III. ENGLISH CRITICISM—1860-1900…

III. ENGLISH CRITICISM—1860-1900

MATTHEW ARNOLD: ONE OF THE GREATER CRITICS—HIS POSITION DEFINED EARLY— THE ‘PREFACE’ OF 1853—ANALYSIS OF IT, AND INTERIM SUMMARY OF ITS GIST—CONTRAST WITH DRYDEN—CHAIR-WORK AT OXFORD, AND CONTRIBUTIONS TO PERIODICALS—‘ON TRANSLATING HOMER’—“THE GRAND STYLE”—DISCUSSION OF IT—THE STUDY OF CELTIC LITERATURE—ITS ASSUMPTIONS—THE ‘ESSAYS’: THEIR CASE FOR CRITICISM—THEIR EXAMPLES THEREOF—THE LATEST WORK—THE INTRODUCTION TO WARD’S ‘ENGLISH POETS’—“CRITICISM OF LIFE”—POETIC SUBJECT OR POETIC MOMENT—ARNOLD’S ACCOMPLISHMENT AND POSITION AS A CRITIC—THE CARLYLIANS—KINGSLEY—FROUDE—MR RUSKIN—G. H. LEWES—HIS ‘PRINCIPLES OF SUCCESS IN LITERATURE’—HIS ‘INNER LIFE OF ART’— BAGEHOT—R. H. HUTTON—HIS EVASIONS OF LITERARY CRITICISM—PATER—HIS FRANK HEDONISM—HIS “POLYTECHNY” AND HIS STYLE—HIS FORMULATION OF THE NEW CRITICAL ATTITUDE—‘THE RENAISSANCE’—OBJECTIONS TO ITS PROCESS— IMPORTANCE OF ‘MARIUS THE EPICUREAN’—‘APPRECIATIONS’ AND THE “GUARDIAN” ESSAYS—UNIVERSALITY OF HIS METHOD—MR J. A. SYMONDS— THOMSON (“B. V.”)—WILLIAM MINTO—HIS BOOKS ON ENGLISH PROSE AND POETRY—H. D. TRAILL—HIS CRITICAL STRENGTH—ON STERNE AND COLERIDGE— ESSAYS ON FICTION—“THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR”—OTHERS: MANSEL, VENABLES, STEPHEN, LORD HOUGHTON, PATTISON, CHURCH, ETC.—PATMORE—MR EDMUND GURNEY—‘THE POWER OF SOUND’—‘TERTIUM QUID.’

[Sidenote: Matthew Arnold: one of the greater critics.]

In coming to Mr Matthew Arnold we come again, but for the last time, to one of our chiefs of the greater clans of criticism. Vixere fortes post Mr Arnold; let us hope that vivunt. We have heard, more or less vaguely, of new schools of criticism since, in more countries than one or two, and an amiable enthusiasm has declared that the new gospels are real gospels, far truer and better than any previously known. I am not myself, by any means, in general agreement—I am often in very particular disagreement—with Mr Arnold’s critical canons, and (less often) with his individual judgments. But as I rest on my oars, and look back over European criticism for the eighty years which have passed since his birth, I cannot find one critic, born since that time, who can be ranked above or even with him in general critical quality and accomplishment. And, extending the view further over the vast expanse down which we have already travelled, though I certainly find greater critics—critics very much greater in originality, greater in catholicity, perhaps greater in felicity of individual utterance—I yet find that he is of their race and lineage, free of their company, one of them, not to be scanted of any sizings that have been, by however unworthy a manciple, allotted to them here.

[Sidenote: His position defined early.]

We have seen that of these greater critics some have, at this or that period of their career, launched a kind of manifesto or confession, of which their other critical work is but, as it were, the application and amplification: while others have never done this, but have built up their critical temple, adding wing to wing and storey to storey, not seldom even deserting or ruining the earlier constructions. Mr Arnold, in practice as in principle, belonged to the first class, and he launched his own manifesto about as early as any man can be capable of forming a critical judgment which is not a mere adaptation of some one else’s, or (a thing really quite as unoriginal) a flying-in-the-face of some one else’s, or a mere spurt and splash of youthful self-sufficiency. You can be a bishop and a critic at thirty—not before (by wise external rule) in the former case; hardly before, according to laws of nature which man has unwisely omitted to codify for himself, in the latter. Mr Arnold was a little over thirty when, collecting such things as he chose to collect out of his earlier volumes of Poetry, and adding much to them, he published the collection with a Preface in October 1853. I doubt whether he ever wrote better, either in sense or in style; and I am quite sure that, while some of the defects of his criticism, as it was to be, appear quite clearly in the paper, all the pith and moment of that criticism appear in germ and principle likewise.

[Sidenote: The Preface of 1853.]

In the interesting and important “Advertisement” which, eight months later, he prefixed to the second edition of this book, Mr Arnold himself summed up the lessons of the Preface, which followed it, under two main heads,—the insistence on the importance of the subject—the “great action”; and the further insistence on study of the ancients, with the specified object of correcting the great vice of our modern, and especially English, intellect—that it “is fantastic, and wants sanity.” He thus, to some extent, justified the erection of these into his two first and great commandments—the table-headings, if not the full contents, of his creed and law. But, for our purpose, we must analyse the Preface itself rather more closely.

It opens with an account of the reasons which led the author to exclude Empedocles, not because the subject was “a Sicilian Greek,” but from a consideration of the situation itself. This he condemns in a passage which contains a very great amount of critical truth, which is quite admirably expressed, and which really adds one to the not extensive list of critical axioms of the first class. Even here one may venture to doubt whether the supreme poet will not vindicate his omnipotence in treating poeticamente. But if the sentence were so qualified as to warn the poet that he will hardly succeed, it would be absolutely invulnerable or impregnable.

[Sidenote: Analysis of it,]

But why, he asks, does he dwell on this unimportant and private matter? Because he wishes particularly to disclaim any deference to the objection referred to above as to the choice of ancient subjects: to which he might have added (as the careful reader of the whole piece will soon perceive), because insistence on the character of the Subject was his critical being’s very end and aim. In effect, he uses both these battle-horses in his assault upon the opposite doctrine that the poet must “leave the exhausted past and fix his attention on the present.”[962] It is needless to say that over his immediate antagonists he is completely victorious. Whatever the origin of the ignoble and inept fallacy concerned, this particular form of it was part of the special mid-nineteenth century heresy of “progress.” But whether he unhorses and “baffles” it in the right way may be another question. His way is to dwell once more, and with something already of the famous Arnoldian iteration, on the paramount importance of the “action,” on the vanity of the supposition that superior treatment will make up for subjective inferiority. And he then exposes himself dangerously by postulating the superior interest of “Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra, Dido,” to the personages of any modern poem, and, perhaps still more dangerously, by selecting as his modern poems Hermann and Dorothea, Childe Harold, Jocelyn [!!!], and The Excursion. He may be said here to lose a stirrup at least: but on the whole he certainly establishes the point—too clear to need establishment—that the date of an action signifies nothing. While if the further statement that the action itself is all-important is disputable, it is his doctrine and hypothesis.

He is consistent with this doctrine when he goes on to argue that “the Greeks understood it far more clearly than we do”—that “they regarded the whole, we the parts”—that, while they kept the action uppermost, we prefer the expression. Not that they neglected expression—“on the contrary, they were ... the masters of the grand style.” Where they did not indulge in this, where they were bald or trivial, it was merely to let the majesty of the action stand forth without a veil. “Their theory and practice alike, the admirable treatise of Aristotle and the unrivalled works of their poets, exclaim with a thousand tongues, ‘All depends upon the subject. Choose a fitting action, penetrate yourself with the feeling of its situations; this done, everything else will follow.’”[963]

As a necessary consequence, they were “rigidly exacting” as to construction: we believe in “the brilliant things that arise under the poet’s pen as he goes along.” We refuse to ask for a “total impression”: instead of requiring that the poet shall as far as possible efface himself, we even lay it down that “a true allegory of the state of one’s own mind in a representative history is perhaps the highest thing one can attempt in the way of poetry.” Against this Mr Arnold pronounces Faust—though the work of “the greatest poet of modern times, the greatest critic of all times”[964]—defective, because it is something like this. Next he deplores the want of a guide for a young writer, “a voice to prescribe to him the aim he should keep in view”—and, in default of it, insists once more on models.

The foremost of these models for the English writer is, of course, Shakespeare, of whom Mr Arnold speaks with becoming reverence, and of whom he had earned the right to speak by his magnificent sonnet years earlier. But his attitude towards Shakespeare, as a literary Bible, is guarded. Shakespeare chose subjects “than which the world could afford no better”; but his expression was too good—too “eminent and unrivalled,” too fixing and seductive to the attention, so to draw it away from those other things which were “his excellences as a poet.”[965] In leading writers to forget this, Shakespeare has done positive harm, and Keats’s Pot of Basil is taken as an instance, whence the critic diverges to a long condemnation of this great but erring bard’s “difficulty” of language, and returns to the doctrine that he is not safe as a model. The ancients are: though even in them there is something narrow, something local and temporary. But there is so much that is not, and that is an antidote to modern banes, that we cannot too much cling to them as models. These, he adds at some length, the present age needs morally as much as artistically. He has himself tried, in the poems he is issuing, to obey his own doctrines: and he ends with the famous peroration imploring respect for Art, and pleading for the observance and preservation of “the wholesome regulative laws of Poetry,” lest they be “condemned and cancelled by the influence of their eternal enemy, Caprice.”

[Sidenote: and interim summary of its gist.]

Comment on this, beyond the remarks already made, had best be postponed till we can consider Mr Arnold’s criticism as a whole. [Sidenote: Contrast with Dryden.]But to one thing we should draw attention, and that is, that here is a critic who knows what he means, and who means something not, directly, or as a whole, meant, or at least said, by any earlier critic. That “all depends on the subject” had been said often enough before: but it had not been said by any one who had the whole of literature before him, and the tendency—for half a century distinctly, for a full century more or less—had been to unsay or gainsay it. Further, the critic has combined with the older Neo-classic adoration of the “fable” something perhaps traceable, as hinted above, to the Wordsworthian horror of poetic diction, a sort of cult of baldness instead of beauty, and a distrust, if not horror, of “expression.” In fact, though I do not believe that he in the least knew it, he is taking up a position of direct and, as it were, designed antagonism to Dryden’s, in that remarkable preface to An Evening’s Love, one of those in which he comes closest to the Spaniards, where he says plumply “the story is the least part,” and declares that the important part is the workmanship—that this is the poiesis. It is hardly possible to state the “dependence”—in the old duelling sense—of the great quarrel of Poetics, and almost of Criticism, more clearly than is done in these two Prefaces by these two great poet-critics of the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries in England.

I do not think that there is any published evidence of the time or of the circumstances at and in which Mr Arnold began contributing critical articles to periodicals. [Sidenote: Chair-work at Oxford, and contributions to periodicals.] But his appointment (which must have been, at any rate to some extent, due to the Preface as well as to the Poems) to the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford in 1857 gave him a strong stimulus towards the development of his critical powers in reasoned form; while shortly afterwards, the remarkable developments of the press towards the end of the ’Fifties, which began by the institution of Macmillan’s and the Cornhill Magazine, and continued through the establishment of a strongly literary and critical daily newspaper in the Pall Mall Gazette, to the multiplication of monthly reviews proper in the Fortnightly, Contemporary, and Nineteenth Century, supplied him with opportunities of communicating these studies to a public larger than his Oxford audience, and with a profitable and convenient intermediate stage between the lecture and the book. He was, however, always rather scrupulous about permitting his utterances the “third reading”: and some of them (notably his Inaugural Address at Oxford) have still to be sought in the catacombs. But the matter of more than a decade’s production, by which he chose to stand, is included in the three well-known volumes, On Translating Homer and The Study of Celtic Literature for the Oxford Lectures, and the famous Essays in Criticism for the more miscellaneous work, the last, however, being rounded off and worked up into a whole by its Preface, and by its two opening pieces, The Function of Criticism in the Present Time and The Influence of Academies.

In these three books the expression of critical attitude, displayed, as we have said, unmistakably in the Preface of 1853, is not only developed and varied into something as nearly approaching to a Summa Criticismi as was in Mr Arnold’s not excessively systematic way, but furnished and illustrated by an extraordinarily interesting and sufficiently diversified body of critical applications in particular. Yet there is no divergence from the lines marked out in the Preface, nor is there to be found any such divergence—if divergence imply the least contradiction or inconsistency—in the work of the last decade of his life, when he had dropped his ill-omened guerilla against dogma and miracles, and had returned to the Muses. He is as much a typical example of a critic consistent in consistency as Dryden is of one consistent in inconsistency: and it naturally requires less intelligence to comprehend him than appears to be the case in the other instance. In fact, he could never be misunderstood in general: though his extreme wilfulness, and his contempt of history, sometimes made him a little bewildering to the plain man in detail.

[Sidenote: On Translating Homer.]

In discussing the first, and indeed all, of these, it is, of course, important to keep what is suitable for a History of Criticism apart from what would be suitable only for a monograph on Mr Arnold. Yet the idiosyncrasies of the greater critics are as much the subject of such a general history as their more abstract doctrines. We see, then, here something which was not difficult to discern, even in the more frugal and guarded expression of the Preface, and which, no doubt, is to some extent fostered and intensified by that freedom from the check of immediate contradiction or criticism which some have unkindly called the dangerous prerogative of preachers and professors. This something is the Arnoldian confidence—that quality which Mr Hutton, perhaps rather kindly, took for “sureness,” and which, though strangely different in tone, is not so very different in actual nature from the other “sureness” (with a prefix) of Lord Macaulay. We may think that this confidence is certainly strengthened, and perhaps to some extent caused, by a habit of turning the blind eye on subjects of which the critic does not know very much, and inspecting very cursorily those which he does not much like. But we shall see that, right or wrong, partial or impartial, capricious or systematic as he may be, Mr Arnold applies himself to the actual appreciation of actual literature, and to the giving of reasons for his appreciation, in a way new, delightful, invaluable.

[Sidenote: “The grand style.”]

The really important part or feature of the tractate for us is its famous handling of “the Grand Style.” He had used this phrase, italicising it, in the Preface itself, had declared that the ancients were its “unapproached masters,” but he had not said much about it or attempted to define it. Here he makes it almost his chief battle-charger—presenting Homer, Dante, and Milton as the greatest masters of it, if not the only sure ones, denying any regular possession of it to Shakespeare, and going far to deny most other poets, from Tennyson down to Young, the possession of it at all. It was impossible that this enigmatic critical phrase, applied so provocatively, should not itself draw the fire of critics. He could not but reply to this in his “Last Words,” but he had to make something of a confession and avoidance, with much sorrow, perhaps not without a very little anger. For those who asked “What is the Grand Style?” mockingly, he had no answer: they were to “die in their sins.” To those who asked with sincerity, he vouchsafed the answer that the grand style “arises in poetry when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or severity a serious subject.” Let us, with as much simplicity, severity, and seriousness as may be, treat both the expression and the definition.

[Sidenote: Discussion of it.]

The expression itself—the origin of which, like that of some others in our special lexicon, is to be found in the criticism not of literature, but of Art in the limited sense, and which was, I think, first made current in English by Sir Joshua Reynolds—is of course a vague one, and we must walk warily among its associations and suggestions. At one end it suggests, with advantage to itself and to us honest inquirers, the ὕψος of Longinus. At the other, it has perhaps a rather damaging suggestion of the French style noble, and a still more dangerous echo-hint of “grand_iose_.” And Mr Arnold himself once (Preface, ed. 1853, p. xix) uses “grandiose”, as we saw that the Latins and the French have sometimes done, as equivalent to “grand”. Coming, then, unsatisfied by these vaguenesses, to the definition, we shall perhaps think it permissible to strike out the first two members, as in the former case almost self-confessedly, in the second quite, superfluous. That the Grand Style in poetry will only arise when the stylist is poetically gifted scarcely requires even enunciation: that the nature which produces the grand style must be pro tanto and pro hac vice “noble,” is also sun-clear. Something of the Longinian circularity in one point[966] seems to have infected Mr Arnold here. But with the rest of the definition preliminary and prima facie inquiry has no fault to find. Let us take it that the Grand Style in poetry is the treatment of a serious subject with simplicity or severity. Even to this a fresh demurrer arises, which may be partly, but cannot be wholly, overruled. Why this antithesis, this mutual exclusion, between “simplicity” and “severity”? “Severe simplicity” is a common, and is generally thought a just, phrase: at any rate, the two things are closely related. We may note this only—adding in Mr Arnold’s favour that his special attribution of simplicity to Homer and severity to Milton would seem to indicate that by the latter word he means “gorgeousness severely restrained.”

This, with such additional and applied lights as are provided by Mr Arnold’s denunciation of affectation as fatal to the Grand Style, will give us some idea of what he wished to mean by the phrase. It is, in fact, a fresh formulation of the Classical restraint, definiteness, proportion, form, against the Romantic vague, the Romantic fantasy. This had been the lesson of the Preface, given after the preceptist manner. It is now the applied, illustrated, appreciative lesson of the Lectures. It is a doctrine like another: and, in its special form and plan, an easily comprehensible reaction from a reaction—in fact, the inevitable ebb after the equally inevitable flow. But when we begin to examine it (especially in comparison with its Longinian original) as a matter of theory, and with its own illustrations as a matter of practice, doubts and difficulties come thick upon us, and we may even feel under a sad necessity of “dying in our sins,” just as Mr Carlyle thought that, at a certain period of his career, Ignatius Loyola “ought to have made up his mind to be damned.”

To take the last first, it is difficult, on examining Mr Arnold’s instances and his comments, in the most impartial and judicial manner possible, to resist the conclusion that his definition only really fits Dante, and that it was originally derived from the study of him. To that fixed star of first magnitude in poetry it does apply as true, as nothing but true, and perhaps even as the whole truth. Nobility, quintessential poetry, simplicity in at least some senses, severity and seriousness in almost all,—who will deny these things to the Commedia? But it is very difficult to think that it applies, in anything like the same coequal and coextensive fashion, to either Homer or Milton. There are points in which Homer touches Dante; there are points in which Dante touches Milton; but they are not the same points. It may, further, be very much doubted whether Mr Arnold has not greatly exaggerated both Homer’s universal “simplicity” and his universal “seriousness.” The ancients were certainly against him on the latter point. While one may feel not so much doubt as certainty that the application of “severity” to Milton—unless it means simply the absence of geniality and humour—is still more rash.

But when we look back to Longinus we shall find at least a hint of a much more serious defect than this. Why this unnecessary asceticism and grudging in the connotation of grandeur? why this tell-tale and self-accusing limitation further to a bare three poets, two of them, indeed, of the very greatest? Mr Arnold himself feels the difficulty presented by Shakespeare so strongly that he has to make, as it were, uncovenanted grand-style mercies for him. But that is only because you have simply to open almost any two pages out of three in Shakespeare, and the grand style smites you in the face, as God’s glory smote St Stephen. We can afford, which shows our strength, to leave Shakespeare alone. Longinus of old has no such damaging fencing of the table of his Grand Style. The Greeks, it is known, thought little of Love as a subject: yet he admitted the sublimity of Sappho. And if he objected to the πλεκτάνην χειμάρροον of Æschylus, it was only because he thought it went too far. How much wiser is it, instead of fixing such arbitrary limits, to recognise that the Grand Style has infinite manifestations; that it may be found in poets who have it seldom as well as in those who have it often; that Herrick has it with

“In this world—the Isle of Dreams”;

that Tennyson has it again and again; that Goethe has it in the final octet of Faust; that Heine and Hugo, and hundreds of others, down to quite minor poets in their one moment of rapturous union with the Muse, have it. How much wiser to recognise further that it is not limited to the simple or severe: whether it is to the serious is another question. For my part, I will not loose the fragile boat or incur the danger of the roof,—speaking in a Pickwickian-Horatian manner,—with any one who denies the grand style to Donne or to Dryden, to Spenser or to Shelley. The grand is the transcendent: and it is blasphemy against the Spirit of Poetry to limit the fashions and the conditions of transcendence.

[Sidenote: The Study of Celtic Literature.]

The other “chair”-book, The Study of Celtic Literature, is tempting in promise, but disappointing in performance. This is due partly to the fact that great—perhaps the greater—part of it is not occupied with literary criticism at all, but with that curious blend of matter— literary, political, theological, ethical, and social—to the manufacture of which Mr Arnold was more and more turning his attention. And when it becomes literary, we find other difficulties. In the Preface itself, and in the Homer, Mr Arnold had sometimes been unjust or unsatisfactory on what he did not know or did not like—Mediæval literature, the Ballad, &c.,—but his remarks and his theories had been, in the main, solidly based upon what he did know thoroughly and did appreciate—the Classics, Dante, Milton, Wordsworth. Here not Pallas, I think, but some anti-Pallas, has “invented a new thing.” Whether Mr Arnold knew directly, and at first-hand, any Welsh, Breton, Cornish, Irish, or Scotch Gaelic, I do not know.[967] He certainly disclaims anything like extensive or accurate knowledge, and it is noticeable that (I think invariably) he quotes from translations, and only a few well-known translations. Moreover he, with his usual dislike and distrust of the historic method, fences with, or puts off, the inquiry what the dates of the actual specimens which we possess of this literature may be. Yet he proceeds to pick out (as if directly acquainted with the literatures themselves, at dates which make the matter certain) divers characteristics of “melancholy,” “natural magic,” &c., in Celtic literature, and then, unhesitatingly and without proof of any kind, to assign the presence of these qualities, in writers like Shakespeare and Keats, where we have not the faintest evidence of Celtic blood, to “Celtic” influence.

[Sidenote: Its assumptions.]

Now, we may or may not deplore this proceeding; but we must disallow it. It is both curious and instructive that the neglect of history which accompanied the prevalence of Neo-classicism, and with which, when it was dispelled, Neo-classicism itself faded, should reappear in company with this neotato-classicism, this attempt to reconstruct the classic faith, taking in something, but a carefully limited something, of Romanticism. But the fact is certain: and, as has been said, we must disallow the proceeding. Whether melancholy, and natural magic, and the vague do strongly and especially, if not exclusively, appear in Celtic poetry, I do not deny, because I do not know; that Mr Arnold’s evidence is not sufficient to establish their special if not exclusive prevalence, I deny, because I do know. That there is melancholy, natural magic, the vague in Shakespeare and in Keats, I admit, because I know; that Mr Arnold has any valid argument showing that their presence is due to Celtic influence, I do not admit, because I know that he has produced none. With bricks of ignorance and mortar of assumption you can build no critical house.

[Sidenote: The Essays: their case for Criticism.]

In that central citadel or canon of the subject, Essays in Criticism, this contraband element, this theory divorced from history, makes its appearance but too often: it can and need only be said, for instance, that Mr Arnold’s estimate of the condition of French, and still more of German, literature in his own day, as compared with English, will not stand for five minutes the examination of any impartial judge, dates and books in hand. But the divorce is by no means so prominent—indeed most of the constituent essays were, if I mistake not, written before the Celtic Lectures were delivered. The book is so much the best known of Mr Arnold’s critical works—except perhaps the Preface to Mr Ward’s Poets— that no elaborate analysis of it here can be necessary. Its own Preface is defiantly vivacious—and Vivacity, as we are often reminded, is apt to play her sober friend Criticism something like the tricks that Madge Wildfire played to Jeanie Deans. But it contains, in the very last words of its famous epiphonema to Oxford, an admission (in the phrase “this Queen of Romance”) that Mr Arnold was anything but a classic pur sang. The two first Essays, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” and the “Influence of Academies,” take up, both in the vivacious and in the sober manner, the main line and strategy of the old Preface itself. We may, not merely with generosity but with justice, “write off” the, as has been said, historically false parallels with France and Germany which the writer brings in to support his case. That case itself is perfectly solid and admissible. Those who are qualified to judge—not perhaps a large number—will admit, whether they are for it or against it, that no nonsuit is possible, and perhaps that no final decision for it or against is possible either, except to the satisfaction of mere individual taste and opinion.

The case is, that the remedy for the supposed or supposable deficiencies of English literature is Criticism—that the business of Criticism is to discover the ideas upon which creative literature must rest—that there is not enough “play of mind” in England—that Criticism again is the attempt “to know the best that is known and thought in the world”—that foreign literature is specially valuable, simply because it is likely to give that in which native literature is lacking. These are the doctrines of the First Essay, mingled with much political-social application and not a little banter. The second takes them up and applies them afresh in the direction of extolling the institution of Academies, and contrasting the effects of that influence on French critics and the absence of it in English, very much to the disadvantage of the latter, especially Mr Palgrave. For Mr Arnold had adopted early in his professorial career, and never gave up, the very dubious habit of enforcing his doctrine with “uses” of formally polite but extremely personal application.[968]

Now, this case or bundle of cases is, I have said, quite fairly and justly arguable. Even though I hope that great part of this volume and of the last will have shown that Mr Arnold was quite wrong as to the general inferiority of English criticism, he was (as I have, not far back, taken the pains to show also) not quite wrong about the general criticism of his own youth and early manhood—of the criticism which he himself came to reform. Nor was he wrong in thinking that there is in the uncultivated and unregenerate English mind a sort of rebelliousness to sound critical principles. Very much of his main contention is perfectly good and sound: nor could he have urged any two things more universally and everlastingly profitable than the charge never to neglect criticism, and the charge always to compare literatures of other countries, literatures of other times, literatures free from the political-religious-social diathesis of the actual patient.

[Sidenote: Their examples thereof.]

It is generally acknowledged that the influence of Sainte-Beuve was an “infortune of Mart” or of Saturn, when it induced Mr Arnold to take his two first examples of this comparative study from interesting but unimportant people like the Guérins. But except persons determined to cavil, and those of whom the Judicious Poet remarks—

“For what was there each cared no jot, But all were wroth with what was not”—

every one will admit that the rest of the seven—the “Heine,” the “Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment,” the “Joubert,” the “Spinoza,” and the “M. Aurelius”—form a pentad of critical excellence, and brilliancy, and instruction, which can nowhere be exceeded. I, at least, should find it hard to match the group in any other single volume of criticism. Idle that we may frequently smile or shake the head—that we must in some cases politely but peremptorily deny individual propositions! Unimportant that, perhaps even more by a certain natural perversity than by the usual and most uncritical tendency to depress something in order to exalt something else, English literature is, with special reference to the great generation of 1798-1834, unduly depreciated! These things every man can correct for himself. How many could make for themselves instances of comparative, appreciative, loosely but subtly judicial criticism as attractive, as stimulating, as graceful, as varied, and critically as excellent, being at the same time real examples of creative literature?

[Sidenote: The latest work.]

We are fortunately dispensed here from inquiring into the causes, or judging the results, of that avocation from literature, or at least literary criticism, which held Mr Arnold for exactly ten years, from 1867 to 1877. Nor will it be necessary (though it would be pleasant) to discuss in detail all the contributions of the slightly longer period which was left him, from his return to his proper task in the spring of 1877 with the article on M. Scherer’s “Milton,” to his sudden and lamented death in the spring of 1888. Just before that death he had published an article on Shelley, which (for all the heresy glanced at below) is one of the very best things he ever did; little less can be said of the Milton-Scherer paper eleven years earlier, and whenever he touched literature (which was fairly often) during the interval, he was almost always at a very high level. A good deal, though not quite all, of the ebullience of something not quite unlike flippancy, which had characterised his middle period, had frothed and bubbled itself away; his general critical views had matured without altering; and their application to fresh subjects, if it sometimes (as very notably in the case of Shelley) brought out their weakness, brought out much more fully their value and charm. The article on Mr Stopford Brooke’s Primer of English Literature, the prefaces to the selected Lives of Johnson, to Wordsworth, to Byron, the papers in Mr Ward’s Poets on Gray and Keats (postponing for a moment the more important Introduction to that work as a whole), the literary part of the Discourses in America, and (though I should put this last quartette on a somewhat lower level) those on Mr Scherer’s Goethe, George Sand, Tolstoi, and Amiel, form a critical baggage, adding no doubt nothing (except in one case) to the critic’s general Gospel or theory, but exemplifying with delightful variety and charm his critical practice.

[Sidenote: The Introduction to Ward’s English Poets.]

The possible or actual exception, however, and the piece which contains it, require more individual notice. In the Introduction to Mr Ward’s book, Mr Arnold devised no one really new thing, but he gathered up and focussed his lights afresh, and endeavoured to provide his disciples with an apparently new definition of poetry. He drove first at two wrong estimates thereof, his dislike of the second of which—the “personal” estimate—had been practically proclaimed from the very first, and may be allowed to be to a great extent justified, while his dislike of the first—the “historic” estimate—had always been clear to sharp-eyed students, though it lacked an equal justification. In fact, it is little more than a formulation of Mr Arnold’s own impatience with the task— laborious enough, no doubt, and in parts ungrateful—of really mastering poetic, that is to say literary, history. Of course, mere age, mere priority, confers no interest of itself on anything. But to say—if we may avail ourselves of Gascoigne’s instance—that the first discoverable person who compared a girl’s lip to a cherry does not acquire for that now unpermissible comparison merit and interest, is not wise. To assume, on the other hand, some abstract standard of “high” poetry, below which time and relation will not give or enhance value, is still less wise. Portia, in a context of which Mr Arnold was justly fond, might have taught him that “nothing is good without respect,” and that no “respect” is to be arbitrarily barred.

[Sidenote: “Criticism of Life.”]

But even from the sweetest and wisest of doctors he would not, I fear, have taken the lesson. He is set to prove that we must only pay attention to “the best and principal things” as of old,—to class and mark these jealously, and to endeavour to discover their qualification. You must not praise the Chanson de Roland or any early French poetry very highly, but you may praise (as before) Homer, Milton, and Dante as much as you like. Chaucer, like Burns, Dryden, and Pope, like Shelley, has not “high seriousness.” And poetry is expressly defined as “a criticism of life, under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.”

It is important (though very difficult) to keep undue repetition out of such a book as this, and we shall therefore, in regard to “high seriousness,” merely refer the reader to what has been said above on the “grand style.” And we shall cut down criticism of the definition as much as possible, to return to it presently. The defence of it once made, as “not a definition but an epigram,” certainly lacks seriousness, whether high or low. The severest strictures made on Mr Arnold’s levity would not have been misplaced had he offered an epigram here. Nor need we dwell on the perhaps inevitable, but certainly undeniable, “circularity” of the formula. The jugulum at which to aim is the use of the word “criticism” at all. Either the word is employed in some private jargon, or it has no business here. Mr Arnold’s own gloss of the “application of ideas to life,” gives it perhaps the doubtful benefit of the first supposition: but, either in this way or in others, does it very little good. All literature is the application of ideas to life: and to say that poetry is the application of ideas to life, under the conditions fixed for poetry, is simply a vain repetition.

[Sidenote: Poetic Subject or Poetic Moment.]

Yet insufficient, and to some moods almost saugrenu, as such a definition may seem at first sight, it is, calmly and critically considered, only a re-forming of the old line of battle. Once more, and for the last time formally, Mr Arnold is taking the field in favour of the doctrine of the Poetic Subject, as against what we may, perhaps, make a shift to call the “Doctrine of the Poetic Moment.” It is somewhat surprising that, although this antinomy has been visible throughout the whole long chain of documents which I have been endeavouring to exhibit in order, no one, so far as I know, has ever fully brought it out, at least on the one side. Mr Arnold—like all who agree with him, and all with whom he and they agree, or would have agreed, from Aristotle downwards—demands a subject of distinct and considerable magnitude, a disposition of no small elaborateness, a maintained and intense attitude, which is variously adumbrated by a large number of terms, down to “grand style” and “high seriousness.” The others, who have fought (we must confess most irregularly and confusedly as a rule) under the flag which Patrizzi, himself half or wholly unknowing, was the first to fly, go back, or forward, or aside to the Poetic Moment—to the sudden transcendence and transfiguration—by “treating poetically,” that is to say, by passionate interpretation, in articulate music—of any idea or image, any sensation or sentiment. They are perfectly ready to admit that he who has these moments most constantly and regularly under his command—he who can co-ordinate and arrange them most skilfully and most pleasingly—is the greatest poet, and that, on the other hand, one or two moments of poetry will hardly make a poet of any but infinitesimal and atomic greatness. But this is the difference of the poets, not of the poetry. Shakespeare is an infinitely great poet, and Langhorne an infinitesimally small one. Yet when Langhorne writes

“Where longs to fall that rifted spire As weary of the insulting air,”[969]

he has in the italicised line a “poetic moment” which is, for its poetic quality, as free of the poetic Jerusalem as “We are such stuff,” or the dying words of Cleopatra. He has hit “what it was so easy to miss,” the passionate expression, in articulate music, unhit before, never to be poetically hit again save by accident, yet never to perish from the world of poetry. It is only a grain of gold (“fish-scale” gold, even, as the mining experts call their nearly impalpable specks), but it is gold: something that you can never degrade to silver, or copper, or pinchbeck.

To Mr Arnold this doctrine of the Poetic Moment, though he never seems to have quite realised it in its naked enormity (which, indeed, as I have said, has seldom been frankly, as here, unveiled), was from the first the Enemy. He attacked it, as we saw in his Preface, when he was young, and he fashions this Introduction so as to guard against it in his age. Yet it is curious that in his practice he sometimes goes perilously near to it. On his own showing, I cannot quite see, though I can see it perfectly well on mine, why even such a magnificent line as

“In la sua volontade e nostra pace”

should not only prove Dante’s supremacy, but serve as an infallible touchstone for detecting the presence or absence of high poetic quality in other poetry. High poetic quality depends, we have been told, on the selection and arrangement of the subject. Dante, we know accidentally and from outside, has that selection and arrangement. But suppose he had not? The line itself can tell us nothing about them.

[Sidenote: Arnold’s accomplishment and position as a critic.]

Nevertheless, as has been said so often, the side which a man may have taken in the everlasting and irreconcilable critical battle of judges by the arrangement, and judges by the result, hardly affects his place in Criticism as it should be allotted by a final Court of Appeal. How does he express for himself, and how does he promote in others, the intelligent appreciation, the conscious enjoyment of literature? That is the question: and few critics can meet this question more triumphantly than Mr Arnold. Like others, he can but give what he has. If you ask him for a clear, complete, resumed, and reasoned grasp of a man’s accomplishment—for a definite placing of him in the literary atlas—he will not have much answer to give you. He does not pretend, and has never pretended, to give any. A certain want of logical and methodical aptitude, which may be suspected, a dislike of reading matter that did not interest him, which is pretty clear, and that dread and distrust of the “historic estimate,” which he openly proclaimed, would have made this impossible. But we were warned at the very outset not to go to him for it. And for acute, sensitive, inspired, and inspiring remarks on the man, or the work, or this and that part of work and man—attractively expressed, ingeniously co-ordinated, and redeemed from mere desultoriness by the constant presence of the general critical creed—no critic is his superior.

Nor are these his only “proofs”—his only “pieces in hand.” He may be said—imperfectly Romantic, or even anti-Romantic, as he was—to have been the very first critic to urge the importance, the necessity, of that comparative criticism of different literatures, the half-blind working of which had helped to create, if it had not actually created, the Romantic movement. In England he was absolutely the first to do this systematically, and with something like—though not with complete— impartiality. The knowledge of Spanish and Italian poetry and romance, long very common with us, had died down in the first half of the nineteenth century, and had not been much used for critical purposes while it lasted. The engouement for French, of the late seventeenth and eighteenth, had reacted itself—in men as different as Coleridge, Landor, and De Quincey—into a depreciation which, if not “violently absurd,” as Mr Arnold translates Rémusat’s term of saugrenu applied to it, was certainly either crassly ignorant or violently unjust. German had, it is true, been exalted on the ruins of the popularity of the three Romance literatures; but it had been worshipped scarcely according to knowledge: and of the whole mediæval literature of Europe there was hardly any general critical appreciation. Mr Arnold himself, in fact, was still too much in the gall of bitterness here. It was imperative, if the Romantic and “result-judging” criticism was not to become a mere wilderness of ill-founded and partial individualisms, that this comparison should be established. It was equally imperative that it should be established, if Mr Arnold’s own “neotato-classicism,” as we have called it, was not to wizen and ossify like Neo-classicism itself. He was its first preacher with us: and there had not, to my knowledge, been any such definite preacher of it abroad, though the practice of Germany had implied and justified it from the first. And he was one of its most accomplished practitioners,—Lessing not being equal to him in charm, and Sainte-Beuve a little his inferior in passion for the best things.

Yet another watch-word of his, sovereign for the time and new in most countries, which he constantly repeated (if, being human, he did not always fully observe it himself), was the caution against confounding literary and non-literary judgment. No one rejected the exaggeration of “Art for Art’s sake only” more unhesitatingly; but no one oftener repeated the caution against letting the idols of the nation, the sect, the party interfere with the free play of Art herself, and of critical judgment on Art.

His services, therefore, to English Criticism, whether as a “preceptist” or as an actual craftsman, cannot possibly be overestimated. In the first respect he was, if not the absolute reformer,—these things, and all things, reform themselves under the guidance of the Gods and the Destinies, not of men,—the leader in reform, of the slovenly and disorganised condition into which Romantic criticism had fallen. In the second, the things which he had not, as well as those which he had, combined to give him a place among the very first. He had not the sublime and ever new-inspired inconsistency of Dryden. Dryden, in Mr Arnold’s place, might have begun by cursing Shelley a little, but would have ended by blessing him all but wholly. He had not the robustness of Johnson; the supreme critical “reason” (as against understanding) of Coleridge; scarcely the exquisite, if fitful, appreciation of Lamb, or the full-blooded and passionate appreciation of Hazlitt. But he had an exacter knowledge than Dryden’s; the fineness of his judgment shows finer beside Johnson’s bluntness; he could not wool-gather like Coleridge; his range was far wider than Lamb’s; his scholarship and his delicacy alike give him an advantage over Hazlitt. Systematic without being hidebound; well-read (if not exactly learned) without pedantry; delicate and subtle, without weakness or dilettanteism; catholic without eclecticism; enthusiastic without indiscriminateness,—Mr Arnold is one of the best and most precious of teachers on his own side. And when, at those moments which are, but should not be, rare, the Goddess of Criticism descends, like Cambina and her lion-team, into the lists, and with her Nepenthe makes men forget sides and sects in a common love of literature, then he is one of the best and most precious of critics.

Mr Arnold’s criticism continued to be fresh and lively, without a touch of senility, or of failure to adapt itself to new conditions, till the day of his death: and when that evil day came, the nineteenth century had little more than a decade to run. On the other hand, though almost all his juniors were more or less affected by him, it cannot be exactly said that he founded any definite school, or started any by reaction from himself. The most remarkable approach to such a school that has been made since was made by Mr Pater, quite fifteen years before Mr Arnold died. No very special necessities of method, therefore, impose themselves upon us in regard to the classification of our remaining subjects in the English division: and we shall be safe in adopting a rough chronological order, taking first three very remarkable persons who—though contemporaries of Arnold—show in criticism as in other literature the influence of Carlyle.

[Sidenote: The Carlylians.]

The increasing disinclination to take the standpoint of pure literary criticism which we noticed in the master, and which characterised the second quarter of the century, naturally and inevitably reproduced itself in the three most brilliant of his disciples—Ruskin, Froude, and Kingsley—with interesting variants and developments according to the idiosyncrasy of the individual. There was, indeed, in them something which can hardly be said to have been in Carlyle at all—a weakness which his internal fire burnt out of him. This weakness, formulated most happily by an erratic person of genius whom I have alternately resolved to admit and decided to exclude here—Thomas Love Peacock,—is the principle that you “must take pleasure in the thing represented, before you can derive any from the representation.”[970] Incidentally and indirectly, no doubt, omnes eodem cogimur; or at least there are very few who escape the suck of the whirlpool. But the declaration and formal acceptance of the principle is comparatively modern: and it is one of the worst inheritances of that Patristic attitude which we dwelt upon long ago.[971] It is indeed closely connected with the doctrine that “all depends upon the subject”: but the Greeks were too deeply penetrated with æsthetic feeling to admit it openly, and, from the earliest times, philosophised on the attraction of repulsive subjects. It is indirectly excluded, likewise, by the stricter kinds of Neo-classic rule-criticism, which saw nothing to disapprove in such poems as the Syphilis. But it has, like other dubious spirits, been let loose by “the Anarchy.” That you may and should “like what you like” is open to the twist of its correlative—that you may _dis_like what you choose to dislike.

[Sidenote: Kingsley.]

At any rate, all these three distinguished persons showed the Carlylian-Peacockian will-worship in their different ways, to an extent which makes them, as critics, little more than extremely interesting curiosities. Kingsley, the least strong, intellectually speaking, of the three, shows it strongly enough. His saying (reported, I think, by the late Mr Kegan Paul), when one of his children asked who and what was Heine, “A bad man, my dear, a bad man,” is a specially interesting blend of the doctrine formulated by Peacock with the old Platonic-Patristic “the poet-is-a-good man” theory. Heine was not quite “a proper moral man” in his early years, certainly: though one might have thought that those later ones in the Matraszen-Gruft would have atoned in the eyes of the sternest inquisitor. But “bad” would have been a harsh term for him at any time. Still, it emphasises the speaker’s inability to distinguish between morality and genius, between the man and the work. This inability was pretty universal with him, and it makes Kingsley’s own work as criticism almost wholly untrustworthy, though often very interesting and stimulating to readers who have the proper correctives and antidotes ready: it even (which is not so very common a thing) affects his praise nearly as much as his blame. You must be on your guard against it, when he extols Euphues and the Fool of Quality[972] as much as when he depreciates Shelley.

[Sidenote: Froude.]

There was less sentimental and ethical prejudice in Mr Froude than in his brother-in-law, but his political and, in a wide, not to say loose, sense philosophical, prejudices were even stronger, and he drew nearer to Carlyle than did either Kingsley or Ruskin in a certain want of interest in literature as literature.[973]

[Sidenote: Mr Ruskin.]

We reach, however, as every one will have anticipated, the furthest point of our “eccentric” in Mr Ruskin. His waywardness is indeed a point which needs no labouring, but it is never displayed more incalculably to the unwary, more calculably to those who have the clue in their hands, than in reference to his literary judgments. Injustice would be done to Rapin and Rymer if we did not give some of the enormous paradoxes and paralogisms to which he has committed himself in this way: but the very abundance of them is daunting, and fortunately his work is not so far from the hands of probable readers as the dustbin-catacombs where those poor old dead lie. “Indignation is a poetical feeling if excited by serious injury, but not if entertained on being cheated out of a small sum of money.” You may admire the budding of a flower, but not a display of fireworks. Contrast the famous exposure of the “pathetic fallacy” with Scott’s supposed freedom from it, and you will find some of the most exquisite _un_reasons in literature. The foam in Kingsley’s song must not be “cruel,” but the Greta may be “happy,” simply because Ruskin does not mind finding fault with Kingsley, but has sworn to find no fault with Scott—perhaps also because he, very justly, likes sea-foam. Squire Western is not “a character,” because Ruskin had determined that only persons “without a fimetic taint” can create character, and Fielding had a fimetic taint. And dramatic poetry “despises external circumstance” because Scott did not despise external circumstance, and explanation is wanted why he could not write a play. Whether, with the most delicious absurdity, he works out a parallel between a “fictile” Greek vase (which is also, one hears, “of the Madonna”) and “fiction,” or is very nearly going to worship a locomotive when it makes a nasty noise and convinces him of its diabolism, this same exquisite unreason is always at the helm. It very often, generally indeed, is committed in admiration of the right things; it is always delightful literature itself. But it never has the judicial quality, and therefore it is never Criticism.[974]

[Sidenote: G. H. Lewes.]

That George Henry Lewes had many of the qualities of the critic it would be mere foolish paradox to deny. His Goethe and his History (if not) of Philosophy yet “of Philosophers” are sufficient proofs for any one to put in: and of his mastery of that element of criticism which goes to the making of an impresario the wonderful success with which he formed and trained his companion, George Eliot, is a still more convincing demonstration. [Sidenote: His Principles of Success in Literature.] I understand, also, that he had real merits as a dramatic critic. But his chief critical work, The Principles of Success in Literature,[975] betrays by its very title the presence of an element of vulgarity in him, which can indeed scarcely escape notice in other parts of his work, and which is by no means removed or neutralised by the quasi-philosophic tone of the work itself. Much may be forgiven to a man, born in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, when he uses the words “progress,” “success,” and the like: but not everything. Fame may be the last infirmity of noble minds; Success is but the first and last morbid appetite of the vulgar. And, as has been said, Lewes does not fully redeem his title by his text. There is plenty of common-sense and shrewdness. There is plenty of apparent and some real philosophy. Some, no doubt, will delight to be told that there are three Laws of Literature, that “the intellectual form is the Principle of Vision; the moral form the Principle of Sincerity; and the æsthetic form the Principle of Beauty,” and then to have these various eggs tossed and caught, in deft arrangements, for some chapters.

Indeed, there be many truths in the book, and I would most carefully guard against the idea that Lewes knowingly and deliberately recommends a mere tradesman-like view of literature. On the contrary, he strongly protests against it: and writes about Sincerity with every appearance of being sincere.[976] But his view of Imagination is confessedly low, and almost returns to the Addisonian standpoint of “ideas furnished by sight.” And when, with a rather rash hiatus, he promises[977] “for the first time to expound scientifically the Laws that constitute the Philosophy of Criticism,” we listen even less hopefully and even more doubtfully than somebody did when he understood somebody else to say that he had killed the Devil. Lewes is not unsound on the subject of imitation of the classics. He has learnt from Coleridge, or from Wordsworth, or from De Quincey, that style is the body not the dress of thought: and much that he says about it is extremely shrewd and true. But when he comes to its actual Laws and gives them as Economy, Simplicity, Sequence, Climax, and Variety, the old not at all divine despair comes upon us. All these are well, but they are not Style’s crown; they are only and hardly some of the balls and strawberry leaves of that crown. A sentence, or a paragraph, or a page may be economic, simple, sequacious, climacteric, and various, and not be good style. I am not sure that a great piece of style might not be produced to which, except by violence, no one of these epithets—I am sure that many such pieces could be produced to which not all—will apply. Once more the light and holy soul of literature has wings to fly at suspicion of these bonds—and uses them.

[Sidenote: His Inner Life of Art.]

Lewes’s best critical work by far[978] is to be found in the Essay on The Inner Life of Art, where he handles, without ceremony and with crushing force, the strange old and new prudery about the connection of verse and poetry, declaring plumply that the one is the form of the other. But it is noticeable that this Essay is in the main merely a catena or chrestomathy of critical extracts, united by some useful review-work. On the whole, even after dismissing or allowing for any undue “nervous impression” created by the unlucky word “Success,” it is not very possible to give him, as a critic, a position much higher than one corresponding to the position of Helps. Lewes is a Helps much unconventionalised and cosmopolitanised, not merely in externals. He is not only much more skilled in philosophical terminology, but he really knows more of what philosophy means. He has more, much more, care for literature. But the stamp of the Exhibition of 1851 is upon him also: and it is not for nothing that his favourite and most unreservedly praised models of style are drawn from Macaulay. I have no contempt for Macaulay’s style myself: I have ventured in more places than one or two to stigmatise such contempt as entirely uncritical. But the preference of this style tells us much in this context, as the preference of champagne in another.

[Sidenote: Bagehot.]

The evils of dissipation of energy have been lamented by the grave and precise in all ages: and some have held that they are specially discoverable in the most modern times. It is very probable that Criticism may charge to this account the comparatively faint and scanty service done her by one who displayed so much faculty for that service as Walter Bagehot. A man whose vocations and avocations extend (as he himself says in a letter quoted by Mr Hutton) from hunting to banking, and from arranging Christmas festivities to editing the Economist, can have but odd moments for literature. Yet this man’s odd moments were far from unprofitable. His essay on Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art in Poetry would deserve a place even in a not voluminous collection of the best and most notable of its kind. The title, of course, indicates Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning: and the paper itself may be said to have been one of the earliest frankly to estate and recognise Tennyson— the earliest of importance perhaps to estate and recognise Browning— among the leaders of mid-nineteenth century poetry. As such titles are wont to do, it somewhat overreaches itself, and certainly implies or suggests a confusion as to the meaning of “pure.” If pure is to mean “unadorned,” Wordsworth is most certainly not at his poetical best when he has most of the quality, but generally at his worst; if it means “sheer,” “intense,” “quintessential,” his best of poetry has certainly no more of it than the best of either of the other two. The classification suggests, and the text confirms, a certain “popularity” in Bagehot’s criticism. But it is popular criticism of the very best kind, and certainly not to be despised because it has something of mid-nineteenth century, and Macaulayan, materialism and lack of subtlety. This derbheit sometimes led him wrong, as in that very estimate of Gibbon which the same Mr Hutton praises, but oftener it contributed sense and sanity to his criticism. And there are not many better things in criticism than sanity and sense, especially when, as in Bagehot’s case, they are combined with humour and with good-humour.[979]

[Sidenote: R. H. Hutton.]

The criticism of a critic just cited, the late Mr R. H. Hutton, affords opportunity for at least a glance at one of the most important general points connected with our subject—the general distaste for pure criticism, and the sort of relief which l’homme sensuel moyen seems to feel when the bitter cup is allayed and sweetened by sentimental, or political, or religious, or philosophical, or anthropological, or pantopragmatic adulteration. Mr Hutton’s criticism was, it is believed, by far the most popular of his day; the very respectable newspaper which he directed was once eulogised as “telling you what you ought to read, you know ”—a phrase which might have awakened in a new Wordsworth thoughts too deep for tears or even for laughter.

[Sidenote: His evasions of literary criticism.]

The commentary on it is supplied by the two volumes of Mr Hutton’s selected and collected Essays.[980] These constantly deal with things and persons of the highest importance in literature; but they abstain with a sort of Pythagorean asceticism from the literary side of them. In his repeated dealings with Carlyle, it is always as a man, as a teacher, as a philosopher, as a politician, as a moralist, that he handles that sage—never directly, or at most rapidly and incidentally, as a writer. On Emerson he is a little more literary, but not much: and on him also he slips away as usual. Even with Poe, whom one might have thought literary or nothing, he contrives to elude us, till his judgment on the Poems suggests that inability to judge literature caused his refusal. Dickens, Amiel, Mr Arnold himself—the most widely differing persons and subjects—fail to tempt him into the literary open; and it is a curious text for the sermon for which we have here no room that he most nearly approaches the actual literary criticism of verse, not on Tennyson, not on “Poetry and Pessimism,” not on Mr Shairp’s Aspects of Poetry, but on Lord Houghton. He goes to the ant and is happy: with deans, and bishops, and archbishops, and cardinals he is ready to play their own game. But if Literature, as literature, makes any advances to him, he leaves his garment in her hands and flees for his life.

[Sidenote: Pater.]

To assert too positively that Mr Walter Pater was the most important English critic of the last generation of the nineteenth century—that he stands to that generation in a relation resembling those of Coleridge to the first, and Arnold to the latter part of the second—would no doubt cause grumbles. The Kingdom of Criticism has been of old compared to that of Poland, and perhaps there is no closer point of resemblance than the way in which critics, like Polacks, cling to the Nie pozwalam, to the liberum veto. So, respecting this jus Poloniæ let us say that those are fair reasons for advancing Mr Pater to such a position, while admitting that he is somewhat less than either of his forerunners.

[Sidenote: His frank Hedonism.]

His minority consists certainly not in faculty of expression, wherein he is the superior of both, nor in fineness of appreciation, in which he is at least the equal of either: but rather in a certain eclectic and composite character, a want of definite four-square originality, which has been remarkably and increasingly characteristic of the century itself. In one point, indeed, he is almost entitled to the highest place, but his claim here rests rather on a frank avowal and formulation of what everybody had always more or less admitted, or by denying had admitted the acceptance of it by mankind at large—to wit, the pleasure-giving quality of literature. Even he, however, resolute Hedonist as he was, falters sometimes in this respect—is afraid of the plain doctrine that the test of goodness in literature is simply and solely the spurt of the match when soul of writer touches reader’s soul, the light and the warmth that follow.

[Sidenote: His polytechny and his style.]

In two other main peculiarities or properties of his—the, we will not say confusion but deliberate blending of different arts in method and process, and the adoption (modifying it, of course, by his own genius) of the doctrine of the “single word,”—he is again more of a transmitter than of a kindler of the torch. The first proceeding had been set on foot by Lessing in the very act of deprecating and exposing clumsy and blind anticipations of it; the second was probably taken pretty straight from Flaubert. But in the combination of all three, in the supplements of mother-wit, and, above all, in the clothing of the whole with an extraordinarily sympathetic and powerful atmosphere of thought and style—in these things he stands quite alone, and nearly as much so in his formulation of that new critical attitude which we have seen in process of development throughout the present volume.

[Sidenote: His formulation of the new critical attitude.]

The documents of his criticism are to be chiefly sought in the Studies in the History of the Renaissance,[981] in parts of Marius the Epicurean, and, of course, in the volume of Appreciations, and the little collection of Essays reprinted from The Guardian.[982] The posthumous books are less to he depended on, in consequence of Mr Pater’s very strong tendency to cuver son vin—to alter and digest and retouch. I do not know any place setting forth that view of criticism which I have myself always held more clearly than the Preface of the Studies. “To feel the virtue of the poet, or the painter, to disengage it, to set it forth,—these are the three stages of the critic’s duty.” The first (Mr Pater does not say this but we may) is a passion of pleasure, passing into an action of inquiry; the second is that action consummated; the third is the interpretation of the result to the world.

[Sidenote: The Renaissance.]

He never, I think, carried out his principles better than in his first book, in regard to Aucassin et Nicolette, to Michelangelo, to Du Bellay, as well as in parts of the “Pico” and “Winckelmann” papers. But the method is almost equally apparent and equally helpful in the more purely “fine art” pieces—the “Lionardo,” the “Botticelli,” the “Luca della Robbia.” In that passage on the three Madonnas and the Saint Anne of Da Vinci, which I have always regarded as the triumph both of his style and of his method, the new doctrine (not the old) of ut pictura poesis comes out ten thousand strong for all its voluptuous softness. This is the way to judge Keats and Tennyson as well as Lionardo: nay, to judge poets of almost entirely different kinds, from Æschylus through Dante to Shakespeare. Expose mind and sense to them, like the plate of a camera: assist the reception of the impression by cunning lenses of comparison, and history, and hypothesis; shelter it with a cabinet of remembered reading and corroborative imagination; develop it by meditation, and print it off with the light of style:—there you have, in but a coarse and half-mechanical analogy, the process itself.

[Sidenote: Objections to its process.]

I fancy that objections to this proceeding take something like the following form: “In the first place, the thing is too effeminate, too patient, too submissive,—it substitutes a mere voluptuous enjoyment, and a dilettante examination into the causes thereof, for a virile summoning of the artist-culprit before the bar of Reason to give account of his deeds. In the second, it is too facile, too fainéant. In the third, it does not give sufficient advantage to the things which we like to call ‘great.’ The moments of pleasure are too much atomised: and though it may be admitted that some yield larger, intenser, more continuous supplies of moment than others, yet this is not sufficient.” Lastly [this is probably always subaud., but seldom uttered except by the hotter gospellers], “We don’t believe in these ecstatic moments, analysed and interpreted in tranquillity; we don’t feel them, and we don’t want to feel them; and you are a nasty hedonist if you do feel them.”

Which protest could, no doubt, be amplified, could, with no doubt also, be supported to a certain extent. Nor is it (though he should placard frankly the fact that he agrees in the main with Mr Pater) exactly the business of the present historian to defend it at any length here, inasmuch as he is writing a history, not a “suasory.” Let it only be hinted in passing that the exceptions just stated seem inconclusive—that the wanters of a sense cannot plead their want as an argument that no others have it; that the process has certainly given no despicable results; that it has seldom demonstrably failed as disastrously as the antecedent rule-system; and, most of all, that nothing can be falser than the charge of fainéantise and dilettanteism. Only as “the last corollary of many of an effort” can this critical skill also be attained and maintained.

[Sidenote: Importance of Marius the Epicurean.]

At any rate, though, as often happens to a man, he became rather more of a preceptist and less of an impressionist afterwards, Mr Pater certainly exemplified this general theory and practice in a very notable manner. Marius is full of both: it is much more than the Wilhelm Meister of the New Criticism. It is this which gives the critical attitude of Flavian, the hero’s friend and inspirer, the supposed author of the Pervigilium; this, which is the literary function of “Neo-Cyrenaicism” itself—the μονόχρονος ἡδονή, the integral atom, or moment of pleasure, being taken as the unit and reference-integer of literary value; this, which gives the adjustment ad hoc of the Hermotimus. The theory and the practice take their most solid, permanent, and important form in this most remarkable book, of which I find it hard to believe that the copy, “From the Author,” which lies before me, reached me nearly twenty years ago. The Renaissance holds the first blooms and promises of them; Appreciations and the Guardian Essays the later applications and developments; but the central gospel is here.

[Sidenote: Appreciations and the “Guardian” Essays.]

That the opening essays of these two latter books happen to contain references to myself is a fact. But I fancy that this will not be the main interest of them to posterity, nor, strange as it may seem, is it their main interest to me.[983] The Essay on Style which opens the larger and more important book, is, I think, on the whole, the most valuable thing yet written on that much-written-about subject. It presents, indeed, as I have hinted, a certain appearance of “hedging,” especially in the return to matter as the distinction between “good art” and “great art,” which return, as easily rememberable and with a virtuous high sound in it, appears to have greatly comforted some good if not great souls. Certainly a pitcher of gold is in some senses greater than a pitcher of pewter of the same design, especially if you wish to dispose of it to Mr Polonius. A pewter amphora is again in some senses greater than a pewter cyathus. But it does not seem to me that this helps us much. How good, on the other hand, and how complete, is that improvement upon Coleridge’s dictum, which makes Style consist in the adequate presentation of the writer’s “sense of fact,” and the criticism of the documents adduced! How valuable the whole, though we may notice as to the writer’s selection of prose literature as the representative art of the nineteenth century, that this was his art, his in consummate measure, and that verse was not. Altogether, in short, a great paper,—a “furthest” in certain directions.

There is an interesting tender, or rather pilot-boat, to this Essay in the first of the Guardian Reviews on “English Literature,” where the texts are the present writer’s Specimens, Professor’s Minto’s English Poets, Mr Dobson’s Selections from Steele, and one of Canon Ainger’s many bits of yeoman’s service to Lamb. The relation is repeated between the Wordsworth Essay in Appreciations and a Wordsworth review among the Guardian sheaf: while something not dissimilar, but even more intimate, exists between the “Coleridge” Essay and the introduction to that poet in Mr Ward’s well-known book, which Introduction actually forms part of the Essay itself. In the two former cases, actual passages and phrases from the smaller, earlier, and less important work also appear in the larger and later. For Mr Pater—as was very well known, when more than thirty years ago it was debated in Oxford whether he would ever publish anything at all, and as indeed might have been seen from his very first work, by any one with an eye, but with no personal knowledge—was in no sense a ready writer, and, least of all, anxious to write as he ran, that those who run might read. There have been critics who, without repeating themselves, and even, perhaps, with some useful additions and variations, could write half a dozen times on the same subject; and indeed most literary subjects admit of such writing. But such (we need not say frivolity but) flexibility was not in accordance with Mr Pater’s temperament.

There is hardly one of the papers in either book (though some of the Guardian pieces are simple, yet quite honest and adequate reviews) that does not display that critical attitude which we have defined above, both directly and in relation to the subjects. The most interesting and important passages are those which reveal in the critic, or recognise in his authors, this attitude itself—as when we read of Amiel: “In Switzerland it is easy to be pleased with scenery. But the record of such pleasure becomes really worth while when, as happens with A., we feel that there has been and, with success, an intellectual effort to get at the secret, the precise motive, of this pleasure—to define feeling.” Indeed, I really do not know that “to define feeling” is not as good—it is certainly as short—a definition of at least a great part of the business of the critic as you can get. And so again of Lamb: “To feel strongly the charm of an old poet or moralist,... and then to interpret that charm, to convey it to others,... this is the way of his criticism.”

It is certainly the way of Mr Pater’s, and it is always good to walk with him in it—better, I venture to think, than to endeavour to follow him in his rarer and never quite successful attempts to lift himself off it, and flutter in the vague. Good, for instance, as is the Essay on “Æsthetic Poetry,” it would have been far better if it had contented itself with being, in fact and in name, what it is in its best parts—a review of Mr William Morris.[984] This, however, was written very early, and before he had sent out his spies to the Promised Land in The Renaissance (and they had brought back mighty bunches of grapes!), still more before he had reached the Pisgah of Marius. Even here though, and naturally still more in the much later paper on Rossetti, he presents us, as he does almost everywhere, with admirable, sometimes with consummate, examples of “defined feeling” about Wordsworth and Coleridge, about Browning and Lamb, about Sir Thomas Browne (one of his most memorable things), about more modern persons—Mr Gosse, M. Fabre, M. Filon. Particularly precious are the three papers on Shakespeare. I have always wished that Mr Pater had given us more of them, as well as others on authors possessing more of what we may call the positive quality, than those whom he actually selected. It would, I think, speaking without impertinence, have done him some good: and it would, speaking with certainty, have done us a great deal. One may sometimes think that it was in his case (as in some others, though so few!) almost a pity that he was in a position to write mainly for amusement. But it is not likely that his sequestered and sensitive genius could ever have done its best—if it could have done anything at all—at forced draught. So, as usual, things are probably better as they are.

[Sidenote: Universality of his method.]

What, however, is not probable but certain, and what is here of most importance, is that the Paterian method is co-extensive in possibility of application with the entire range of criticism—from the long and slow degustation and appreciation of a Dante or a Shakespeare to the rapidest adequate review of the most trivial and ephemeral of books. Feel; discover the source of feeling (or no feeling, or disgust, as it will often be in the trivial cases); express the discovery so as to communicate the feeling: this can be done in every case. And if it cannot be done by every person, why, that is only equivalent to saying that it is not precisely possible for everybody to be a critic, which, again, is a particular case of a general proposition announced in choice Latin a long time ago, practically anticipated in choicer Greek long before, and no doubt perfectly well understood by wise persons of all nations and languages at any time back to the Twenty-third of October B.C. 4004, or any other date which may be preferred thereto. Besides the objections before referred to, there may be others—such as that the critic’s powers, even if he possesses them, will become callous by too much exercise,—an objection refuted by the fact, so often noticed, that there is hardly an instance of a man with real critical powers becoming a worse critic as he grew older, and many a one of his becoming a better. But, at any rate, this was Mr Pater’s way of criticism: this had already been the way pursued, more or less darkling or in clear vision, by all modern critics—the way first definitely formulated, and, perhaps, allowing for bulk of work, most consistently pursued, by himself. And I have said—perhaps often enough—that I do not know a better.

[Sidenote: Mr J. A. Symonds.]

Although the relation of “moon” to “sun,” so often used as an image in literary history, will not work with pedantic exactness in relation to Mr J. A. Symonds and the critic just mentioned,—for the moon is not many times more voluminous than the sun, and there are other difficulties,—it applies to a certain extent. Both were literary Hedonists; both were strongly influenced by Greek and Italian. But Mr Symonds’s mind, like his style, was very much more irregular and undisciplined than Mr Pater’s (which had almost something of Neo-classic precision adjusting its Romantic luxuriance), and this want of discipline let him loose[985] into a loquacity which certainly deserved the Petronian epithet of enormis, and could sometimes hardly escape the companion one of ventosa. His treatise on Blank Verse,[986] interesting as it is, would give the enemy of the extremer “modern” criticism far too many occasions to blaspheme by its sheer critical anti-nomianism: and over all his extensive work, faults of excess of various kinds swarm. But beauties and merits are there in ample measure as well as faults: and in the literary parts of The Renaissance in Italy the author has endeavoured to put some restraint on himself, and has been rewarded for the sacrifice. From some little acquaintance with literary history, I think I may say that there is no better historical treatment of a foreign literature in English. One can never help wishing that the author had left half his actual subject untouched, and had completed the study of Italian literature.[987]

[Sidenote: Thomson (“B. V.”)]

Not much need be said of the critical production—arrested, like the poetical, by causes unhappy but well known—of James Thomson “the Second,” hardly “the Less,” but most emphatically “the Other.” It ought to have been good: and sometimes (especially under the unexpected and soothing shadow of Cope’s Tobacco Plant) was so.[988] Thomson had much of the love, and some of the knowledge, required; his intellect (when allowed to be so) was clear and strong; he was, in more ways than one, of the type of those poets who have made some of the best critics, despite the alleged prodigiousness of the metamorphosis. But the good seed was choked by many tares of monstrous and fatal growth. The least of these should have been (but perhaps was not) the necessity of working for a living, and not the necessity, but the provoked and accepted doom, of working for it mostly in obscure and unprofitable, not to say disreputable, places, imposed upon a temperament radically nervous, “impotent,” in the Latin sense, and unresigned to facts. That temperament itself was a more dangerous obstacle: and the recalcitrance to religion which it was allowed to induce was one more dangerous still. There are no doubt many instances where rigid orthodoxy has proved baneful, even destructive, to a man’s critical powers, or at any rate to his catholic exertion of them: but there are also many in which it has interfered little, if at all. On the other hand, I can hardly think of a case in which religious, and of very few in which political, heterodoxy has not made its partisans more or less hopelessly uncritical on those with whom they disagree. Nor could the peculiar character of Thomson’s education and profession fail to react unfavourably on his criticism. It is hard to get rid of some ill effects of schoolmastering in any case; it must be nearly impossible, in the case of a proud and rather “ill-conditioned” man, who has not enjoyed either full liberal education or gentle breeding, and who is between the upper and nether millstone, as Thomson seems to have been, or at least felt himself, while he was a military schoolmaster. All these irons entered into a critical soul which might have been a fair one and brave: and we see the scars of them, and the cramp of them, too often.[989]

[Sidenote: William Minto.]

A journalist for one-half of his working life, and a professor—partly—of literature for the other, William Minto executed in both capacities a good deal of literary work: but his most noteworthy contribution[990] to our subject consisted in the two remarkable manuals of English literary history which, as quite a young man, he drew up.[991] To say that these manuals were at the time of their publication by far the best on the subject would be to say little: for there were hardly any good ones. Their praise can be more of a cheerfully positive, and less of a “rascally, comparative” character. They were both, but especially the Poets from Chaucer to Shirley, full of study, insight, originality, and grasp—where the author chose to indulge his genius. [Sidenote: His books on English Prose and Poetry.] Their defects were defects which it requires genius indeed, or at least a very considerable share of audacity, to keep out of manuals of the kind. There is, perhaps, too much biography and too much mere abstract of contents—a thing which will never serve the student in lieu of reading, which will sometimes disastrously suggest to him that he need not read, and which must always curtail the space available for really useful guidance and critical illumination to him when he does. In the Prose there is something else. The book is constructed as a sort of enlarged praxis on a special pedagogic theory of style-teaching, that of the late Professor Bain: and is elaborately scheduled for the illustration of Qualities and Elements of Style, of Kinds of Composition. There is no need to discuss how far the schedule itself is faulty or free from fault; it is unavoidable that rigid adjustment to it—or to any such—shall bring back those faults of the old Rhetoric on which we commented in vol. i., with others more faulty than themselves. For classical literature was very largely, if not wholly, constructed according to such schemes, and might be analysed with an eye on them: English literature had other inceptions and other issues. That Minto’s excellent critical qualities do not disappear altogether behind the lattice-work of schedule-reference speaks not a little for them.

[Sidenote: H. D. Traill.]

Few writers have lost more by the practice of anonymous journalism than the late Mr Traill. He engaged in it, and in periodical writing generally, from a period dating back almost to the time of his leaving Oxford,[992] and he had to do with it, I believe, till his death, the extraordinary quality of his work recommending him to any and every editor who knew his business. It was impossible, in reading any proof of his, be it on matters political, literary, or miscellaneous, not to think of Thackeray’s phrase about George Warrington’s articles, as to “the sense, the satire, and the scholarship” which characterised them. In the rather wide knowledge, which circumstances happened to give me, of writers for the press during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, I never knew his equal for combination of the three. [Sidenote: His critical strength.] For a great many years, however, chance, or choice, or demand, directed him chiefly to the most important, as it is thought, and the most paying, but the most exhausting and, as far as permanent results go, the most utterly thankless and evanescent division of journalism—political leader-writing, with actual attendance at “the House” during the Session. And this curtailed both his literary press-work and his opportunities of literary book-work. He did, however, a great deal of the former: and the labours of the much-abused but sometimes useful literary resurrection-men, who dig contributions out of their newspaper graves, could hardly be better bestowed than upon him. Fortunately, however, the literary side of his criticism—he was a critic of letters and life alike, born and bred, in prose and in verse, by temper and training, in heart and brain—remains in part of The New Lucian, in the admirable monographs on Sterne and Coleridge,[993] and in the collection of Essays[994] issued but a year or two before his death.

[Sidenote: On Sterne and Coleridge.]

In the three last-named volumes especially, his qualities as a critic are patent to any one with eyes. The two monographs are models of competence and grasp, but they are almost greater models of the combination of vigour and sanity. Both subjects are of the kind which used to tempt to cant, and which now tempts to paradox. To the first sin Mr Traill had no temptation—whatever fault might have been found with him, neither Pecksniffery nor Podsnappery was in the faintest degree his failing. But he might have been thought likely to be tempted, as some very clever men in our day have been, by the desire to fly in the face of the Philistine, and to flout the Family Man. There is no trace of any such beguilement—the moral currency is as little tampered with as it could have been by Johnson or by Southey, while there is no trace of the limitations of the one or of the slight Pharisaism of the other. And yet the literary judgment is entirely unaffected by this moral rectitude: the two do not trespass on each other’s provinces by so much as a hair’s-breadth.

[Sidenote: Essays on Fiction.]

The title-paper of the collected Essays, “The New Fiction,” connects itself with several other pieces in the volume, “The Political Novel,” “Samuel Richardson,” “The Novel of Manners,” and, to some extent, “The Future of Humour.” Mr Traill was a particularly good critic of the most characteristic product of the nineteenth century: I doubt whether we have had a better. In poetry he seemed to me to sin a little, in one direction (just as, I know, I seemed to him to sin in the other), by insisting, too much in the antique fashion, on a general unity and purpose. He shows this, I think, here in the paper on “Matthew Arnold,” who, indeed, himself could hardly have objected, for they were theoretically much at one on the point. But as to prose fiction he had no illusions, and his criticism of it is consummate. We have not a few instances of onslaughts upon corrupt developments of the art by critics great and small; but I do not think I know one to equal Mr Traill’s demolition of the “grime-novel” of to-day or yesterday. [Sidenote: “The Future of Humour.”] His highest achievement, however, in a single piece, is undoubtedly “The Future of Humour,” which transcends mere reviewing, transcends the mere causerie, and unites the merits of both with those of the best kind of abstract critical discussion. One may say of it, without hesitation, Ça restera; it may be lost in the mass, now and then, but whenever a good critic comes across it he will restore it to its place. It is about a day, but not of or for it: it moves, and has its being, as do all masterpieces of art, small and great, sub specie æternitatis. If it were not so idle, one could only sigh at thinking how many a leading article, how much journey-work in biography, one would give for Traill to be alive again, and to write such criticism as this.

[Sidenote: Others: Mansel, Venables, Stephen, Lord Houghton, Pattison, Church, &c.]

Others, great and small, we must once more sweep into the numerus named, or unnamed. Mr Traill himself—for they were both of St John’s—may be said to have directly inherited the mantle of Dean Mansel in respect of critical wit and sense, though the Dean had only occasionally devoted these qualities, together with his great philosophical powers, and his admirable style, to pure literary criticism.[995] Of the immense critical exercise of Mr George Venables, a little lacking in flexibility, sympathy, and unction, but excellently sound and strong, no salvage, I think, has ever been published: and though a good deal is available from his yoke-fellow, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen,[996] this latter’s tastes—as his father’s had done before, though in a different direction—led him away from the purer literary criticism. Of three other persons, eminent in their several ways, more substantive notice may perhaps have been expected by many, and will certainly be demanded by some. But Lord Houghton’s Monographs,[997] admirably written and extremely interesting to read, hardly present a sufficiently individual kind, or a sufficiently considerable bulk of matter, for a separate paragraph. Mr Mark Pattison’s dealings with Milton and with Pope, as well as with the great seventeenth-century scholars, may seem more, and more imperatively, to knock for admission. As far as scholarship, in almost every sense of the word, is concerned, no critic can surpass him; but scholarship, though all but indispensable as the critic’s canvass, needs much working upon, and over, to give the finished result. And Pattison’s incurable reticence and recalcitrance—the temperament which requires the French words rêche and revêche, if not even rogue, to label it—were rebel to the suppleness and morigeration which are required from all but mere scholastic critics. The happier stars or complexion of his near contemporary, Dean Church, enabled him to do some admirable critical work on Dante, on Spenser, and on not a few others, which will be found in the English Men of Letters, in Mr Ward’s Poets, in his own Collected Essays, and in separate books. Dr Church combined, with an excellent style, much scholarship and a judgment as sane as it was mild, nor did he allow the natural drift of his mind towards ethical and religious, rather than purely literary, considerations to draw him too much away from the latter.

[Sidenote: Patmore.]

Mr Coventry Patmore has been extolled to the skies by a coterie. But to the cool outsider his criticism, like his poetry, has somewhat too much the character of “diamondiferous rubbish,”—a phrase which, when applied to the poetry itself, did not, I am told, displease him. For though, in Principle in Art[998] and Religio Poetæ[999] there may be a few things rich and rare, there is a very large surplusage of the other constituents of the mixture. The short articles of the first volume consist almost wholly of it, and might have been left in the columns of the Daily Paper in which they appeared with a great deal of advantage.[1000] Indeed those on Keats, Shelley, Blake, and Rossetti, which unfortunately follow each other, make a four-in-hand good only for the knacker. Mr Patmore, when he wrote them, was too old to take the benefit of no-clergy, to be allowed the use of undergraduate paradox. And as, unfortunately, he was a craftsfellow, and a craftsfellow not very popular or highly valued with most people, his denigration is all the more awkward. A man who says that The Burden of Nineveh “might have been written by Southey” (and I do not undervalue Southey), must have an insensible spot somewhere in his critical body. A man who says that Blake’s poetry, “with the exception of four or five pieces and a gleam here and there,” is mere drivel, must be suffering from critical hemiplegia. There are better things in the other volume, and its worst faults are excesses of praise, always less disgusting, though not always less uncritical, than those of blame. But I am not here giving a full examination to Mr Patmore’s criticism, I am only indicating why I do not here examine it, as I am perfectly ready to do at any moment in a proper place.

[Sidenote: Mr Edmund Gurney.]

There were, I think, few English writers of the last quarter of the nineteenth century who showed more of the true critical ethos than the late Mr Edmund Gurney. I did not know Mr Gurney myself, but most of my friends did; a situation in which there is special danger (when the friends are complimentary) of the fate of Aristides for the other person. But the good things which were told me of Mr Gurney I find to be very much more than confirmed by his books, though, of course, I also find plenty to disagree with. The earlier of them, The Power of Sound,[1001] is in the main musical; and I have generally found (though there are some capital exceptions) that critics of poetry, or of literature generally, who start from much musical knowledge, are profoundly unsatisfactory, inasmuch as they rarely appreciate the radical difference between musical music and poetical music. Even Mitford fails here. But Mr Gurney does not. He was the first, or one of the first, I think, in English to enunciate formally the great truth that “the setting includes a new substance”—meaning not merely the technical music-setting of the composer, but that “sound accompaniment” which, in all poetry more or less, and in English poetry of the nineteenth century especially, gives a bonus, adds a panache, to the meaning.

[Sidenote: The Power of Sound.]

He was right too, I have not the slightest doubt, in laying it down that “metrical rhythm is imposed upon, not latent in, speech”; and he went right, where too many scholars of high repute have gone wrong, in seeing that the much-decried English scansion-pronunciation of Latin almost certainly brings out to an English ear the effect on a Latin one, better than any conjectured attempt to mimic what might have been the Latin pronunciation itself. I was delighted to find that he, too, had fixed upon Tennyson’s “Fair is her cottage” (his is not quite my view, and perhaps we were both guided by a reported speech of Mr Spedding’s) as almost the ne plus ultra of “superadded” audible and visual effect combined. And he is well worth reading on certain “illusions” of Lessing’s.

[Sidenote: Tertium Quid.]

The literary part of The Power of Sound is, however, if not accidental, incidental mainly: not a few of the papers in the second volume of Tertium Quid[1002] deal with literature pure and simple. They are to some extent injured by the fact that many, if not most of them, are merely strokes, or parries, or ripostes, in particular duels or mêlées on dependences of the moment. And, as I have pointed out in reference to certain famous altercations of the past, these critical squabbles seem to me almost invariably to darken counsel—first, by leading the disputants away from the true points, and secondly, by inducing them to mix in their pleadings all sorts of flimsy, ephemeral, and worthless matter. Not the point, but what Jones or Brown has said about the point, becomes the object of the writer’s attention; he wants to score off Brown or Jones, not to score for the truth. So when Mr Gurney contended with the late Mr Hueffer—another literary-musical critic, who did not, as Mr Gurney did, escape the dangers of the double employ—when he contributed not so much a tertium as a quartum quid to the triangular duel of Mr Arnold, Mr Austin, Mr Swinburne about Byron—he did not always say what is still worth reading. And he makes one or two odd blunders, such as that the French are blind to Wordsworth, whereas Wordsworth’s influence on Sainte-Beuve, to name nobody else,[1003] was very great. But he is always sensible,[1004] and he always has that double soundness on the passionate side of poetry and on the peculiar appeal of its form, which is so rare and so distinctive of the good critic.

These qualities should, of course, appear in his essay on the “Appreciation of Poetry”;[1005] and they do. It is, however, perhaps well to note that, while quite sound on the point that there is a right as well as a wrong comparison, he, like others, hardly escapes the further danger of “confusing the confusion”—of taking what is really the right comparison for what is really the wrong. The comparison which disapproves one thing because it is unlike another is wrong, not the comparison which is used to bring out a fault, though the unlikeness is not assigned as the reason of the fault at all. But I am here slipping from history to doctrine on this particular point. I think Mr Gurney, right in the main, might have been still righter: but in general I am sure that he had admirable critical qualities, and I only wish he had chosen, or had been forced, to use them more fully and frequently.[1006]

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IV. LATER GERMAN CRITICISM

HEINE: DECEPTIVENESS OF HIS CRITICISM—IN THE ‘ROMANTISCHE SCHULE,’ AND ELSEWHERE—THE QUALITIES AND DELIGHTS OF IT—SCHOPENHAUER—VIVIDNESS AND ORIGINALITY OF HIS CRITICAL OBSERVATION—‘DIE WELT ALS WILLE,’ ETC.—GRILLPARZER—HIS MOTTO IN CRITICISM—HIS RESULTS IN APHORISM, AND IN INDIVIDUAL JUDGMENT—A CRITIC OF LIMITATIONS: BUT A CRITIC— CARRIÈRE: HIS ‘ÆSTHETIK’—LATER GERMAN SHAKESPEARE-CRITICS—GERVINUS: HIS “GERMAN POETRY”—ON BÜRGER—THE SHAKESPEARE-HERETICS: RÜMELIN— FREYTAG—HILLEBRAND AND COSMOPOLITAN CRITICISM—NIETZSCHE— ‘ZARATHUSTRA,’ THE ‘BIRTH OF TRAGEDY,’ AND ‘DER FALL WAGNER’— ‘UNZEITGEMÄSSE BETRACHTUNGEN’—‘LA GAYA SCIENZA’—‘JENSEITS VON GUT UND BÖSE,’ ETC.—‘GÖTZEN-DÄMMERUNG’—HIS GENERAL CRITICAL POSITION.

The volume of critical writing in Germany since Goethe’s death, and the deaths of those younger contemporaries of his, like Tieck and A. W. Schlegel, who were mentioned in our last chapter on the subject,[1007] has been, of course, very great. The unceasing literary and scientific industry of the nation (with, in particular, the habit of the doctoral thesis forming almost an obligatory part of the regular education of any man pretending to culture) has made books of more or less critical intent and content as the sands of the sea. Yet the determination of the national critical temperament towards abstract æsthetic, or towards the most rudimentary and literal duties of Quellenforschung, of tabulation of rhyme and word-form, and the like, together with the custom (most fatal of all those encouraged by the thesis habit) of constantly “shoddying-up” former inquiries into fresher form, has prevented much of the very best kind of work from being done. If it were not for Heine, Schopenhauer, and one other who may come more as a surprise, in the earlier part, and the singular, erratic, and mainly wasted genius of Nietzsche in the later, this chapter would cut a very rueful figure beside most others in the book. Nor was any one of these primarily a literary critic.[1008]

[Sidenote: Heine: deceptiveness of his criticism.]

Heinrich Heine[1009] did many wonderful and many delightful things; but though he certainly did many things more delightful, I do not know that he ever did anything more wonderful than in making Die Romantische Schule persuade divers folk that he, the author of the Nord-See in his morning, the author of Bimini when the night had almost fallen, was anything but a Romantic himself. This curious achievement shows the dangers that wait upon those who peruse his criticism. If they cannot remember that a man very frequently blasphemes, in jest or temper, what he loves and adores, if they have not graven on their souls Lamb’s lines which culminate in

“Not that she is truly so”—

they had much better not read Heine at all. For he will lead them into many foolish and hurtful errors, and direct them, as by his own account he actually did certain poor people in his impish days, to the sign of the Stone Jug as the most comfortable and respectable hotel in Göttingen.[1010]

[Sidenote: In the Romantische Schule, and elsewhere.]

To put at once out of controversy what ought never to have been in it, let any one compare the famous passage or passages in The Romantic School[1011] about the Schlegels, with all their fantastic and contemptuous satire, and the serious passage about them in the much less well-known article on Menzel.[1012] Nay, let any man accustomed to sift evidence compare the more serious part of the “Romantic School” passages themselves with the less serious ones, and he will not have much doubt left on the manner. Heine was not only one of those persons who “cannot get enough fighting,” but one of those who always prefer the most fantastic, the most unconventional, I fear one must in some cases say the most unsportsmanlike, tactics and methods. He would have liked the savate better than the formal rules of the English ring, with their pruderies about hitting below the belt and using your feet: and I think his favourite weapon would have been that ingenious Irish implement the Gae-Bulg, with which the great Cuchullain slew somebody else nearly as great whose name abides not with me—a short, many-barbed harpoon which you kicked from between your toes upwards, into the under and unprotected part of the opponent’s stomach. The Middle Ages were actually the most representative times of Christian literature: and had been made even too much of as such by the school he was attacking. This offended his Judaism, that equally passionate and unpractical form of religion. He knew—it is one of his great critical deliverances—that if the Romantic is not always the mediæval, the mediæval is almost always the Romantic. And so at times there was no mercy for mediævalism and Romanticism. At other times he went and wrote, or had already written, Don Ramiro and Das Liedchen von der Reue, and Mein süsses Lieb, wenn du im Grab, and Die alten bösen Lieder, and Ich bin die Prinzessin Ilse, and the best things in the Nord-See itself, and the nineteenth chapter of Atta Troll, and nearly the whole of the Romancero, and Bimini!

[Sidenote: The qualities and delights of it.]

With such a man the critical letter killeth, unless you crush the snake on the wound, and, as the scientific people say now (justifying, like all real new wisdom, the wisdom of old), set free the antidote which the snake’s own blood contains for its own safety against its venom. Never was any so liberal of this antidote, without even the trouble of crushing, so easy to charm, so self-charming, as Heine. As he says himself,[1013] “the laughter sticks in his throat,” too often and too evidently: and all but the dullest ears should hear the sob that chokes it. But, unfortunately, there are ears in this world that are dull of hearing; there are even several of them. And for these, as a critic, Heine is not.[1014]

For others he is perhaps the chief, and certainly one of the earliest, of those who have discovered that the Goddess of Criticism is really all the different Muses in turn, and that she can be Thalia as well as Clio. There is still an idea that the critic ought to be very serious: and this Heine certainly was not—at least consecutively—while he was not even quite master of his own seriousness when he had it. There is, for an Englishman, no more agreeable spectacle of the kind than the delightful struggle of Shakespeareolatry and Anglophobia in Shakespeare’s Mädchen und Frauen.[1015] All the Victor Hugo passages[1016] should be carefully compared, remembering of course that the half of Hugo had not been told to Heine. So should all the Goethe pieces,[1017] remembering, again, the interview, when the younger poet could find nothing to say to the elder but that the wayside plums between Jena and Weimar were good. Read him on Hoffmann and Novalis,[1018] and remember that it is not exactly everybody—not even every Heine (if indeed there could be more Heines than one)—that can appreciate Novalis and Hoffmann together. In fact read him everywhere: but whenever you begin to read him, remember two little sentences of his, and if you cannot understand and enjoy them, shut the book. The one is that[1019] about the orange-trees at Sans-Souci whereof “every one has its number, like a contributor to Brockhaus’s Konversationsblatte.” The other is the pronouncement that “without the Will of the Lord no sparrow falls from the housetop, and Government-Councillor Karl Streckfuss makes no verse.” These will serve as useful tuning-forks, and they are not difficult to carry about and use.

In fine, Heine is a dangerous model, no doubt; yet even as a model he gave something to Criticism which it had not possessed before, which even Voltaire was unable to give it, because his laughter was too far removed from tears. Heine’s humour too often turned to the humoursome: but it was always present. And Humour is to the critic very nearly what Unction is to the preacher, in its virtue as well as in its danger. Moreover if he could certainly hate he could as certainly love—could not help loving. And when you find Love and Humour together, they and you are not far from the critical Kingdom of Heaven.[1020]

[Sidenote: Schopenhauer.]

The critical work of Schopenhauer[1021] is partly to be found in his great book, but it there assumes forms which are not of those with which we chiefly busy ourselves, while the critical sections of the Parerga und Paralipomena[1022] are ours—“stock, lock, and barrel”—a familiar metaphor which ceases to be hackneyed in face of the peculiar combativeness of Schopenhauer’s thought and style. They have all the refreshing quality of audacious originality and crisp phrase,[1023] and they have perhaps less than is the case elsewhere the perverseness—in fact, the mere ill-temper—which was the result, partly of his dreary creed, partly of the injustice with which he considered himself to be treated by the Verdammte Race.

[Sidenote: Vividness and originality of his critical observation.]

In these latter moods he is sometimes very amusing, as where he speaks of “a disgusting jargon like the French,”[1024] or whenever he mentions Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel; but in them few men are critical, and Schopenhauer is certainly not one of the few. One might make a not uninteresting critical postil or annotatiuncula on the enthusiasm of this pessimist for Scott: but it would be a slight divagation. Read all that he has to say on Style;[1025] it is the best thing, I think, that has ever been written on that subject in German, and one of the best things ever written in any language. It is conspicuously free from the old jest (repeated after Diderot on Beccaria so often) that there is nothing of his subject in his treatment; and we may forgive him for denouncing Parenthesis, when we remember the misconduct of the Germans towards that delightfullest of Figures. Among his numerous judgments, of more wisdom than mercy, none is better suited for these times (in which the evil, bad in his own, has grown worse) than his condemnation of the idea that “the last work is always the best,” that “what is written later is always an improvement on what was written before.”[1026] Nor is Schopenhauer’s anathema on reading pure and simple too strong, if it be taken with the grain of salt always necessary as seasoning to his strong meat—which grain is in this place the addition, “what is not worth reading, and what is merely new.”[1027]

Nor (as though he could leave no literary fault of his and our time untransfixed) does he spare the labour lost on biography and inquiry into originals and the like—“the analysing,” as he calls it, “of clay and paint instead of admiring the shape and colour of the vase.”[1028] No critic, who is not very uncertain of himself, need be annoyed by the characteristic observation on the critical faculty, “there is for the most part no such thing.”[1029] For each of us may flatter himself that he is the exception, and need have no doubt about the rule. And, as a matter of fact, Schopenhauer proceeds to show that there is a critical faculty, and that he knows very well what it is, and that he has it. If he condemns comparison, it is only what we have so often called the wrong comparison; he lays the very strongest emphasis on the Golden Rule of Criticism—that a poet, or any writer, is to be judged by his best things. On the old subject of the value of immediate and popular recognition, he is perhaps too interested a judge: and there is also evident temper in his exhortation to critics to “scourge mercilessly,” his doctrine that “Politeness in criticism is injurious.” As the world goes, the critic who accepts it as his first duty to scourge mercilessly, to neglect politeness, is quite as likely to scourge the few good books as the many bad, and will certainly do himself irreparable harm. So, also, while recognising the nobility of much that Schopenhauer has written on genius,[1030] we shall perhaps think that his encomia on arrogance and his disapproval of modesty are slightly unnecessary. Let us, at any rate, first light our largest lantern, and go out in the brightest day our climate allows, to find these modest men.

[Sidenote: Die Welt als Wille, &c.]

In the æsthetic section,[1031] main and appended, of his great book itself, Schopenhauer concerns us less. It may be quite true[1032] that the subjective part of æsthetic pleasure is delight in perceptive knowledge, independent of Will; and the bass may be “the lowest grade of the objectification” of the said Will. But according to the views, perhaps wrongly but constantly maintained in this book, positions of this kind have nothing to do with the discovery or the defence of any concrete critical judgment whatsoever. We find of course—as we must find in any man of Schopenhauer’s powerful intellect and wide knowledge— divers interesting aperçus, not always or often conditioned by a tame consistency. Thus[1033] he dislikes rhyme altogether, but sees, as not everybody since has seen, and as comparatively few had seen before him, the beauty of rhymed Mediæval Latin. The passage on the sublimity of silence and solitude is an extremely fine one: and if his general quarrel with the world puts him in an unnecessary temper with minor poets,[1034] it is interesting to compare his attack on them with Castelvetro’s.[1035] It would be very interesting, too, to compare and connect his views on Poetry with his very celebrated opinions on Love: but non nostrum est.[1036] And it is only when Schopenhauer touches ethics that he is disputable; on æsthetic questions in the applied sense he seldom goes wrong, and is always stimulating and original to the highest degree.

[Sidenote: Grillparzer.]

Our “surprise” is the Austrian poet, Grillparzer.[1037] I am told by persons who know more about that matter than I do, that Grillparzer was a remarkable playwright; I am sure that he is a remarkable critic. Four volumes of his Works are devoted to this subject, and nearly the whole of one of them[1038] is occupied by critical pensées and aphorisms of the kind in which Joubert is the great master. Grillparzer is not the equal of the Frenchman, nor has he the depth of his countryman Novalis: but his critical matter is more abundant than the latter’s, and it is of a rather more practical kind. He seems, at all times of his long life, to have practised, and he has explicitly, preached, what I myself believe to be certainly the most excellent if not the only excellent way of criticism. [Sidenote: His motto in criticism.] The delivery unto Satan of all theory, which I have put in the forefront of this Book, is of course intentionally hyperbolical: yet what he puts in the forefront of his own is quite sober. “My plan in these annotations is, without any regard to system, to write down on each subject what seems to me to flow out of its own nature. The resultant contradictions will either finally clear themselves away, or, being irremovable, will show me that no system is possible.” I am by no means sure that this was not the practice of Aristotle; it pretty certainly was that of Longinus; I have endeavoured to show that, pursued as it was by Dryden all through his literary life, it made him a very great critic; and it was to no very small extent (though in his case it was hampered and broken into by his fatal inconsecutiveness) the method also of Coleridge. Grillparzer had not the genius of these men: but he seems to have pursued his own method faithfully for some fifty or sixty years, and the result is some mediate axioms of very considerable weight, and a large body of individual judgments which are at least of interest.

[Sidenote: His results in aphorism,]

The former are perhaps the better. He has even attempts at the definition of Beauty, which are as good as another’s, holding that the Beautiful not merely gives satisfaction and appeasement to the sensual part in us, but also lifts up the soul.[1039] This, at least, escapes the witty judgment of Burke quoted above, after Schlegel. He has the combined boldness and good sense[1040] to see and say that “Sense is prose”—to cry woe on the poetry that can be fully explained by the understanding. He has dealt a swashing blow[1041] at a terribly large part of ancient and modern criticism in the words, “Pottering, [“Schlendrian,”] and Pedantry in Art always delight in judging by Kinds— approving this and denouncing that. But an open Art—sense knows no Kinds: only individuals.” He is interesting and distinctly original on Dilettanteism:[1042] stigmatises in women (I fear he might have added not a few men) the “inability to admire what you do not wholly approve,”[1043] and says plumply,[1044] Klassisch ist fehlerfrei, a proposition which begs the question as little as any on a question that is always begged.

Nearly all his aphorisms on poetry and prose blend neatness and adequacy well, as this:[1045] “Prose and Poetry are like a journey and a walk. The object of the journey lies at its end: of the walk, in the walking.” Nay, he is blunter still, and to some people perhaps quite shocking, in comparing the two to eating and drinking.[1046] A text for a weighty critical sermon might, I think, be found in an aphorism of his,[1047] which is not easy to translate into English without periphrasis: and though he does not often venture upon the complicatedly figurative, there is another[1048] about Islands which I wish Mr Arnold had known, that he might have given us a pendant to Isolation. In fact, in these meditations of his, Grillparzer, though never pretentiously Delphic, is always for thoughts.

[Sidenote: and in individual judgment.]

The very large body[1049] of individual judgments on literature, ancient and modern, with which he supports these, and from which, in part no doubt, he drew them, is, on the whole though not wholly, a little inferior. But we can see the reason for this inferiority where it exists, and even then it does not make him worthless. He has somewhat imperfect sympathies. On Shakespeare’s Sonnets[1050] he is not much better than Hallam; his single judgment on Heine,[1051] though studiously moderate, might almost be called studiously inadequate: and in talking of Friedrich Schlegel he cannot forget the author of Lucinde, or that when they once met at Naples, the future mystic and Neo-Catholic ate too much, drank too much, and talked too greasily. This, considering that he himself can admire The Custom of the Country, seems a little hard.

[Sidenote: A critic of limitations: but a critic.]

Grillparzer is, in fact, one of those critics in exploring whose region one gets to be familiar with certain danger-signals which are not always signals of danger only. As a practised playwright he speaks with special interest on Shakespeare, and he has given us judgments on other dramatists, which have not less. His appreciation, by no means indiscriminate, of Beaumont and Fletcher[1052] is specially noteworthy, and he has a whole volume on the Spanish Drama. I do not know whether any of our modern Byron-worshippers are acquainted with his estimate[1053] of their idol, whom he fully accepts as “the second greatest English poet,” but of whom he gives an idea quite different from the average Continental one. As a dramatist once more, and a man with dramatic ideas, he is extremely hard on Lessing;[1054] but I do not know an admiring critic of Goethe who is much better[1055] on that difficult person. We know that he will not appreciate Walther von der Vogelweide, though he has no strong anti-mediæval prejudice as such; and he does not.[1056] Finally, let me give, as remarkable, his coupling of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and A. W. Schlegel’s Lectures on Drama as “two of the most mischievous books of modern times for an inexperienced understanding.” I am not satisfied with his calling Tieck a “chattering noodle” (“Fasler”), but at any rate he calls Gervinus “absurd.” He returns again and again to the charge against this latter egregious person, who is still quoted by the compilers of Shakespeare Hand-books and the writers of examination papers. If I had any need of pardoning (which I have not, since I understand them) his remarks on Walther, on the Sonnets, and on Heine, I would do it at once for the exclamation, “Du lieber Himmel!” which he, a German, makes on Gervinus’s most famous boast that “the English have left it to us Germans to do full justice to their Shakespeare,” and for his explosion at the methods by which “bis aufs Blut wird alles erklärt.”[1057]

In short, I strongly recommend Grillparzer, about whom I have seen very little in English, to study at the hands of those Englishmen who take an interest in criticism. A very considerable man of letters himself, he seems to have never, in the course of his long life, lost interest in the work of others. He had some natural limitations, and they appear to have been further tightened by his playwrightship and by the influence of Joseph Schreyvogel, a sort of Austrian Nisard, of whom I do not know much.[1058] But the quotations and account which I have given will, I think, show that he had no small root of the critical matter in him, and that in more than one or two instances he enunciated and observed critical truths which are not exactly the stereotyped headings of the critical copybook.

It is not necessary here, after what has been said repeatedly before, to enter into any apology for not discussing the abstract Æsthetic of the German nineteenth century. Even Hegel, though he is tempting, must be omitted; for, as an authority of unsuspected competence[1059] observes with some naïveté on this very point, “it is undoubtedly difficult to get a net result out of Hegel,” and it is with net results that we are concerned. But a disciple of his may be usefully discussed with reference to the more general sides of the matter.

[Sidenote: Carrière: his Æsthetik.]

The Æsthetik[1060] of Moritz Carrière is a sort of object-lesson on its subject. The praises which have been bestowed on its style are quite justified: there is no German book of the kind known to me that is pleasanter to read. Its learning and its arrangement are all that can be desired. And yet, as one reads it, the old reflections on The Elements of Criticism arise (with a difference of course) once more. The impressions produced are rather those of a long course of elegant sermons, with æsthetic substituted for theology, than of anything else. Here you may read that women are smaller than men; that “as the noses of children are small and stumpy, a retroussé nose in the adult indicates want of development, though with elegant culture [of the feature or the person?] it may be naïve and roguish”; that dilettanti are always plagiarists. The conclusion of the second volume, to the extent of nearly two hundred pages, is devoted to Poetry, and is very good reading. Sometimes whole pages are neatly woven of agreeable poetical citations, or of dicta from more or less important persons,—“Schiller says,” “Goethe observes,” and so on. We learn further how Music “presents the idea as the principle and measure of the movement of life, and connects the beauty of that which is to come with that of what is”— like, say, a dinner-bell when one is talking to an agreeable person in a pretty drawing-room. Observe that Herr Carrière is neither quack nor twaddler; he does really feel the beauties about which he is talking. Such a passage as that at the foot of p. 457, vol. ii., and the top of the next, on Homer’s method of bringing scenes and figures before us, is real criticism of a valuable kind,—not more, it is true, than a corollary of Lessing’s propositions, but worth adding to them, for all that. I know hardly anything more shrewdly and amusingly adjusted, as a sort of æstheticised “Rhetoric” of the Hermogenean type, than the remarks and illustrations about Figures, from that of the orator who said, “Let us burn our ships and launch out boldly into the open sea,” onwards. The attempts to connect different metres with distinctive mental effects, or with separate classes of subject, are again most ingenious. His defence of the rhymes of the Nibelungenlied against the characteristic criticism of Gervinus is admirable. In fact, the book is almost everywhere, as Mr Weller would say, “wery pretty.”

Only—as we have so often been constrained to add in dealing with critics, from the Greek Rhetoricians downwards—how much better employed would this erudition, this taste, this ingenious adjustment of exposition to example, have been upon individual and complete poems, books, writers! These pieces, these selected examples, are after all only branches torn from the living trunk, mutilated things, wanting their context almost always to give them full beauty and their own beauty. But this is not the worst: for at least on the doctrine of the Poetic Moment they will sometimes give that moment. But they are produced, not to give it but to exemplify a presumed classification and analysis of the manner of its giving. They have to yield a formula: and insensibly, inevitably, the heresy will grow upon the reader, that the formula will yield them. It is as if some diabolical physiologist took Helen from the arms of Paris or of Faustus, extracted her eyes, or tore off her hair, or drew ounces of the half-divine blood from her veins, dissected and analysed them, and said, “Gentlemen, this dissection reconstituted, this analysis ‘made up,’ will give you what is required to make you immortal.” But, alas! it will not. And the fact is, that no explanation of the manner in which the literary delight is produced is ever general or true of any but the individual instance. That delight is never the same twice running: these stars always have some, it may be infinitesimal, but discernible and individualising, glory. Yet Herr Carrière is a craftsmanlike and entertaining demonstrator of the Undemonstrable.

[Sidenote: Later German Shakespeare-critics.]

The performances of the later German Shakespeare-critics are so much better known in England than almost any other part of the literature of the subject that it seems unnecessary to devote much of our rapidly disappearing space to them. Gervinus, Delius, Ulrici, Elze, have all been translated, quoted, and so forth, with the curious deference to foreign opinion in matters of taste, which has so oddly accompanied English stiff-neckedness in general. [Sidenote: Gervinus: his German Poetry.] I am bound to say that I think not much of any of these pundits;[1061] and least of all of their great Panjandrum Gervinus. His critical quality, however, may be for our purpose better gauged by taking his large work on German Poetry.[1062] It is an estimable book enough; the author often says what he ought to have said, and does not very often or very outrageously say what he should not. But the faults of his Shakespeare-criticism—platitude, verbiage, attention to the unnecessary, and avoidance of the heart and root of the matter, the quality of Shakespeare as an English poet, mark this also. Take persons most diverse in character, time, what you will—take Walther von der Vogelweide, Hans Sachs, Opitz, Novalis, for instance—and read his verdicts on them. You will find that in the first place he hardly ever quotes or appreciates a phrase—in itself a tell-tale, and damagingly tell-tale, abstinence. But you will also find, in compensation for this reticence, a flood of general remark, (false) comparison, see-saw antithesis, and the like. By no means his worst judgment, but a most characteristic one, is that on Bürger, which I may partly translate, partly summarise, from the original:[1063]—

[Sidenote: On Bürger.]

“Bürger then appears to us as at once a pathological and a critical poet, a poet of Nature and of Art, a poet of the people and of Love. He belongs at once to the school of the North and to that of the South, relies at once on sensations and reflections. His nature-painting is apparently dashed on with a big brush, but it is careful in detail. There is in him a fight of the Universal and the Particular, of Art and Nature, of Endowment and Facility, of Poetry and Platitude.”

I do not know how many readers will sympathise with, or even understand, the kind of rage which, I confess it, such criticism as this excites in my mind. It is not exactly false criticism; on the contrary, it is rather true. But its truth has nothing vital, nothing germinal, nothing specially appropriate to the subject in it: and if there can be said to be anything specially appropriate to the writer, it is only matter for an unfavourable judgment of him. Any man, with a good deal of reading and a little practice, can string tic-tac antitheses of this kind, made up of critical commonplaces and terminology, together for pages. No man, from anything of the kind, could grasp the real differentia of Bürger— the fact that he was one of the first to make, in poetry, an almost convulsive attempt to get out of the conventional by attempting the supernatural.

In all these German Shakespeare-critics, moreover, the fault (which we have noticed even in Goethe) reappears, that they are criticising, not Shakespeare, but the translation of Shakespeare; that while they have plenty to say about the plot, and the “points in Hamlet’s soul,” and even sometimes the text in its lower aspects, the other and over-soul, the essence, the poetry, of Shakespeare not merely escapes, but apparently fails to interest or occupy them at all. On the accidents, the unnecessary things, they are voluble. “The rest is silence”—to expand which text in its present bearing were an insult.

[Sidenote: The Shakespeare-heretics: Rümelin.]

A word or two, however, may be given to the arch-heretic in this division—the interesting Herr Rümelin.[1064] I find, in relation to this subject, a MS. note, of no matter what author, which may deserve quotation, despite the impropriety of its phraseology: “Asinus Rumelinus. Asinity much invited by precedent asinity on the other side.” And really there is something in this. It is not merely that Herr Rümelin’s essay sets forth his thoughts as those eines Realisten, and thus declares its author a reactionary partisan against Idealism and Romanticism. By a quaint, but not uncommon, “suck of the current” he has adopted not a few of the fallacies of the school he combats. It is their Shakespeare, not the Shakespeare of Shakespeare and eternity, that he is belittling. We have seen how a sensible German like Grillparzer treated Gervinus’s boast about Germany as Shakespeare’s prophet. Rümelin’s demonstration that Shakespeare was forgotten in England for 150 years is only this same boast altered a little. It is, as every child ought to know now, and as I shall not here waste time in proving, an absolute falsehood: but it could be of no importance to the true critic if it were true. Gold scarcely ceases to be gold during the time that it is, or because it is, irrepertum: and perhaps the only thing that retains the slightest interest in this part of Herr Rümelin’s examination is his use of the argument that Bacon does not mention Shakespeare—a fertile source since of the finest mare’s-nests. But the Essay is a really interesting one, and might have done—though I do not know that it has done—much good to the chatterers about Shakespeare. The Southampton chatter, the chatter about the greatness of the Elizabethan period in connection with politics, &c., the chatter of Gervinus, the chatter of the Romantics—against all these Rümelin directs an anti-criticism, easy enough and sometimes not ineffective. As a Realist he does not (we can easily see why) like the character-play. As a Preceptist, he holds that Tragedy must not individualise, and that scarcely one of Shakespeare’s dramas contains a wohlgefügte pragmatische denkbare Handlung. As a mid-nineteenth century Liberal he is pained to find that Shakespeare was a Royalist and an aristocrat of the purest water. Comparing Shakespeare and Goethe (for there is much mere Chauvinism in Rümelin), he finds that the one “flashes on things like a rocket or a blue light,” while the other “shows them in a clear mirror.” But after all he admits “the joy in the poet.” So perhaps this poor heretic was not quite so far from the Kingdom of Heaven as Gervinus and Ulrici, for in reading them you are seldom invited to consider “the joy in the poet”—the Poetic Moment—at all.

We may conclude this chapter with notices of three later German critics, who are, in different ways, interesting and characteristic—the novelist Freytag; the cosmopolitan polygrapher, Karl Hillebrand; and the greatest, if the maddest, man of letters of modern Germany—Nietzsche.

[Sidenote: Freytag.]

For the first, Gustav Freytag’s Technik des Dramas[1065] could hardly lack mention here as the principal contribution to criticism of the chief novelist of Germany during the later nineteenth century, and as itself one of the main contributions to a division of our subject which comes direct from one of the main fountainheads, the Poetics of Aristotle. Freytag, however,—and the explicitness of his title bars any complaint on the subject,—occupies himself almost wholly with the theatrical side of the matter—such questions as that of verse or prose and the like being relegated to the close, and very briefly handled. Had he written three hundred years earlier we should have had more room for him. As it is, the chief thing noticeable, and that not favourably, is his adoption of that Goethean utilitarianism which we have stigmatised before. He says nothing, he tells us, about French classical drama or the drama of Spain, because “we have nothing more to learn and nothing to fear from them.” That, it need scarcely be said, is complete heresy according to the view of criticism maintained in this book. What you have to “fear” hardly in any case matters; and you have always something to learn.

[Sidenote: Hillebrand and cosmopolitan Criticism.]

Karl, or, as he sometimes called himself, Carl, Hillebrand is an interesting figure, and withal a typical one. He invented, I think, a useful word—“xenomania” or Fremdensucht—which was very proper for the nineteenth century: he attracted the notice, in his own country, of such a formidable and considerable person as the young Nietzsche; he wrote in several languages and lived in more countries, especially England and Italy. There was a time, which I can remember very well, when he “seemed to be a pillar.” But I am not so sure that he was one. He prided himself on his cosmopolitanism: and one of his best-known pieces, addressed to the editor of The Nineteenth Century and reprinted in the great collection of his miscellaneous works, entitled Zeiten Völker und Menschen,[1066] deals with the presence of Fremdensucht and insularity combined in Englishmen. We were, thought Herr Hillebrand some twenty or five-and-twenty years since, interesting ourselves in Continental matters at last, but we were not doing it in the right way. Frenchmen thought we interested ourselves too promiscuously in their men and matters; so did Germans. We put [did we?] Mérimée and Octave Feuillet on a level; Rachel and Madame Sarah Bernhardt. We distressed Herr Hillebrand’s cosmopolitanism and his particularism equally.

This is a sufficiently interesting and distinct point of view to have a few words here, especially as it has been often taken since. I venture to disagree with it in toto. It is very well, if your sight is weak, to have the best spectacles adjusted to it that art can adjust. But you will very seldom better your sight by taking somebody else’s spectacles; and if you borrow the spectacles of several other people and combine or frequently substitute them, you will very soon see “men as trees walking.” To the process of having spectacles made for yourself corresponds that of studying foreign literatures as widely as possible and as carefully as possible; the process of adopting French points of view of Frenchmen, German of Germans, and the like, answers, I think, to the other. There is a wrong interpretation of Sportam nactus es, but also a right. And I think Herr Hillebrand’s own results bear out what I have said. His critical work is very extensive; it had much, and still has some, interest. It is the work of a man of certainly more than average cleverness and of much more than average information; of a man with a really fair knowledge of literature and more than a fair knowledge of institutions, customs, national mores generally. Herr Hillebrand would never have made some, or many, of the little slips at which we laugh so much in other people, and at which other people laugh in us. But his cosmopolitanism, I think, eviscerated and emasculated his genius. In re-reading essays of his which I have read before, I have found them faded, tame, “fushionless”; in reading others for the first time they produce the same effect without the contrast. The satirist was justified in making fun of the “temptations To belong to other nations”; but, in a sense of which Mr Gilbert was not thinking, and of which I doubt his making fun, it is to credit and to advantage that an Englishman shall remain an Englishman, a German a German, and so forth. There is a moral in the story of Antæus.

Not that there is not in Hillebrand work still interesting (though it is usually rather too contemporary as well as too cosmopolitan) when he is dealing with Fielding and Sterne and Milton, and Machiavelli and Rabelais and Tasso, as well as when he is dealing with Doudan and Renan and Taine. He was for an age: but for rather a short one. And one of his papers is an awful example. It is entitled Delirium Tremens, and it characterises the work with which it deals as a “distressing aberration.” That work is analysed with considerable skill, and the article contains some shrewd remarks, notably one on the invariable tendency towards “charcoal-burner” faith of some kind even in the most free-thinking Frenchman. Hillebrand’s strength lay in things of this kind. But the instance shows where his strength did not lie, and that this was in the direction of literary criticism. For this “distressing aberration,” this effect of delirium tremens, is one of the capital imaginative works of the later nineteenth century—the Tentation de Saint-Antoine of Gustave Flaubert.

[Sidenote: Nietzsche.]

Nietzsche’s criticism[1067] is, on the one hand, very much what might be expected by any one who might have managed (it would be difficult) to read only that part of his work which does not contain it, and on the other throws a very useful amount of additional light on his general mental attitude. Himself a remarkable artist from the purely literary side—the best modern German prose-writer by far, with Heine and Schopenhauer—he cannot help paying literary art the same compliment which he pays to some other things, that, not exactly of believing and trembling, but of acknowledging as he blasphemes. He blasphemes, of course, pretty freely: take away blasphemy, parody, and that particular kind of borrowing which thinks to disguise itself by inserting or extracting “nots,” and there is not much of Nietzsche left but form. [Sidenote: Zarathustra, the Birth of Tragedy, and Der Fall Wagner.] The mere headings of Also Sprach Zarathustra will guide the laziest to his ultimate opinions upon poetry and other things. At the beginning, the Birth of Tragedy (1871) is, despite its title, hardly literary at all; its theory of an orgiastic hyperanthropic Dionysus-cult superseding the calm “Apollonian” Epic, and itself superseded by the corrupting philosophy of Socrates, being entirely philosophic (or philo_moric_). Later, the onslaught on Wagner is very literary, and consists, in fact, of a violent—of a frantic—protest against the tendencies of Romanticism, of which he quite correctly sees that Wagner is, with whatever differences, a musical exponent, and against “literary” music itself. Perhaps there never was a hostile contention which the other side could accept with such alacrity as Nietzsche’s approximation[1068]of Wagner and Victor Hugo. They are extremely alike in merits as in faults, and the recognition of the twinship is a point in favour of Nietzsche’s critical power, whatever his dislike of it may be.

[Sidenote: Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen.]

To attend more heedfully to chronological order—the four remarkable essays of the Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, which, early as they are (1873-76), are perhaps the last things in which Nietzsche displayed himself as entirely compos mentis, are close to our subject throughout,[1069] and not seldom openly deal with it. The tremendous castigation administered to the “Culture-Philistinism” of Strauss—a document very fit to be registered as an abiding corrective to the hymns of our German-praisers, from Mr. Arnold to Mr. Haldane, and all who shall follow—is sometimes directly, and always in spirit, literary-critical. The unfriendly attitude of the next paper to the Study of History may seem less so, for, as we have seen, literary criticism without literary history is almost hopeless. But here Nietzsche’s as yet unformulated, but certainly conceived, aspirations towards a future that was to be quite different from the past, probably come in, and he was entitled to regard with suspicion, and to meet with protest, the “dry-as-dust” character of German history-study. The enthusiastic encomia on Schopenhauer and Wagner are again as constantly literary in character as the subsequent denials of both.

[Sidenote: La Gaya Scienza.]

If the similarity of title in Nietzsche’s La Gaya Scienza (“Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft”) and in Mr Dallas’s above-mentioned book should awake expectations of criticism in anybody, he will be at first grievously disappointed, for, except an anticipation of a later fling at Seneca,[1070] he will, for a long time, find nothing at all of the kind. But he will make a very great mistake if he throws the book aside. The aphoristic manner, or rather the manner of detached notes, like Ben Jonson’s in the Discoveries, which Nietzsche had now adopted, makes it unsafe to conclude from any one page, or even from a considerable sequence of pages, what will meet us when we turn the next. In the middle, and again towards the end, we come upon “pockets” of our ore. From § 82 onwards, on the opposition of esprit to the Greek temper, on translation, on the origin of Poetry, we find many noteworthy things, leading up to a formal note on “Prose and Poetry,” wherein is the selection of Leopardi, Mérimée, Emerson, and Landor as the prose masters of the nineteenth century proper. Here Mérimée’s scorn and Landor’s pride may have had something to do with Nietzsche’s admiration: but they cannot be said to usurp their places. I am not Italian scholar enough to give an opinion on Leopardi’s claim. Emerson, some may think, while not denying his merits, “a little over-parted.” I should venture to substitute Schopenhauer, if not Nietzsche himself.[1071] And after this we at last come on the long missing passage on Shakespeare, only to find, as perhaps some may have been very well prepared to find, that Shakespeare is not treated as a poet at all, but as the author of Hamlet and the creator of—Brutus! Nietzsche, as most people should know, had a great idea of the Romans, thought them vornehm, and the nearest approaches in history to the Uebermensch; but his special selection of Brutus is very curious, though fortunately out of our range. The other pocket of the book comes long afterwards, and quite toward the end, where we get interesting things on modern German philosophers, “learned books and literature,” and the all-important question, “Was ist Romantik?” Here, however, Nietzsche goes off on Apollo and Dionysus as of old.

[Sidenote: Jenseits von Gut und Böse, &c.]

The late and already somewhat half-sane Jenseits von Gut und Böse, with its still later and still more fatally symptomatic continuation the Genealogie der Moral (1887), devotes itself mainly to non-literary exercises of Nietzsche’s general topsyturvyfication.[1072] But there are passages which at any rate come close to literature. Such are the curious remarks on Galiani, Aristophanes, Petronius, together with some on Plato and Lessing, in §§ 26-28 of Jenseits; those on certain Germans of the great age, from Goethe himself downwards, in § 247; very specially those on German style and speech, in § 250; and the quaint attack on English philosophy in § 255. It may be not improperly observed here, in connection with Nietzsche’s Anglophobia, that besides what was, as in the case of “der Alte Zauberer” (Wagner), a sufficient cause of hate, the fact that he had once been rather directed by and indebted to English thinkers,[1073] there were others. He paid us the compliment of believing England to be the European stronghold of Christianity and Morality, and seems to have known very little directly about us.

[Sidenote: Götzen-Dämmerung.]

The great critical “place” in Nietzsche, however, as far as I have read him (for I have not yet had time to explore the “rubbish-heaps raked together by abject adorers,” as a very competent authority once described them to me, of the Nachgelassene Werke) is the Götzen-Dämmerung (1889), his last publication before the prison-house closed. Nowhere is the Ishmaelite character, which reveals itself pathetically in the Zarathustra, so petulantly present. The very first paragraph batches together as “Meine Unmöglichen,” with a scornful tag to each tail, Seneca, Rousseau, Schiller, Dante, Kant, Hugo, Liszt, George Sand, Michelet, Carlyle, Mill, the Goncourts, and Zola—a somewhat heterogeneous company who receive some recruits in the amplifications of their judgments that follow. A hasty judge, who could not apply the system of ruthless toleration which has been applied in this book, might of course disable Nietzsche altogether on some of them. To say that Dante is “a hyena who makes poetry in graves” is, mutatis mutandis, no more and no less critical than to say that Nietzsche is a Bedlamite who sets his Bedlam on fire and sings and dances on the blazing walls. Here the source of uncritical blindness is obvious: and the explanation is renewed in the cases of Mill, George Sand, and one of the later additions, Renan. But the objection to Mill’s “offensive clearness,”[1074] to George Sand as “the milch-cow of beautiful style,” to Renan’s “nerve-dissolvingness,”[1075] are really literary objections, and, as some may think, not unjust ones.

Very interesting is his intense hatred of Sainte-Beuve for his “femininity,” his Romanticism (which Nietzsche does not, like some people, mistake), and (as he lets us see, with his usual naïveté) his critical power. His wrath with George Eliot for trying to retain Christian morality, after giving up Christian faith, is less literary. But, on the whole, Nietzsche’s criticism, such as it is, hangs very well together and is characteristic enough, even where it may seem, inconsistent. It has the special bents of the lover of Rausch, of the anti-crusader to whom, not as in the case of his much-admired Beyle,[1076] the Christian Hell, but the Christian Heaven, is something that leaves him no peace or patience, with the general drift which we have seen in German criticism, to fix on extra-literary points. A whole study might be made of his attitude to Goethe, whom he welcomes, salutes, almost adores as a fellow anti-crusader, as an example of vornehm selfishness and unsentiment, while he is never tired of bringing in some of Goethe’s greatest things, notably the ends of both parts of Faust, for his favourite end-of-the-nineteenth-century trick of parody-reversal.

[Sidenote: His general critical position.]

On the whole, therefore, we may call Nietzsche a contributor of extraordinarily interesting things to our history, and in some ways a literary critic in potentia, such as Germany has hardly given us save in the case of Novalis. But here, as elsewhere, his gifts of potency were marred by the impotency, the reckless, uncontrolled, uncontrollable flux and reflux of mood and temper, which distinguished him ever more and more. We have not required—we have seen that it is ridiculous to require—a rigid consistency, a development only in one straight line, from the critic. He may, he must, learn, branch out, even sometimes retrace his steps in a moderate degree. But when we find, with but a few years between the judgments, of Schopenhauer, that he is “a great educator,” a sort of intellectual Joshua to the German Israel, and that he is a “common smasher or debaser of the currency”;[1077] of Wagner that he is a hierophant, a master of masters, the “Alexander Magnus” of music, and that he is an “old sorcerer,” a “modern Cagliostro,” a “seducer and poisoner of Art,” we can but shake our heads. No man can go through such revolutions as these and remain a critic, if he ever was one. That in some ways Criticism has seen no nobler mind, no stronger or keener faculty, overthrown and lost to her, is, I think, true enough: but of the overthrow and the loss I can entertain no doubt.

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