other—matter. To judge you must know,—must know not merely the so-called best that has been thought and done and written (for how are you to know the best till you know the rest?), but to know all, or something of all, that has been written, and done, and thought by the undulating and diverse animal called Man. His undulation and his diversity will play you tricks still, know you never so widely; but the margin of error will be narrower, the more widely you know. The most perfect critical work that we have—that of Aristotle and that of Longinus—is due in its goodness to the thoroughness of the writers’ knowledge of what was open to them, in its occasional badness and lack of perfection to the fact that everything was not open to them to know. “The goodness of our goodness when we’re good” is due to our knowing a little more, and the more frequent badness of our badness when we are bad to our not taking the trouble to know it thoroughly.

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VIII. THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM

“To the young I would remark that it is always unwise to judge of anything by its defects; the first attempt ought to be to discover its excellences.”—COLERIDGE.

“Il ne savait pas de quoi étaient faites les limites de l’art.”— VICTOR HUGO.

“Savoir bien lire un livre en le jugeant chemin faisant, et sans cesser de le goûter, c’est presque tout l’art du critique.”— SAINTE-BEUVE.

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