IV. THE CHANGE IN THE OTHER NATIONS
The present chapter could hardly be omitted; but it must be almost necessarily rather an apology for what does not appear than a substantive presentation. Something has been said already[804] of the state of Italian and of Spanish criticism during the eighteenth century. Its lethargy was only quickened after (and even some time after) the beginning of the nineteenth, by the spread of those very waves of influence which have been described, and their origin and progress traced, partly in the last Book, and partly in the three preceding chapters of the present. Neither country contributed anything original to the critical change—to the establishment of Romanticism—though both had much to do with that establishment as furnishing those texts of past creation which were, as we have seen, almost the most powerful, and certainly the most beneficent, of all agencies in the revolution. None, perhaps, did so much by furnishing further scenery and apparatus to the new movement: though Byron, by adopting these, enhanced their influence in this way, yet it had been exercised long before he wrote—before he even existed—in England, from the time of the Castle of Otranto, in Germany, from one somewhat, but not so very much, later. But all this belongs to the far-off fringes of our subject, if even to them; and we have only too little room for its central and substantive portions.
The critical awakening of more backward and outlying nations and languages, such as Russian, Polish, and Hungarian, was in much the same case; that of the Scandinavian countries was a little more advanced. The closer relations in which Denmark at all times stood with Germany, and those which Sweden maintained, not merely with Germany but with France, must have kept them more to the front in these matters, while the double influence was of course still more constantly, though not quite so effectually, at work in Holland. Holberg and Tullin and Ewald, with Baggesen a little later in Denmark, rather accompanied than followed the reconstructive reformation of German literature; Kellgren, Leopold, and Thorn conducted the attack and defence in Sweden a little later still; and the literary decadence of Dutch was at last relieved, towards the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, by Southey’s friend, Bilderdijk. In regard to all the languages referred to in this paragraph, though not in regard to Italian and Spanish, I am in the disability formerly acknowledged, as to one of them—Dutch. But I cannot learn from any good authority that this disability is likely here to be fatal, or even injurious. In the history of the individual literatures their criticism is of course of great importance: but in the history of the general subject it can have very little.[805]
INTERCHAPTER VIII. (WITH AN EXCURSUS ON PERIODICAL CRITICISM.)
We here come to the point antipolar to that of the last volume, at which[806] we ventured to give a sketch of the Classic or Neo-classic creed. The challenge to array definitions of Classicism and Romanticism in a tabular form has already[807] been respectfully declined: but that this “declinature” comes neither from pusillanimity, nor from complacency in purblindness, may be best proved by undertaking the much more perilous adventure of an anti-creed to that formerly laid down. Even there we had to interpose the caution that absolute subscription, on the part of all the critics concerned, ought not to be thought of: but here the very essence and quiddity of the situation is that no such agreement is in any way possible. In fact, no single and tolerably homogeneous document could possibly here be drawn up, for there would be minority (and sometimes majority) counter-reports on every article. Even those who resist the extremer developments take large licenses upon the old classical position. You have your Jeffrey expressing admiration of a Pharonnida which would have seemed to Dennis a monstrous stumbling-block, and to Johnson mere foolishness: while among the extremists themselves, each man is a law unto himself. Still, it is perhaps possible to draw up some articles of the Modern or Romantic Criticism which was reached during this period, and we have already, in the last two books, described at some length the process by which they were reached. These articles will be best separated into two batches, the first representing the creed of centre and extremes at once, the second that of extremes (left or right) only: and it will be well to mark the difference from the former statement by giving the articles separately, and not arranging them in paragraphs.
The more catholic creed is very mainly of a negative and protesting character, and its articles might run somewhat thus:—
All periods of literature are to be studied, and all have lessons for the critic. “Gothic ignorance” is an ignorant absurdity.
One period of literature cannot prescribe to another. Each has its own laws; and if any general laws are to be put above these, they must be such as will embrace them.
Rules are not to be multiplied without necessity: and such as may be admitted must rather be extracted from the practice of good poets and prose-writers than imposed upon it.
“Unity” is not itself uniform, but will vary according to the kind, and sometimes within the kind, itself.
The Kind itself is not to be too rigidly constituted: and subvarieties in it may constantly arise.
Literature is to be judged “by the event”: the presence of the fig will disprove the presence of the thistle.
The object of literature is Delight; its soul is Imagination; its body is Style.
A man should like what he does like:[808] and his likings are facts in criticism for him.
To which the extremer men would add these, or some of them, or something like them:—
Nothing depends upon the subject; all upon the treatment of the subject.
It is not necessary that a good poet or prose writer should be a good man: though it is a pity that he should not be. And Literature is not subject to the laws of Morality, though it is to those of Manners.[809]
Good Sense is a good thing, but may be too much regarded: and Nonsense is not necessarily a bad one.
The appeals of the arts are interchangeable: Poetry can do as much with sound as Music, as much with colour as Painting, and perhaps more than either with both.
The first requisite of the critic is that he should be capable of receiving Impressions: the second that he should be able to express and impart them.
There cannot be Monstrous Beauty: the Beauty itself justifies and regularises.
Once more it has to be stipulated that these articles are not to be regarded as definitely proposed ends and aims, which the critical practice of the period set before itself, and by which it worked. They are, for the most part, piece-meal results and up-shots of a long and desultory campaign, often reached as it were incidentally, “windfalls of the Muses,” kingdoms found while the finder is seeking his father’s (or anybody’s) asses. If anything general is to be detected before and beneath them, it is a sort of general feeling of irksomeness at the restraints of Neo-classicism—a revolt against its perpetual restrictions and taboos.
To recur once more to those egregious juvenilia of Addison’s, which, though not to be too much pressed as stigmata on his own memory, are a useful caricature of Neo-classicism in regard to English, some English lover of literature feels that there is much more in Chaucer than vulgar jests, now not even fashionably vulgar, and in Spenser than tiresome preaching. He looks about to support his feeling with reasons, and he “finds salvation” in the Romantic sense, more or less fully, more or less systematically, more or less universally. The ways and manners of the finding are very much the same in all countries, and have been dealt with in the first Book of this volume; the results of it, in critical form, have been set forth in that just finished, but may deserve some summary and rationale here.
In the remarkable group of English critics whom we have called “the companions” of Coleridge, and in Coleridge himself, the contemporary quality, and in some cases the direct suggestion, of that great critic appear unmistakably, while in at least most cases they are free from the chaotic or paralytic incompleteness which he hardly ever, save in the Biographia, shook off. They all show, as he does, though in varying degrees, the revolt or reaction from the hidebound failure of the baser kind of Neo-classic to appreciate—the effort really to taste, to enjoy, and so to deliver that judgment which without enjoyment is always inadequate. And it would be unjust to regard them as merely the sports and waifs of an irresistibly advancing tide. There is something of this in them,—the worst of the something being the uncritical scorn with which they sometimes regarded even the greatest of the departed or departing school—the astonishing injustice of Coleridge himself to Gibbon, and Johnson, and the Queen Anne men; of many of them to Pope; of Hazlitt even to Dryden. But they were not only carried, they swam,—swam strongly and steadily and skilfully for the land that was ahead. Their appreciation is not mere matter of fashion; it is genuine. They are honestly appetent of the milk and honey of the newly opened land of English literature for themselves, and generously eager to impart of it, and of the taste for it, to others.
But we must not—for these merits, or even for what some may think the still greater one of providing, for almost the first time in any literature, a great bulk of matter which is at once valuable criticism and delightful literature itself—make a refusal of our own critical duty as to their shortcomings, which were neither few nor inconsiderable, and which led directly to the sad and singular decadence of English criticism in the middle third of the century. The first and the greatest of these—let us fling it frankly and fairly to any partisan of the older critical dispensation who “expects his evening prey” as our history draws towards its close—was, or at any rate was a result of, the very lawlessness and rulelessness by which they had effected their and our emancipation. True, many of the rules that they threw off were bad and irrational, most perhaps were inadequate, irrelevant, requiring to be applied with all sorts of provisos and easements. But they had at any rate kept criticism methodical, and tolerably certain in its utterances. There had been a Creed; there had been not the slightest difficulty in giving reasons, though they might be doubtful ones, for a faith which, if incomplete and not really catholic, was at any rate formally constituted. With the new men it was different. Coleridge indeed boasted mediate and even higher rules and principles behind his individual judgments. But with the rest it was rather a case of sheer private judgment, of “meeting by yourself in your own house.”
Another drawback, dangerous always but intensified in danger by its connection with the former, is that, while most of them were much less intimately acquainted with the classics than the critics of former generations had been, this deficiency was not generally compensated by any of that extensive knowledge of modern literature which the ruleless or scantily ruled system of criticism imperatively requires. Nay, they were all, including even Coleridge himself and De Quincey (the two most learned, not only of these but of all English critics), very imperfectly acquainted with French literature—which, as a whole, is the best suited to qualify the study of our own, correct it, and preserve it from flaws and corruptions. Leigh Hunt knew little but Italian; and in Italian knew best the things that are of least real importance for the English student. As for Lamb, he was more than a fair Latin scholar; but he seems to have known very little Greek, and not to have had wide reading in the classics, either Greek or Latin, while he betrays hardly the slightest knowledge of, or interest in, any foreign modern literature whatever. Hazlitt’s case is worse still, for he evidently knew very little indeed, either of the classics or of foreign modern literature, except a few philosophic writers, here of next to no use. In fact, one cannot help wondering how, knowing so little, he came to judge so well—till the wonder nearly disappears, as we see how much better he would have judged if he had known more. Wilson (to look forward a little as we have done with De Quincey) had some classics: and Lockhart had not only classics, but German and Spanish. But one suspects the former to have known next to nothing of modern literature: and the latter did not use critically that which he knew. Even as regards English itself the knowledge of all these critics was very gappy and scrappy. They did not, with all their advantages of time, know anything like so much of early English literature (even putting Anglo-Saxon out of the question) as Gray had known nearly a hundred years earlier, and Mitford in their own early days.
Thus, while they had deliberately, and in the main wisely, discarded the rules which at least were supposed deductively to govern all literature, they had not furnished themselves with that comparative knowledge of different literatures, or at the very least of all the different periods of one literature, which assists literary induction, and to some extent supplies the place of the older Rules themselves. They were therefore driven to judge by the inner light alone; and as, fortunately, that inner light, in at least some of them, burnt with the clearest and brightest flame, they judged very well by it. But their system was a dangerous one when it came to be applied, as it inevitably had to be applied, in the majority of cases, when their own torches went out, by the aid of smoky farthing rush-lights in blurred horn lanterns.
Yet, allowing for these drawbacks of commission and of example in the most illiberally liberal manner, there will yet remain to their credit such a sum as hardly any other group[810] in any country—as none in ours certainly—can claim. Here at last, and here almost for the first time, appears that body of pure critical appreciation of the actual work of literature for which we have been waiting so long, which we have missed so sorely in ancient times, and which, in the earlier modern, has been given to us stinted and, what is worse, adulterated, by arbitrary restrictions and preoccupations. In Coleridge, in Hazlitt, in Lamb, in Leigh Hunt even, to name no others, we have real “judging of authors,” not—or at any rate not mainly—discussion of kinds, and attempts to lay down principles. They are judges, not jurists, “lawmen,” not lawmongers and potterers with codes. Appreciation and enjoyment, with their, in this case necessary, consequences, the communication of enjoyment and appreciation—these are the chief and principal things with them, and these they never fail to provide.
The same merits and drawbacks, differently adjusted and conditioned, appear in the French division of the subject. Perhaps there is nothing, even in Sainte-Beuve, of the same consummate merit, from the point of view of appreciation, as the best things of Hazlitt and Lamb: and I do not think there are any critical generalities, either in Sainte-Beuve or in any other, that quite approach the best things of Coleridge. The length and the bitterness of the Classic-Romantic quarrel threw some French critics into a mood of partisanship too extreme to be quite judicial: but on the other hand it gave us that admirably trenchant profession and confession of the faith that “nothing depends on the subject” which we have dealt with from Victor Hugo, and other things from other men. And, moreover, the interest excited by this quarrel, coming to reinforce the general French spirit of system, order, and artistic adequacy, brought about that high general level in the new appreciative criticism which attracted the admiration of Mr Arnold and others, and which certainly for a time (cir. 1830-1860) was much above the level of English. Numerous as are the writers whom I have discussed in the chapter on this subject, I feel half ashamed of not having included more, and could easily do so. But it is almost enough to say that, in accordance with that gregarious or scholastic spirit which has always characterised Frenchmen, the merits which have been so fully displayed in Sainte-Beuve are visible more or less in almost all his fellows.
There is no doubt that these merits were to some extent (as Sainte-Beuve himself allowed with equal judgment and generosity) transmitted or inherited from the Empire critics, especially Chateaubriand and, in a different way and lower sense, Villemain: while the whole secret of the method had been revealed, or concealed, in and by the “fuliginous flashes” of Diderot long before. But this sudden and enormous development of it is still rather wonderful. It cannot be put down merely to Sainte-Beuve, though Sainte-Beuve was its most eminent representative; for, as we have seen, he did not himself reach his perfection at once, or for a very long time, and critical results as good as, or better than, his own at the time had been produced by others earlier. It was a case of a plenteous and great vintage, with one growth improving beyond the rest. To this day it is impossible to read over again, well as one may have known it, any of the better critical work of France in this period without astonishment at its varied and yet even excellence. But, as has just been said, it is not always, even in its highest examples, of the very highest: and perhaps at no time is what we have so often called “grasp” a characteristic of it. It would be absurd to call it superficial: yet, if it has a tendency towards something not of the best, that tendency is towards superficiality.
Further, the French, though largely influenced by foreign nations and literatures at this period, hardly shine so much as some others do in criticism of those literatures. But, in reference to their own, they exemplify the new process of “judging by the result,” and setting forth that result, with attractiveness rivalled by hardly any, and with facility and craftsmanship rivalled perhaps by none. From the elaborate process of Sainte-Beuve to the impressionism of Gautier, and from the strong meat and drink of Nisard to the froth of Janin, whatever is provided is provided so as to give the user and consumer the least fatigue and the most delectation. The severer critics are not pedantic, and the lighter ones are seldom merely frivolous or horse-playful. Occasionally, as in Nisard’s case again, there is a solidly constructed, if not quite a solidly based, system: occasionally, as with Planche, there are serious, if disputable, philosophical starting-points. In Sainte-Beuve himself there is perhaps the greatest and most orderly accumulation of positive knowledge, never of the “marine store” kind, that any critic has brought together. But these dignified things never take leave of the Graces: and even the lightest armed of the army—even Janin and those about Janin—seldom write with the appalling absence of knowledge and of method to which we are only too well accustomed in the critics of some other countries.
The part played by Germany in this process was, of course, of the utmost importance, and it is by no means out of a pusillanimous desire to disarm the indignation or the contempt invited by some things already written that I repeat and emphasise this acknowledgment. Germans (taking their Swiss brethren with them) were among the very first to move the stagnant waters. They were among the most—they were the most— industrious engineers in continuing the process—in clearing out the water-courses and turning the new streams into them. It is impossible to exaggerate their merits in putting at the service of criticism the massive and acute intellect of Lessing, to substitute a new Preceptism for the old: the wide range and towering literary faculty of Goethe, to extend and popularise the new methods: the attractive and contagious alacrity of the Schlegels in overrunning the provinces and the empires of literature. But in the highest and purest work of criticism, as we here define it, even these their greatest are sometimes strangely wanting: and others are wanting less strangely but more disastrously. As a rule, the German is far too scientific (the epithet of praise usually selected for him and by him) in his criticism. He has curiosity, but not passionate or intimate enjoyment; intelligence, but not enthusiasm; industry, but little (and hardly at all subtle) intuition. He only gets out of the pupillary state—if he ever does so—to get into the pedagogic. And it is difficult to say which of these is the more unfavourable to true critical accomplishment.
We may, however, be justly asked, in this place or in that, to face that view of German criticism which Carlyle was the first to put in England by a famous (and indeed very admirable) “State of German Literature,”[811] and which, with some modifications, was maintained and enforced later by Mr Arnold, who did not like Carlyle. The eulogium is well known, and it is a magnificent one. The Germans are [1827] distinctly and considerably in advance of other nations in Criticism. They have “raised it to a higher power,” in fact: though he does not, I think, use the phrase. They neither, in the old way, discuss diction, figures, logical value, &c., nor, as is usual with the best of our own critics at present, discover and debate the particular nature of the poet from his poetry: but, subordinating these two, attack the essence and peculiar life of the poetry itself. “How did Shakespeare organise his dramas?” they ask. “What unmixed reality is bodied forth in them?” &c. Then, too, how do they proceed? Not by gorgeous mystic phraseology[812] and vague declamation? No: by “rigorous scientific inquiry,” of which much is said, the illustration and the enforcement at once being drawn from Schiller on “Æsthetic Education,” and Fichte on the “Nature of the Scholar.”[813]
This abstract is designedly cut short, not out of unfairness, but because the original is known to many and accessible easily to all. It is a high encomium: and even the contents of this book will show that it is, beyond controversy, in part at least a deserved one. From Lessing onwards there can be no question of the intent of the Germans to bring about a complete critical Reformation: nor can it be denied that, after a time, and to no small extent in consequence of their efforts, something like a complete critical Reformation was brought about. But whether there is not an indispensable nexus wanting somewhere—whether the general improvement of actual criticism in Germany and elsewhere, though not perhaps more in Germany than elsewhere, is a consequence of the endeavour to consider the essence of Poetry and frame theories of it—that is the question. It would be fatuous to say that I have shown, but I have at least endeavoured to show, some cause against the affirmative answer. In particular, I should like to re-invite the reader’s attention to that aporia which has been stated earlier— whether the famous criticism of Hamlet in Wilhelm Meister (to which Carlyle, of course, appeals here) might not have been written without any knowledge of the original, of its language, and of its form—in short, on a German prose translation of Shakespeare? If anybody is bold enough to say “Yes: and so much the better,” well and good. But in that case his idea of the essence of poetry and mine are so different that I must necessarily seem a Completed Bungler to him, and that he must necessarily seem to me (let us say) a Person to be Sincerely Commiserated.
In actual “judging of authors” I have endeavoured to collect some facts showing that the Germans did not attain to any remarkable proficiency[814] by the application of their new systems of Æsthetic—in regard to which, by the way, no two authorities agreed among them, and of which, as a whole, some great authorities among them used language not much more respectful than my own. And so, far from this “scientific” criticism having any effect in the production of great poetry or of great literature, it is a notorious fact that since Heine—who was a hopeless rebel to the whole system—Germany has produced no great poet, and very few great men of pure letters. While other countries, besides producing in their unscientific way critics at least not less great (I should of course myself say, much greater) than Germany’s own, have maintained the production of creative literature for the best part of a century—for all but the whole of it.
And I have also endeavoured—if only by such hints and glances and instances as are allowable on the plan of this book—to show why the Germans seem to me to have failed, if not exactly where they seemed to Carlyle to have succeeded, yet in the same neighbourhood—how they have generally either flown too high or grubbed too low, and so have failed to gather the flowers and garner the fruit of the field of literature. Very likely these opinions are quite unjust, but at any rate they are not founded on ignorance; and he who holds them is perfectly ready to fight for them at any time with the due arms and in the proper lists.
If, more shortly and in slightly altered form, I may once more put my objection to German criticism, I can, as it happens, do so by simply inserting a “not” in a German boast on this very subject. Professor Schelling, of the University of Pennsylvania, in the Alumni-Register[815] of that Institution, quotes these remarkable words from Professor Lemcke of Marburg: “Let us for once lay aside our proverbial modesty and openly declare that it is not the affinity of race, nor the indications in his poetry of a German spirit, which have brought us so close to Shakespeare, but it is that God-given power, vouchsafed to us Germans before all other nations, by the grace of which we are enabled to recognise true genius, of whatever nation, better than other nations, ofttimes better than its own, and better to enjoy and appreciate its gifts.” Far be it from me to anticipate the obvious comments of different kinds upon this utterance of Germanism in cuerpo, and with the encumbrances of modesty laid aside. I shall only observe that it is precisely this “God-given power” of recognition or appreciation which German criticism seems to me to lack. It has the best intentions; it takes the most enormous trouble; it accumulates the most extensive and sometimes not the least valuable material and plant for appreciation. But, except in the case of its very greatest exponents, it does not seem to me often to appreciate.
But—French, or German, or English, with whatever diversity of immediate aim, exact starting-point, felicity of method, and perfection of result— all the dominant and representative criticism of this time tends in the direction and obeys the impulse of some form or other of that general creed which we have endeavoured to sketch earlier in this Interchapter, and so contributes to the general progress (straight or circular, who shall say?) of which this Book is the history. And when, rather, as usual, by the influence of creative than of critical literature, and by that of Scott and Byron above all, the same purpose was inspired in yet other countries, the results were again the same. The dislike of Rule; the almost instinctive falling back upon mediæval literature as an alterative from classical and (recent) modern; the blending of the Arts; the cultivation of colour- and sound-variety in poetry; the variegation and rhythmical elaboration of prose,—in all these ways, by all these agencies, literary Criticism as well as literary practice was reconstructed. And the end is not even yet.
Some more general remarks on the sub-period must be postponed to the several parts of the Conclusion. But there is one phenomenon which, first appearing towards the end of the last volume, and much more noticeable in the last Book, now becomes what the Germans call hervorragend, persistently and almost aggressively prominent. And on this we must say something.
[816]To enter into all the questions connected with the Periodical here, would be obviously impossible. That it has multiplied criticism itself is a truism; that it has necessarily multiplied bad criticism is maintainable; the question is whether it has actually multiplied good. I think it has. It is very difficult to conceive of any other system under which a man like Sainte-Beuve—not of means, and not well adapted to any profession—could have given his life practically to the service of our Muse as he actually did. It is difficult to imagine any other which would have equally well suited a man like Mr Arnold, with abundant, and fairly harassing, avocations on the one hand, and with apparently no great inclination to write elaborate books on the other. Many officials, professional men, persons “avocated” (in the real sense) from criticism by this or that vocation, have been enabled by the system to give us things sometimes precious, and probably in most times not likely to have been given at all under the book-and-pamphlet dispensation. Above all, perhaps, the excuse of the surplusage which beset the regular treatise has disappeared, while the blind (or too well-seeing) editor, with his abhorred shears, is apt to lop excrescences off if they attempt to appear.[817] Although there certainly has been more bad criticism written in the nineteenth century than in any previous one,—probably more than in all previous centuries put together,—it is quite certain that no other period can show so much that is good. And the change which has resulted in it was needed. The early Bibliothecæ of the late seventeenth century wanted pliancy, variety, combination of industrial power: the later Reviews were far too apt to be mere booksellers’ instruments, while their wretched pay kept many of the best hands from them, and kept those who were driven to them in undue dependence. And further, the increasing supply of actual literature required more criticism than could easily be had under the old system of few periodicals, eked out by independent treatises and pamphlets.
These are not unimportant considerations, but they lie a little outside of—or only touch—the question of the altered quality and increased or decreased goodness of criticism as a whole and in itself. And when we come to discuss this, the question assumes rather a different aspect. The better pay, the increased repute, the greater independence, might be thought likely to attract, and did attract, a better class of writers to the work: but whether this better class was always better fitted for the particular task itself one may sometimes doubt. And there can be no doubt at all that the same attractions must necessarily tempt, and that the increased demand must almost force, a very much larger supply of inferior talent to the said task. Again, this increased demand, if not for critics, for somebody who would undertake to criticise (which is not quite the same thing), coincided with a gradual removal of the not very severe requisitions of competence which had up to this time been imposed upon the aspirant. The Mr Bludyer of the eighteenth century was at least supposed to know his Aristotle and his Longinus, his Horace and his Quintilian, his Boileau and his Le Bossu, his Dryden and his Addison. In the majority of cases he did know them—after a fashion—though he constantly misinterpreted the best of them and put his faith chiefly in the worst. But the Mr Bludyer of the nineteenth has not been supposed to know anything at all of the history and theory of his art. Now, when you at once set up a Liberty Hall, and dispense good things therein freely to all comers, your Liberty Hall is too likely before long to become a Temple of Misrule.
As the older arrangements went to make the critic’s trade not merely homely and slighted, but cramped by too many, too strict, and too little comprehended rules and formulas, so the new tended rather to make it a paradise of the ignoramus with a touch of impudence. It has never perhaps been quite sufficiently comprehended, by what may be called the laity, that though, in a sense, Blake was perfectly right in saying that every man is a judge of art who is not connoisseured out of his senses, yet it does not quite follow that every man, without training and without reading, is qualified to deliver judgment, from the actual bench, on so complicated and treacherous a work of art as a book. You can take in at least great part of the beauty of a picture at the first glance; and, no matter what the subject may be, many of the details, with all the colour and some of the drawing and composition, require neither previous education nor prolonged and attentive study, though study and attention will no doubt greatly improve the comprehension and enjoyment of them. In the case of a book it is very different. The most rapid and industrious reader[818] will require some minutes—it may even be some hours—to put himself in a position to deliver any trustworthy judgment on it at all: and he must be an exceedingly well-informed one who is at home with every subject treated in every volume that he has to review. You have to find out what it is that the author has endeavoured to do, and then—the most impossible of tasks to some critics, it would seem—to consider whether he has done it, and not whether he has or has not done something else which you wanted him to do. You have to guard against prejudices innumerable, subtle, Hydra-headed,—prejudices personal and political, prejudices social and religious, prejudices of style and of temperament, prejudices arising from school, university, country, almost every conceivable predicament of man. You must be able first to grasp, then to take off a total impression, then to produce that impression in a form suitable to the conveyance of it to the public. One would not perhaps be quite prepared to assert that every one of the hundreds and thousands who have, under the new dispensation, undertaken the office of a critic, has been divinely endowed with these gifts before undertaking that office, or that all of them, even if they took the trouble to acquire what may be acquired, were likely to succeed. There remains, of course, the comfortable doctrine that “practice makes perfect”: or, as one of the most agreeable and acute of modern political satirists, himself an admirable critic, has ironically put it—
“That by much engine-driving at intricate junctions One learns to drive engines along with the best.”
And if this seem small comfort to the suffering author, who thinks that he has had too great a share of the bad criticism and too little of the good—if it make him think of that inspiriting substitute in the Secularist hymn for our old-fashioned Glorias—
“The social system keep in view! Good night! dear friends, good night!”—
there are two other consolations which may suit him according to his temperament. The one is that under any other system his book would very probably have received no notice at all, which would in some cases (not in all) annoy him worse than blame. If he be of another sort, he may perhaps anticipate the all-healing question to any alma passably sdegnosa, “Would you rather not have written so, and be praised?”
One very necessary branch of the new criticism, as regarded poetry, the average critic, whether in or out of periodicals, was sadly slow to learn—indeed for the most part he recalcitrated furiously against learning it. This was the proper appreciation of the new effects in verbal painting and verbal music. There had always, of course, been much of this in the great old masters: but there had not been so much of it, and the critic had been wont to treat it alternately in a peddling and in a high-sniffing fashion.[819] On the musical side especially, theory had chiefly confined itself to the remarks on “suiting the sound to the sense,” in a comparatively infantine fashion—putting plenty of ss's into a line about a snake or a goose, and plenty of r's into a line about a dog; giving trisyllabic feet in a line that meant swift movement, and clogging it with consonants when effort or tardiness came in. The new poets—Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson,—in increasing degree, changed this simple and rudimentary proceeding into a complicated science of word-illumination and sound-accompaniment, which the new critics perhaps could not see or hear, and at which they were by turns loftily contemptuous and furiously angry. That there was some genuine inability in the matter may appear from looking back to Johnson’s well-known and very interesting surprise at Pope’s fondness for his couplet—
“Lo! where Mœotis sleeps, and hardly flows The freezing Tanais, through a waste of snows.”
This couplet is beautiful, though the homœoteleuton of “Mœot_is_” and “Tana_is_” is a slight blemish on it. But its beauty arises from such subtle things as the contrast of the metrical rapidity of “Tănăĭs” and the sluggish progression of its waters, and from the extremely artful disposition and variation of the vowel notes o, a, ee.
Even this is not very complicated: and it occurs with Pope and his clan once in a thousand or ten thousand lines. The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan are simply compact of the colouring symphonies of sound: and the palette becomes always more intricate, the tone-schemes more various and more artful, as you journey from the Eve of St Agnes to the Palace of Art, and from the Dream of Fair Women to Rose Mary. In the Palace especially[820] the series of descriptions of the pictures pushes both these applications of the two sister arts towards— almost to—the limits of the possible. Rossetti alone has since surpassed them. Take, for instance, the cunning manipulation of the quatrain stanza[821] itself to begin with; the figures and colour of the actual designs; and the sound-accompaniment, to suit these figures and colours, in such a stanza as—
“One seemed all dark and red: a tract of sand, And some one pacing there alone, Who paced for ever in a glimmering land, Lit with a low large moon.”[822]
Now the “values” of this are not really difficult to make out: they can be thoroughly mastered for himself, without book or teacher, by an intelligent boy of sixteen or seventeen, who, having a taste for poetry, has read some—and who happens to have been born within the nineteenth century. But they do need intelligent, sympathetic, and to a certain extent submissive, co-operation on the part of the person who is to enjoy them. The adjustment of the stanza, with its successive lines of varying capacity and cadence; the fitness of those lines themselves to receive and express more or less detailed images, and add, as it were, not merely stroke after stroke, but plan after plan, to the picture; the monosyllables; the alliteration of the last line, and the crowning effect whereby the picture is lightened after being displayed in shadow; the trisyllabic foot thrown in by “glimmering,” whether you take it in the last or the last but one of the third verse; the atmosphere-accompaniment,—all these things might well be almost invisible and inaudible to a critic brought up on eighteenth-century principles. And if he saw or heard them at all, they might affect him with that singular impatience and disgust at refinement and exquisiteness in pleasure which was affected by ancient philosophers, and which seems to be really genuine in many excellent Englishmen whom the Gods have not made in the very least philosophical. I have never myself understood why it is godliness to gulp and sin to savour; why, if a pleasure be harmless in itself, it becomes harmful in being whetted, and varied, and enhanced by every possible innocent agency. But there are doubtless some people who think it a “poisoning of the dart too apt before to kill.” And there are, I strongly suspect, a good many more whose senses are too blunt to taste or feel the refinements, and who receive the attentions of the poetic fairies with as little appreciation, though usually with by no means as much good-humour, as Bottom showed to those of Titania and her meyny.
This, however, is undoubtedly something of a digression, perhaps something too much of it. But it illustrates the perils to which the new reviewers were exposed, and at the same time (which is the excuse for the divagation) the constant opportunity of salvation which reviewing provides.
[Sidenote: Saws and instances.]
Nor need much be said of the general quality of the articles in these famous collections. Persons of enterprise have sometimes gone “exploring,” like Mrs Elton (on or off their donkeys, and with or without their little baskets), in this direction, and have come back saying, more or less wisely, that the land is barren. Some of the more practical of them have brought back specimens of its flora and fauna, its soil and its rocks.[823] It is perhaps more profitable to digest some of the general considerations which have already been stated or indicated than to dwell on particulars. Not that these particulars are useless or always uninteresting. It is good to know that The Monthly Review, in an article which could not be called unfriendly, thought The Ancient Mariner “a rhapsody of unintelligible wildness and incoherence” [the whole thing is as clear to us as a proposition in Euclid], with “poetic touches of an exquisite kind.” It is very interesting, and not at all surprising (especially when we remember Voltaire) to find the Edinburgh, the oracle of political Whiggery, enunciating the doctrine of Poetical Divine Right in its article on Thalaba.[824] It is interesting, again, and almost more instructive, to find the Quarterly, in the article which did not kill John Keats, finding fault with that poet and his master Leigh Hunt, not (as might have been done plausibly enough) for a flaccid mollities, for the delumbe and the in labris natantia,[825] but, of all things, for “ruggedness.” If we have pursued our critical studies aright, we know the symptoms, we know the diseases. They are all varieties of Kainophobia,—the horror and the misunderstanding of the unaccustomed.
[Sidenote: Their justification, such as it is.]
But though it is not original, it is very far from superfluous to point out that these poor old unjust judges, these Doubters and Bloodmen of the poetic Mansoul at this crisis of its history, were by no means without their excuses. The original form of The Ancient Mariner is only less inferior to the later form which most people know now than Tennyson’s Poems[826] as they appear in the editions since 1842 are superior to themselves as they appeared to risk the knout of Wilson and the thumbikins of Lockhart. Southey’s unrhymed vers libres in Thalaba are, when all is said and done, a mistake: and their arrangement is sometimes as unmusical as the least successful parts of Mr Arnold’s followings of them. Exquisite as are the beauties, intoxicating as is the atmosphere, of Endymion, no one nowadays could pronounce it free from faults of taste of more kinds than one, or deny that as, after all, it holds itself out to be a story, the demand for some sort of intelligible narrative procession is not so irrelevant as when it is put to a lyric, in even the widest sense of that word. And the critics were, in every one of these cases, justified of their victims. Coleridge and Tennyson altered into perfection the poems which had been so imperfect. Southey added rhyme and better rhythm in Kehama; Keats grew from the incoherence of Endymion, and its uncertain taste, to the perfection of Lamia and the great Odes and the Eves of St Agnes and St Mark. “They also serve, who only stand and—whip.” But it is better to have a soul above mere whipping.
IX. THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY
“En critique littéraire, les œuvres n’ont d’intérêt que par leur beauté et leur perfection.”—ÉMILE MONTÉGUT.
“Der Teufel hole alle Theorien!”—GRILLPARZER.
I. THE SUCCESSORS OF SAINTE-BEUVE
“ORDONNANCE” OF THIS CHAPTER—PHILARÈTE CHASLES—BARBEY D’AURÉVILLY—ON HUGO—ON OTHERS—STRONG REDEEMING POINTS IN HIM—DOUDAN—INTEREST OF HIS GENERAL ATTITUDE, AND PARTICULAR UTTERANCES—RENAN—TAINE—HIS “CULPA”— HIS MISCELLANEOUS CRITICAL WORK—HIS ‘HISTOIRE DE LA LITTÉRATURE ANGLAISE’—ITS SHORTCOMINGS—INSTANCES OF THEM—MONTÉGUT: HIS PECULIARITIES—DELICACY AND RANGE OF HIS WORK—SCHERER: PECULIAR “MORAL” CHARACTER OF HIS CRITICISM—ITS CONSEQUENT LIMITATIONS—THE SOLID MERITS ACCOMPANYING THEM—SAINTE-BEUVE + GAUTIER—BANVILLE— SAINT-VICTOR—BAUDELAIRE—CRÉPET’S ‘LES POÈTES FRANÇAIS’—FLAUBERT: THE “SINGLE WORD”—“NATURALISM”—ZOLA—‘LE ROMAN EXPÉRIMENTAL’—EXAMPLES OF HIS CRITICISM—THE REASONS OF HIS CRITICAL INCOMPETENCY—“LES DEUX GONCOURT”—“SCIENTIFIC CRITICISM”: HENNEQUIN—“COMPARATIVE LITERATURE”: TEXTE—ACADEMIC CRITICISM: GASTON PARIS—CARO, TAILLANDIER, ETC.—THE “LIGHT HORSEMEN”: JANIN—PONTMARTIN—VEUILLOT— NOT SO BLACK AS, ETC.—THE PRESENT.
[Sidenote: Ordonnance of this chapter.]
It may be barely worth while to repeat the caution given above—that “successors” in the title of this chapter is not to be taken too literally; though, in fact, “Beware of the Letter” would be the best possible continuous heading for every page of every History of Literature or of Criticism. Construed, however, with some elasticity, the term has more than enough truth in it. Some of Sainte-Beuve’s elders, most of his contemporaries, practically all his juniors, felt the influence of the flood of criticism that welled, gently but irresistibly, from the fountainheads of the Causeries and their companion- or forerunner-volumes. Indeed, Taine—the most influential critic purely of the second half of the century in France—is only Sainte-Beuve methodised and formulated. Before him, we shall deal with three interesting individualities belonging to each of the groups just indicated. Then a sufficiently natural grouping will give us a notable quartette in Renan, Taine himself, Montégut, and Scherer. We may then diverge to another group, who represent the influence of Sainte-Beuve very strongly blended with that of Gautier, the most distinguished of these being Saint-Victor, Baudelaire, and Flaubert. Then we may take the “Naturalists”; then two notable theorists who pushed Taine’s own theory further, one in a less, the other in a more fruitful direction; then a fresh batch of critics of the generally academic or specially erudite kind. After which we may cast back to a kind of “Cossack” division— écheloned over the century,—and finish with at least a salute to certain famous living representatives of French criticism, of whom it is not, according to our plan, lawful to speak further.
The trio first referred to were more or less contemporaries, and present various tendencies of literature and criticism in the nineteenth century strikingly enough. Two of them, Jules Barbey d’Aurévilly and Victor Euphémion Philarète Chasles, were men of letters by profession, and in constant practice and publicity, for the greater part of the period: the third, Ximénès Doudan, published hardly anything in his lifetime, and was suddenly revealed, after his death and within the last quarter of the century, as one of those observers of the λάθε βίωσας who tend to become rarer and rarer in modern life.
[Sidenote: Philarète Chasles.]
The eldest of the three, Philarète Chasles,[827] was at an early period of his life a refugee in England for political reasons, and acquired there a knowledge of our literature and institutions which stood him in good stead for literary purposes ever afterwards. He was, however, at least as well acquainted with the literature of his own country, and in the summer of 1828 he divided the Academy’s prize, for a study of French literature in the sixteenth century, with an Essay[828] which is still worth studying, not merely as a foil to Sainte-Beuve’s famous and epoch-making book, but in itself. Some hold that, in one piece or another of a man’s early work, his whole literary development is, so to say, acorned; there is certainly something of the phenomenon in this tractate of Chasles. It has plenty of knowledge; it is well written; it abounds in intelligent aperçus; and it inclines (if with a limitation to be stated immediately) in the Romantic direction not obscurely, in the catholic, comparative, historical direction beyond all question. But there is a certain deficiency in grasp; the style, though often brilliant and forcible in a way, too seldom concentrates itself to light up, or to blast home, an important proposition; and in the principles there is a certain transaction and trimming to catch the favour of the judges. These merits and these defects alike continued to mark Chasles' work for the fifty years during which he unweariedly performed it: but the defects, if they did not exactly get the upper hand, made him more of a journalist than of a representative of literature. He was useful and important to his contemporaries, especially as a populariser of that English literature which was needed as an alterative by French, at least as much as French was by English. But even some special interest[829] cannot make me rank him very high as a critic.
[Sidenote: Barbey d’Aurévilly.]
If Chasles gave some occasion to those who charged him with being a “Swiss of Letters,” a journalist ready to do any journey-work—this was certainly not the case with Barbey d’Aurevilly, one of the most considerable eccentrics of recent literature. A dandy and an apostle of Dandyism, a practitioner of the most “precious” style, a transgressor as to forbidden subjects, and at the same time one of the most formidable of those free lances of Catholicism of whom Ourliac, Pontmartin, and Veuillot are the chief others in his time and country, Barbey d’Aurévilly did a good deal to invite the title of charlatan, which was freely bestowed on him by his numerous and recklessly provoked enemies. But I do not think he quite deserved it at any time: and in a very large part of his extensive work[830] he did not deserve it at all. Nor are many people likely to follow me in reading this without acknowledging him as a chief example of that steady improvement in critical power with age, which has been so often noted. He never, indeed, became a good critic sans phrase—that is to say, a trustworthy one. In his country the danger-flag is constantly flying; or, rather, there are all sorts of danger-flags, some of which even the tolerably wary may not always recognise as such.
[Sidenote: On Hugo.]
Not the most difficult case is that of the attacks on Hugo, which provoked the poet to some of his most undignified Billingsgate in reply. It may seem indeed odd that a person who, though with a difference, was himself a romantique enragé—a man who calls Villemain un eunuque littéraire opéré par le goût—should dislike Hugo. But, first of all, there is the religious and political grudge against Hugo as a deserter: and Barbey never forgets his grudges, though he deplores the effect of other grudges on Chasles. And, secondly, one begins to wonder whether, in the soul of his soul, he cared much for poetry. One of his epigrams on Hugo himself,[831] clever as it is, gives more than a hint of this. The poet is un puits artésien de poésie—intarissable, mais de la même eau. This is to a very great extent true; but who ever quarrelled with a fountain of living water because it is a fountain of living water, and does not, like an artificial one on a holiday, alternately play milk, and milk-punch, and raspberry vinegar? Certainly no one who had ever thoroughly realised what the Water of Poetry—the Water of Life for the soul—is. So, too, no one, whatever his political and religious views, who can taste this Water of Life, could possibly dismiss the Contemplations as un livre accablant, un livre qui doit descendre vite dans l’oubli des hommes. And his distaste leads him into puerilities and almost stupidities of verbal criticism, such as the question, when Hugo has written, “O chiens! qu’avez vous donc dans les dents? C’est son nom.” “Comment s’y est on pris pour l’y faire entrer?”
[Sidenote: On others.]
But his dislike for Hugo does not, in the least, conciliate him to, for instance, Mérimée—the same prejudices working in a different way, and summoning others to their aid. This exquisite master of style and irony, this ice-covered volcano, is at one time[832] un morceau de bois (I wish some one would show me the Broceliande where such wood grows!), at another a “wading bird” (échassier) who occasionally fishes up a Carmen! (“O lead us to those ponds where Carmens swarm!”) A writer who is at least as different from Mérimée as from Hugo, George Sand, is le plus grand préjugé contemporain (another example of Barbey’s successes, at least in epigram) la grande routine dans l’admiration de ce siècle, nay, actually commune—which even those who have no mania for the lady or her work may think extravagant.[833] One stares as one reads that Southey’s Nelson is bêtement raconté, till one remembers Barbey’s intense, flaming, roaring Byronism, or, perhaps, till one reads the rather tell-tale statement that “stern” [Sterne] veut dire sérieux en Anglais, which certainly does not argue a nice acquaintance with the nuances of the English language. As for the other statement, that “Johnson, l’affreux docteur Johnson, l’hippopotame de la lourde critique Anglaise, fut un de ceux qui se moquèrent le plus de Sterne,” it is sufficient to answer, “Why, no, sir!”
[Sidenote: Strong redeeming points in him.]
It may seem strange, after my citing these instances of wrong-going, which might be very largely multiplied, that I should have given even partial praise to Barbey d’Aurévilly as a critic. Yet I cannot withdraw it. In the first place, as examples already given will have shown, he was really a great master of the critical epigram—a thing capable of much abuse, and of late specially abused and vulgarised and brought into discredit, but (when well-bred, and well-trained, and well-ridden) a great battle-horse in the critical stable for all that. His own critical axioms, though generally requiring correction and completion, are often most valuable, as when he says[834] that the two great critical qualities are Penetration and Weight. Only he should have added (but the addition would have hit himself hard) “Directing Judgment,” without which diamond-point and battering-ram momentum can but waste themselves or do mischief. Indeed, in his own most misguided criticisms, penetration and weight themselves are seldom wanting. His ninth volume, Les Critiques ou les Juges jugés, is often quite admirable, almost always noteworthy, on the most different people—on Joubert as on Villemain, on Nisard as on Sainte-Beuve. And almost everywhere the writing is alive; the liking, if it be only crotchet, the dislike, if it be only prejudice, is, pro tanto and for the moment, real, felt, vécu. He is rather a bad example; he has, I think, like Veuillot, already done harm, not merely in France but in England. But I should be loath to lose him: for he is not as the scribes.
[Sidenote: Doudan.]
It is impossible to imagine a more curious contrast to the often by no means ignoble hack-work of Chasles, and the restless and somewhat “posing” activity of Barbey, than the fireside and library arm-chair quiet which pervades the writings of Doudan.[835] Critically, indeed, that work is chiefly valuable as a placid and agreeable reflection of the workings of such a life on an intellect above the average, but of no gigantic force or “genial” individuality, and a taste for literature which never raised itself to very active or deliberate discharges of the critical function. His two most regular critical exercises, the early article “De la nouvelle école poétique”[836] occasioned by Sainte-Beuve’s Tableau, and the later but (unless I mistake) not precisely dated “Les Révolutions du Goût,”[837] are more curious than exactly important. They exhibit, as the work of these half-recluses often does, an odd mixture of reflection of the time-movements and reaction against them. His style of opposition (for he does oppose it) to the Romantic movement is double, and in each case rather unexpected. [Sidenote: Interest of his general attitude,] One horn is pure Chauvinism. “Who are these Germans and English, that we Frenchmen should imitate them?” This he shed later. But he always lifted up the other—a curious form of belief in progress and development, which once more almost persuades us to believe that no believer in Progress can be a critic as such and for the time. In the “De la Nouvelle École” this takes the cruder form, common in the early nineteenth century, of asking why we, with all our glorious gains, should go back to, if not exactly barbarous ages, yet less favoured ones? In the Révolutions it becomes a subtler, but perhaps more dangerous, heresy, which draws to its aid the fashionable fancies about time and climate and the like. According to Doudan, it would seem, a real historical criticism is impossible,— “Les nuances délicates s'évanouissent quand les mœurs, etc., ont changé.” You cannot keep on the tracks of poesy, cette science émue et populaire (note the Montaignesque perfection of the phrase, whatever we may think of the argument), you cannot sound ces magnifiques abîmes. Each generation sees only one side of the Beautiful—and apparently you cannot extract and combine the visions of each from their records. Which is, I think, blasphemy against Criticism and Literature; but some fight might, no doubt, be made for it, and it is admirably and suggestively put.
[Sidenote: and particular utterances.]
It would require a separate and elaborate handling to show how far these half-progressist half-nihilist views are reflected in the literary utterances which stud Doudan’s Letters: but some of these must be given. He never achieves the supremacy of his very close analogue Joubert: but he is certainly “to be made a note of.” For instance,[838] in a certain Chartreuse (not otherwise identified, but which must be Beyle’s from what follows) he says (as he should not) that it is “stupid,” and accounts for, at the same time as he disables, his own judgment by adding that he has not read it. But he knows other books of the author, who is “un mauvais sujet au courant de tous les procédés d’imagination.” Unjust of course: but with how much justice and with how much more felicity in it! In 1843 he must have somewhat modified his fifteen years’ earlier disapproval of Old French, for in the Roman de la Rose he sees[839] “mille idées passer dans ces ombres du Moyen Âge”— ideas, we may retort, which, if you see, you may surely cry Halt! to, and register. Twenty years later again, in 1865,[840] he not merely condemns, in the Mémoires d’Outre Tombe, “le langage torturé, comme dans M. Victor Hugo, pour produire des effets,” which might be thought to show a certain obsolescence of judgment, but clears himself from this charge, and from his old fault of Chauvinist criticism, not merely by defending Eugénie de Guérin but by approving Charlotte Bronté, a combination of literary lady-loves which is not commonplace. He even consents, later still, to read Miss Braddon: and expresses warm and intelligent approval of The Small House at Allington. Only fanatical Goetheaner will find much fault with his characterisation,[841] in one of his interesting letters to A. W. Schlegel, of Meister as “excessively desultory and chimerical” in matter: and all but fanatical Hugonians will at least understand his unhappiness[842] at William Shakespeare, though the expressions of it have a touch of the comic. When you have read the book for ten minutes you feel as if you were standing on your head. Polyphemus must have written like it when he had eaten a Greek and drunk a skinful of wine. And the younger generation finds it admirable! These are the tricks that await all of us as we grow older, unless we keep our feet (and our heads) very carefully when we go into the House of Literature. But Doudan is not excessively affected by them, though, on the other hand, he does not shake himself vigorously and critically free. He is a good specimen of the purely contemplative and “occasional” critic—a sort of hermit of the desert, who does not object to decide on cases that present themselves, but who will not go to seek them.[843]
[Sidenote: Renan.]
We may turn from Doudan to a very different figure, introducing a new and important group. It is not uncommon to see M. Renan spoken of as a considerable critic; on the other hand, I think some one (and no mean authority, if my memory serves me) is reported to have said of him, “Renan n’a pas le sens littéraire.” Both statements are excessive: but at the risk of shocking some readers, I am bound to say that the second is a great deal nearer the truth than the first. A biblical critic he was, no doubt: but, as has been pointed out at the beginning of this history, the operations of the biblical critic are always conducted on principles different from, and usually on principles diametrically opposed to, the principles of the criticism of literature. Yet it may be urged, Did he not help to produce one volume, and that on a very interesting period, of the great Histoire Littéraire de la France? Did he not almost precede Mr Arnold himself in arguing for the necessity of Criticism, and the excellent influence not merely of Science but of Literature? and quite precede him in exalting the literary uses and virtues of Celtic? Has he not left us, from the Averroès and the Avenir de la Science downwards, constant literary allusions and handlings, frequent literary papers, on subjects ranging from Spinoza to Béranger?
This is all quite true: and if it were reasonable, as some people seem to think it is, to expect that an author should use as great length in showing why he does not deal with a subject as in dealing with what he thinks it right to handle, I could, as in the case of others from Voltaire downwards, produce chapter and verse to any extent in negative justification. But M. Renan seemed to me, on a careful perusal of all his then published work, twenty years ago[844] and more—he seemed to me, on a repetition and extension of that reading a dozen years later[845]— and he seems to me now, after recurring to his work for the present purpose—seldom or never to have regarded literature as literature. He said, in so many words, at the beginning of his career, and he published the saying towards the close,[846] that literary work is only valuable as the work of its time, that “the Pensées of Pascal and the Sermons of Bossuet, if they appeared to-day, would be hardly worth notice.” This exaggeration of the historic view is interesting, of course; but it is as fatal to criticism as the absolute refusal to take that view.
[Sidenote: Taine.]
Not thus is to be dismissed one who thought Renan a critic and a great one. Hippolyte Taine was a critic, though too often (not always) a “black horseman” of criticism. He was a great æsthetician, he was a brilliant literary historian—that is to say, what should be a critic on the greatest scale. He could do splendid justice[847] to another critic of tendencies and predilections so different from his own as those of Paul de Saint-Victor. To question his competence in pure criticism may seem more than presumption, it may seem pure fatuity. But, though a poet is dispensed from having a conscience, a critic and a historian of criticism is not.
[Sidenote: His culpa.]
The fault of Taine as a critic was put once for all from two different points of view and by two widely different, though each in his different way supremely competent, persons, in that conversation at one of the Magny dinners which is referred to elsewhere,[848] and the reporting of which,[849] whether justifiable in itself or not, should bribe Rhadamanthus in his condemnation of the Goncourtian reportage. He did not understand the sublime—the “magnificent”—in literature, as no less a person than Sainte-Beuve told him on that occasion: and he did not understand it, because, as no less a person than Gautier (consciously or unconsciously repeating Longinus) told him, he did not see that the secret of literature lies in the “mots rayonnants,” the “mots de lumière.” Or, rather, he would not understand: for as two of his selected quotations,[850] from such an apostle of the mot rayonnant as Saint-Victor, show, he had the root of the matter in him, but would not let it grow.
[Sidenote: His miscellaneous critical work.]
Taine is, therefore, the capital example of the harm which may be done by what is called “philosophy” in criticism. If he had resisted this tendency, and had allowed himself simply to receive and assimilate the facts, he might have been one of the great critics of the world. That he could have done so is shown, I think, completely by the greatest work of his life, the Origines de la France Contemporaine—in which, with a good grace, if not explicitly, swallowing all he had said in his earlier remarks on Carlyle’s French Revolution, he allowed himself to yield to the other facts, and established the truth for ever, on and in an impregnable foundation and circumvallation of document. But he had no time to do everything: and in his literary perversity he had gone too far. He began as quite a young man, but not young enough to be immature, in the famous studies on La Fontaine and Livy, by a philosophical crystallisation of the process which Sainte-Beuve had almost invented, but had always kept in a fluid and flexible condition—the process of inquiring into the “circumstances,” the ancestry, country, surroundings, religion, tastes, friends, career, of the man of letters. As crystallised under the influence of a philosophical determinism, this process became one of inquiring into the racial origin, chronological period, and general environment (milieu) of the individual, the school, the literature, as a result of which these “had to be”—what they seemed to M. Taine. The man of letters, be he Shakespeare or Voltaire, Dante or Cervantes, was simply a made-up prescription.
[Sidenote: His Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise.]
It might not have been so disastrous as it was, if M. Taine had had the audacity—or from a different point of view the pusillanimity—to choose the literature of his own country as his sphere of principal operation. His theory would not have been so cramping as Nisard’s, and he was better furnished with facilities of direct appreciation. That there would have been faults, gaps, oddities, in the survey is certain: but it would have been a great and an invaluable history of French Literature. Now his famous Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise—one of the most brilliantly written of its class, one of the most interesting, perhaps the history of literature, which has most of literature itself—is only valuable for qualities which are not of its own essence, and in the qualities which are of its essence is very nearly valueless. To any one who knows “those who are there and those who are not”—the authors whom M. Taine discusses and the authors whom he skips—it is a stimulating and piquant, if not exactly an informing, book to read. Those who do not know them will be led hopelessly astray. To begin with, M. Taine himself did not know enough, though he knew creditably much. He had many distractions and avocations at the time, and did not plunge on the document with anything like the “brazen-bowelled” energy which he afterwards showed in the Origines. Whole periods—especially where language or dialect present difficulties—are jumped with the most perfect nonchalance, but unfortunately not always in silence. Those minor writers who give the key of a literature much more surely than the greater ones (for these are akin to all the world) receive very little attention. The native, automatic, irrational, sympathies and preferences, which keep a man right much oftener than they lead him wrong, are necessarily wanting. Nothing interferes to save the critic from the influence of his theory. He has constructed for himself, on that theory, an ideal Englishman with big feet (because the soil of our country is marshy and soft), with respect for authority (as is shown by English boys calling their father “Governor”), Protestant, melancholy, with several other attributes. This ideal Englishman is further moulded, tooled, typed, by race, time, milieu: and he becomes Chaucer, Shakespeare, Pope, Byron. And the literature of Byron, Pope, Shakespeare, Chaucer has to deliver itself in a concatenation accordingly.
[Sidenote: Its shortcomings.]
It is unnecessary to add much to what Sainte-Beuve and Scherer,[851] both his personal friends, both practically Frenchmen, both acquainted as few Frenchmen have been with English literature itself, one of supreme and the other of high critical competency, said in deprecation of this proceeding. But an Englishman, especially if he knows something of other literatures as well as his own, enjoys a parrhesia which they did not enjoy. And the only adequate verdict that can be pronounced on Taine’s History of English Literature is that, great as a book and as a creation, it is as criticism not faulty, not unequal, but positively and utterly worthless. It does not even supply the native with useful independent checks and views “as others see,” for the views are the views of a theory, not a man. It supplies the foreigner with a false and dangerous travesty.
[Sidenote: Instances of them.]
But in reference to so famous, and in a way so engaging, a book, it might seem impertinent not to descend a little more to particulars. Let anybody contrast the handlings of Dryden and of Swift. The former is one, I do not hesitate to say, of the worst criticisms ever written by a great writer, the latter one of the best. And why? Because Swift—great, arch-great as he is—is very much of a piece: and Taine can adjust him to his theory. Dryden is not of a piece at all, except in regard to that purely literary craftsmanship which a foreigner can judge least well. He is scattered, eclectic, contradictory: and if you make any general theory about him, or even bring any general theory in contact with him, you get into difficulties at once. About Keats—a great person surely, and in casting shadows before him immense—Taine is null; about Shelley, ludicrous; I am not sure that he so much as mentions Browning, most of the best of whose work was done when he wrote. To take examples all over the history, on Piers Plowman, on the Caroline Poets, on Gray and Collins, he is at the mercy of any cub in criticism, and a thing to look at and pass for the more gracious and benign animals therein. Sometimes, as we have said above, he tempts the horrid reflection, “Had he really read the authors of whom he speaks?” And always his neglect (which may have endeared him to Mérimée)[852] of the minor figures throws his sketches of the major out of drawing, out of composition, out of proportion. That he started from Sainte-Beuve is certain; but he comes round to a point absolutely opposed to Sainte-Beuve’s serene observatory. He speaks of what he has not seen.
[Sidenote: Montégut: his peculiarities.]
It is strange, though perhaps not inexplicable, that the critical renown of Émile Montégut is not greater with us than it is. He was one of the best and most popular writers of the Revue des Deux Mondes at a time when it still held the position of the chief critical periodical in Europe. He dealt largely with subjects of special interest to Englishmen. Yet, with us, he has nothing like the reputation, not merely of Sainte-Beuve, but of Scherer and Taine. The reasons for this lie partly in the fact that Montégut was, I believe, at all times a man who wrote for his bread, and so not only had to do translation,[853] biography on commission, and other hack-work, but even in his proper sphere could not pick and choose his tasks. Another cause may probably be found in his fondness—I will not say for prolixity, but for handling on the very great scale. I have said elsewhere that I believe part of the success of Sainte-Beuve to be due to the fact that in his very best days he very rarely dealt, at any one time, with any one subject at more than single (or at most double) causerie length. Montégut’s treatment of George Eliot runs to 160 pages, that of Charlotte Bronté to very little less, those of Musset and (more remarkably still) of Nodier to 120 each. Now, though people will sometimes read critical estimates of great length, they will rarely re-read them. And they do not show the qualities of the critic, especially to the running reader, with as much clearness, crispness, and variety of effect as do shorter, but not too short, pieces.
Yet these qualities in Montégut were rare and admirable. I do not know that I have found any work, short of the Aristotelian-Longinian-Coleridgian level, stand the process of re-reading, among the thousand applications of it which this book has necessitated, better than his. His critical appeal is not tapageur and peremptory like that of Taine; nor has it quite the clear, vigorous, masculine, common-sense judgment, when prejudice does not interfere, of Scherer; but it is extraordinarily enveloping, penetrating, intimate. With Taine you get soon tired, if not of his opes, which are indeed considerable, yet of his fumum strepitumque: with Scherer you think that he has said what he ought to have said, but you are not very anxious to hear him say it again,[854] and there is rarely any “second intention,” any suggested but not obvious thought, for you to hear. Montégut’s delicate, intricate reflection and sympathy, especially at the length at which they are given, can hardly, by the most attentive and sensitive of readers, be taken in all at once; there are always gleanings of the grapes, always second mowings of the grass to be made.
Further, Montégut was, in this group, the only one who did not commit himself to the absolute and inseparable identification of critical inquiry with the construction and application of a general theory of national character and history. He was not, indeed, always free from this besetting delusion of nineteenth-century criticism, a delusion which has done nearly as much harm as all the idols of Neo-classicism put together.[855] On the contrary, he has whole essays tending in this direction.[856] But his best work is done in quite a different one, and, in a late and remarkable study of Saint-René Taillandier,[857] he expressly draws a contrast between critique littéraire and critique qui se propose un but social, and lays down that in the former “les œuvres n’ont d’intérêt que par leur beauté et leur perfection.” And so, unenslaved by non-literary theory, and only “servant,” in the good old sense of lover, to the Muses, he is able to discern the interest of work in both directions, while the pure national-character critics are hampered in one by the theory they take to help them along in the other, and not much helped by it even there.
[Sidenote: Delicacy and range of his work.]
Among the best examples of Montégut’s critical genius that I can think of is the short essay on Boccaccio[858] (where he shows conclusively that great length was not, in the least, an indispensable condition with him), almost all his English papers,[859] and the exceedingly agreeable study of Théophile Gautier,[860] which remains the best thing ever written on that author—difficult, though himself delightful. If I were an admirer of the Guérins (I am, though no more than reason, an admirer of Eugénie), I think I should prefer his papers on these two extraordinarily overpraised young persons to either Sainte-Beuve’s or Mr Arnold’s. The above-mentioned piece on Saint-René Taillandier is a real triumph of friendly advocacy. On Béranger—a subject, though for different reasons, almost as much a touchstone as Gautier—he is again wonderfully happy.
Indeed it is rather difficult—except when he is Tainising—to discover where Montégut is not happy. To his natural genius for delicate appreciation he united very wide reading, not merely in French, but in English, German, and Italian. In these foreign tongues he has the unconventional main heureuse, which sometimes, though not very often, attends foreigners who are not ignorant and who follow their own judgment. The average superficial critic in England to-day may think that he took Guy Livingstone[861] much too seriously; the future Sainte-Beuve of England may not. He could appreciate—as, again, not all our own critics could or can—the unequal, and for a foreigner one might think hopelessly baffling, qualities of Charles Kingsley. I am not sure that this “horizontality”—this faculty of bringing himself in line with German, Italian, English, French subjects and interpreting them, has not done him some harm. It is something so much out of the way, if not out of the reach, of most people that they suspect it. But in the court of International Critical Law—which, had it power as it has authority, would govern the literary world—his case is pretty safe.
[Sidenote: Scherer: peculiar moral character of his criticism.]
It has been recognised from the first that the obituary epigram of M. Edouard Rod on M. Edmond Scherer, “Il ne jugeait pas les écrits avec son intelligence; il les jugeait avec son caractère”—especially if it be remembered that caractère in French combines the meaning of the two English words “character” and “temper”—is an exposition, as happy as it was meant to be friendly, of the defects of the subject’s criticism. But, like all epigrams, it is scarcely adequate even to the portion of the subject to which it applies: and this subject was by no means one-sided. Fully to understand the dozen or so volumes[862] of trenchant and well-informed censorship which Scherer left, it is necessary, for all but persons of unusual powers of intellectual divination, to know much more of the circumstances than is always needful. He was, though French by birth, Swiss by extraction on the father’s side, and English on the mother’s: and he was brought up, in the straitest school of French Protestantism and English dissent, to become a Protestant-pastor. Continental Protestantism has always tended towards freethought, and after many years of progressive “advance” in his opinions, M. Scherer reached something like positive Nihilism in religion, or at least Agnosticism of the extremest kind. He had, though he must have read very widely in French Literature,[863] written little or nothing on it during this period: and he did not become a literary critic till he was forty-five. Moreover, in the process of unsettlement of his belief, his temper, which had always been very serious, seems to have acquired, as in the case of Mark Pattison and others, though not all, something like a definite roughening or souring. Further, he had paid much attention to philosophical study, and was peremptory in his requirement of “a philosophy” in all works of art and letters.[864] Yet further, his relinquishment of religion had made him only the more strenuous on the score of morality: and against any book or writer showing loose morals, or tolerance of them, he waged truceless war. [Sidenote: Its consequent limitations.] And to conclude, while he had a somewhat limited sense[865] of the comic, and was slow to appreciate irony, litotes, and other things like unto them, his very intelligence, though remarkably strong and in certain senses acute, was distinctly wanting in flexibility, accommodation, and “play.” It was a chisel rather than a watchspring-file, and when it encountered resistance or stoppage of any sort, it was apt rather to try to batter and break than to insinuate itself and so to open a way.
[Sidenote: The solid merits accompanying them.]
Add to these influences, not always tending for good, others tending powerfully the right way—great learning, the freedom from national prejudice derived from mixed blood, an inflexible honesty of intention, a perfect fearlessness, and a clear and forcible if not exactly attractive style—and the qualities of the resultant are easily anticipated. Such a critic will be weakest in the expression of dislikes. On Molière, Diderot, Carlyle, Baudelaire, especially on the three Frenchmen, M. Scherer is scarcely even interesting or edifying. His imperfect sympathy with the comic in the first case; his porcupine morality, perhaps again in the first, and certainly in the second and fourth; his dislike of the eccentric, the abnormal, the bizarre, in the third and fourth,—make real appreciation impossible for him. “What he says may be used against him,” to play on the famous police caution: but in regard to his subjects it is not so much ineffectual as almost irrelevant.
On the other hand, when he speaks of writers with whom he is more or less in sympathy,—on Milton, Wordsworth, Lamartine, George Eliot,—very few critics are better worth reading. His temperament saves him from the usual danger of exaggeration, except very rarely, when the indulgence is quite pleasant; his general approval confines his exposition of particular defects within the limits of an acute liberality; and his setting forth of merits has all the sufficiency which can be conferred by full knowledge, untiring industry, a strong intelligence, and a practised and logical method.
When, on the other hand, cases of attraction and repulsion are about equally present, at least when the caractère allows the intelligence full play, he is almost, if not quite, as good.[866] And as these two classes of Essays are, after all, in the majority, the criticism of M. Scherer is a most valuable exercise both for his craftsfellows and for the general student of literature. When his vision is not distorted by prejudice, he is the inferior of hardly any critic in argumentative power: there is a directness, solidity, simplicity about his methods and his conclusions which, without being in itself better or worse than the accumulative but not always decisive method of Sainte-Beuve and the suggestive approaches of Montégut, forms a very useful alternative and complement to both. He was never popular either in France or elsewhere: and he has hardly charm enough to recover, or rather attain, popularity at any future time. But on no subject on which he has written favourably or impartially—and not on all of those where the caractère has had too much the upper hand—will it be safe for the real student to neglect him. And if that counsel of perfection which I have more than once adumbrated here—the compilation of a critical corpus of the best work of all times and literatures—were ever undertaken, it would be possible to select from his work a volume, and perhaps more than one, of the strongest and soundest criticism to be found in the French language.
[Sidenote: Saint-Beuve + Gautier.]
These four notable writers represent, as has been said, the principles and practice of Sainte-Beuve, more or less hardened and methodised by an attempt to make a philosophy of them in Taine’s case, coloured by personal and “professional” tendencies in those of Renan and Scherer, least altered in Montégut. But the specially Romantic tone, which, though it never quite disappeared, had become less and less noticeable in Sainte-Beuve himself, shows little in any of them, unless it be in the last. On the contrary, in another group, where Sainte-Beuve’s general influence was strongly qualified by that of Gautier, the Romantic side, both formal and “tonal,” appears very strongly, and leads on to a development rather more noteworthy (except in the attacks upon it) for creative than for critical results in the Realist-Naturalist-Impressionist-Symbolist movement. The chief members of this group[867] were, the famous master of flamboyant style Saint-Victor, the poets Baudelaire and Banville, and the novelist Flaubert, with whom we may join the band (among which some of them figured with Sainte-Beuve and Gautier himself) of contributors to the very remarkable Poètes Français, issued by Crépet forty years ago. [Sidenote: Banville.] Banville needs but little separate notice, for though a delightful prose-writer, as well as a charming poet, he did not write very much criticism besides his contributions to Crépet. But his Tractate of Versification[868] is most important in the history of French prosody.
[Sidenote: Saint-Victor.]
One very famous writer just mentioned, Paul de Saint-Victor, is perhaps hardly here entitled to the place which he must occupy in a History of Literature, though, as a fact, all his production came more or less under the head of criticism in its vaguer and wider sense. The distinction is due partly at least to the fact that his professional criticism was in the main either purely theatrical or else artistic, with neither of which branches, as such, do we meddle. But there is more to say. Saint-Victor published little of this; and the chief books on which his reputation depends—the rather famous Hommes et Dieux[869] earlier, and Les Deux Masques,[870] an elaborate study of literary drama from classical times, the publication of which he undertook just before his death—put forward at least some claim to be strictly of our material; and invite attention because of the elaborate perfection of their style. Saint-Victor, after his death, was made the subject of that “nimious and indiscreet” biography which has played the ghoul to almost all men of letters, especially in France, for many years past: and a story, already referred to, has obtained currency that he built up his paragraphs by dotting over the sheet nouns or epithets of striking qualities which he wished to introduce, and then filling in the contexts to suit. This, which is half a caricature and half an antithesis of the Flaubertian theory and practice, is by no means incredible, and though the practice lends itself to criticism, it is capable enough of defence, but not as criticism itself. The more serious point is that Saint-Victor’s interests are obviously not in pure literary appreciation. He rarely attempts it, and when he does (as in his article on Swift) the result is sometimes disastrous. Where he succeeds he is rather historic, and historic-pictorial, than literary. Deriving partly from Hugo (whom he worshipped) and partly from Gautier, he has more proportion, less immensity in grandeur and in absurdity than the first, and a somewhat greater sense of humanity generally than the second, while his phrase (as in the sentence admired by Taine and quoted above) is sometimes of enchanting beauty. He is interesting to compare with Mr Pater: but the Englishman has very greatly the advantage of him as a pure critic.
[Sidenote: Baudelaire.]
If Baudelaire had given less attention to the criticism of art[871] and more to that of literature, and if he had been permitted more health and longer life,[872] it is more than probable—it is nearly certain—that he would have been a very considerable literary critic. As it is, there is hardly a page of the two hundred or so which concern the subject in the volume of his posthumously published or republished works, entitled L’Art Romantique, that does not contain most remarkable things. He had paid beforehand for Gautier’s admirable Preface by the most elaborate of his own individual appreciations: and the shorter notices of Hugo and others, with the few reviews of individual books (including Les Misérables and Madame Bovary), make a worthy company for it. But Baudelaire’s special aptitude is for criticism of a slightly more abstract kind, such as his Conseils aux Jeunes Littérateurs, Les Drames et Les Romans Honnêtes, &c.; while the actual appreciations of particulars just noticed are apt to drift off in this direction. And it was not to be regretted: for these axiomata media are often extremely true and subtle. If people would only study them, the popular idea—as far as there is any popular idea at all—of Baudelaire as a passionate and paradoxical champion of immorality and abnormality of all kinds would be strangely altered.[873] Irony is indeed almost always present: but it is yoked with a feeling for art which is extraordinary, and with a sound good sense which, especially in its ironic leaven, often makes one think of Thackeray.
[Sidenote: Crépet’s Les Poètes Français]
As a combined anthology of poetry and criticism, Crépet’s Poètes Français[874] has no superior—it may be doubted whether it has an equal. After its general Introduction by Sainte-Beuve, the mediæval and fifteenth-century poets were committed to the admirably competent hands of Louis Moland, a member of the second Romantic generation mainly represented in this Book, who gave up the bar to devote himself to editing and studying older French literature; Anatole de Montaiglon, a still more learned scholar and palæographer; Charles d’Héricault, the remarkable excellence of whose fifteenth and early sixteenth century studies has been referred to before, and who has hardly a critical fault except a slight over-valuation of his pet subjects. With the sixteenth century—or rather with the Pléiade—recourse was naturally had to writers who were less of specialists and more of men of letters generally. Gautier, Baudelaire, and Banville are contributors; Janin’s article on Lamartine is one of the best specimens of his more serious criticism: while the great mass of minor poets were divided among divers others, of whom the most fully presented and the best known were Charles Asselineau, the bibliographer of Romanticism and a diligent student with a pleasant pen; Hippolyte Babou, the accredited inventor of Baudelaire’s title Fleurs du Mal, and a man of remarkable though (except here) rather wasted talent; Philoxène Boyer (“Dans les salons de Philoxène, Nous étions quatre-vingt rimeurs”); and Edouard Fournier, an inestimable editor, in the Bibliothèque Elzévirienne and elsewhere, and the author, among innumerable other things, of the famous collection, L’Esprit des Autres (Paris, 1855).
The whole collection is a real literary and critical monument— independently of the merit of many of the articles—because it is practically the first attempt to deal with the entire poetry of a literature in a catholic and impartial manner, uninfluenced by any prevailing theory exalting or depressing particular periods, or particular writers, at the expense of others. The nineteenth century had its faults, and many of them: but this book could hardly have been written before the nineteenth century.
[Sidenote: Flaubert: the “Single Word.”]
If Rousseau, who wrote no criticism at all, ought, according to some, to have a large place in a History thereof, how much more Flaubert? For the author of Madame Bovary, though he wrote, or at least published, hardly any, has filled his Letters[875] with critical remarks, and is the acknowledged godfather, though by no means the inventor (for we have seen it as far back as La Bruyère, nay, as Longolius, if not as far back as Virgil), of the Doctrine of the Single Word—the notion that there is only one phrase, sometimes only one single and integral combination of letters, which will really express an author’s meaning, and that he must wrestle with Time and the dictionary and his own invention till he finds this. This, we say, will be found passim in Flaubert’s Letters; it will be found, by those who do not wish to read all these (they make a mistake), admirably and forcibly put by his disciple Maupassant in the Introduction thereto. The doctrine,[876] though an obvious exaggeration of the true doctrine of the importance of “the word,” is an interesting one, and has been—perhaps still is—an influential, but, on our general principles, I do not think it necessary to give Flaubert much space here on the strength of it. He never chose to embody his opinions on this matter in any regular form; probably, with his very peculiar temperament, it would have been quite impossible for him to do so, while his headlong ways of thought and speech, so oddly contrasted with the enormous patience of his writing, made his critical utterances in relation to others mainly genial and Gargantuan splutters—things gigantesque, to use his own favourite word, but not critical.
[Sidenote: “Naturalism.”]
As in the case of Flaubert and “Realism,” so in the case of “Naturalism” and M. Zola, the more general considerations will be for the Conclusion, the selection of facts and documents, on which they are based, for this place. To obtain these facts and documents we must a little break the rule of not noticing persons who have lived very recently, in the case of M. Zola himself and his friend M. de Goncourt. Their numerus must undergo the law of representation by chiefs which presses ever and ever more upon us. Of the host opposed to them, the chief and principal, M. Ferdinand Brunetière, is still living.
[Sidenote: Zola.]
The author of Les Rougon-Macquart (for out of those good manners which do not determine by death, I shall not call him by the periphrasis against which he specially protested, “the author of L’Assommoir”) wrote a good deal of criticism; his combative temperament supplying the impulse, and his journalist experience the means.[877]
But of the nearly half-score volumes[878] in which this criticism has been collected, perhaps only one, Le Roman Expérimental,[879] is much worth re-reading; at any rate, it will give us quite sufficient “document” here. Issued at the very culminating-point of its author’s talent and popularity, in 1880, long after he had come through the struggles of his youth, and long before he had fallen into that condition of a naturalist and anti-theistic voyant which we find in Travail and Vérité, it is thoroughly characteristic, thoroughly equipped. There is no reason, if the author had had the same talent for criticism that he had (after making all allowances) for creation, why it should not display as much power in the one direction as the nearly contemporary Attaque du Moulin does in the other.
[Sidenote: Le Roman Expérimental.]
Not to mince matters (and waste time in the mincing), it does nothing of the sort: but, on the contrary, proves that he had next to no critical aptitude. The contention of the title-paper—that the exploits of M. Zola and his friends in fiction correspond to those of Claude Bernard in physics, supported as it is by extensive quotation and adaptation of the famous vivisector’s own words—can, I fear, receive no other epithet than puerile. The physiologist can, of course, experiment very abundantly. But how, in the name of transcendentalism and common-sense alike, can the artist in fiction experiment? One artist in fiction did do so certainly: to wit, the unlucky author of Sandford and Merton, who trained up a little girl that she might become his wife, with the natural result that she became somebody else’s. That was a roman expérimental, on all-fours with physiological and other experiments, if you like. Many persons who are entertained at His Majesty’s expense, or who have stretched His Majesty’s hemp, might also be described as romanciers expérimentaux, and the company could be strengthened from less sinister sources.
But how can the writer experiment? He can observe, he can experience, he can (the ambiguous sense of the word is probably the source of M. Zola’s blunder) analyse, as we call it. But he can never experiment, he can only imagine. The check of nature and of the actual, the blow of the quintain if you charge at it and fail, can never be his except in the metaphorical and transformed sense of “literary” success or failure, which brings us back to another region altogether. Now “imagination,” “idealism,” and the like are M. Zola’s abomination, the constant targets of his ineffectual arrows. He does not see that he is himself using them all the time to form his subjects, just as he is using the “rhetoric,” which he abominates equally, to convey his expression.
[Sidenote: Examples of his criticism.]
Consult other places to fill out M. Zola’s ideas of literature, and they will be found all of a piece. Read[880] his “Lettre à La Jeunesse,” with its almost frenzied cry for a literature of formula, excluding genius, excluding individuality, though only to smuggle them in again afterwards by a backdoor. Read his account (very well done and producing quite the opposite effect to that which he intends) of the old man of letters, the man of letters à la Sainte-Beuve, in “L’Argent dans la Littérature,” and the funny details about royalties and centimes which follow. Read him on “L’expression personnelle” in the novel—where he is specially interesting, because with all his talent this is exactly what he himself had not got. Read him on the famous “Human Document,” where he misses— misses blindly and obstinately, almost ferociously, with the ferocity of the man who will not see—the hopeless, the insuperable rejoinder, “Study your documents as much as you like, but transform the results of the study before you give them as art.” Read the astonishing paralogism entitled “La Moralité,” where he excuses the product of tacenda in literature because tacenda are constantly recurring in life, and even being inserted in the newspapers which object to them in fiction. Read his queer reversal of a truth (certainly not too generally recognised) that Naturalism is only Romanticism “drawn to the dregs”—“le Romantisme est la période initiale et troublé du Naturalisme.” And read above all, in another of the papers, generally headed “De la Critique,” the monumental, fatal sentence, “Balzac, qui avait pour Walter Scott une admiration difficile à concevoir aujourd’hui.”[881]
He has said it. Not—let it be also said and underlined with all the emphasis possible, that M. Zola—that anybody—is to be put out of court because he does not admire Scott. We may be extremely sorry for him; we may think him quoad hoc utterly wrong; but he can plead the old privilege. He likes what he can—what he does like: and there is no more to be said. But if he cannot understand why Balzac (whom he himself admires for certain, not for all, of his qualities) should have admired an author whom he himself does not admire, because his qualities are different—then he shows himself at once to be destitute of the primal and necessary organ of criticism—the organ which appreciates, which at any rate comprehends and admits the appreciation of, things that are different. He is even as those Neo-classics, who could not understand how anybody could admire what was not like Virgil, or like something else, as the case might be. He has cut the ground from under his own feet, thrown up his own charter and passport. He cannot object if he be bound hand and foot and carried into the outer darkness, where La Harpe is Minos and M. Nisard Rhadamanthus, with the third place on the infernal bench left vacant for the reader to fill at his pleasure.
[Sidenote: The reasons of his critical incompetency.]
The truth, I think, of it all is, that M. Zola, though in his way a rather great man of not the best kind of letters, knew nothing critically about literature, and did not even take any real interest in it. I do not know that it has been generally remarked, but I am sure that if any one who is familiar with the enormous stretch of the novels will exert his memory, he will find an almost unexampled absence of literary reference, literary allusion, literary flavour in them. Even Dickens is not to be named in this respect beside Zola. Nay, his very critical works themselves, though they deal with books, have nothing of the book-atmosphere about them. When a man is really saturated with literature, he carries the aroma of it with him like a violet or a piece of Russian leather (less complimentary comparisons can be added at the taste and pleasure of the reader). He cannot dissociate himself from it if he would: just as another cannot attain it, however hard he pretends. When M. Zola read books it seems generally to have been to coach up his documents and his details: indeed, why should a person who despised poetry and rhetoric read them for anything else? Given this ignorance or this want of appetite, given a consuming desire to philosophise, combined with a very weak logical faculty, an intense belief in one formula or set of formulas, and a highly combative temperament, and you get a set of conditions which even M. Hennequin might admit as sufficient to turn out or account for a personage nothing if not _un_critical.
[Sidenote: “Les Deux Goncourt.”]
The state of his friends, the MM. de Goncourt, was not much more gracious; but though they were even more influential, as holding up the general critical doctrine and practice of naturalist-impressionism, they have left very little direct criticism, and what they have is of art rather than of letters. They too seem to have read not much belles lettres. The elder brother, towards the very end of his days (when, by the way, he thought that Shakespeare manque d’imagination), discovered with much interest that there had been a man named Defoe who was a considerable Realist or Naturalist, and that M. Maspero had hit upon a remarkably interesting story about one Rhampsinitus. Their general principle—that all literature (they, like so many moderns who cannot write poetry, thought that prose had quite superseded it) should consist of direct personal observation clothed in deliberately and jealously “personal” expression—may be dealt with later. Of individual applications of it, the most attractive is Edmond’s quarrel with Flaubert because he, with all his labour, hit only on “the epithets of all the world in excelsis,”[882] while “we” achieved the “personal” epithets. From which it will appear that our old friend, Miss Edgeworth’s Frederick, when he called his hat by the extremely personal epithet of “cadwallader,” had finished the art of literature, had sounded the depths and scaled the heights of possible writing.
[Sidenote: “Scientific criticism”: Hennequin.]
One of the objections—and not the least forcible—to philosophising too much, in æsthetic matters as in others, is at the “too much” always begets a too much more; it is like the Hybris of Greek dramatics. Some might have thought that Nisard, with his ideal French genius, and still more Taine, with his all-pervading law of place and time and circumstance, would have satisfied every normal craving for “scientific” criticism: some even that the results of their practice were sufficient to warn any reasonable person off such things. But to think this would have been to ignore humanity and history. Towards the end of the penultimate decade of the century a young and energetic critic, M. Émile Hennequin, fluttered the dove-cotes (or hawk’s eyries) of criticism with a still further straitening of the method, by the promulgation of what he was pleased to term esthopsychology. His career was cut prematurely short:[883] and, as the experienced had foreseen, “esthopsychology” soon followed—if it did not even accompany—him to the grave. But it made some noise for a time: and the three volumes,[884] which he issued in three successive years, will always remain a curiosity of criticism if not much more; while his attempt, foredoomed as it was, is, will be, to failure, is sure to be renewed. It was duly pointed out at the time that when “esthopsychological” criticism proceeded most closely on its own lines it was usually bad criticism, and that when it was good criticism its methods were not distinguishable from those of other kinds. This is true; but there is something more to be said.
Let us do M. Hennequin the justice to admit at once that he separated his new science from strictly literary criticism, and adjusted literature itself in an entirely peculiar and novel attitude and garb, before he subjected it to his own processes of pathological experiment. “Literary work,” according to him,[885] is “a collection of written signs intended to produce non-active emotions”: and of course in the country where, and for the people to whom, it is this, all sorts of peculiar phenomena may arise. In that country we can quite understand that they regard individuality as an influence perturbatrice,—a nasty, impudent, interfering baggage that upsets formulas, and brings your sum all wrong just when you have got it symmetrically arranged in the ciphering book. But those who consider individuality as the source and soul of genius, the only begetter of poetry, the incomparable companion, patron, voucher of great Art—what part or lot can they have with the esthopsychologists? A sort of slender snow-bridge across the crevasse may show itself when we come to the doctrine that, in order to understand a book, you must analyse its effect on the reader as well as the evidences it gives of its own originating causes and purposes in the author; but then, as was pointed out in the antithesis above cited, there is nothing new in this:—we are back again with Longinus, nay, with Aristotle. And we speedily discover that the other side of this bridge is a place to which we do not even wish to get, though the proceedings of the inhabitants are sometimes rather funny at a distance.
An enormous tabular scheme of conditioning and distinguishing circumstances, characteristics, means, effects, &c., has first to be arranged. The sea as a place is b: something more complicated is “daxxx,” and so on. You compose your formula for Hugo by the help of thus symbolising his Mystery, his Grandiosity, and a good many other things, including the fact (not a fact by any means) that he had in 1888 only one disciple in England—to wit, Mr Swinburne. You study Dickens, Heine, Tourguénieff, and Poe in this way as Écrivains Francisés, others as Écrivains Français. And what is the result? Dickens has much “sensibility”; Hugo is “antithetic”; the Goncourts rather draw than write; M. Huysmans affects sensational colour; Panurge is an incarnation of the ancient French character. “Après avoir fait l’analyse du vocabulaire, de la syntaxe, de la métrique, de la composition de Flaubert, nous avons examiné ses procédés de description et de psychologie qui se reduisent à ceux—[the reader doubtless expects something new and startling]—du réalisme”! These “secrets of Punch,” these “truths of M. de La Palisse,” simply pullulate in M. Hennequin’s pages. We travel painfully from Dan to Beersheba, and from Beersheba through all the wildernesses to the uttermost parts of the sea; we accumulate the most elaborate implements, provisions, documents of travel that the shops can furnish or our ingenuity invent: we spend months and years in painful prospecting. And we bring home exactly the same conclusions which have been written on the walls of every house in the intellectual Israel for Heaven knows how many years. Much μόχθος περισσὸς has been seen in this story: some (though I should demur) would have it to be a history—and an example—of nothing else. But labour more utterly lost than “esthopsychology” I think we have not found, and shall not find, even here.
[Sidenote: “Comparative Literature”: Texte.]
About ten years later Fate again cut short the life of an industrious and promising critic in M. Joseph Texte. I received, from personal friends of M. Texte, such golden accounts of his character and abilities, and the purpose to which he devoted his too short life-work— that of the study of “Comparative Literature”—is so much that to which I have devoted my own much more extended if not quite unhampered opportunities,— that I should like to say nothing of him but good. His last title, La Littérature Comparée, sums up the drift of critical and literary-historical thought for the last hundred and fifty years, and especially for the last hundred. As we have seen, from the time of Bodmer and Breitinger in Germany, from that of Gray in England, from that of Diderot, if not even earlier, in France, it has always been this extended and comparative study which has corrected criticism. But it was not till the nineteenth century was pretty far advanced that the practice of Sainte-Beuve, and a little later the formal doctrine of Mr Arnold, recognised and, as it were, canonised the idea; while it is only within the last twenty or five-and-twenty years that it has been largely carried out, and only within the last decade or less that it has received regular academic and other sanction. I have never myself, since I began to study literature seriously almost forty years ago, had the slightest doubt about its being not only the via prima, but the via sola of literary safety.
But literary roads are never quite “royal” in the sense of the proverb: there are always obstacles and breaches in the way, as well as possibilities of mistaking it. Especially, as it seems to me, is the student of Comparative Literature exposed to the old temptation of generalising and abstracting too much. I think that M. Texte’s first, and perhaps best known book, Rousseau et les Origines du Cosmopolitanisme Littéraire,[886] is rather an example of this. It will be observed that the very title hurries us a long way to sea—that we are almost out of sight of the firm land of individual example-study. If you have been brought up solely on the drama of Racine and are introduced to that of Shakespeare—nay, even vice versa, though not to the same extent—it is almost impossible that the contrast should not do you good, if only by forcing you to distinguish—to give your reasons, not to “like grossly.” But “Literary Cosmopolitanism”[887]? is not this a very distant and very vague City of God? is it not even something of a Nephelococcygia? It has never existed except to some extent during the Middle Ages: there is no present sign of its ever being likely to exist. And the coupling of it with Rousseau excites other apprehensions. Rousseau was a Swiss; he lived in France, Italy, England: his works were popular all over Europe. There is an air—but an almost obviously false air—of cosmopolitanism about this. When we examine the actual book we find that, practically, it consists of a summary of the chief literary rapports between France and England before Rousseau; of an ingenious attempt[888] to make Rousseau himself out as a kind of unconscious apostle of universal principles of literary criticism: and then of some remarks on the further rapports of English and French after him. “Rousseau and the Relations of English and French Literature” would be the real title of the book: and a useful enough monograph it is. The Études de Littérature Européenne are better (the studies of Keats and Browne are very good), and the Littérature Comparée interesting. But M. Texte was always too heedless of the guile that lurks in generals— literary more than of any other kind. The “Descendants of the Lakists in France” really means little more than that Wordsworth exercised a considerable influence on Sainte-Beuve: and “The German Influence in France” is either a quite unmanageably large subject, or a mere disproportion of nut and kernel. It is very dangerous to take, as an example of “contemporary” English literature, at the end of the nineteenth century, Aurora Leigh, which merely represents a brief and passing phase between the first Reform Bill and the first Exhibition. But nothing is further from my wishes than to carp and cavil at M. Texte, who in an average lifetime must have made vast and valuable progress, and who, as it is, was a valiant pioneer in a great and effectual way.
[Sidenote: Academic Criticism: Gaston Paris.]
To pass or recur to criticism of a strictly academic character, it is much easier to be impartial in judgment of an enemy than of a friend. And, but for one thing, I fear I might be bribed in favour of M. Gaston Paris by the extraordinary liberality and indulgence which, without any private introduction or intercession, he showed, some twenty years ago, towards an attempt on the subject in which he was the unquestioned authority and master—an attempt which did not follow his own or any other leading, which to his expert eyes must have been full of blunders and shortcomings, and which could have had in those eyes no merit but that of being honest, and based on first-hand study. Even this would not have conciliated everybody. But M. Paris had nothing of the dog who growls when any one approaches his bone, and it was most interesting to watch in Romania, the periodical which he helped to direct for more than thirty years, the difference of his method and that of some of his coadjutors. One could only marvel at his perfect freedom from this lues of the mere scholar.
This equity or urbanity, however, though the most pleasing to persons who experienced it, was not the only nor perhaps the chief, it was certainly not the most purely literary, excellence of M. Paris as a critic. He had another, still rarer in the philologist—the faculty of appreciating literature. His philological and other conscientiousness, indeed, prevented him from reprinting—during long years in which all students of Old French coveted it—the delightful Histoire Poétique de Charlemagne, with which (in 1865-66) he began his literary career: and most of his time was spent on lectures, editions, and miscellaneous work in the periodical just mentioned and others. But many of his Romania Essays (which we may hope will be collected) display the rare union just mentioned, as the work of few other philologists in the older modern tongues has done throughout Europe, though the late Professor Kölbing came an honourable second in Germany. And in 1885 he actually collected, under the title of Poésie du Moyen Age, some of his more popular lectures on the title-subject, on the origins of French Literature, on “La Chanson de Roland et La Nationalité Française” (a fine piece, delivered crânement, as his students might have said, in beleaguered Paris, during the central December of the Année Terrible), on the quaint semi-comic epic of Charlemagne’s Pilgrimage, on the story of Parnell’s Hermit, on his father. Some years later he gave an excellent but too brief Manual of Mediæval French Literature: and in 1896 he published a very noteworthy collection of articles, obituary and other, on modern men of letters, entitled Penseurs et Poètes. The longest and most remarkable of these is on the poet, M. Sully Prudhomme—a lifelong friend—and it shows better than anything else M. Paris’s power of pure literary criticism in subjects far distant in character as in time from those in which his hand usually dealt. I do not agree with him here; I cannot rank his subject’s estimable and faultless, but rather cold and limited, poetic gift so highly as he did. But for careful investigation and grouping of results, for delicate arrangement of merits so that they may produce the best effect, for good taste in enthusiasm, and ingenuity, never unfair, in advocacy, the article will stand comparison with one of Sainte-Beuve’s at his most interested and good-natured, or one of Montégut’s at his least discursive and protracted.
[Sidenote: Caro, Taillandier, &c.]
The number of learned or academic critics—some older, some younger—who might be grouped round or arranged after M. Paris is of course very large: but I do not know any who combined his special accomplishment with his general literary quality. Long ago, in another place, I was guilty of introducing two of the class as “M. Saint-René Taillandier, a dull man of industry, and M. Caro, a man of industry who is not dull.” Neither, alas! “is” anything now: but a renewed and special study of their work for the purposes of this book does not induce me to tone down the flippancy. Still, it is fair to say that neither seems to have intended what we call here “pure literary criticism.” Caro[889] was (and was satirised rather unjustly as such, in a comedy famous in its day) a sort of ladies’ philosopher, a moralist in kid gloves and dress clothes. Taillandier (the “Saint-René” appears to be one of the usual self-embellishments) was in the same way a historian and political student, who, in his capacity as regular contributor to the Deux Mondes, attempted a great deal of literary work, and collected a good deal of it.[890] He had little grasp or suppleness: and retained a great deal of the old academic horror of the bizarre. A review by him of Flaubert’s Éducation Sentimentale was, I think, the particular locus which convinced me of his dulness: and I have never read anything which removed the impression.[891]
[Sidenote: The “Light Horsemen”: Janin.]
Of what may be called the light horsemen of French criticism, almost any one, with even the slightest knowledge of the subject, would at once name Jules Janin as the hetman. He was very early singled out by Nisard in his attack on la littérature facile;[892] and though he replied with all the wit, style, and facility itself for which he was justly renowned, he probably—or rather certainly—knew as well as anybody else that it was easier to counter-raid the enemy’s country than to defend his own. A “prince of criticism,” as he was called (and is said to have liked to call himself, with the mixture of self-deceit and self-satire which all men of some brains know), he hardly was: a prince of journalism he was most certainly. Of his purely literary exercises in the art practically nothing survives; his early romantic extravagances in novel kind, L’Âne Mort and Barnave, have outlasted them, while themselves possessing no very solid fame. His purely theatrical criticisms are said to be of some value as points de repère. But, on the whole, if the most brilliant of journalists, he was also the most of a journalist among brilliant men of letters. His appreciations were written with all that appetising à peu près—that dash and sparkle and apparent mastery—which, more than any solid qualities, have given French criticism its reputation with those who do not know. But they represent little real knowledge on the writer’s own part: and while destitute of any theory of criticism of the more abstract kind (which they might lack and be no worse for it), they display no standard of personal taste, no test of goodness drawn from comparative experience, to supply the place of such a theory. They had their day; but they have ceased to be.
[Sidenote: Pontmartin.]
It might have been scarcely safe to class M. Armand de Pontmartin with the light horse during his lifetime; he would at any rate, in all probability, have taken care to show that light horsemen not only do not belong to the non-combatant divisions of an army, but are one of its most formidable arms of offence and defence. The extreme voluminousness (he reprinted some fifty or sixty volumes of his Samedis and other work) of this Royalist critic; the sharpness of his tongue, especially in a book entitled Les Jeudis de Madame Charbonneau, which fluttered literary critics in the middle years of the Second Empire; and the fact that Sainte-Beuve took the field against him on more than one occasion, have created, I believe, rather an unfavourable impression. This is not quite fair. M. de Pontmartin wrote, or at least republished, too much; he was too generally under the influence of splenetic partisanship in more than one kind, and there was in his criticism a certain superficiality and tendency to gossip round a subject, whether in attack or in caress, rather than to grasp and penetrate it. But he had great acuteness, wrote an admirable French style of the older and purer kind, and certainly had no reason to be ashamed of the way in which he harassed the “Naturalists” in his later years of contribution to the Gazette de France. The other publications of these years[893] show a mellowing of temper and no loss of ability: while even in the earlier Samedis a great number of true things, well put, may be found.
[Sidenote: Veuillot.]
But the most formidable of French critical Pandours—a man of genius in his own way, and the inspirer in that way of no small or inconspicuous divisions of journalism in other countries and since his own time—was Louis Veuillot. Most of his “swashbuckler” writing—to do him justice he did not merely swash the buckler, but had a right swashing blow with the sword at his enemy’s face and body—was directed to religious and political matters. But he had a real interest in literature: and though his principles, as Extreme Right and Extreme Left principles generally do, allowed and indeed encouraged him to regard no blow as foul in their service, he is perhaps less unscrupulous in administering literary sensations[894] than in dealing out others.
The twelve solid volumes of his Mélanges,[895] despite the apparently ephemeral character of many of their subjects, are still excellent reading, especially for the judicious student who knows how to skip, and does not disdain to do so now and then. Even when Veuillot raises false issues he is seldom quite negligible; and when he is in sympathy with his subject he is sometimes extraordinarily happy; while one seldom or never detects in him the note of personal spite, or the mere pedantic snarling, which, as has been said, are the unpardonable sins of criticism.
It might surprise some people who have heard of Veuillot only as a tomahawk-and-black-flag critic to read the affectionate and admirably executed eulogy of Edouard Ourliac, at iv. 580 of the second series; until Sainte-Beuve went out of his way to offend the Clericals, Veuillot appreciated him; and even in regard to Hugo, his handling (at ii. 542 of the second series) is astonishingly clever. Further, Veuillot is very seldom silly: one of the few instances I can think of, is his attack on Sainte-Beuve and Rabelais. It is never quite easy to understand what there is in Master Francis which upsets and disorganises even the most intelligent Roman Catholic critics, and the fact is one of the heaviest charges against the Roman form of Catholicism, from the literary point of view. Of poetry, Veuillot had not much sense; one would hardly expect it in him, and it is certain that his doctrine, that a great poet must sing ni sa dame, ni la dame d’autrui, ni les dames de tout le monde, would, if it were carried out universally, make poetry extremely uninteresting. He could be vulgar, as in his attack on Edmond About (at v. 372 of the second series), but then it has to be remembered that About could be and was extremely vulgar himself, and that the greatest danger of this sort of rough-and-tumble journalism is that you are too apt to accept the weapons and the methods of the adversary.
[Sidenote: Not so black as, &c.]
We have little space for “Mr Bludyer” in this book, and therefore it is that I have given some to his greatest and most gifted representative in the flesh during our time. One may think indeed—I do—that Mr Bludyer is a very unnecessary evil,—that it is perfectly possible to fight as keenly and as stanchly as you like with the pen, and yet never write otherwise than fairly, honestly, and like a gentleman. But whether Mr Bludyer must come or not, he generally does; and when he does, it would be well if he always had the wits, and the raciness, and, on the whole, the freedom from mere dirty selfish vanities and jealousies and greeds, which characterised the redoubtable and notorious author of the Odeurs de Paris.
[Sidenote: The present.]
It is half pleasant and half unpleasant to conclude this notice of French criticism with only a reference to those distinguished living representatives of it who hold up its banner and spread its sails to all the winds of the spirit. To name no juniors, I have already had more than one occasion to refer to the great erudition, the remarkable acuteness, and the practised critical method of M. Ferdinand Brunetière. These qualities, with an agreeable and sufficient difference, appear also in M. Émile Faguet: while M. Anatole France illustrates a more strictly impressionist, and a lighter kind of our office with one of the most charming styles that any living European writer uses for the pleasure of the human race; and there are many who greatly admire the wit, the alertness, and the truly Gallic nonchalance of M. Jules Lemaître. They have all written for some considerable time: may they put on none but Academic immortality for at least as much longer!
II. BETWEEN COLERIDGE AND ARNOLD
THE ENGLISH CRITICS OF 1830-60—WILSON—STRANGE MEDLEY OF HIS CRITICISM— THE ‘HOMER’ AND THE OTHER LARGER CRITICAL COLLECTIONS—THE ‘SPENSER’— THE ‘SPECIMENS OF BRITISH CRITICS’—‘DIES BOREALES’—FAULTS IN ALL, AND IN THE REPUBLISHED WORK—DE QUINCEY: HIS ANOMALIES AND PERVERSITIES AS A CRITIC, IN REGARD TO ALL LITERATURES—THEIR CAUSES— THE ‘RHETORIC’ AND THE ‘STYLE’—HIS COMPENSATIONS—LOCKHART—DIFFICULTY OF APPRAISING HIS CRITICISM—THE ‘TENNYSON’ REVIEW—ON COLERIDGE, BURNS, SCOTT, AND HOOK—HIS GENERAL CRITICAL CHARACTER—HARTLEY COLERIDGE—FORLORN CONDITION OF HIS CRITICISM—ITS QUALITY—DEFECTS AND EXAMPLES—MAGINN—HIS PARODY-CRITICISMS AND MORE SERIOUS EFFORTS— MACAULAY—HIS EXCEPTIONAL COMPETENCE IN SOME WAYS—THE EARLY ARTICLES— HIS DRAWBACKS—THE PRACTICAL CHOKING OF THE GOOD SEED—HIS LITERARY SURVEYS IN THE ‘LETTERS’—HIS CONFESSION—THE ‘ESSAYS’—SIMILAR DWINDLING IN CARLYLE—THE EARLIER ‘ESSAYS’—THE LATER—THE ATTITUDE OF THE ‘LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS’—THE CONCLUSION OF THIS MATTER—THACKERAY— HIS ONE CRITICAL WEAKNESS AND EXCELLENCE—‘BLACKWOOD,’ IN 1849, ON TENNYSON—GEORGE BRIMLEY—HIS ESSAY ON TENNYSON—HIS OTHER WORK—HIS INTRINSIC AND CHRONOLOGICAL IMPORTANCE—“GYAS AND CLOANTHUS”—MILMAN, CROKER, HAYWARD—SYDNEY SMITH, SENIOR, HELPS—ELWIN, LANCASTER, HANNAY—DALLAS—THE ‘POETICS‘—‘THE GAY SCIENCE’—OTHERS: J. S. MILL.
There are few things more difficult to the conscientious writer, and few which he knows will receive so little consideration from the irresponsible reader, as those overlappings on the one hand, and throwings-back on the other, which are incumbent on all literary historians save those who are content to abjure form and method altogether. The constituents of the present chapter give a case in point. Some of them may seem unreasonably torn away from their natural companions in our last chapter dealing with English criticism; some unreasonably kept back from the society of the next. But, once more, things have not been done entirely at the hazard of the orange-peel or the die.
[Sidenote: The English Critics of 1830-60.]
There is, to the present writer at any rate, a distinct colour, or set of colours, appertaining to most of the English criticism of 1830-1860, and it seems worth while to bring this out by isolating its practitioners to a certain extent. We shall find these falling under three main divisions—the first containing the latest-writing, and in some cases hardly the least, of the great band of periodical critics, mostly Romantic in tendency, of whom Coleridge is the Generalissimo and Hazlitt the rather mutinous Chief of the Staff. Then come the mighty pair of Carlyle and Macaulay; and then a rear-guard of more or less interesting minors and transition persons. So, first of the first, let us deal with one who, not only to his special partisans and friends, seemed a very prince of critics in his day.
[Sidenote: Wilson.]
The difficulties of appraising “Christopher North” as a critic are, or should be, well known in general; but it is doubtful whether many persons have recently cared to put themselves in a position to appreciate them directly. No such revival has come to him as that which has come to Hazlitt: and I have elsewhere given at some length[896] the reasons which make me inclined to fear that no such revival is very likely to come soon. For Wilson accumulated, with a defiance valorous enough but certainly not discreet, provocation after provocation to Nemesis and Oblivion. He is immensely diffuse; he is not more diffuse than he is desultory; and in the greater part of his work he sets his criticism with a habitual strain of extravagant and ephemeral bravura which even the most tolerant and catholic may not seldom find uncongenial. [Sidenote: Strange medley of his criticism.] But all this, though bad, is followed by things worse—critical incivility of the worst kind, violent political and other partisanship, a prevailing capriciousness which makes his critical utterances almost valueless, except as words to the wise; and occasional accesses of detraction and vituperation which suggest either the exasperation or some physical ailment, or a slight touch of mental aberration. And yet, side by side with all this, there is an enthusiastic love of literature; a very wide knowledge of it; a real capacity for judging, wherever this capacity is allowed to exercise itself; a generosity (as in the famous palinodes to Leigh Hunt and to Macaulay) which only makes one regret the more keenly that this generosity is so Epimethean; and, lastly, a faculty of phrase which, irregular and uncertain as it is, apt as it is to fall on one side into bombast and on the other into bathos, is almost always extraordinary. An anthology of critical passages might be extracted from Wilson which few critics could hope to surpass; but the first and probably the last exclamation of any one who was driven by this to the contexts would be, “How on earth could such good taste live in company with a Siamese brother so hopelessly bad!”[897]
[Sidenote: The Homer and the other larger critical collections.]
Wilson’s admirers, from his daughter downwards, have lamented that the Homer—a good thing but not his best—was the only one of his longer and more connected critical exercitations that was included[898] in his collected works, while three others—the Spenser, the Specimens of British Critics, and the dialogue Dies Boreales—were excluded. The reasons of the exclusion seem obvious enough. At a rough and unprofessional “cast-off,” I should guess each of the two earlier series at about 300 of these present pages, and the Dies at nearer 400. This would have meant at least another three volumes added to a collection already consisting of twelve. The Devil’s Advocate, moreover, would have had other things to urge. Whatever Wilson had gained by age and sobering (and he had gained much), he had lost nothing of his tendency to exuberance and expatiation. After the first paper or two, the whole of the Spenser criticism is occupied with an examination of the First Book of the Faerie Queene only—the best known part of the poem. The Specimens of British Critics—an admirable title which might have served for a most novel, useful, and interesting work—means in fact a very copious examination of Dryden’s critical utterances and a rather copious one of those of Pope—so that this professor at any rate has not filled this hiatus. And the Dies, though they have got rid of some of the superabundant animal spirits of the Noctes, are (it is necessary to say it) very much duller.
[Sidenote: The Spenser.]
Yet the regretters had some reason. I myself could relinquish without much sorrow, from the matter actually republished, more than as much as would accommodate the Spenser, nearly as much as would make room for the Specimens also. As for the former, the famous compliment of Hallam[899] (not a person likely, either on his good or his bad side, to be too lenient to Wilson’s faults) is at least a strong prerogative vote. Nor does it[900] stand in need of this backing. Wilson spends far too much time in slaying forgotten Satans that never were very Satanic— the silliness of the excellent Hughes, the pedantry of the no less excellent Spence, the half-heartedness, even, of Tom Warton. He does not entirely discard his old horse-play and his old grudges, though we can well pardon him for the fling that “the late Mr Hazlitt” did not think Sidney and Raleigh gentlemen. But he discards them to a very great extent; as well as the old namby-pambiness which sometimes mars his earlier work, when he is sentimental, and which, with him as with Landor, was a real danger. And the thing is full of admirable things,— the generous admission that “Campbell’s criticism is as fine and true as his poetry”; the victorious defence of the Spenserian stanza against those who think it a mere following of the Italians: a hundred pieces of good exposition and appreciation. While as for mere writing, we have “written fine” after De Quincey and Wilson himself for some eighty years. But have we often beaten this: “Thus here are many elegies in one; but that one [Daphnaida] is as much a whole as the sad sky with all its misty stars”?[901]
[Sidenote: The Specimens of British Critics.]
The Specimens of British Critics,[902] ten years later, maintains, and even with rare exceptions improves, the standard of taste in the Spenser, but its faults of disproportion, irrelevance, and divagation are much greater. The author himself once insinuates that his work may be taken for “an irregular history of British Criticism,” and it certainly might have been made such—“nor so very irregular neither,” as they would have said in the days when Englishmen were allowed to write English, and grammarians to prate about grammar. But Wilson cannot resist his propensity to course any hare that starts. As has been said above, he has the compass of a by no means meagre volume for dealing ostensibly with no British critics but Dryden and Pope. If he dealt with them only, and only as critics, there would not be much fault to find, though we might wish for a better and fuller planned work. But not a quarter—not, we might almost venture to say, a tenth—of his space is occupied with them or with criticism. A very large part is given to discussion, not merely of Dryden and Pope but of Churchill as satirists; Dryden’s plays, rhymed and other, receive large consideration, his theory of translation almost a larger, with independent digressions on every poet whom he translates. Two or three whole papers are devoted to Chaucer, not merely as Dryden translated him but in all his works, in his versification, and so forth. I do not wonder that, seeing a farrago so utterly non-correspondent to its title, any one should have hesitated to reprint it. But I do know that there is admirable criticism scattered all over it, that if it appeared as Miscellanies in English Criticism, or Critical Quodlibeta, or something of that sort, it would be worth the while of every one who takes an interest in the subject to read it: and I do think it a pity that it should be practically as if it were not.
[Sidenote: Dies Boreales.]
Perhaps hardly as much can be said of Dies Boreales,[903] which was written when the author’s bodily strength was breaking, and which betrays a relapse on senescent methods, with, naturally, no relief of juvenile treatment. The dialogue form is resumed, but “Seward,” “Buller,” and “Tallboys” are, as Dryden might have said, “the coolest and most insignificant” fellows, the worst possible substitutes for “Tickler,” and the Shepherd, and the wonderful eidolon of De Quincey in the Noctes. There is no gusto in the descriptions, even of Loch Awe: and among the rare and melancholy flashes of the old genial tomfoolery, the representation of a banquet at which these thin things, these walking gentlemen, sit down with the ghost of Christopher to a banquet of twenty-five weighed pounds of food per man, is but ghastly and resurrectionist Rabelaisianism. But if there is not the old exuberance, there is the old pleonasm. Wilson seems unable to settle down to what is his real subject—critical discussion of certain plays of Shakespeare and of Paradise Lost. Nor, when the discussions come, are they quite of the first class, though there are good things in them. The theory of a “double time” in Shakespeare—one literal and chronological, which is often very short, and another extended by poetical licence—is ingenious, if somewhat fantastic, and, critically, quite unnecessary. But the main faults of the writer, uncompensated for the most part by his merits, are eminently here.
[Sidenote: Faults in all,]
These faults, to be particularised immediately, result in a lack of directness, method, clean and clear critical grip, which is continuous and pervading. Forty pages could generally be squeezed into fourteen, and not seldom into four, with great gain of critical, no loss of literary, merit. Now diffuseness, a bad fault everywhere, is an absolutely fatal one in critical literature that wishes to live. It is hard enough for it to gain the ear of posterity anyhow; it is simply impossible when the real gist of the matter is whelmed in oceans of divagation, of skirmishes, courteous or rough-and-tumble, with other critics, of fantastic flourish and fooling. It is no blasphemy to the Poetics and the Περὶ Ὕψους themselves to say that to their terseness they owe at least half their immortality.
[Sidenote: and in the republished work.]
In the earlier, better known, and more easily accessible work the same merits and defects appear in brighter or darker colours, as the case may be. In once more going through the ten volumes of the Noctes,[904] and the Recreations, and the Essays, I can find nothing more representative than the Wordsworth Essay,[905] the famous onslaught on Tennyson’s early Poems,[906] and the eulogy of Macaulay’s Lays,[907] though I should now add An Hour’s Talk about Poetry from the Recreations.[908] In the first the author tries to be systematic, and fails; in the second he is jovially scornful, not without some acute and generous appreciation; in the third he is enthusiastically appreciative, but not, on the whole, critically satisfactory; in the fourth he compasses English sea and land to find one Great Poem, and finds it only in Paradise Lost. Everywhere he is alive and full of life; in most places he is suggestive and stimulating at intervals; nowhere is he critically to be depended upon. Praise and blame; mud and incense; vision and blindness alike lack that interconnection, that “central tiebeam,” which Carlyle, in one of the least unsympathetic and most clear-sighted of his criticisms of his contemporaries, denied him. The leaves are not merely—are not indeed at all—Sibylline; for it is impossible to work them into, or to believe that they were ever inspired by, a continuous and integral thought or judgment. There is enjoyment on the reader’s part, as on the writer’s, but it is “casual fruition”: there is even reasoning, but it is mostly on detached and literally eccentric issues. A genial chaos: but first of all, and, I fear, last of all, chaotic.
[Sidenote: De Quincey: his anomalies]
Wilson’s neighbour, friend, contributor, and, in a kindly fashion, half-butt, De Quincey[909] is, like Southey, though in different measure, condition, and degree, rather puzzling as a critic. He, too, had enormous reading, a keen interest in literature, and a distinctly critical temperament. Moreover, during great part of his long life, he never had any motive for writing on subjects that did not please him: and, even when such a motive existed, he seems to have paid sublimely little attention to it. The critical “places” in his works are in fact very numerous; they meet the reader almost passim, and often seem to promise substantive and important contributions to criticism. Nor, as a matter of fact, are they ever quite negligible or often unimportant. They constantly have that stimulating and attractive property which is so valuable, and which seems so often to have been acquired by “the Companions” from contact with the loadstone-rock of Coleridge. Every now and then, as in the well-known “Note on the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” De Quincey will display evidence (whether original or suggested) of almost dæmonic subtlety. Very often, indeed, he will display evidence, if not of dæmonic yet of impish and almost fiendish acuteness, as in his grim and (for a fellow artificial-Paradise seeker) rather callous suggestion[910] that Coleridge and Lamb should have put down their loss of cheerfulness in later years not to opium or to gin but to the later years themselves. “Ah, dear Lamb,” says the little monster,[911] “but note that the drunkard was fifty-six years old and the songster twenty-three!”
[Sidenote: and perversities as a critic,]
Yet De Quincey is scarcely—on the whole, and as a whole—to be ranked among the greatest critics. To begin with, his unconquerable habit of “rigmarole” is constantly leading him astray: and the taste for jaunty personality which he had most unluckily imbibed from Wilson leads him astray still further, and still more gravely and damagingly. In the volume on The Lake Poets I do not suppose that there are twenty pages of pure criticism, putting all orts and scraps together. The main really critical part of the essay on Lamb—then a fresh and most tempting subject—is a criticism of—--Hazlitt! The extremely interesting subject of “Milton v. Southey and Landor” (though the paper does contain good things, and, in particular, some excellent remarks on Metre) is all frittered and whittled off into shavings of quip, and crank, and gibe, and personality. The same is the case with what should have been, and in part is, one of his best critical things, the article on Schlosser’s Literary History of the Eighteenth Century. The present writer will not be suspected, by friend or foe, of insisting ruthlessly on a too grave and chaste critical manner: but De Quincey here is too much for anything and anybody. “For Heaven’s sake, my good man,” one may say almost in his own words, “do leave off fooling and come to business.” In the very long essay on Bentley he has little or no criticism at all; and here, as well as in the “Cicero,” he is too much stung and tormented by his hatred of the drab style of Conyers Middleton to see anything else when he gets near to that curious person, as he must in both. On Keats, without any reason for hostility, he has almost the full inadequacy of his generation, with not much less on Shelley; and when he comes to talk even of Wordsworth’s poetry, though there was no one living whom he honoured more, he is not very much less unsatisfactory.
[Sidenote: in regard to all literatures.]
Nor are these inadequacies and perversities limited to English. There was a good excuse (more than at one time people used to think under the influence of the fervent Goethe-worship of the mid-nineteenth century) for his famous and furious attack on Wilhelm Meister; but what are we to think of a man (admitting that much has been said and thought of it) coolly “dismisses,”[912] without so much as an unfavourable opinion, the lyric and miscellaneous poetry of one of the greatest lyric poets of Europe, or the world? He persistently belittles French literature: and he had, of course, a right to give his judgment. But, unfortunately, he not only does not give evidence of knowledge to support his condemnation, but does give negative evidence of ignorance. That ignorance, as far as contemporary literature went, seems to have been almost absolute. Even Chateaubriand (a rhetorician after his own heart) he never names in his dealing with French rhetoric, and never at all, so far as I remember, except as a praiser of Milton; while the subject before the seventeenth century seems to have been equally a blank to him. But he is most wayward and most uncritical about the classics. He gives himself all the airs of a profound scholar, and seems really to have been a very fair one. Yet that “Appraisal of Greek Literature” which Professor Masson has ruthlessly resuscitated[913] might almost have been written by the most ignorant of the “Moderns,” two hundred years ago, for its omissions and commissions. He seems to have been in his most Puckish frame of mind if he was not serious; if he was, actum est (or almost so) with him as a critic.
[Sidenote: Their causes.]
The truth seems to be that he had no very deep, wide, or fervent love of poetry as such. He could appreciate single lines and phrases,—Milton’s
“Sole sitting by the shores of old romance,”
Landor’s
“Beyond the arrows, views, and shouts of men”;
but on the whole his curious, and of course strictly “interested,” heresy about prose-poetry made him as lukewarm towards poetry pure and simple as it made him unjust to the plainer prose, such as that of Middleton, that of Swift, and even (incomprehensible as this particular injustice may seem) that of Plato. Yet we should not be sorry for this heresy, because it gave us, independently of the great creative passages of the Confessions, the Suspiria, and the rest, the critical pieces of the Rhetoric and the Style. It is somewhat curious that in the midst of an appreciative period we should have to fall back upon “preceptist” work. But it is certainly here that De Quincey, though not without his insuperable faults, becomes of most consequence in the History of Criticism. In fact, he may be said to have been almost the “instaurator”[914] of this preceptist criticism which, since its older arguments had become nearly useless from the disuse of the Neo-classic appreciation upon which they were based, or which was based upon them, very urgently and particularly required such instauration.
[Sidenote: The Rhetoric and the Style.]
The Rhetoric in particular, with all its defects, has not been superseded as a preceptist canvas, which the capable teacher can broider and patch into a competent treatise of the ornater English style. Its author’s unconquerable waywardness appears in his attempt—based in the most rickety fashion and constantly self-contradictory—to combine the traditional and the popular senses of the word in a definition of Rhetoric as unconvinced fine writing,—the deliberate elaboration of mere tours de force in contradistinction to genuine and heartfelt Eloquence. But its view is admirably wide—the widest up to its time that can be found anywhere, I think; it is instinct with a crotchety but individual life; and if the defects of the new method appear when we compare it with Rapin or Batteux, the merits thereof appear likewise, and in ample measure. Nor, despite some digression, is there much of the author’s too frequent tomfoolery. His erudition, his interest in the subject, and (towards the end) his genuine and alarmed eagerness to contradict Whately’s damaging pronouncements as to poetry and prose, keep him out of this. The Style is much more questionable, and has much more ephemeral matter in it—the author rides out all his favourite cock-horses by turns, and will often not bate us a single furlong of the journey to Banbury Cross on them. Moreover, much of it is occupied with often just condemnation of the special vices of ordinary English newspaper-and-book style in the earlier middle nineteenth century—Satans which, though not quite extinct, have given main place to other inhabitants of Pandemonium. But the paper, with the subsidiary pieces on Language and Conversation, will never lose interest and importance.
[Sidenote: His compensations.]
No incident in the ruthless duty of the critical historian has given me more trouble, or been carried through with more reluctance, than this handling of De Quincey. I have to acknowledge a great, a very early, and a constantly continued indebtedness to him. I could, as was hinted at the beginning of this notice, compile a long and brilliant list of separate instances in which his old-man-of-the-sea caprices have left him free to give admirable critical pronouncements. His suggestive and protreptic[915] quality cannot be overrated. On a philosophical point of criticism he is very rarely wrong, though even here he is too apt to labour the point, as in his deductions in the Appraisal from the true and important caution that “sublime” is a defective and delusive word for the subject of Longinus. But he is of those critics, too commonly to be found in the present stage of our inquiry, who are eminently unsafe—who require to be constantly surrounded with keepers and guards. I do not remember that Mr Matthew Arnold often, or ever, refers to De Quincey. But I cannot help thinking that, in his strictures on the English critics of his earlier time, he must often have had him in mind. He could not have charged him with narrow reading. He could not have charged him with mere insularity, or with flattery of his co-insulars. But he might easily have produced him,—and it would have been very difficult to get him out of the Arnoldian clutches, as a victim of that “eternal enemy of Art, Caprice.”
[Sidenote: Lockhart.]
There are few critics of whom we have been less allowed to form a definite and well-grounded opinion, than of one of the most famous of the practitioners of the art in the first half of the nineteenth century. Some, I should hope, of the very unjust obloquy which used to rest on Lockhart for his “scorpion” quality has been removed by Mr Lang’s Life: but of his more than thirty years of criticism not much more is accessible than what was public the day after his death. It is true that this—the main articles of it being the Scott, the Burns, the Theodore Hook, and the earlier Peter’s Letters[916]—is a very goodly literary baggage indeed, and one which any man of letters might consent to have produced, at the cost of a large curtailment of his peau de chagrin. [Sidenote: Difficulty of appraising his criticism.] It is true, further, that great part of it puts Lockhart in the forefront of the critical army. But its criticism, like the mousquetaireship of Aramis, is but of an interim order; and of the necessarily great body of anonymous reviewing, wherein at once the sting and the strength of his critical powers must have been revealed, we have but a very few instances even indirectly authenticated, the chief being the famous Quarterly review of Tennyson’s early work. Eking this further with indications from letters and the like, we shall find in Lockhart a notable though a more accomplished instance of the class of critic to which, on the other side, Jeffrey also belonged. He is differentiated from Jeffrey by a harder, if clearer and stronger, intellect, by more critical system, and, no doubt, by less amiability of temper. He had formed his taste by a deeper and wider education, he possessed a better style, and he had, as his non-critical work shows, far more imagination.
[Sidenote: The Tennyson review.]
In the “Tennyson” paper, the authorship of which appears to be certain, we have an example of Lockhart himself and of the school of criticism which he represents, very far from at the best, but far also from at the worst. This worst would have been nearly reached by him, if we could believe the earlier “Keats” article in Blackwood to be his—a charge which, fortunately, is as yet Not Proven to any competent court, though there may be searchings of heart about it. Undoubtedly Lockhart was capable of indulging in that style of sneering insolence which, though it is intellectually at a higher level by far than the other style of hectoring abuse, is nearly as offensive, and less excusable because it requires and denotes this very intellectual superiority. But the author of the Tennyson article displays neither. He is merely polite and even good-tempered for the most part; and it is constantly necessary to remember, that if there were beauties which ought to have drawn his eyes away from the faults, there were, in the earlier versions of these early poems, faults enough to draw the eyes of any critic of his stamp away from the beauties. There were trivial and mawkish things which have disappeared entirely; flawed things which have been reforged into perfect ring and temper; things, in the main precious, which were marred by easily removable disfigurements. From unwillingness to accept the later stages of a movement of which he had joyfully shared the earlier, Lockhart cannot be cleared; but his guilt extends little further.
[Sidenote: On Coleridge, Burns, Scott, and Hook.]
And he has excellent compurgation to bring forward against it. Quite early, in Peter’s Letters, he had defended the genius of Coleridge against his detractors with admirable vigour and taste. He is extraordinarily good on Burns. The abundant critical remarks which he has interspersed in the Life of Scott itself, afford a wonderful exhibition of sensitiveness and fineness of taste, with nothing to be set on the other side except the very pardonable tendency to undervalue and grudge a little in the case of the non-Scottish novels. But an almost better instance of Lockhart’s critical power, on the biographical as well as the literary side, is to be found in his article on Theodore Hook, with its remarkable welcome of the new school of Victorian novelists, which shows that his want of receptivity, as regards new poetry, did not extend to prose fiction.
[Sidenote: His general critical character.]
On the whole, we have few better examples than Lockhart, if we have any, of the severer type of critic—of the newer school, but with a certain tendency towards the older—a little too prone, when his sympathies were not specially enlisted, to think that his subjects would be “nane the waur of a hanging”—a little too quick to ban, and too slow to bless—but acute, scholarly, logical, wide enough in range, when his special prejudices did not interfere, and entitled to some extent to throw the responsibility of those prejudices on the political and literary circumstances of his time.
[Sidenote: Hartley Coleridge.]
If the pixies had not doomed Hartley Coleridge[917] to a career (or an absence of one) so strange and in a manner so sad, there would pretty certainly have been a case, not merely of poetic son succeeding poetic father, against the alleged impossibility or at least non-occurrence of which succession he himself mildly protested, but of critical faculty likewise descending in almost the highest intensity from father to son. And the not ungracious creatures might plead that, after all, opportunity was not lacking. During that strange latter half of his lifetime when he fulfilled, more literally than happily, the poetic prophecy of Wordsworth in his childhood, he seems to have had very little other occupation—indoors at least—besides criticism actual and practical. But, with the inveterate Coleridgean habit of “marginalling,” and the equally inveterate one of never turning the Marginalia to any solid account, the results of this practice, save in the case of the famous copy of Anderson’s Poets (shabbiest and slovenliest treasure-house of treasures immortal and priceless!) which bears his father’s and uncle’s notes as well as his own, are mostly Sibylline Leaves after the passage of the blast. [Sidenote: Forlorn condition of his criticism.] When a man commits his critical thoughts to the narrow margins of weekly newspapers unbound—indeed, if he had them bound, the binder would no doubt have exterminated them after the fashion of his ruthless race—he might just as well write on water, and better on sand. Still, the disjecta membra do exist—in the Biographia Borealis, or Northern Worthies, to some extent; in the Essays, collected by the pious, if sometimes a little patronising, care of his brother Derwent, to a much greater; and perhaps in one instance only, the “Massinger and Ford” Introduction, after a fashion in a manner finished. Yet even here the intended critical coda is wanting, and the inevitable critical divagation too much present.
[Sidenote: Its quality.]
But in all this there is also present, after a fashion of which I can remember no other instance, the evidences of a critical genius which not only did not give itself, but which absolutely refused itself, a chance. Hartley Coleridge has never, I think, been the subject of much study: but a more tempting matter for “problem” lovers can hardly exist. Nothing in his known history accounts for the refusal. He was admittedly not temperate: but no one has ever pretended that he was the slave of drink to the extent to which his father was the slave of opium; his interest in literature was intense and undying—that every page that he ever wrote shows beyond possibility of doubt; and the fineness of his critical perceptions is equally indubitable. [Sidenote: Defects] But the extraordinary and, I think, unparalleled intellectual indolence—or rather intellectual paralysis—which beset him, seems to have prevented him not merely from writing, but from that mere reading in which men, too indolent to make any great use of it, constantly indulge as a mere pleasure and pastime. He confesses frankly that he had read very little indeed: and this, though he had been almost all his life within reach of, and for great part of it actually under the same roof with, Southey’s hardly equalled library. This ignorance leads him wrong not only on matters of fact, but also on matters of opinion: indeed, he seldom goes wrong, except when he does not know enough about the matter.
It is unfortunate that we have hardly anything finished from him in the critical way, except the “Massinger and Ford” and the Essays he wrote for Blackwood, while these last bear such a strong impress of Wilson’s own manner[918] that it is impossible not to think them Christopherically sophisticated. In the Northern Worthies he professes not to meddle with Criticism at all, or to touch it very little. In the “Marvell,” however, the “Bentley,” the “Ascham,” the “Mason,” the “Roscoe,” and the “Congreve,” he is better than his word, and gives some excellent criticism as a seasoning to the biography. [Sidenote: and examples.] One cannot, indeed, but grudge the time that he spends on such worthless stuff as Elfrida and Caractacus, but we must remember that in that generation of transition, the generation of Milman and Talfourd earlier, of Henry Taylor and others later, the possibility of reviving the serious drama was a very important subject indeed. Hartley, whose reverence for his father is as pleasant as his affection for his mother, evidently thought much of Remorse and Zapolya, and might probably, if he ever could have got his will to face any hedge, have tried such things himself. On Congreve he is nearly at his best: and his essay certainly ought to be included in that unique volume of variorum critical documents on the Restoration Drama, which somebody some day may have the sense to edit.
But he would be neither Hartley nor Coleridge if he were not best in the Marginalia, good as the “Massinger and Ford” introduction is in parts. The “Anderson” notes, and those on Shakespeare, deserve the most careful reading: and I shall be much surprised if any competent reader fails to see that the man who wrote them at least had it in him to have made no inadequate thirdsman to his father[919] and Hazlitt.
[Sidenote: Maginn.]
Very few people nowadays, in all probability, think much of “bright, broken Maginn”[920] as a critic; and of those few some perhaps associate his criticism chiefly with such examples of it as the article on Grantley Berkeley, which almost excused the retaliation on its unfortunate publisher, or the vain attempt to “bluff” out the Keats matter by ridiculing Adonais. Even as to most of his exercitations in this most unlovely department, or rather corruption, of our art, there is perhaps something to be said for him. He fights, as a rule, not with Lockhart’s dagger of ice-brook temper, nor with Wilson’s smashing bludgeon, but with a kind of horse-whip, stinging indeed enough, but letting out no life and breaking no bones at worst and heaviest, at lightest not much more than switching playfully. Had there, however, been nothing to plead for him but this, there would have been no room for him here. [Sidenote: His parody-criticisms] But his favourite way of proceeding in his lighter critical articles, though not invented by himself (as it was not of course invented even by Canning and his merry men, from whom Maginn took it), the method of parody-criticism, is, if not a very high variety, and especially not in the least a convincing one, still one which perhaps deserves a few lines of reference, and of which he was himself decidedly the chief master. These parody-criticisms[921] are often quite good-natured, and they exhibit the seamy sides of the various styles in a manner which is critical “after a sort.”
[Sidenote: and more serious efforts.]
Still, a mere allusion would suffice for them if they stood alone, and Maginn’s paragraph might be completed by observing that he has repaired the absolutely false statement, that “Michael Angelo was a very indifferent poet,” by the far too true one, that “Any modern sermon, after the Litany of the Church of England, is an extreme example of the bathos.”[922] But his Essay on Dr Farmer’s Learning of Shakespeare,[923] and the much shorter but still substantial Lady Macbeth,[924] are by no means to be omitted or merely catalogued. These two pieces show that Maginn, if
only he could have kept his hand from the glass, and his pen from mere gambols or worse, not only might but would have been one of the most considerable of English critics. The goodness, and the various goodness, of both is all the more remarkable because Maginn seems to have owed little or nothing to the influence of Coleridge. Almost the only fault in the first is the hectoring incivility with which Farmer himself is spoken of, and this, as we have seen, is but too old a fault with critics, while it was specially prevalent at this period, and our own is far from guiltless of it. But the sense and learning of the paper are simply admirable: and Maginn’s possession of the last critical secret is almost shown by his wise restraint in arguing that Farmer’s argument for Shakespeare’s ignorance is invalid, without going on, as some would do, and have done, to argue the poet omniscient by learning as well as by genius. As for the Lady Macbeth, the sense is reinforced, and the learning (here not necessary) replaced, by taste and subtlety of the most uncommon kind. I do not know a piece of dramatic character-criticism (no, not the thousand-times-praised thing in Wilhelm Meister) more unerringly delicate and right. And this man, not, as the cackle goes, by “neglect of genius,” by the wicked refusal of patrons to patronise, not by anything of the kind, but by sheer lack of self-command, wasted his time in vulgar journalism at the worst, and with rare exceptions[925] in mere sport-making at the best!
We have been occupied since the beginning of this chapter by men who, save in the case of Hartley Coleridge, were closely connected with the periodical press, and owed almost all their communication with the public to it. We now come to a pair, greater than any of them, who were indeed “contributors,” but not contributors mainly.
[Sidenote: Macaulay.]
Another great name is added, by Macaulay, to the long and pleasant list of our examples how “Phibbus car” has, in unexpected and puzzling but always interesting ways, “made or marred the” not always “foolish Fates” of critics and criticism. When we first meet him as a critic of scarcely four-and-twenty, in the articles contributed to Knight’s Quarterly, we may feel inclined to say that nobody whom we have yet met (except perhaps Southey) can have had at that age a wider range of reading, and nobody at all an apparently keener relish for it. [Sidenote: His exceptional competence in some ways.] He is, what Southey was not, a competent scholar in the classics; he knows later (if unfortunately not quite earlier) English literature extraordinarily well; he has, what was once common with us, but was in his days getting rare, and has since grown rarer, a pretty thorough knowledge of Italian, and he is certainly not ignorant of French (though perhaps at no time did he thoroughly relish its literature), while he is later to add Spanish and German. But he does not only know, he loves. There is already much personal rhetoric and mannerism especially in the peroration of his review of Mitford’s Greece, where he reproaches that Tory historian with his neglect of Greek literature. But it is quite evidently sincere. He has shown similar enthusiasm, combined in a manner not banal, in his earlier article on Dante, and he shows wonderful and prophetic knowledge of at least parts of literature in his paper on the Athenian Orators, as well as in the later article on History belonging to his more recognised literary period. [Sidenote: The early articles.] From a candidate of this kind, but just qualified to be a deacon of the Church in years, we may surely expect a deacon in the craft of criticism before very long, particularly when he happens to possess a ready-made style of extraordinarily, and not merely, popular qualities. There are some who would say that this expectation was fully realised: I am afraid I cannot quite agree with them, and it is my business here to show why.
[Sidenote: His drawbacks.]
We have said that, even in these early exercitations, Macaulay’s characteristics appear strongly: and among not the least strongly appearing are some from which, unless a man disengages himself, he shall very hardly become a really great literary critic. The first of these is the well-known and not seriously to be denied tendency, not merely to “cocksureness,” but to a sweeping indulgence in superlatives, a “knock-me-down-these-knaves” gesticulation, which is the very negation of the critical attitude. Even the sound, the genuine, the well-deserved literary preferences above referred to lose not a little by this tone of swaggering sententiousness in their expression; and they lose a great deal more by the simultaneous appearance of the hopelessly uncritical habit of making the whites more dazzling by splashing the deepest black alongside of them. The very eulogy of Dante as a whole seems to Macaulay incomplete without an elaborate pendant of depreciation of Petrarch, while “Tasso, Marino, Guarini, and Metastasio” are swept into a dust-bin of common disdain, and we are told that the Secchia Rapita, “the best poem of its kind in some respects,” is “painfully diffuse and languid,” qualities which one might have thought destructive of any “bestness.”
[Sidenote: The practical choking of the good seed.]
It is of less importance—because the fault is so common as to be almost universal—that the “Mitford” displays very strong political prejudice, which certainly affects, as it should not do, the literary judgment. Mitford may have been an irregular and capricious writer, but the worst vices of the worst Rymer-and-Dennis criticism appear in the description of him as “bad.” His style could not possibly be so described by a fair critic who did not set out with the major premiss that whatever is unusual is bad. And not only here, but even in the purely literary essays, even at their most enthusiastically literary pitch, we may, I think, without any unfairness, perceive an undertone, an undercurrent, of preference for the not purely literary sides of the matter—for literature as it bears on history, politics, manners, man, instead of for literature in itself and for itself.
With the transference from Knight’s to the Edinburgh, which was political and partisan-political, or nothing, these seeds of evil grew and nourished, and to some extent choked the others. The “Milton,” the “Machiavelli,” the early and, for a long time, uncollected “Dryden,” serve as very hot-beds for them. All three are, as the French would say, jonchés with superlatives, arranged side by side in contrast like that of a zebra. The “Dryden”—a very tempting subject for this kind of work— is not the worst critically; indeed it is perhaps the best. It is, at any rate, far the most really literary, and it may not be unfair to think that this had something to do with the fact that Macaulay did not include it in the collected Essays.
[Sidenote: His literary surveys in the Letters.]
The real locus classicus, however, for Macaulay’s criticism is perhaps to be found, not in his published works at all, but in the letters which he wrote to Flower Ellis from Calcutta,[926] taken in connection with their context in Sir George Trevelyan’s book, and especially with the remarkable avowal which occurs in a letter, a very little later, to Macvey Napier. Macaulay, as is well known, availed himself of his Indian sojourn to indulge in almost a debauch of reading, especially in pure literature, and especially (again) in the classics. And his reflections to Ellis, a kindred spirit, are of the most interesting kind. He tells his correspondent that he has gone back to Greek literature with a passion quite astonishing to himself. He had been enraptured with Italian, little less pleased with Spanish, but when he went back to Greek he felt as if he had never known before what intellectual enjoyment was. It is impossible to imagine a happier critical diathesis: and the individual symptoms confirm it. Admiration of Æschylus is practically a passport for a man claiming poetical taste: admiration of Thucydides holds the same place in prose. And Macaulay puts them both super æthera. But it is a tell-tale that his admiration for Thucydides (of whom he says he had formerly not thought much) seems to have been determined by his own recent attention to “historical researches and political affairs.” He does full justice to Lucian. He is capital on Niebuhr: a good deal less capital on the Greek Romances; for though Achilles Tatius is not impeccable in taste and exceeding peccable in morality, it is absurd to call his book “detestable trash.” Perhaps he is hard on Statius as compared with Lucan: but here taste is free. It is more difficult to excuse him for the remark that St Augustine in his Confessions (a book not without interest) “expresses himself in the style of a field-preacher.” The present writer is not fond of conventicles, either house or hedge. But if he knew of a field-preacher who preached as St Augustine writes, he fears he might be tempted astray.
[Sidenote: His confession.]
And then, after the six months’ voyage home in the slow Lord Hungerford (which must have been six months' hard reading, though not penal), comes the great avowal to Macvey Napier, now editor of the Edinburgh:—
You cannot suspect me of any affectation of modesty: and you will therefore believe me that I tell you what I sincerely think, when I say that I am not successful in analysing the effect of works of genius. I have written several things on historical, political, and moral questions of which, on the fullest reconsideration, I am not ashamed, and by which I should be willing to be estimated; but I have never written a page of criticism on poetry or the fine arts which I would not burn if I had the power. Hazlitt used to say of himself, “I am nothing if not critical.” The case with me is exactly the reverse; I have a strong and acute enjoyment of works of the imagination, but I have never habituated myself to dissect them.... Trust to my knowledge of myself; I never in my life was more certain of anything than of what I tell you, and I am sure that Lord Jeffrey will tell you exactly the same.[927]
Such a deliberate judgment on himself by such a man, close on the “age of wisdom,”[928] after fifteen years’ constant literary practice, is practically final; but probably not a few readers of Sir George’s book felt, as the present writer did, that it merely confirms an opinion formed by themselves long before they ever read it.
[Sidenote: The Essays.]
At any rate, in nearly all the best known Essays the literary interest dwindles and the social-historic grows. I do not object, as some do, to the famous “Robert Montgomery.” This sort of criticism ought not to be done too often: and no one but a Dennis of the other kind enjoys doing it, except when the criminal’s desert is of peculiar richness. But it has to be done sometimes, and it is here done scientifically, without rudeness I think, with as much justice[929] as need be “for the good of the people,” and well. Still, it is not in the hangman’s drudgery, it is in the herald’s good office, that Macaulay’s critical weakness shows. There are some who, in all good faith and honest indignation, will doubtless cry “What! is there no literary interest in the “Milton” itself or in the “Bunyan”? Certainly there is. But, in the first case, let the Devil’s Advocate’s devil (it is too easy for his chief) remind us that there is very strong party feeling in both—that no less a person than Mr Matthew Arnold denied criticism to the “Milton”—that the author of the “Bunyan” himself puts in the forefront of his praise of The Pilgrim’s Progress its “strong human interest,” and that he goes on to make one of his too frequent uncritical contrasts, and one of his very rare gross blunders of fact, as to the Faerie Queene. And, besides, he was still in the green tree, as he was also when he gave the, in part, excellent criticism of the “Byron,” where the sweeping general lines of the sketch of the poetry of “correctness” follow those of some inferior but more original surveys of Macaulay’s editor Jeffrey. And though there is interesting criticism in the “Boswell,” it is pushed to the wall by the (I fear it must be said) ignoble desire to “dust the varlet’s jacket,” and pay Croker off in the Edinburgh for blows received at St Stephen’s.[930]
Indeed it would be quite idle to stipulate that anything here said to the detriment of Macaulay’s criticism is said relatively, if there were not a sort of doubtless honest folk who seem to think that denying a man the riches of Crœsus means that he is penniless and in debt. Macaulay was a critic on his day—a good one for a long time, and perhaps always a great one in potentia. But his criticism was slowly edged out by its rivals or choked by its own parasitic plants. It occupies about a twentieth part (to adopt his own favourite arithmetical method) of the Essay on Bacon, about one-tenth of that on Temple. In the famous piece on “Restoration Drama” it is the moral and social, not the literary or even the dramatic, side of the matter that interests Macaulay: and in dealing with Addison himself, a man who, though not quite literary or nothing, was certainly literary first of all, the purely literary handling is entirely subordinated to other parts of the treatment. This may be a good thing or it may be a bad thing: the tendenz-critics, and the criticism-of-life critics, and the others, are quite welcome to take the first view if they please. But that it is a thing; that Macaulay himself acknowledged it, and that—despite his unsurpassed devotion to literature and his great performance therein—it must affect our estimate of him, according to the schedules and specifications of this book, is not, I think, deniable by any honest inquirer.
[Sidenote: Similar dwindling in Carlyle.]
A phenomenon by no means wholly dissimilar in kind, but conditioned as to extent and degree by the differing temperaments and circumstances of the two men, may be seen in the criticism of Macaulay’s great contemporary, opposite, and corrective, Carlyle;[931] and those who care for such investigations might find it interesting to compare both with the admitted instances of dwindling literary interest—not critical but simply enjoying—in cases like that of Darwin. But leaving this extension as out of our province, and returning to our two great men of letters themselves, we shall find differences enough between them, here as elsewhere, but a remarkable agreement in the gradual ascendancy obtained by anthropology over (in the old and good sense, not the modern perversion) philology. Carlyle had always the more catholic, as Macaulay had the exacter, sense of literary form; but it may be suspected that at no time was the form chiefly eloquent to either: and in Carlyle’s attitude for many years after the somewhat tardy commencement of his actual critical career, something ominous may be observed. It may seem strange and impious to some of those who acknowledge no greater debt for mental stimulation to any one than to Carlyle, and who rank him among the greatest in all literature, to find one who joins them in this homage, and perhaps outgoes most of them therein, questioning his position as a critic. Let us therefore examine the matter somewhat carefully.
Carlyle’s criticism, like his other qualities, interpenetrates nearly all his work, from Sartor to the “Kings of Norway”: it appears in the Life of Schiller,[932] in Heroes and Hero-Worship, in Past and Present, in the Life of Sterling, while it fuliginates itself to share in the general fuliginousness of the Latter-day Pamphlets, and is strewn even over the greater biographies and histories of the Cromwell and the Frederick. We shall, however, lose nothing, and gain much, by confining ourselves mainly to the literary constituents of the great collection of Essays in this place. The discussion can be warranted to be well leavened with remembrance of the other work.
Who indeed is more rememberable than Carlyle? Of late years, partly from having read them so much, partly from having so much else to read, I have left parts of these Essays unopened for a long time. Yet, in looking them through for the purpose of this present writing, I have found myself constantly, even in the least familiar and famous parts, able to shut the book and complete clause, sentence, or even to some extent paragraph, like a text, or a collect, or a tag of Horace or Virgil. But in this re-reading it has struck me, even more forcibly than of old, how much Carlyle’s strictly critical inclinations, if not his strictly critical faculties, waned as he grew older. In the earlier Essays—those written before and during the momentous period of the Craigenputtock sojourn—there is a great deal of purely or almost purely literary criticism of an excellent kind—sober and vigorous, fresh and well disciplined. There may be, especially in regard to Richter and Goethe, a slightly exaggerated backing of the German side. But it is hardly more than slightly exaggerated, and the treatment generally is of the most thorough kind compatible with an avowed tendency towards “philosophical” rather than “formal” criticism. Professor Vaughan was certainly justified in including part of the Goethe in his selected specimens of English criticism[933] for its general principles and examples of method. Nor is Carlyle less to be praised for his discharge of the more definitely practical part of the critic’s business. He is thought of generally as “splenetic and rash”: but it would be impossible to find anywhere a more good-humoured, and (in parts at least) a more judicial censure than that of William Taylor’s preposterous German Poetry,[934] or a firmer, completer, and at the same time less excessive condemnation than that of the equally preposterous method of Croker’s original Boswell. We may see already that the critic evidently prefers matter to form, and that he is by no means quite catholic even in his fancy for matter. [Sidenote: The earlier Essays.] But he has a right to be this; and altogether there are few things in English criticism better worth reading, marking, and learning, by the novice, than the literary parts of these earlier volumes of Essays.[935] It may be that the channels in which his ink first flowed (especially that rather carefully, not to say primly, banked and paved one of the Edinburgh) imposed some restriction on him; it may be that he found the yet unpublished, or just published, Sartor a sufficient “lasher” to draw off the superfluous flood and foam of his fancy. But the facts are the facts.
[Sidenote: The later.]
And so, too, it is the fact that, later, he draws away from the attitude of purely literary consideration, if he does not, as he sometimes still later does, take up one actually hostile to this. The interesting “Characteristics” (as early as 1831) is one of the places most to be recommended to people who want to know what Carlyle really was, and not what divers more or less wise or unwise commentators have said of him. The writer has flings at literary art—especially conscious literary art— towards the beginning: afterwards (which is still more significant) he hardly takes any notice of it at all. In the much better known “Boswell,” “Burns,” and “Scott”[936] Essays, his neglect of the purely literary side is again the more remarkable, because it is not ostentatious. In the “Diderot,” dealing with a subject who was as much a man of letters first of all (though of very various and applied letters) as perhaps any man in history, he cannot and does not neglect that subject’s literary performance; but the paper is evidence of the very strongest how little of his real interest is bestowed upon it. It is of the man Diderot—and of the man Diderot’s relation to, and illumination of, that condition of the French mind and state of which some good folk have thought that Carlyle knew nothing—that he is thinking, for this that he is caring. Later still, he will select for his favourite subjects people like Mirabeau, who had much better have written no books at all, or Dr Francia, whose connection with literature is chiefly limited to the fact of his having written one immortal sentence. And this sentence, not having myself seen or wished to see the works of Rengger, I have always suspected that Carlyle or “Sauerteig” edited for him.[937]
[Sidenote: The attitude of the Latter-day Pamphlets.]
And then things get worse. That invocation of the Devil in the Latter-day Pamphlets,[938] “to fly away with the poor Fine Arts,” is indeed put off on “one of our most distinguished public men.” But Carlyle avows sympathy with it. He even progresses from it to the Platonic view that “Fiction” at all “is not quite a permissible thing”— is “sparingly permissible” at any rate. “Homer” was meant for “history”:[939] the arts were not “sent into the world to fib and dance.” As for Literature more particularly, “if it continue to be the haven of expatriated spiritualisms,” well: but “if it dwindle, as is probable, into mere merry-andrewism, windy twaddle, and feats of spiritual legerdemain,” there “will be no hope for it.” Its “regiment” is “extremely miscellaneous,” “more a canaille than a regiment,” and so forth. The “brave young British man” is adjured to be “rather shy of Literature than otherwise, for the present,”—a counsel which, it is well known, Mr Carlyle repeated in his Edinburgh Rectorial address sixteen years later. Nor did he ever alter the point of view which he had now taken up, either in book, or minor published work, or Letters, or autobiographic jottings, or those Ana which still flit on the mouths of men concerning his later years.
[Sidenote: The conclusion of this matter.]
A man who speaks thus, and thinks thus, has perforce renounced the development of any skill that he may once have had in the analysis of the strands of the tight-rope, or the component drugs of the Cup of Abominations. Still less can he be expected to expatiate, with the true critic’s delight, on the elegance with which the dancer pirouettes over vacancy, or on the iridescent richness of the wine of Circe, as it moveth itself in the chalice. I do not know that—great critic, really, as he had been earlier and always might have been—the loss of his services in this function is much to be regretted. For he did other things which assuredly most merely literary critics could not have done: and not a few good workmen stepped forward, in the last thirty years of his life, to do the work which he thus left undone, not without some flouting and scorning of it. But, once more, the fact is the fact: and his estrangement from the task, like that of Macaulay, undoubtedly had something to do with the general critical poverty of the period of English literature, which was the most fertile and vigorous in the literary life of both.
[Sidenote: Thackeray.]
Another of the very greatest gods of mid-nineteenth century literature in England displays the slightly anti-critical turn of his time still more curiously. It is one of the oddest and most interesting of the many differences between the two great masters of English prose fiction in the mid-nineteenth century that, while there is hardly any critical view of literature in Dickens, Thackeray is full of such views.[940] He himself practised criticism early and late; and despite the characteristic and perhaps very slightly affected depreciation of the business of “reading books and giving judgment on them,” which appears in Pendennis and other places, it is quite clear that he pursued that business for love as well as for money. Moreover, from first to last,— from his early and long uncollected “High-Jinkish” exploits in Fraser to the Roundabout Papers,—he produced critical work from which an anthology of the very finest critical quality, and by no means small in bulk, might be extracted with little pains and no little pleasure. [Sidenote: His one critical weakness] If he “attains not unto the first three,” it is I think only from the effect of the reaction or ebb that we note in this chapter, and from a certain deficiency in that catholic sureness which a critic of the highest kind can hardly lack. Nobody is obliged to like everything good; probably no one can like everything good. But, in case of disliking, the critic must be able either to give reasons (like those of Longinus in regard to the Odyssey) relatively, if not positively, satisfactory: or he must frankly admit that his objections are based upon something extra-literary, and that therefore, in strictness, he has no literary judgment to give.
Now Thackeray does not do this. He was not, perhaps, very good at giving reasons at all: and he was specially affected by that confusion of literary and extra-literary considerations from which all times suffer, but from which his own time and party—the moderate Liberals of the mid-nineteenth century in England—suffered more than any time or party known to us. Practically we have his confession, in the famous and dramatically paradoxical sentence on Swift, that, though he is the greatest of the Humourist company, “I say we should hoot him.” The literary critic who has “got salvation” knows that he must never do this—that whatever his dislike for the man—Milton, Racine, Swift, Pope, Rousseau, Byron, Wordsworth (I purposely mix up dislikes which are with those which are not mine)—he must not allow them to colour his judgment of the writer. Gulliver may be a terrible, humiliating, heart-crushing indictment, but nothing can prevent it from being a glorious book: and so on. Now Thackeray, by virtue of that quality of his, different sides of which have been—with equal lack of wisdom perhaps—labelled “cynicism” and “sentimentality,” was wont to be very “peccant in this kind,” and it, with some, though less, purely political or religious prejudice, and a little caprice, undoubtedly flawed his criticism.
[Sidenote: and excellence.]
When, however, these outside disturbers kept quiet, as they very often did, Thackeray’s criticism is astonishingly catholic and sound, and sometimes he was able to turn the disturbers themselves out. He had a most unhappy and Philistine dislike of the High Church movement: yet the passage in Pendennis on The Christian Year is one of the sacred places of sympathetic notice. The well-known locus in The Newcomes, as to the Colonel’s horror at the new literary gods, shows how sound Thackeray’s own faith in them was: yet he, least of all men, could be accused of forsaking the old. He had that generous appreciation of his own fellow-craftsmen by which novelists have been honourably distinguished from poets: though not all poets have been jealous, and though, from Richardson downwards, there have been very jealous novelists. If there were more criticism like the famous passage on Dumas in the Roundabouts, like great part of the solid English Humourists, like much elsewhere, our poor Goddess would not be liable to have her comeliness confounded with the ugliness of her personators, as is so often the case. And his is no promiscuous and undiscriminating generosity. He can “like nicely,” and does.
Still, though he has sometimes escaped the disadvantages of his temperament, he has often succumbed to those of his time; and what those disadvantages were cannot be better shown than by an instance to which we may now turn.
[Sidenote: Blackwood, in 1849, on Tennyson.]
When, in writing a little book upon Mr Matthew Arnold,[941] the present writer spoke severely of the state of English criticism between 1830 and 1860, some protests were made, as though the stricture were an instance of that “unfairness to the last generation” which has been frequently noticed, and invariably deprecated and condemned here. I gave, on that occasion, some illustrative instances;[942] I may here add another and very remarkable one, which I had not at that time studied. In April 1849 there appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine an article of some length on Tennyson’s work, which at the time consisted of the revised and consolidated Poems of 1842 (still further castigated in the one-volume form, so familiar to the youth of my generation), and of The Princess. This article[943] is not in the least uncivil—“Maga” had now outgrown her hoydenish ways: but we do not find the maturer, yet hardly less attractive, graces of the trentaine. The writer proclaims himself blind and deaf at every moment. He misses—he positively blasphemes—the beauty of many things that Wilson had frankly welcomed. He selects for praise such second—or third-rate matter as The Talking Oak. Claribel, not Tennyson’s greatest thing, but the very Tennyson in germ, “leaves as little impression on the living ear as it would on the sleeper beneath.” The exquisite Ode to Memory, with all its dreamy loveliness, is “an utter failure throughout,” it is a “mist” “coloured by no ray of beauty.” But the critic is made most unhappy by the song “A spirit haunts the last year’s bowers.” It is “an odious piece of pedantry.” Its admirable harmony, at once as delightful and as true to true English prosody as verse can be, extracts from him the remark, “What metre, Greek or Roman, Russian or Chinese, it was intended to imitate, we have no care to inquire: the man was writing English, and had no justifiable pretence for torturing our ears with verse like this.” The Lady of Shalott is “intolerable,” “odious,” “irritating,” “an annoyance,” “a caprice”: anybody who likes it “must be far gone in dilettanteism.” Refrains are “melancholy iterations.” With a rather pleasing frankness the critic half confesses that he knows he ought to like the Marianas, but wholly declares that he does not. He likes the Lotos-Eaters, so that he cannot have been congenitally deprived of all the seven senses of Poetry; but he cannot even form an idea what “the horse with wings kept down by its heavy rider” means in the Vision of Sin, and he cannot away with the Palace and the Dream, now purged, let it be remembered, of their “balloons” and Groves-of-Blarney stanzas, and in their perfect beauty. “Giving himself away,” in the fatal fashion of such censors, he does not merely in effect pronounce them both with rare exceptions “bad and unreadable,” but selects the magnificent line—
“Throb through the ribbed stone”—
for special ridicule. “To hear one’s own voice throbbing through the ribbed stone is a startling novelty in acoustics,” which simply shows, not merely that he had never heard his own or any other voice singing under a vaulted roof, but that he had not the mite of imagination necessary for conceiving the effect. With The Princess, as less pure poetry—good as it is—he is less unhappy; but he is not at all comfortable there.
To do our critic justice, however, though it makes his case a still more leading one, he is not one of the too common carpers who string a reasonless “I don’t like this” to a tell-tale “I can’t understand that,” until they can twist a ball (not of cowslips) to fling at a poet. He has, or thinks he has, a theory: and in some respects his theory is not a bad one. He admits that “the subtle play of imagination” may be “the most poetical part of a poem,” that it may “constitute the difference between poetry and prose,” which is good enough. But he thinks you may have too much of this good thing, that it may be “too much divorced from those sources of interest which affect all mankind”; and he thinks, further, that this divorce has taken place, not merely in Tennyson, but in Keats and in Shelley. Yet, again, as has been indeed already made evident, he has not in the least learnt the secret of that prosodic freedom, slowly broadened down from precedent to precedent of early Middle English writers, and Chaucer, and the Balladists, and Spenser, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Coleridge, which it is the glory of the nineteenth century to have perfected. And he detests the new poetic diction, aiming at the utmost reach of visual as well as musical appeal, which came with this freedom. His recoil from the “jingling rhythm” throws him with a shudder against the “resplendent gibberish.” In other words, he is not at focus: he is outside. He can neither see nor hear: and therefore he cannot judge.
But others’ eyes and ears were opening, though slowly, and with indistinct results, at first.
[Sidenote: George Brimley.]
I hardly know a book more interesting to the real student of real criticism than George Brimley’s Essays.[944] That it gives us, with Matthew Arnold’s earliest work, the first courses of the new temple of English Criticism is something, but its intrinsic attraction is its chief. The writer was apparently able to devote his short but not unhappy life, without let or hindrance other than that of feeble health, to literature; he was unhampered by any distracting desire to create; he could judge and enjoy with that almost uncanny calmness which often results, in happy dispositions, from the beneficent effect of the mal physique, freed from the aggravation of the mal moral.[945] He has idols; but he breaks away from them, if he does not quite break them. He puts no others in their places, as Arnold did too often: and, like Dryden (though they had no other point of resemblance than in both being admirable critics, and both members of Trinity College, Cambridge), he never goes wrong without coming right, with a force and vehemence of leap only intensified by his recoil. In his best work, what should be the famous, and is, to those who know it, the delightful, Essay on Tennyson, we have a thing profitable at once for example, for reproof, and for instruction, as few critical things are.
[Sidenote: His Essay on Tennyson.]
We find him at the opening a little joined to one idol, that apparently respectable, but infinitely false, god, the belief that the poet must somehow or other deal with modern life.[946] Even from this point of view he will not give up Tennyson, but he apologises for him, and he colours nearly all his remarks on at least the early Poems by the apologies. He cannot shake himself quite free. He sees the beauty of Claribel: but he will not allow its beauty to be its sole duty. It “is not quite certain what the precise feeling of it is,” and “no poem ought to admit of such a doubt.” No music of verse, no pictorial power, “will enable a reader to care for such ‘creatures of the fancy’” as Margaret or Eleanore, as the Sea Fairies, and many others. “If expression were the highest aim of poetry,” Mariana would be consummate: but—--! Mr Tennyson “moved in the centre of the most distinguished young men of the University,” “yet his poems present faint evidences of this,” strange to say! The Miller’s Daughter, and The Gardener’s Daughter, and The May Queen are dwelt on at great length, and with an evident feeling that here is something you can recommend to a practical friend who cannot embrace day-dreams. Mariana in the South should “connect itself more clearly with a person brought before the mind”—with a certificate of birth, let us say, and something about her parentage, and the bad man who left her, and the price of beans and garlic in the next village. The Lady of Shalott “eliminates all human interest.” Fatima, justly admired, “has neither beginning, middle, or end.” The Palace of Art has “no adequate dramatic presentation of the mode in which the great law of humanity works out its processes in the soul.” [So lyric poets, we understand, are not entitled to speak lyrically: but must write drama!] And, greatest shock of all, The Dream of Fair Women is not so much as mentioned. When Brimley wrote it had long shaken off its earlier crudities,—had attained its final symmetry. It was there, entire and perfect, from the exquisite opening, through the matchless blended shiftings of life and literature, woven into one passionate whole, to those last two stanzas which give the motto of Life itself from youth to age, the raison d'être of Heaven, the undying sting of Hell, the secret of the peace that grows on the soul through Purgatory. And the critic says nothing about it!
Yet he has justified his instinct—if not quite his cleared vision—from the first. Of Claribel itself, of the Marianas, of The Lotos-Eaters, of the Palace, he has given analytic appreciations so enthusiastic, and at the same time so just, so solidly thought, and so delicately phrased, that there is nothing like them in Mr Arnold (who was rather grudging of such things), and nothing superior to them anywhere.
There is a priceless wavering, a soul-saving “suppose it were true?” in that “If” (most virtuous of its kind!),—“If expression were the highest aim of poetry,” nor do I think it fanciful to see in the blasphemy about music and painting not saving “creatures of the fancy,” a vain protest against the conviction that they do. Where he can get his prejudice and his judgment to run in couples—as in regard to Locksley Hall—the car sweeps triumphantly from start to finish, out of all danger from the turning pillar. When he comes to Maud (which the folk who had the prejudice, but not the judgment, were blaspheming at the very moment at which he wrote), he turns on them with a vehemence almost inconsistent—but with the blessed inconsistency which is permissible—and lays it down plump and plain, that “it is well not to be frightened out of the enjoyment of fine poetry ... by such epithets as morbid, hysterical, spasmodic.” Most true, and it would be still better to add “beginning,” “middle,” “end,” “not human,” the neglect of acquaintance with the most distinguished young men of the university, the absence of dramatic presentation, and the rest of them, to the herd of bogies that should first be left to animate swine, and then be driven into the deep. Once, indeed, afterwards he half relapses, observing that there is “incongruity” in The Princess. But his nerves have grown firmer from his long bath of pure poetry, and he agrees to make the best of it.
[Sidenote: His other work.]
This “Tennyson” essay is one of a hundred pages, though not very large ones: but the only other piece of length which has been preserved, a paper on “Wordsworth” not much shorter than the “Tennyson,” is, as was perhaps natural, seeing that it was published immediately after the poet’s death, mainly biographical, and so uninteresting: while the remaining contents of the volume are short reviews. The “Wordsworth” starts, however, with reasoned estimates of Byron, Scott, and Shelley, as foils to Wordsworth: and to these, remembering their time,[947] the very middle of the century, we turn with interest. The “Byron” and the “Scott” reward us but moderately: they are in the main “what he ought to have said,”—competent, well-balanced, true enough as far as they go, but showing no very individual grip. The Shelley, a better test, is far more satisfactory in the result. It is quite clear that Brimley sympathised neither with Shelley’s religious views, nor with his politics, nor with his morals. He may be thought to be even positively unjust in saying that Shelley’s “mind was ill-trained, and not well furnished with facts,” for intellectually few poets have been better off in this respect. Yet, in spite of all this, he says, “with one exception a more glorious poet has not been given to the English nation,” which once more shows how very much sounder he was on the subject of poetry than Arnold, and how little beginnings, and middles, and ends, with all their trumpery, really mattered to him. Among the shorter pieces, the attempts at abstract, or partly abstract, treatment in “Poetry and Criticism” and “The Angel in the House” (only part of which latter is actually devoted to its amiable but rather wool-gathering title-subject) are not conspicuously successful; they are, in fact, trial-essays, by a comparative novice, in an art the secrets of which had been almost lost for nearly a generation. But the attempt in “Poetry and Criticism” to gather up, squeeze out, and give form to the Coleridgean vaguenesses (for that is very much what it comes to), has promise and germ. As for the smaller reviews, Mr Brimley had the good fortune to deal as a reviewer with Carlyle, Thackeray, and Dickens, as well as Bulwer and Kingsley, not to mention such different subjects as the Noctes Ambrosianæ and the Philosophie Positive: and the merit of coming out, with hardly a stain upon his character, from any one of these (in some cases very high) trials. We may think that he does not always go fully right; but he never goes utterly wrong. And when we think what sorrowful chances have awaited the collision of great books at their first appearance even with by no means little critics, the praise is not small.
[Sidenote: His intrinsic and chronological importance.]
Yet a sufficient study of the “Tennyson” essay should have quite prepared the expert reader for these minor successes. Brimley, as we have said, was only partially favoured by time, place, and circumstance, even putting health out of the question. He was heavily handicapped in that respect: and he had no time to work out his critical deliverance fully, and to justify it by abundant critical performance. But he has the root of the matter in him: and it throws out the flower of the matter in that refusal to be “frightened out of the enjoyment of fine poetry by epithets.” When a man has once shown himself ausus contemnere vana in this way, when he has the initial taste which Brimley everywhere shows, and the institution of learning which he did not lack, it will go hard but he is a good critic in posse already, and harder if he is not a good one in such actuality as is allowed him. And this was well seen of George Brimley.
[Sidenote: “Gyas and Cloanthus.”]
It is one of the penalties, late but heavy, of an attempt to take a kingdom (even one not of Heaven) by storm for the first time, that you have to “refuse” or “mask” not a few of its apparently strong places—and if their strength be more than apparent, the adventurer will not be conqueror. There are in English, as in other nineteenth-century literatures, many persons who addressed themselves more or less seriously to criticism, who obtained more or less name as critics, with whose works every well-read person is more or less acquainted, yet who must be so refused or masked at the writer’s peril of the reader’s disappointment or disapproval. Many of them seemed to be pillars of the early and middle nineteenth-century reviews; from some of them, no doubt, some institution in criticism has been received by readers of all the three generations which have passed since the appearance of the earliest. [Sidenote: Milman, Croker, Hayward.] It may seem intolerable outrecuidance to put Milman and Croker and Hayward, Sydney Smith and Senior and Helps, with others not even named, as it were “in the fourpenny box” of our stall. Yet it is unavoidable, and the stall-keeper must dare it, not merely—not even mainly—because he has no room to give them better display. Milman was at least thought by Byron a formidable enough critic to have the apocryphal crime of “killing John Keats” assigned to him by hypothesis: and his merits (not of the bravo kind) are no doubt much greater than the bad critics who, after Macaulay, depreciate his style, and the maladroit eulogists of his free thought, who would make him a sort of nineteenth-century Conyers Middleton, appear to think. But he has no critical credential, known to the present writer, that would give him substantive place here.[948] Croker was neither such a bad man nor such a bad writer as Macaulay would have had him to be: but he was almost as much more of a bravo than Milman as he was less of a scholar. Senior, before he became a glorified earwig, or, if this seem disrespectful, the father of all such as interview, was a sound, if not very gifted, reviewer, but little more: Hayward, a much cleverer and, above all, much more worldly wise Isaac Disraeli, who made the most of being “in society” (see Thackeray), talked better than he wrote, but still wrote well, especially by the aid of l’esprit des autres. [Sidenote: Sydney Smith, Senior, Helps.] Of Sydney Smith earlier, and Sir Arthur Helps later, the fairest thing to say in our present context is, that neither held himself out as a literary critic at all. Sydney could give admirable accounts of books: but he nowhere shows, or pretends to, the slightest sense of literature. Helps, starting[949] a discussion on Fiction,—the very most interesting and most promising of all literary subjects for a man of his time—a subject which was just equipped with material enough at hand, and not yet too much, neither novel to the point of danger nor stale to the point of desperation,—“keeps to the obvious,” as one of his own characters acknowledges, in a fashion almost excusing the intrinsically silly reaction from obviousness, which distinguished the last quarter of the century, and is now getting obviously stale itself. The influence of works of fiction is unbounded. The Duke of Marlborough took his history from Shakespeare. Fiction is good as creating sympathy. It is bad as leading us into dreamland. Real life is more real than fiction. Writers of fiction have great responsibility. In shorter formula, “We love our Novel with an N because it is Nice; we hate it because it is sometimes Naughty; we take it to the Osteria[950] of the Obvious, and treat it with an Olio of Obligingness and Objurgation.” But Helps, in this very passage, tells us that he prefers life to literature, and no one can be a good critic who, when he criticises, does that: though he may be a very bad one, and yet make the other preference.
[Sidenote: Elwin, Lancaster, Hannay.]
We must still extend this numerus a little in order to do that justice—unjust at the best—which is possible here, and which is yet not quite so futile and inadequate as some still more unjust judgments would have it. For the object of this History is to revive and keep before the eye of the reader the names, the critical position, and, if only by touches, the critical personality, of as many of those who have done good service to criticism in the past as may be possible. A little less wilfulness and exclusiveness of personal taste, or rather less opportunity of indulging it, would probably have made of Whitwell Elwin— who survived till the earlier portion of this book was published, but did his critical work long ago—a really great critic. Even as it is, his Remains[951] contain some of the best critical essays, not absolutely supreme, to be found among the enormous stores of the nineteenth century, especially on the most English Englishmen of letters during the eighteenth, such as Fielding and Johnson. A short life, avocations of business, and perhaps the absence of the pressure of professional literary occupation, prevented the work of Henry Lancaster[952] from being much more than a specimen: but his famous essay on Thackeray showed (and not alone) what he could do. On the other hand, the not always mischievous, though too often galling, yoke of the profession was not wanting to James Hannay. His literary work was directed into too many paths, some of them too much strewn with the thorns and beset with the briars of journalism. But there are very few books of the kind which unite a certain “popularity” in no invidious sense, and an adaptation for the general reader, with sound and keen criticism, as does his far too little known Course of English Literature;[953] while many of his scattered and all but lost essays show admirable insight.
[Sidenote: Dallas.]
To one remarkable critic, however, who, though a younger man than Mr Arnold, is on the whole of a Præ-Arnoldian type, and to whom justice, I think, has not usually been done, a little larger space must be given. I must admit that, having been disgusted at the time of the appearance of The Gay Science[954] by what I then thought its extremely silly, and now think its by no means judicious, title, I never read it until quite recently, and then found (of course) that Mr Dallas had said several of my things before me, though usually with a difference.[955] But I have not the least inclination to say Pereat: on the contrary, I should like to revive him. [Sidenote: The Poetics.] Fourteen years earlier than the date of his principal book, as a young man fresh from the influence of the Hamiltonian philosophy, and also, I think, imbued with not a little of Ruskinism, he had written a volume of Poetics,[956] which, though it does not come to very much, is a remarkable book, and a very remarkable one, it we consider its date—a year before Mr Arnold’s Preface, and when Brimley and others were only waking up by fits, and starts, and relapses, to the necessity of a new criticism. Not that Dallas is on the right track: but he is on a track very different from that of most English critics since Coleridge. He revives, in an odd way,—odd, at least, till we remember the Philistinism of the First Exhibition period,—the Apologetic for Poetry; he establishes, rather in the old scholastic manner, the distinction between Poetry the principle and Poesy the embodiment: he talks about the “Law of Activity,” the “Law of Harmony,” and the like.
[Sidenote: The Gay Science.]
There is, for the time, not a little promise in this: and there is much more, as well as some, if not quite enough, performance, in the later book. The Gay Science (an adaptation, of course, of the Provençal name for Poetry itself) was originally intended to be in four volumes: but the reception of the two first was not such as to encourage the author— who had by this time engaged in journalism, and become a regular writer for The Times—to finish it. I cannot agree with the author of the article in the D. N. B., that the cause of its ill-success was its “abstruseness”: for really there is nothing difficult about it. On the contrary, it is, I should say, rather too much in the style of the leading article—facile, but a little “woolly.” Its faults seem to lie partly in this, but more in the two facts that, in the first place, the author “embraces more than he can grasp”; and that, in the second, he has not kept pace with the revival of criticism, though he had in a manner anticipated it. He knows a good deal; and he not only sees the necessity of comparative criticism, but has a very shrewd notion of the difference between the true and the false Comparisons. Acuteness in perception and neatness in phrase appear pretty constantly: and he certainly makes good preparation for steering himself right, by deciding that Renaissance criticism is too verbal (he evidently did not know the whole of it, but is right so far); German too idealist; Modern generally too much lacking in system. Yet, when he comes to make his own start, he “but yaws neither.” He is uncomfortable with Mr Arnold (who, by this time, had published not merely the Preface but the Essays in Criticism), and finds fault with him, more often wrongly than rightly. Especially he shows himself quite at a loss to comprehend Sainte-Beuve, whom he, like some later persons, hardly thinks a critic at all.[957] He gets boldly into the “_psycho_logical coach,” and books himself, as resolutely as any German, for the City of Abstraction. “The theory of imitation,” we are told, “is now utterly exploded”—a remarkable instance of saying nearly the right thing in quite the wrong way. We travel arm-in-arm with “Imagination” and “The Hidden Soul” (which seems to be something like Unconscious Cerebration); we hear even more than from Mr Arnold about the “Play of Thought”; we have chapters on chapters about Pleasure—not the specially poetic pleasure, but pleasure in general. In short, we are here in the presence, not so much of what we have called “metacritic” as of something that might almost better be called “_pro_critic”—altogether in the vestibule of critical inquiries proper. Of course it is fair to remember the two unwritten or unpublished volumes. But I venture very much to doubt, from a perusal of both his published works, whether Dallas would have ever thoroughly “collected” his method, or have directed it to that actual criticism of actual literature, of which, however (as of most things), there are fragments and essays in his work. The disturbing influences which, as we have seen, acted on so many of his contemporaries or immediate seniors acted differently on him, but they acted: and his literary “ideation” was, I think, too diffuse to make head completely against them. Yet he had real critical talent: and it is a pity that it has not had more adequate recognition.
[Sidenote: Others: J. S. Mill.]
But it is time to leave this part of the subject, only casting back among the elders, because each of these has “become a name,”—to John Foster,[958] and W.J. Fox,[959] Henry Rogers,[960] and the first Sir James Stephen, not even naming others of perhaps hardly less fame. And let us salute the man among these elders who, at first sight and frankly, could pronounce The Lady of Shalott, “except that the versification is less exquisite [it was much improved later], entitled to a place by the side of The Ancient Mariner and Christabel,” who doubted whether “poetic imagery ever conveyed a more intense conception of a place and its inmate than in Mariana,” and who justified his right to pronounce on individual poems by the two very remarkable articles on “What is Poetry?” and “The Two Kinds of Poetry.” One remembers, with amused ruth, Charles Lamb’s friend and his “What a pity that these fine ingenuous youths should grow up to be mere members of Parliament?” as one thinks of the Juvenilia and the Senilia of John Stuart Mill.[961]