V. REVIVALS AND COMMENCEMENTS…

V. REVIVALS AND COMMENCEMENTS

LIMITATIONS OF THIS CHAPTER—SPAIN—ITALY—DE SANCTIS—CHARACTER OF HIS WORK—SWITZERLAND—VINET—SAINTE-BEUVE ON HIM—HIS CRITICISM OF CHATEAUBRIAND AND HUGO—HIS GENERAL QUALITY—AMIEL: GREAT INTEREST OF HIS CRITICAL IMPRESSIONS—EXAMPLES THEREOF—THE PITY OF IT.

[Sidenote: Limitations of this chapter.]

Something apologetic has to be said, also, in regard to this present chapter. It is confessedly inadequate as a History, in each individual case, of the critical performances of European countries, other than England, France, and Germany; it is perhaps not so inadequate as a constituent of the present work. That the writer does not pretend to any such acquaintance with these performances as he may, he believes, claim with the others, may seem a rather damning plea: yet perhaps it is not so. For it is for the other side to show that such acquaintance was necessarily incumbent on him, and that, not possessing it, he was bound to postpone the setting forth of what he had to say until the acquisition was accomplished. I acknowledge that I am not of this opinion. In some cases, as we shall see, the critical achievements now under consideration are almost demonstrably unimportant to the general history of Criticism as yet: and in all it may, I think, be fairly contended that they are for the present negligible. For the present, no doubt, only. There probably will come a time when such a new-comer as Russian will extend to European criticism the influence which it has already begun to exercise on European literature, and when older literatures, like Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and the Scandinavian varieties, will reassert, or assert for the first time, their position. But they have hardly done so yet, save in the case of those who, like Dr Brandes, are not of our competence, as living.

[Sidenote: Spain.]

The most remarkable of the confessions of this with which I am acquainted is given by the part relating to our present subject, of that work, so freely used, and so necessarily praised, in the last volume, the Historia de las ideas estéticas en España of Señor Menéndez y Pelayo. This consists of three substantial volumes, or about a third of the whole work. Yet it is hardly too much to say that it is solely concerned with æsthetic ideas out of Spain—that it is an account of the general course of European, not of the particular course of Spanish, criticism. The foreigner and the general historian can hardly be blamed for not attempting what the native and the specialist declines. If, indeed, we were concerned with living writers, Señor Menéndez himself and others would give us most satisfactory occupation: but we are not.

[Sidenote: Italy.]

The case of Italy is rather different. Here also there are notable critical names with which our scheme precludes us from dealing, but here native enterprise has not “confessed and avoided.” I do not know anything, in any other language, like the very remarkable Antologia della Nostra Critica Moderna of Signor Luigi Morandi:[1078] and I certainly do not know of any such testimony to the existing critical interests of another country as the fact that sixteen editions of it appear to have been sold in little more than as many years. Yet this very book justifies our refusal. Signor Morandi has not hesitated to “throw back,” not merely to Manzoni, who was born fifteen years within the eighteenth century, but even to Baretti, whose whole life was comprised therein, and who was born in the year in which Addison died. Yet by far the larger number of his contributors are living. They have already done much to make good the claim of their country, if not to that pride of critical place which she held in the sixteenth century, at any rate to a place far higher than she could claim in the seventeenth and eighteenth: and they are likely to go farther yet. For Italy, never quite neglectful of the glories of her older literature, has of late turned to their study with a will; and in this turning, as we have seen, lies the one and certain way to a critical Renaissance.[1079]

[Sidenote: De Sanctis.]

We must, however, give some special mention to one writer who is very remarkable in himself, and who is generally admitted to have been, as far as in one man lay, the author, or at least encourager, and guide of this renewed attention to criticism in Italy. Francesco de Sanctis is undoubtedly a very interesting person. To us his interest does not lie— to the same extent as it may to others—in the coincidence of his time and his efforts with the new struggle for, and attainment of, political unity: but we can cheerfully allow a place for this. Italy wanted to do for and by herself, in criticism as elsewhere, and he came to show her how so to do. But from our point of view his critical character is interesting somewhat differently, and somewhat differently explicable. He obviously, like Mr Arnold in England, like others elsewhere, was determined towards criticism by the influence of the French Romantics, especially Sainte-Beuve. But he blended with the general characteristics of this criticism not so much Mr Arnold’s specially literary devotion to the greater gods of ancient and modern times, not so much Sainte-Beuve’s own irresistible attraction to the character, the manners, and so forth of his subjects—as the old Italian addiction, already revived and redirected by Vico, towards philosophising. [Sidenote: Character of his work.] In the first Essay of his most famous, influential, and characteristic book[1080] he cannot write more than a few lines without flinging his disciple neck and heels into the ocean with the question, as a chief one of Literature, “What is the destiny of the human generations?” A momentous question certainly: but one which concerns literature only as it concerns everything else from theology to therapeutics, and perhaps a little less than it concerns most of them. But this opens the old truceless war, and we must turn away from it. Let me only suggest that De Sanctis is a little unfair to the ancients when he says in the same essay that “the sense of Life begins to reveal itself in Shakespeare.” Many a dialogue and many a chorus, many an oration and many a historic passage, will rise up in judgment against him for this, at the great day of critical account.

We must not, however, be too severe on him; for a certain southern tendency to hyperbole is not one of his least engaging characteristics. He shows himself of the nineteenth-century in general, and of the tribe of Sainte-Beuve in particular, by being almost nothing if not an essayist. They complain of his History of Italian Literature that, good as it is, it is too much of a bundle of Essays; his two best-known works, Saggi Critici[1081] and Nuovi Saggi,[1082] do not pretend to be anything else. The latter is chiefly devoted to Italian subjects, for De Sanctis was deeply imbued with a generous cult of his own noble literature, which is one of the best features of the Italians. The Saggi Critici is more miscellaneous, and so more representative. I do not know his work quite exhaustively enough to be certain how much he knew of English; but it is rather noteworthy that in dealing with Beatrice Cenci his reference to Shelley is exceedingly slight, and might almost be called perfunctory. On the other hand, he has an interesting (first hand?) comparison between “Machbet” and Wallenstein. But French literature, and especially contemporary French literature, seems to have interested him most. He has a very vigorous and successful defence of Hugo’s Triboulet against Saint-Marc Girardin, and what seems to me the best, and the most characteristic, of all his essays is one on the Contemplations, where two distinct and rather opposite currents of thought and sentiment clash and ripple in the most refreshing manner. Nowhere is there a better example of that generous hyperbolical rhetoric which has been glanced at: no one has given a more amiable exhibition of that petite fièvre cérébrale which has been noticed more than once, and which the great Frenchman excites in all fit minds. But while the critical De Sanctis applauds and revels, the philosophical De Sanctis has qualms. Is not (here we have an echo of Planche) Hugo’s art more musical than poetical? Poetry must have “a clear silver” sound. No sound can give you any idea: where we have Mr John Morley’s sad heresy about the “vernal wood” anticipated. So once more the besoin de philosopher did a little spoil De Sanctis, and has continued, let us say, not quite to improve his countrymen and disciples. But he did a great, an effectual, and to this day an enduring and admirable work: and even Italy, high as is the standard which she has set her children, is justified also of this her child.

[Sidenote: Switzerland.]

The accounts which I could give of nineteenth-century criticism in most other nations would be second-hand, would have to be meagre, and, for the reasons just given, as well as others to be added at the end of this chapter, would be almost superfluous; but there is one—the smallest of all—which cannot be quite passed by. Switzerland, from geographical situation and linguistic and racial circumstance, has always been exposed to whatever literary influences were felt in each and all of her three great neighbours: and her contributions to the literature of Europe, stimulated thereby, have always been more than respectable. We have somewhat unceremoniously classed not a few of the authors of these contributions according to language rather than to strict nationality. But the literary activity of the Swiss—chiefly in French, but as Swiss—has been particularly great and particularly critical during the nineteenth century: and we may give some space to two[1083] famous examples of it, one in the earlier, one in the later, division of the period—to Vinet and to Amiel.

[Sidenote: Vinet.]

Alexandra Vinet was not a long-lived man, scarcely completing his half-century. But from a very early age he was a teacher of literature, and though he devoted part of his energies to theology and other subjects, he was always, in a manner, a critic in his heart. His Chrestomathie Française,[1084] arranged when he was little past thirty, was one of the earliest books of the kind, and is still one of the best, as far as its time would let it be: and his History of Eighteenth Century French Literature[1085] is, and will remain, a minor Classic. But perhaps no book of his affords better occasion for criticising his criticism than the posthumous collection of his Études sur la Littérature Française au Xix^{ème} Siècle.[1086]

[Sidenote: Sainte-Beuve on him.]

Vinet was (to give a choice of metaphors) dubbed Knight-Critic, or admitted of the Academy of Universal Criticism, at the hands of Sainte-Beuve himself—the Grandmaster of Order and Academy alike—in an article written in 1837, and at present contained in the first thirty pages or so of the Portraits Contemporains, vol. iii. It is written in a more patronising tone, with more meticulousness of detail, and with less easy mastery of method, than it would have been as a Causerie, a dozen or two dozen years later; but it is very flattering on the whole, and well enough deserved. The Master’s sword, however, as usual, in the process of dubbing, finds out, lightly but unerringly, the joints of the neophyte’s harness. “Les idées morales, religieuses, chrétiennes, eurent toujours le pas dans son esprit sur les opinions purement littéraires.” This is the same peculiarity which, with a difference, afterwards distinguished Vinet’s compatriot, M. Scherer: and it is very noticeable in the book which we have selected for comment. [Sidenote: His criticism of Chateaubriand and Hugo.] The gown and bands of the Protestant pastor are perpetually hampering the critic’s step and gesture, and flopping up into his eyes. He admires Chateaubriand,[1087] but he is constantly stopping to tell him how sad it is that he should confuse Popish superstition with Christian verity. He admires Victor Hugo[1088]—he does him indeed much more justice than one might have expected, and than remarks on Vinet himself would sometimes lead the second-hand reader to think. But he is made unhappy as a man by Hugo’s art-for-art’s-sake attitude, by his early royalism, by his later anti-Christianity or non-Christianity: while as a professor he is shocked by single-syllable lines, by audacious metaphors (yet he himself finely says somewhere that “only one poet has a greater range of metaphor than Hugo, and that is Humanity itself”), by some real enormities and more escapades of bravado. One is sometimes tempted to laugh at such things as his review of Les Burgraves,[1089] with its tone of half-puzzled seriousness, till one comes again to such excellent points as the remark that “Hugo is sometimes mistakable for a parody of Hugo.”

[Sidenote: His general quality.]

On the whole, however, I confess that I find Vinet rather estimable than enjoyable. He is distinctly lourd: though it would be unjust and inaccurate to call him by the dictionary equivalent of that term in English. He carries his Chair too much with him,[1090] and seems to think it necessary to set it down with an effort, and formally establish himself in it, before he makes any deliverance. I do not—I think I may at this eleventh hour ask my readers if I have not justified this claim to impartiality—object to him because he is what he calls a spiritualist in art, or because, against my own views, he pronounces[1091] that there can be no such thing as “pure” literature. I could produce from him a very large number of acute and true critical aperçus, like those above cited. He is never merely trivial or negligible: I do not think that he was in the least indifferent about literature. But he seems to me to leave his reader indifferent. His critical method has none of that maestria which carries one away, and only sets one down again when it chooses to relax its grip. There is no stimulus in Vinet, such as we find after widely different fashions in Sainte-Beuve himself and in Planche, in Saint-Victor and in Taine—nay, even in M. Scherer. There is neither persuasion nor provocation in him: he disposes you neither to follow nor to fight.

[Sidenote: Amiel: great interest of his critical impressions.]

Of the famous and much-discussed work of Henri François Amiel,[1092] we are fortunately concerned only with the literary criticism, the value of which Mr Arnold duly saw, though, in deference to other persons, perhaps, he did not pay so much attention thereto as to some other matters. This literary criticism is of great interest, and I may as well say at once that I think M. Scherer did not do it justice[1093] when he said of his friend that “en littérature, il reculait devant une œuvre.” He could not here mean, what is true, that Amiel’s timid and half-despairing nature recoiled before the completion of a work, for he makes it a parallel with his recoiling before avowal in love, and quotes his own words about his difficulty in “enjoying naïvely and simply.” Undoubtedly this “moral eunuchism” (for it is impossible not to think of the famous passage in Peter Bell the Third) is to be laid to Amiel’s charge too often; but I think conspicuously not in his presentments and judgments of literature. He is here far more healthy and far more natural than anywhere else. Indeed, he is sometimes so very little sicklied over with any pale cast that he frankly and naïvely records his changes of impression about the same book as he reads. These changes are, in tolerably active and sensitive natures, so rapid and curious that some practised reviewers have made it a principle, whenever they can, first to read the book they are reviewing through, with as little interruption as possible, lest the “plate” shift or change; and, secondly, never to review it on the same day on which they read it, that the impressions may have time to blend and harmonise. The most interesting, perhaps, of Amiel’s records of experience in this kind is the group of impressions of Eugénie de Guérin, which occur together in the Journal at vol. i. p. 197. He reads and re-reads her on successive September days in 1864, and reads her once more in the middle of October. The first impression (which maintains itself for the two days) is altogether one of enthusiasm, not merely in regard to the sentimental side, the impression nostalgique, &c., but with a delighted recognition of verve, élan, greatness of soul in this “Sévigné des Champs” [Notre Dame des Rochers will forgive!]. After the month’s interval he does not recant: but finds a rather less charming side as well. Eugénie’s existence is at once “too empty and too confined”: he wants “more air and space.” Now both these impressions are genuine and vivid: and, what is more, they are both frankly taken and expressed, without any gaucherie or “feeling faint,” any “touching the hem of the shift,” and daring no more.

[Sidenote: Examples thereof.]

And this character of at least relative vivacity—of ease and power in enjoyment—generally distinguishes, as it seems to me, the literary entries, which have far less of what some have called the ton amielleux about them than any others. The description of the style of Montesquieu[1094] is quite admirably true and fresh: and if that of Joubert[1095] is open to more exception, it is precisely because Amiel is mixing up Joubert’s utterances as a literary critic and his utterances as a philosopher, &c., too much; because he is not keeping his own saner organ of judgment mainly at work. The fastidious and morbid side does show itself in that on Rousseau, which follows immediately: but this we should expect. On Vinet,[1096] though too complimentary, as was for a dozen reasons almost inevitable, he shows extraordinary acuteness and finesse, as also on Sismondi.[1097] If he is less satisfactory on Chateaubriand, we can again explain it, and he does justice to René. The apology for Quinet[1098] is as judicious as it is sympathetic: and I know few more curious and interesting companion passages in criticism than those on Hugo and Lamartine earlier, on Corneille and Hugo later, which occur almost together in the book, though there was some time between the composition of them.[1099]

In the first of these, the juxtaposition of the citations from Les Châtiments and Jocelyn is a stroke of genius; in the latter batch, though it is quite clear that the judge does not completely like either the author of Polyeucte or the author of Les Misérables, the indication of characteristics is even greater in another way, because more elaborated and responsible. On M. Cherbuliez[1100] Amiel is again of the first interest, because the slight over-valuation of compatriotism on the small scale is balanced by a distinct antagonism of “nervous impression.” And we have even a more curious “place” in the notice of John Halifax,[1101] which is the last of our passages in the first volume. Here Amiel’s starting-point is a vain imagination—the usual misjudgment of things English, by a man who does not know England— but the use made of it is singularly good. The second volume gives us another invaluable pair on the most antecedently not to be paired of writers, About and Lotze—who nevertheless bring out between them the remarkable powers of Amiel’s mind-camera. The summer of 1869 supplies more documents on Lamennais, Heine (inadequate this latter, but again necessarily), and Renan, with admirable obituary remarks to follow on Sainte-Beuve. One side of Taine—the side up to the date almost solely in evidence—comes out two years afterwards,[1102] and the remaining references that I have are so numerous that I fear they, or rather some of them only, must be collected in a note.[1103]

[Sidenote: The pity of it.]

We must, however, in order to take an accurate and complete view of Amiel as a critic, and not merely of Amiel’s occasional criticisms, remember that these aperçus, brilliant as they are, are scattered over more than thirty years, and that they form, as it were, the lucid intervals in a lifelong night of moping, the islets far scattered and estranged from another, amid the nigras undas lethargi. That the man who wrote them was, at the time of writing, almost invariably a sane, mentally active, “moderately cheerful” being, is, I think, absolutely beyond question; that he might, if he had chosen to write more and to give himself more freely to that which comes before the writing, have freed himself to a great extent from his Melancholia, I have no doubt. Escape from that dread yet sweet enchantress—that serpent not of old Nile but of the older Ocean that flows round the world—no man can wholly who has been born of her servants; probably no such man would ever wish to do so. But there are two gates of partial and temporary emancipation— the Gate of Humour and the Gate of Study—which she usually permits to stand open, and through which men may pass, lest her sway become tyranny. That of Humour was apparently barred to Amiel: the other evidently was not. But he would very rarely use it. We know that he had many opportunities of contributing to critical journals, and that he would not take them, but fled back to Maya and the Great Wheel. Here the other, the more popular, the more irritating, side of him comes in.

But I can see no pose whatever in the literary entries. On the contrary, their freshness and spontaneity make a very remarkable contrast to almost all the rest of the book, except perhaps a few of the Nature-passages. Still, they are “intervals and islets” only—there is a singular want of connection between them. Amiel seems seldom or never to have troubled himself in the least about taking any connected views of literature: he seldom or never extends the remarkable comparative power which he shows in his various companion sketches. And, further, I am not certain that if he had attempted regular studies or causeries they would have been good—that he would not have maundered off into the vague instead of giving grasped views and judgments. This, however, no one can decide. What remains positive and proved is, first, that his intellect never shows to greater advantage than in his literary passages.

Sed hæc hactenus. I believe honestly, and not as a subterfuge to cover pusillanimity or laziness, that if I were to give here an examination of notable critics during the nineteenth century from every nation and country in Europe, I should not really advance the survey of criticism which we now possess in the very least. Until a time so recent that it falls out of our consideration, all these countries and nations have most certainly been following—until, perhaps, one which is not recent but still to come, they seem likely to follow, the same course which the Three First have pursued before them, and in most, if not in all cases, have followed their leaders in a more definite order of sequence still. All, about the second or third decade of the century, devoured Scott and Byron; all, a little (or more than a little) later, reinforced our influence by that of the French Romantic movement; most, earlier or later, devoted themselves to that German literature which had in a sense preceded ours, as it certainly had the French. In all, the Romantic leaven worked itself out, under the conditions of the literature and the individual, to spirit, or wine, or vinegar, as the case might be. In all, “Realism” and “Naturalism,” “Decadence” and “Preciousness,” showed themselves, as similar things have shown themselves many a time before, in the merry-go-round of history and of literature. Quite lately, in some—Russian, Norwegian, Belgian, que-sais-je?—signs of secondary fermentation have been shown, which have greatly impressed some observers. But it is as yet much too early to take serious critical account of them.

And so the long journey—the tale of length also, which recounts it—may, if it actually must not, end with a few general observations of summary and reflection, to correspond to those which we have interspersed before.

CONCLUSION

CONCLUSION.

§ I. THE PRESENT STATE OF CRITICISM.

§ II. THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER.

I.

In a letter (written on what was to prove his deathbed) which I received from my friend of nearly forty years, the late Bishop of London, in reference to the first volume of this work, he said he had often wished it possible to begin books of the kind at the end, and write backward, so as at once to engage the interest of the reader on matter more or less known to him, and to lead him on to the unknown by easy stages, instead of plunging him into a bath of strange matter. I nearly always found in Creighton’s utterances—from the time when we used to outwatch the Bear in certain lofty rooms looking over Merton Meadow, and the Broad Walk, and the river, towards the full of the moon—a Hinterland as well as a foreground of meaning. And in this case, no doubt, the advantage of such a topsyturvyfication, if it were practicable, would not be confined to the reader. It is almost as important to the writer that he should not lose himself too much in “origins”—that he should keep fruit as well as root in view—nay, that, if possible, he should have a sort of Alcinous' garden of the subject before him, with its various developments simultaneously present. I hope, indeed, that I have not quite failed, as it is, to accomplish something of this tregetour-work for my own benefit and the reader’s. Yet even “beginning at the end” would have had its dangers, for in no part of the book is what we have sometimes called a “horizontal” view more necessary, or more apparently hard to maintain, than in this present. The immense mass of material which has to be selected or rejected is an obvious difficulty: and the certainty that, as readers in the earlier part have grumbled at too extensive treatment of matters of which they knew nothing, so in this later they will grumble at too curt treatment of what they do know and expect to be treated fully—is equally obvious. But these are not really formidable dragons or lions. To grapple with the first is the plain and prima facie business of the adventure, and to the second the adventurer must make up his mind.

But the knight’s worst foes now, as of old, are not lions or dragons, but treacherous and deluding enchanters and enchantresses, taking advantage of his own weakness. And the difficulty of keeping a steady, achromatic, comparative estimate of the criticism of to-day and of yesterday is in this instance Archimago and Duessa at once. We have seen, again and again, during the progress of our history, how at one time—a long time ago for the most part—Criticism has been entirely bewitched by the idea of a Golden Age, when all poets were sacred and all critics gave just judgment: how, at another, a confidence, bland or pert as the case might be, has existed (and exists) that we are much wiser than our fathers. Above all, we have seen repeatedly that constant and most dangerous delusion that the fashion which has just ceased to be fashionable is a specially bad and foolish one, with its concomitant and equally unreasonable but rather less dangerous opposite, that the fashion that is in is the foolishest and feeblest of all fashions. With these things we have hitherto had to cope only at long bowls, so that it has been comparatively easy to keep a critical head. We are now at closest grapple with them: and while it cannot but be difficult to escape or to conquer, it will be wellnigh impossible not to seem captured or vanquished to spectators who have themselves not fully purged their eyes with the necessary euphrasy and rue.

From these same dangers, however, the very fact of having steadily worked through the history from the beginning, yet with an abiding memory of the end, should be something of a safeguard for writer and reader alike. We have seen how justly Mr Rigmarole might pronounce all times “pretty much like our own” in respect of the faults and dangers of criticism, though this time might incline to that danger and that to this. If one—even one—lesson has emerged, it must have been that to select the favourite critical fancy of any time as the unum necessarium is fatal—or redeemed only by the completeness with which such a selection, when faithfully carried out, demonstrates its own futility. Yet we have seen also that the criticism of no time is wholly idle or wholly negligible—that the older periods and the older men are no “shadows,” but almost more real, because more original, than the newer—that each and all have lessons, from the times of prim and strictly limited knowledge to the times of swaggering and nearly unlimited ignorance. And we should not be quite unable to apply these.[1104]

In the preceding Book we have surveyed, in most cases virtually and in some actually, to the end of the Nineteenth century, the latest stage or stages of that modified and modernised criticism, the rise of which was traced in the first Book of the present volume, and its victorious establishment in the second. We have seen how—owing partly, no doubt, to the mere general law of flux and reflux, but partly, and perhaps mainly, to the enlarged study of literature, and the breaking down, in connection with this, of the Neo-classic standards and methods,—judging a posteriori, or, as Johnson, prophesying and protesting, called it, “by the event,” came to take the place of judging a priori, or by the rule. That in many cases the new critics would not themselves have admitted this description of their innovations we have not attempted to deny or disguise: but we have not been able to agree with them. We have, however, seen also that to satisfy the craving for generalities and for “pushing ignorance further back,” new preceptist systems, in no small number, and sometimes of great pretensions and no small complexity, have been advanced, and that the new subject of “Æsthetics”—in itself little more than a somewhat disorderly generic name for these systems—has obtained considerable recognition. But no one of these has, nor have all of them together, attained anything like that position of acknowledgment, “establishment,” and authority which was enjoyed by the Neo-classic faith: and we have seen that some of the straitest doctrinaires have condescended, while the general herd of critics have frankly preferred, to judge authors as they found them.

That the results have been in many ways satisfactory, it seems impossible for any one but the extremest of partisans to deny. The last and worst fault of any state, political or other, that of “decreeing injustice by a law,” has been almost entirely removed (at least as a general reproach) from the state of Criticism. That a work of art is entitled to be judged on its own merits or demerits, and not according as its specification does or does not happen to be previously entered and approved in an official schedule—this surely cannot but seem a gain to every one not absolutely blinded by prejudice. Nor is it the only point which ought to unite all reasonable suffrages. By the almost necessary working of the new system, the personnel of Criticism has been enlarged, improved, strengthened in a most remarkable degree. The old opposition of the poet and the critic has ceased to exist. It is true indeed that, as we have seen, it never existed as an absolute law; but it was a prevailing one, and it deprived criticism of some of its most qualified recruits, or made them, if they joined, inconsistent, like Lope, and Dryden, and Johnson. Nay, Coleridge himself could hardly have been the critic he was under the older dispensation, much less those other poets, many and of many countries, who have enriched the treasury of a Goddess once thought to be the poet’s deadliest foe.

Yet, again, putting the contributions of poets, as poets, on one side, the general literary harvest of the kind has been undoubtedly more abundant, and in its choicer growths more varied, more delightful, even more instructive. A collection of the best critical results of the last fifty years only would certainly yield in these points to no similar book that could be compiled from the records of any other period, even of much greater length. From the perfected craftsmanship of Saint-Beuve, and the whole critical production of Matthew Arnold, through the work of writers unnecessary to enumerate, because all possible enumeration would almost necessarily be an injustice, you might collect—not a volume, not half a dozen, but a small, and not so very small, library, of which you could not merely say “Here be truths,” but “Here is reading which any person of ordinary intelligence and education will find nearly, if not quite, as delightful as he can find in any other department of belles lettres, except the very highest triumphs of prose and poetic Fiction itself.”

Now, the removal of the reproach of injustice, the removal of the reproach of dulness, these are surely good and even great things: while better, and greater still, is the at least possible institution of a new Priesthood of Literature, disinterested, teaching the world really to read, enabling it to understand and enjoy, justifying the God and the Muse to Men.

This is a fair vision; so fair, perhaps, that it may seem to be, like others, made of nothing more solid than “golden air.” That would be perhaps excessive, for, as has been pointed out above, the positive gains under this New Dispensation, both of good criticism produced and of good literature freed from arbitrary persecution, have been very great. But, as we foreshadowed in the Interchapter at the end of the last volume, there is another side to the account, a side not to be ignored. If Buddha and Mr Arnold be right, and if “Fixity” be “a sign of the Law”—then most assuredly Modern Criticism is not merely lawless, but frankly and wilfully antinomian. It is rare to find two critics of competence liking just the same things; it is rarer still to find them liking the same things for the same reason. And so it happens that the catholic ideal which this New Criticism seemed likely to establish is just as far off, and just as frequently neglected or even outraged, as in the old days of strict sectarianism, and without the same excuse. The eighteenth-century critic could render a reason, pro tanto valid, for patronising Chaucer, and taking exceptions even to Milton, because neither was like Dryden. But the critic of to-day who belittles Dryden because he is not like Chaucer or Milton is utterly without excuse:—and yet he is to be found, and found in high places. If (as in another case) critics were to be for a single day what they ought to be, the world would no doubt be converted; but there certainly does not appear to be much more chance of this in the one case than in the other.

And so the enemy—who is sometimes a friendly enemy enough—has not the slightest difficulty in blaspheming,—in asking whether the criterion of pleasure does not leave the fatal difficulty: “Yes: but pleasure to whom?”; in demanding some test which the simple can apply; in reproaching “Romantic” critics with faction and will-worship, with inconsistency and anarchy. Nor perhaps is there any better shift than the old Pantagruelian one—to passer oultre. There are these objections to the modern way of criticism: and probably they can never be got rid of or validly gainsaid. But there is something beyond them, which can be reached in spite of them, and which is worth the reaching.

This something is the comprehensive and catholic possession of literature—all literature and all that is good in all—which has for the first time become possible and legitimate. From Aristotle to La Harpe— even to one of the two Matthew Arnolds—the covenant of criticism was strictly similar to that of the Jewish Law,—it was a perpetual “Thou shalt not do this,” or “Thou shalt do this only in such and such a specified way.” There might be some reason for all the commandments, and excellent reason for some; but these reasons were never in themselves immortal, and they constantly tended to constitute a mortal and mortifying Letter. The mischief of this has been shown in something not far from two thousand pages, and there is no need to spend more time on it. Nor is it necessary even to argue that in the region of Art such a Law entirely lacks the justification which it may have in the region of Morals.

But it may fairly be asked, How do you propose to define any principles for your New Critic? And the answers are ready, one in Hellenic, one in Hebraic phraseology. The definition shall be couched as the man of understanding would define it: and if any will do the works of the New Criticism he shall know the doctrine thereof. And the works themselves are not hard to set forth. He must read, and, as far as possible, read everything—that is the first and great commandment. If he omits one period of a literature, even one author of some real, if ever so little, importance in a period, he runs the risk of putting his view of the rest out of focus; if he fails to take at least some account of other literatures as well, his state will be nearly as perilous. Secondly, he must constantly compare books, authors, literatures indeed, to see in what each differs from each, but never in order to dislike one because it is not the other. Thirdly, he must, as far as he possibly can, divest himself of any idea of what a book ought to be, until he has seen what it is. In other words, and to revert to the old simile, the plate to which he exposes the object cannot be too carefully prepared and sensitised, so that it may take the exactest possible reflection: but it cannot also be too carefully protected from even the minutest line, shadow, dot, that may affect or predetermine the impression in the very slightest degree.

To carry this out is, of course, difficult; to carry it out in perfection is, no doubt, impossible. But I believe that it can be done in some measure, and could be done, if men would take criticism both seriously and faithfully, better and better—by those, at least, who start with a certain favourable disposition and talent for the exercise, and who submit this disposition to a suitable training in ancient and modern literature. And by such endeavours, some nearer approach to the “Fair Vision” must surely be probable than was even possible by the older system of schedule and precept, under which even a new masterpiece of genius, which somehow or other “forced the consign” and established itself, became a mischief, because it introduced a new prohibitive and exclusive pattern. I have said more than once that, according to the common law of flux and reflux—the Revolution which those may accept who are profoundly sceptical of Evolution—some return, not to the old Neo-classicism, but to some more dogmatic and less æsthetic criticism than we have seen for the last three generations, may be expected, and that there have been not a few signs of its arrival. But this is a History, not a Prophecy, and sufficient to the day is the evil thereof. Perhaps even the good is not quite so insufficient as the day itself, “chagrined at whatsoe’er it is,” may be apt to suppose.

II.

“Who would has heard Sordello’s story told.”

In these three volumes an endeavour has been made to fulfil the pledge given at their beginning, and to set before the reader, in a plain tale, what men have actually done, said, and thought in Criticism of Literature, in Judging of Authors. We have seen how the art grew up, like so many other arts, as a sort of parergon, as a corollary upon the strictly practical study of Rhetoric for the purpose of the orator: and how it was long held in a sort of subjection to this techne, which, if not exactly a techne banausos, certainly must rank far below the study and the fruition of the whole of literature. We have seen how, in the times called ancient, it never got wholly free from this inferior position; how, in the times called mediæval, it hardly showed any signs of life; how it revived with the general new birth, and what have been its fortunes since. There can be no need to pad this already stout volume with abstracts of our Interchapters. The story of Criticism is actually before the reader, and if he will not take it now, that it is at last given to him, because there is wanting something that is not the story, I cannot help it. No doubt there are some, perhaps there are many, who honestly and impartially think the story not worth giving, think it a story of something, at best a superfluity, generally a failure, at worst a nuisance, redeemable and excusable only (if then) by being made to serve as illustration of some philosophic theory. But I have said often enough and positively enough, though I trust not too contumaciously, that I do not think so.

And even if the record seem too often a record of failure and mistake, there is a cheerful side to this also. Most of the dangers of criticism, as this long survey must have sufficiently taught those who care to learn, are comfortably and reassuringly (if from another point of view despairingly) old. We know they will come, and we know they will go, whether in our time or in another we cannot say, but it does not much matter.

“The Whole man idly boasts to find,” no doubt. Not many have even attempted to do it; few who have attempted it have succeeded in that comparatively initial and rudimentary adventure which consists in justly finding the parts. But Criticism is, after all, an attempt, however faulty and failing, however wandering and purblind, to do both the one and the other. No Muse, or handmaid of the Muses (let it be freely confessed) has been less often justified of her children: none has had so many good-for-nothings for sons. Of hardly any have some children had such disgusting, such patent, such intolerable faults. The purblind theorist who mistakes the passport for the person, and who will not admit without passport the veriest angel; the acrid pedant who will allow no one whom he dislikes to write well, and no one at all to write on any subject that he himself has written on, or would like to write on, who dwells on dates and commas, who garbles out and foists in, whose learning may be easily exaggerated but whose taste and judgment cannot be, because they do not exist;—these are the too often justified patterns of the critic to many minds. The whole record of critical result, which we have so laboriously arranged and developed, is a record of mistake and of misdoing, of half-truths and nearly whole errors.

So say they, and so let them say: things have been said less truly. But, once more, all this is no more Criticism itself than the crimes and the faults of men are Humanity in its true and eternal idea. Criticism is the endeavour to find, to know, to love, to recommend, not only the best, but all the good, that has been known and thought and written in the world. If its corruption be specially detestable, its perfection is only the more amiable and consummate. And the record of the quest, while it is not quite the record of the quest for other Eldorados—while it has some gains to yield, some moments of adeption, some instances of those who did not fail—should surely have some interest even for the general: it should more surely have much for those few but not unworthy, faint yet pursuing, who would rather persevere in the search for the unattainable than rust in acquiescence and defeat.

For to him who has once attained, who has once even comprehended, the ethos of true criticism, and perhaps to him only, the curse which Mr Browning has put in one of his noblest and most poetic passages does not apply. To him the “one fair, good, wise thing” that he has once grasped remains for ever as he has grasped it—if he has grasped it at first. Not twenty, not forty years, make any difference. What has been, has been and remains. If it is not so, if there is palling and blunting, then it is quite certain either that the object was unworthy or that the subject did not really, truly, critically embrace it—that he was following some will-o'-the-wisp of fancy on the one hand, some baffling wind of doctrine on the other, and was not wholly, in brain and soul, under the real inspiration of the Muse. That this adeption and fruition of literature is to a certain extent innate may be true: that it is both idle and flagitious to simulate it if it does not exist, is true. But it can certainly be cultivated where it exists, and it probably in all cases requires cultivation in order that it may be perfect. In any fair state of development it is its own exceeding great reward,—a possession of the most precious that man can have. And the practical value of the Art of Criticism, and of the History of Criticism (which, as in other cases, is merely the exposition of the art in practice), is that it can and does assist this development; that by pointing out past errors it prevents interference with enjoyment; that it shows how to grasp and how to enjoy; that it helps the ear to listen when the horns of Elfland blow.

-----

Footnote 1:

For uniformity’s sake I have kept the title “to the present day.” That day, however, was the day of the first volume, 1900; and should the book reappear it will read “to the end of the nineteenth century.”

Footnote 2:

Especially in the phrase “the Modern Spirit”—a Geist who seems to have received the blessing of a good opinion of himself, and to have no inclination to “deny” it.

Footnote 3:

As I have known this quotation challenged, I may observe that there is a Tenth book of the Æneid as well as a First.

Footnote 4:

Published, not entirely, by Thyer of Manchester in 1759 (2 vols.). A handsome reprint of 1827 gives only a few of the prose “Characters”: more of these, but not the whole, were given by Mr H. Morley in his Character-Writing of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1891). The verse remains may be found in Chalmers or in the Aldine (vol. ii., London, 1893).

Footnote 5:

A blank rhyme indicates “Howard”—whether Edward or Robert does not matter. But another blank requires a trisyllable to fill it.

Footnote 6:

Benlowes is a warning to “illustrated poets.” It pleased him to have his main book (Theophila, or Love’s Sacrifice: London, 1652, folio) splendidly decorated by Hollar and others; and the consequence is that copies of it are very rare, and generally mutilated when found. I congratulate myself on having first read Benlowes and William Woty, a minor poet of a century later, on the same day. To study Theophila and The Blossoms of Helicon in succession is quite a critical gaudy.

Footnote 7:

I do not make Vico my Italian example, for the same reasons which induced me to postpone him to this volume. See inf., chap. v.

Footnote 8:

_The_V. sup., ii. 450, 553.

Footnote 9:

_The_Op. cit. sup., ii. 425 note, p. 71. I am not certain whether this came before or after the 1897 reprint (by E. Ritter: Paris and Berne) of Muralt. But Dr Otto von Greyerz had some years earlier published a study of him (Frauenfeld, 1888), which I have not yet seen.

Footnote 10:

_The_V. sup., ii. 271.

Footnote 11:

_The_V. sup., ii. 63.

Footnote 12:

From the social-historical side he is very valuable. It is a pity, and rather a surprise, that Macaulay did not know—for if he had known he must have used—him. No foreign writer is more valuable as illustrating the astonishing coarseness and the less astonishing immorality which the Puritan curse had directly, or by reaction, brought upon England.

Footnote 13:

For the special subjects of the present chapter, putting Lessing, and even him not wholly, out of the question, there exists a remarkably “in-going” monograph, Herr Friedrich Braitmaier’s Geschichte der Poetischen Theorie und Kritik von den Diskursen der Maler bis auf Lessing (Frauenfeld, 1889). This book has been of great use to me; and I do not think that any one can read it without respect for the author’s learning, his good sense, and the clearness and definiteness of his report. His compte-rendu of particular authors is often larger than it need be for a fair first view; while neither it nor anything else can ever dispense the thorough student from going to originals; and he might be here and there less polemical. But these things will not displease some readers, and certainly they do not spoil the book, which, however, be it observed, is deplorably in want of an index. With it should be taken the extremely full and informing introduction—almost a book in itself—of Herr Johann von Antoniewicz to the ed. of Joh. Elias Schlegel, cited below. For almost all my German chapters I am also much indebted to the admirable Grundriss der Geschichte d. Deutsch. Nationallit. of Koberstein (ed. 5, by Bartsch, Leipzig: 5 vols. and index, 1872-73)—a book which, let some say what they will, is not likely soon to be really obsolete.

Footnote 14:

The text-book for German seventeenth-century criticism is that of Dr Karl Borinski, Die Poetik der Renaissance und die Anfänge der literarischen Kritik in Deutschland (Berlin, 1886). This book is “choke-full” of information and indication, and the only possible faults that Momus himself could find with it are—first, that the author sometimes digresses somewhat from his path, which is itself so little trodden that one would like him to stick to it; and, secondly, that his dealings with his subject might be rather clearer and more methodic in the text, and, being what they are, are all the more in want of a clear and methodic table of contents. But I am too much indebted to him to quarrel.

Footnote 15:

Schönes Blumenfeldt. Lignitz, 1601, 4to.

Footnote 16:

ii. 360 note.

Footnote 17:

G. R. Weckherlin. See Borinski, p. 51. The influence of English literature on German was still pretty strong. Sidney’s Arcadia was translated in 1629.

Footnote 18:

Braunschweig, 1651.

Footnote 19:

Berlin-Jena, 1656.

Footnote 20:

Kurzer Wegweiser sur Deutsch-Tichtkunst. Je[h]na, 1663. Some of Buchner’s original work seems to be lost, if it ever was published.

Footnote 21:

I use the Zürich reprint of 1749.

Footnote 22:

1702.

Footnote 23:

A comparison of the three contemporaries, Gravina, Werenfels, and Addison, would make an interesting critical essay.

Footnote 24:

“Some are so rigorous that they will only have a time of one or two days.” I quote from Borinski, p. 364, not having seen the original.

Footnote 25:

V. sup., ii. 552-557.

Footnote 26:

Op. cit., Part I., Chaps. 1-5 and 8. His special enemy or target is Danzel’s Gottsched und seine Zeit (Leipzig, 1848), an unhesitating championship of the classical champion.

Footnote 27:

1725-26. These eccentric and sometimes baroque titles were a mania with German men of letters. It had become epidemic in the fifteenth century, and continued so till the eighteenth, if not longer, the last very distinguished patient being, of course, Jean Paul. In this the feminine is an exaggeration of the Addisonian tendency to “fair-sex it,” as Swift says.

Footnote 28:

He had a real zeal for his native tongue: and it is admitted that the Beiträge, by discarding the Spectatorian miscellaneousness, and concentrating attention upon letters, and by promoting, if mainly from the mere side of language, the study of elder German literature, did much good.

Footnote 29:

It has been debated whether “Sasper” or “Saspar,” by which names the Swiss critics sometimes (but very rarely) mention our poet, is a proof of ignorance or merely a phonetic accommodation. But it is admitted that the first German who felt his true inspiration and healing power was J. E. Schlegel, v. inf.

Footnote 30:

I have been remonstrated with, in no unfriendly manner, for not discussing the origin, progress, and variations of this famous word. I can only say of this, as of some other remonstrances, that all show rather imperfect realisation of what I intended to do in this book. Such a discussion would form a most fitting part of a volume of Abhandlungen or Excursus on this History—a volume which, if I found any encouragement to do so, I would very gladly write, and for which I have all the materials ready. But it and its possible companions would, according to my ideas of my plan, not merely enlarge the book itself too much, but throw it out of scheme and scale, if they were introduced into the text.

Footnote 31:

Antonio Conti (1677-1749) is called author of that Paragone which in vol. ii. p. 554 sup. I called “anonymous,” because Gottsched gave no author for it, and which was an offshoot of this correspondence in 1728-29. Conti was acquainted with Leibnitz and Newton, spent a long time both in England and in France, wrote tragedies and other things, which are imperfectly collected in his Prose e Poesie, Venice, vol. i., 1739; vol. ii. (posthumous), 1756. Professors D’Ancona and Bucci (Manuale della Litt. Ital., Firenze, 1897, iv. 379) speak highly of him. The passage which they give from him on Dante and Petrarch is respectable and erudite, but gives no very high idea of his critical powers. Milton sticks to history and tradition, but Dante does all “out of his own head.” Petrarch has in his poetry not only the sacred and the venerable, but the graceful and the delicate, &c., &c. For more on him and on König see note at end of chapter.

Footnote 32:

Kritische Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren in der Poesie und dessen Verbindung mit dem Wahrscheinlichen in einer Vertheidigung des Gedichtes Joh. Milton’s von dem Verlorenen Paradiese. [By Bodmer.] 1740.

Kritische Abhandlung von der Natur, den Absichten und dem Gebrauche der Gleichnisse. [By Breitinger, edited (besorget) by Bodmer.] 1740.

Kritische Dichtkunst. Worinnen die Poetische Malerei in Absicht auf die Erfindung im Grunde untersuchet wird, &c. [By Breitinger.] 1740.

Kritische Betrachtung uber die Poetischen Gemahlde der Dichter. [By Bodmer, with an introduction by Breitinger.] 1741.

All these might, with advantage, be more accessible than they are. The Kritische Dichtkunst was promised long ago as a reprint in the Litteraturdenkmale. The originals appear to be rare, and when they occur are dear, and at once carried off.

Footnote 33:

V. sup., ii. 554. As an example of Gottsched in his less sad but more furious mood, nothing can be better than the passage quoted by Herr Braitmaier (op. cit., p. 139) from the Beiträge (xxix. 8). After much vituperation of Shakespeare (Julius Cæsar had just been translated) and other English playwrights, even Addison, he winds up: “That the English stage helps in such a shameless fashion to nourish the two principal vices of the English people—cruelty and lust—is something so horrible that all honour-loving Englishmen must blush as often as they think of their theatre. There is scarcely a comedy wherein blood and murder do not come in just as if it were a tragedy, and wherein both sexes do not openly, and with the most revolting expressions, speak of things that can only occur in disreputable and forbidden houses.” Poor Gottsched!

Footnote 34:

Which, be it remembered, B. himself translated.

Footnote 35:

Heilbronn?, 1883.

Footnote 36:

These latter date from 1742.

Footnote 37:

It is well known that Germany was still intensely provincial. The “snorings under six-and-thirty monarchs,” as Heine put it unkindly, almost a century later, were not peaceful by any means.

Footnote 38:

Zürich, 1741-44.

Footnote 39:

They were numerous from 1740 to 1760, and their titles—except those of the rather well-known Bremer Beiträge, itself a “short title,” and the Gelehrten Zeitungen of Göttingen, are mostly rather cumbrous, e.g., Cramer and Mylius’ Bemühungen zur Beförderung der Kritik und des Guten Geschmacks, Halle, 1743-47. I do not pretend to a very extensive acquaintance with them, but what I have confirms Herr Braitmaier’s statement that, excepting the Göttingen one, and this for the sake of Haller, chiefly, “All these newspapers did as good as nothing for the advancement of criticism.”

Footnote 40:

Gellert, who was a sort of “prefect” for his time in this school of modern German literature, gave at least one proof of practical wisdom which few men of letters have equalled. Frederic the Great sent for him, poured oil over him from his beard to the skirts of his clothing, and invited him again. Gellert did not go. As for the others, Christian Mylius, dying young, had the further good luck to be a friend of Lessing, who edited his Vermischte Schriften (Berlin, 1754). They run from Theology to Vivisection. The chief critical piece is a tractate (1743), Von den Reimen und dem Sylbenmasse in Schauspielen. Mylius is against rhyme both in Tragedy and in Comedy.

Footnote 41:

I say “at least” because the youngest brother of the elder batch, Johann Heinrich, also meddled with literature. But we need take no keep of him.

Footnote 42:

A phase of, and sometimes identified with, the general “Swiss-Saxon” battle.

Footnote 43:

I only know the third edition (Leipzig, 1770), which, as well as the second, 1758-59, seems to have been a good deal revised. There are eleven Abhandlungen here, two of which were new, while two others had been added in the second to the original seven.

Footnote 44:

Ed. cit. sup., J. E. S. Aesthetische und Dramaturgische Schriften. Heilbronn, 1887.

Footnote 45:

Ed. cit., pp. 96-166.

Footnote 46:

He is nearest in the title of the first dissertation, “How Imitation must sometimes be unlike the originals,” which may have deceived some. But he does not quite live up to this, and mainly contents himself with arguing that you may improve upon your originals, embellish them, &c., to give more pleasure.

Footnote 47:

Sämmtliche Werke. Wien, 1838.

Footnote 48:

V. sup., i. 139.

Footnote 49:

Ed. cit., p. 958.

Footnote 50:

This separation of the drama (or at least of the theatre) and literature may shock some readers, but I can rely on support from persons who take a very different view of the acting theatre, and a very different interest in it from mine, yet who agree with me that the connection between literature and acted or actable drama is in no sense essential or necessary.

Footnote 51:

Hamburgische Dramaturgie, §§ 33-35, vol. xi. p. 233 sq. of the other edition which I use. There is a translation by Miss Zimmern and others of the Dramaturgie, the Laocoön, and one or two other things in Bohn’s Library.

Footnote 52:

Œuvres, ed. Belin (Paris, 1819), ii. 17-28. A translation—the old contemporary version revised by the present writer—will be found in Marmontel’s Moral Tales (London, 1895).

Footnote 53:

V. sup., ii. 327, 417, 418.

Footnote 54:

Of course the general drift of the piece, with the corrections it introduces in the ut pictura poesis maxim, is very important indeed, and was of the very highest opportunity in supplying corrections to the different opinions on the subject of Du Bos and the Switzers. Moreover, such discussions as that of the Disgusting, &c., are undoubtedly things which we should have noticed in the first volume, and perhaps in the second. But the iron room is closing in.

Footnote 55:

Laocoön, xx. Ed. cit., x. 120 sq.

Footnote 56:

Observe that it will be quite useless for the “parallel passage” marine-storekeeper to point out, even if he can, earlier uses of either image. Neither was a stock image at the time of use.

Footnote 57:

H. D., No. (or Stück) 11 and part of 12; xi. 144 sq.

Footnote 58:

Semiramis, III. vi. sub fin.

Footnote 59:

H. D., No. 22 sq.

Footnote 60:

Ibid., 29 sq.

Footnote 61:

Ibid., 36 sq.

Footnote 62:

Some of the original dates of Lessing’s works may be usefully grouped in a note: Early critical work, 1750 onwards; Abhandlungen über die Fabeln, 1759; Laocoön, 1766; Hamb. Dramaturgie, 1767-68; Anmerkungen über das Epigramm, 1771. But the whole thirty years of his literary life—at least until his unlucky attack of anti-theological mania towards its close—were fruitful in criticism.

Footnote 63:

This important and edifying problem has attracted much attention from scholars. M. Kont, the author of a really admirable monograph on Lessing et l’Antiquité (2 vols., Paris, 1894-9), devotes almost an excursus to it. The original may be found in vol. 15 of Herr Göring’s (the collected) ed., and it is fair to say that the latter part of Lessing’s dissertation does much to save the earlier.

Footnote 64:

Again see M. Kont for comment and the “Anmerkungen über das Epigramm,” Works, xv. 73 sq. for text. Lessing also proclaimed his admiration for Martial in his preface to the early collection of his writings, in 1753.

Footnote 65:

The not uncommon ascription even of this is a result of that unjust neglect or depreciation of Scaliger and Castelvetro and the other Italians, which we have attempted pro viribus to repair.

Footnote 66:

Lessing’s curiosity as to at least the English Drama was so insatiable that he actually translated part of Crisp’s (Fanny Burney’s “Daddy” Crisp’s) Virginia—that play, the doleful effects of whose failure or doubtful success Macaulay, according to Mrs Ellis, so much exaggerated.

Footnote 67:

That he knows and quotes the Arte Nuevo is much more surprising than that he does not fully comprehend Lope’s position.

Footnote 68:

Eth. Nic., VII. ii. 10.

Footnote 69:

I wish that M. Kont had not fallen into a common error by saying that Bernays has “proved” Lessing’s interpretation wrong in part. When will people learn, in critical discussion, to see that to “make a thing probable” is not to “prove” it?

Footnote 70:

Apparently Lessing would not have disagreed much with the reactionary modern who said that “the only really valuable articles in the present English school curriculum are Greek and Euclid.”

Footnote 71:

Not that he did not pay some attention to Old German: but it had little effect on him, and he was evidently fonder of the fifteenth century than of the thirteenth. Nor is what has been said above to be taken as meaning that Gottsched himself neglected mediæval writers. On the contrary, he studied them very carefully as a part of his general patriotic “Germanism.” Only he did not in the least feel their drift. Opinions on Lessing’s own attitude to mediæval literature differ remarkably, but I cannot see much real appreciation in it.

Footnote 72:

V. sup., vol. ii. p. 523. As we have seen, J. A. Schlegel had translated the Frenchman when Lessing was barely of age.

Footnote 73:

To illustrate this before going further, we may take account both of the Theatrical Miscellanies, which fill vols. vii. and viii. of the Works, and of the similar miscellanies of a more general kind contained in vol. xiv. The latter include many short reviews and notes of the kind elsewhere noticed: the former supply by far the most remarkable instance of that extraordinary industry—that mania, so to speak, for assimilating all the material furnished by older and more accomplished literatures—which is the great note of this period of German culture. Much, as was almost necessary, is mere abstract, such as in vol. 7 the above-noticed analysis of Crisp’s Virginia and the long article on the Tragedies of Seneca, where, however, there is not a little actual criticism of Brumoy, &c. The Lives of Thomson (“Jacob” Thomson) and of Destouches show us by contrast what a great thing Dr Johnson did in elaborating the biographical-critical causerie: and even the Dissertations on tragédie larmoyante give little more than a frame of Lessing’s, the painters being Chassiron and Gellert. One article in vol. 8, “Von Johann Dryden,” might have been of the very highest critical interest; but it is a mere fragment. And the “Outlines of a History of the English Stage,” though showing Lessing’s astonishing scholarship in his favourite subject, are only outlines.

Footnote 74:

vi.-ix. of the edition cited.

Footnote 75:

This occupies more than fifty pages (91-145) of vol. vi.

Footnote 76:

Lessing is less tolerant in this case than in that of Martial. The fact is that, in spite of its outrageousness, the libel would be rather amusing if it were not so exceedingly tautologous—with the tautology of a certain class of graffiti.

Footnote 77:

Vol. ix.

Footnote 78:

P. 205.

Footnote 79:

P. 173.

Footnote 80:

xv. 73-155. The thirteenth volume is wholly archæological, and contains among other things the polemic with Klotz as to the Laocoön, and the tractate On Ancient Representations of Death.

Footnote 81:

Ueber die sogenannten Fabeln aus den Zeiten der Minnesinger, xvi. 47-87.

Footnote 82:

P. 270. The Germans could not get nearer to the title than Der Schwärmer oder Herumstreifer. I suppose Der Schlenderer would have been not “noble” enough. Lessing’s English does not seem to have been very idiomatic, for he says that the word “Rambler” means properly “a landlooper who has no regular abiding-place.”

Footnote 83:

V. sup., ii. 267.

Footnote 84:

It is curious that three great critics of the three great literary countries of modern Europe, Lessing, Sainte-Beuve, and Mr Arnold, should all have forgotten in their later years, the caution, “Be not critical overmuch.”

Footnote 85:

See, for instance, the art. on Hagedorn, xx. 108.

Footnote 86:

I most particularly, for instance, do not wish to seem of the mind of an American Professor who announces in a periodical as I revise this book that he believes he has “overthrown most of Lessing’s ideas” in the Laocoön, “shown that his statements about Homer are wrong, his psychology wrong, and his reasoning often fallacious.”

Footnote 87:

Lessing did not always keep so cool. The Briefe Antiquarischen Inhalts (vol. 13, ed. cit.) not unfrequently betray a rise of temperature, and at the last boil over in coarse and self-forgetful language.

Footnote 88:

Deutsche Litteraturdenkmale. Heilbronn, 1883. One cannot be too grateful for the admirable re-edition of this by Herr L. Geiger. Berlin, 1902.

Footnote 89:

Mr David Hannay, Introduction to Jacob Faithful. London, 1895.

Footnote 90:

Goethe, Conv. Eck., i. 125, says none.

Footnote 91:

As in his smartness (p. 12, ed. cit.) on the phrase (which he misattributes, but this is nothing), “Ihro Majestät Glanzen wie ein Karfunkel am Finger der Jetzigen Zeit.” “Peut-on,” asks this other Majesty with fine irony, “rien de plus mauvais? Pourquoi une escarboucle? Est-ce que le temps a un doigt? Quand on le représente, on le peint avec des ailes, parcequ’il s’envole sans cesse, avec un clepsydre parceque les heures le divisent, et on arme son bras d’un faulx pour désigner qu’il fauche ou détruit tout ce qui existe.” The question as to the carbuncle is, of course, an example of pure ignorance, as is the general objection to the consecrated phrase and figure of the “finger of time” and its ring. But “arms” generally have “fingers,” unless these are cut off; and how, Ihro Majestät, does Time work his scythe without them?

Footnote 92:

Quoted by Geiger, op. cit., p. xxvi.

Footnote 93:

“Tot verba, tot pondera.”—Ibid., p. 18.

Footnote 94:

P. 23.

Footnote 95:

By an accident not worth dilating upon I was unable to incorporate the results of careful reading of König and Conti in the text. The former’s treatise on Taste is very respectable for its time, and must then have been quite stimulating; but it belongs to the obsolete box of our matter. Taste, excellent in the palmy times of Greek literature, declined later, was revived by the Romans, lost in the Middle Ages, recovered at the Renaissance, lost again and recovered by the French, and so on. He is much cumbered (as some other excellent persons have been) about the origin of the word Taste—deprives the Spaniards of the honour of inventing it, and very properly finds its origin in Græco-Roman times. It must be natural, but can be improved by acquirement. It is more immediate than judgment. It extends to quite trivial things—snuff, wine, foppery in dress, sensual pleasures, &c.

Conti’s work, in the edition quoted, has the great drawback of being presented almost wholly, as far as the critical part of it is concerned, in abstracts made from MS. by the editor. It consists, besides Letters to the Doge Marco Foscarini, to Maffei, to Muratori, &c., of Treatises on “Imitation,” “Poetic Fantasy,” and the like and of animadversions on classical and Italian Poetry, on Fracastoro, on Gravina, and others. It does not come to very much.

Footnote 96:

One celebrated person, much associated with it in some ways, and referred to in passing above, will not appear here. Horace Walpole did, for such a carpet knight, real service in the general movement; but he was a literary critic pour rire only. His admiration of Mme. de Sévigné is not really much more to his credit than his sapient dictum (to Bentley, Feb. 23, 1755) that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is “forty times more nonsensical than the worst translation of an Italian opera-book.” “Notre Dame des Rochers” talked of subjects that interested him in a manner which he could understand: Shakespeare was neither “Gothic” nor modern. So he liked the one and despised the other—uncritically in both cases.

Footnote 97:

Choice Collection of Scots Poems. In three Parts. Reprinted in 1 vol. (Glasgow, 1869).

Footnote 98:

The Evergreen, The Tea-Table Miscellany. Reprinted in 4 vols. (Glasgow, 1876).

Footnote 99:

Said to be Ambrose Philips. If so, the book, despite its uncritical and heterogeneous character, is “Namby-Pamby’s” best work by far. There is a reprint, without date (3 vols.), among the very valuable series of such things which were published by Pearson c. 1870.

Footnote 100:

For more on them, see chap. vi. of this book.

Footnote 101:

Ausonius, Ep. 77.

Footnote 102:

With acknowledgments to Longinus.

Footnote 103:

Mr Gosse, I find, agrees with me on this point. It is well known that ignorance of German was almost (Chesterfield, I think, in encouraging his son to the study, says roundly that it was quite) universal among Englishmen in the mid-eighteenth century.

Footnote 104:

Gray’s Works (ed. Gosse, 4 vols., London, 1884), ii. p. 106, Letter xliv., dated April, without the year; but the next gives it: 1742.

Footnote 105:

Gray has been upbraided with his description (in part at least) of Boswell’s Paoli-book as “a dialogue between a green goose and a hero.” It does him no discredit; in fact, he might have summarised the whole of Boswell’s work, had he lived to see it, as that of a green goose with a semi-heroic love for heroes.

Footnote 106:

I am well aware that the “parallel-passagers” have tried their jaws on these.

Footnote 107:

After all, he may be forgiven much apparent over-valuation of Mason for this name. Whatever its meaning between the friends, it “speaks” the author of Elfrida and Caractacus, and the Monologues and the Odes, and all but those lines of the epitaph on his wife which Gray wrote for him. “To skroddle” should have been naturalised for “to write minor poetry.”

Footnote 108:

As printed in Mr Gosse’s edition he is made to say that the Moral Ode was written “almost two hundred years after Chaucer’s time.” The sense, however, as well as the use of the word “Semi-Saxon,” shows that he meant “before,” so that “after” must be a slip either of his own pen or of the later press.

Footnote 109:

See Letter to Wharton, October 7, 1757 (cxxxvi., ii., 340, ed. cit.).

Footnote 110:

I mean, of course, nobody except specialists. On the vexed question of Gray’s direct knowledge of Norse, on the priority or contemporaneousness of Percy’s “Five Pieces,” and on the subject generally, an interesting treatise, Mr F. E. Finlay’s Scandinavian Influences on the English Romantic Movement (Boston, U.S.A., 1903), has appeared since the text was written.

Footnote 111:

Despite the curious infuriation which such attention seems to excite in some minds by no means devoid of celestial quality. Gradually it will be seen that current views of prosody are a sort of “tell-tale” or index of the state of poetic criticism generally. They concern us here, however, only at certain moments.

Footnote 112:

My copy of him is Dodsley’s third edition, in 2 vols., of the Poems and Essays (London, 1768), with the second edition of the additional volume containing the Letters (London, 1769). These latter are described by Gray in the less agreeable Graian manner, as “about nothing but” the Leasowes “and his own writings, with two or three neighbouring clergymen who wrote verses also.”

Footnote 113:

Ed. cit., ii. 10-13, 158-161, and elsewhere.

Footnote 114:

Most of the quotations following are found in two Essays on “Books and Writers,” ii. 157-180, 228-239.

Footnote 115:

ii. 172; ii. 167. The first of these has been echoed, perhaps unconsciously, by more than one great Romantic writer. For the second, compare Regnier’s regret pensif et confus, D’avoir été et n'être plus. Shenstone’s Letters (as is implied in the very terms of Gray’s sneer) deal with literary subjects freely enough; but their criticism is rarely important, though I have noted a good many places. Some of the most interesting (p. 58 sq., ed. cit.) concern Spenser, and Shenstone’s gradual conversion “from trifling and laughing to being really in love with him.” From another (lxii. p. 175) we learn that at any rate when writing, S. was still in the dark about “the distance of the rhymes” in Lycidas. There is seen in Letter xc., viii. sq., on “Fables,” an intimation (c. iii. p. 321) of the ballad plan with Percy; praise of The Rambler; a defence of light poetry as being still poetry, &c. &c. It is almost all interesting as an example of Critical Education.

Footnote 116:

By Messrs Hales & Furnivall. 3 vols. and Supplement. (London, 1867-68.) As for Percy’s Scandinavian Enquiries, see note above.

Footnote 117:

Vol. i. appeared in 1756, vol. ii. not till 1782—which gap of a quarter of a century is not imperceptible in the work itself, and must be remembered in reading the text.

Footnote 118:

On this, as on other points in this chapter and chap. v., and on chapter i. of the last Book of the last volume generally, a most valuable companion has been supplied since my text was written by Mr D. Nichol Smith’s excellent edition of Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare. (Glasgow, 1903.)

Footnote 119:

The full title is Observations on the Faërie Queene of Spenser ed. 1 (London, 1754); ed. 2, 1762 (of which is my copy). From Hughes’s editions of 1715 to Upton’s of 1758 (after Warton’s first edition) a good deal of attention had been paid to Spenser, if not quite according to knowledge. For a long list of imitations in the eighteenth century see Mr H. A. Beers (English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century, London, 1899, pp. 854-55, note), who copies it from Prof. Phelps.

Footnote 120:

i. 15, ed. cit.

Footnote 121:

Ed. cit., i. 96.

Footnote 122:

Originally issued in the years 1774-78-81. The editions of 1824 and 1840, with additional notes by Price and others, are valuable for matter; and that of Mr W. C. Hazlitt (4 vols., London, 1871), with the assistance of Drs Furnival, Morris, Skeat, and others, _in_valuable. But Warton’s own part is necessarily more and more obscured in them.

Footnote 123:

De quo fabula?

Footnote 124:

See Appendix I.

Footnote 125:

He is, however, exquisitely characteristic in his description of Addison’s own critical work (see the Bohn ed., ii. 383) as “discovering his own good taste, and calculated to improve that of the reader, but otherwise of no great merit.”

Footnote 126:

e.g. iii. 171: “Men’s minds. Men’s, for the genitive plural of man, is not allowable.”

Footnote 127:

Vide ed. cit., ii. 417, and especially iii. 389-91, a long note of very great interest. I do not know whether Hurd had condescended to take a hint from the humble dissenting Mason (v. inf.)

Footnote 128:

He was born only twenty years after the death of Dryden, and died the year before Tennyson was born.

Footnote 129:

My copy in 10 vols. (London, 1777) appears to be made up of different editions of the separate books—the fifth of the Horace and Dialogues, the third of the Cowley.

Footnote 130:

These qualities are particularly shown in a really admirable note, ii. 107-15, on the method and art of criticism, with special reference to Longinus, Bouhours, and Addison. Hurd is, however, once more, and in more detail, too severe on Addison. It may be repeated that Lessing pays very particular attention to Hurd in the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, and speaks of him with great respect.

Footnote 131:

ii. 153.

Footnote 132:

ii. 154.

Footnote 133:

ii. 220.

Footnote 134:

Almost too liberal, as where he falls foul of Jeremias Holstenius for saying the plain truth that “but for the Argonautics, there had been no fourth book of the Æneis” (iii. 49).

Footnote 135:

iii. 153.

Footnote 136:

P. 464.

Footnote 137:

Boswell, Globe ed., pp. 363, 441.

Footnote 138:

Ibid., p. 598.

Footnote 139:

Works, ed. cit., vol. vi., p. 196.

Footnote 140:

In Letter VIII., ibid., p. 266 sq.

Footnote 141:

P. 271.

Footnote 142:

P. 273.

Footnote 143:

P. 290.

Footnote 144:

P. 299.

Footnote 145:

P. 306.

Footnote 146:

P. 309.

Footnote 147:

P. 313.

Footnote 148:

Hurd knew Gray (who, characteristically in both ways, described him as “the last man who wore stiff-topped gloves”) pretty well (see the references in Mr Gosse’s Index). He may have caught some heat from one who had plenty, though he concealed it.

Footnote 149:

“Skroddles” was William.

Footnote 150:

My copy contains all three bound together. It is interesting, though not surprising, to find that there was no demand for the two original and valuable constituents, and a brisk one for the commonplace third.

Footnote 151:

Power of Numbers, p. 9.

Footnote 152:

Ibid., p. 27.

Footnote 153:

Prosaic Numbers, passim.

Footnote 154:

Mason’s very errors are interesting, as where his delight in recovered rhythm—in full melody of variety—leads him to something like the old blasphemy of rhyme (“one of the lowest ornaments and greatest shackles of modern poesy” Power of Numbers, p. 14).

Footnote 155:

Even at this early date Mason was able to quote not a few writers— Pemberton, Manwaring, Malcolm, Gay, who, as well as Geddes, Foster, Galley, and others, had dealt with this subject. In fact, the list of such authors in the eighteenth century is quite long, though few of them are very important. For an excellent reasoned bibliography see Mr T. S. Omond’s English Metrists (Tunbridge Wells, 1903). Henry Pemberton, Gresham Professor of Physic, and a man of various ability, published on the to us surprising subject of Glover’s Leonidas, in 1738, Observations on Poetry, which I had hunted in the catalogues for a long time, when Mr Gregory Smith kindly gave me a copy. It shows, as the election of its text may indicate, and as its date would further suggest, no very enthusiastic or imaginative appreciation of the Muse, but is remarkably learned, not merely in the ancients and the modern Frenchmen, but in Italians like Minturno and Castelvetro. Pemberton deals with Epic and Dramatic poetry—their rise, dignity, fable, sentiment, character, language, and difference; with Versification, where his standpoint may be guessed, from his denouncing “the mixture of iambic and trochaic” as a blemish on L’Allegro and Il Penseroso; with the Sublime. He is not an inspiring or inspired writer, but holds some position, both as influential on the Germans, who not seldom quote him, and in the history of Prosody.

Footnote 156:

Not Cowper’s hero, but a son of “Picturesque” Gilpin. Mitford had been a pupil of Gilpin the elder.

Footnote 157:

Foster’s (John) Essay on the Different Nature of Accent and Quantity (second edition, Eton, 1763) is duly before me also, but I must not touch it here.

Footnote 158:

As An Essay on the Harmony of Language. My friend, Mr T. S. Omond, in the quite invaluable bibliography referred to above, thinks this “clearer, shorter, more pointed” than the second. It is at any rate well to remember that when it appeared, Johnson had ten years to live, and Scott, Wordsworth, and Coleridge were in their nurseries.

Footnote 159:

Harmony of Language, second edition, p. 51.

Footnote 160:

Ibid., p. 81.

Footnote 161:

20 vols., ed. Assézat and Tourneux: Paris, 1875-76. I had known Diderot before, not merely from Carlyle and Mr Morley, but from Génin’s extraordinarily well-chosen Pensées Choisies in the Didot collection. But I remember very well, after more than a quarter of a century, the delight with which I read this edition as the successive volumes reached me at their appearance. I cannot take them down without that anticipation of sentences at particular places of the page which one only feels in such a case. They are quarrelling with the edition now, of course: but that does not matter.

Footnote 162:

Cf. p. 160, vol. vi. ed. cit. “Vous avez péché contre les règles d’Aristote, d’Horace, de Vida, et de Le Bossu.” Even if (as so much else in the book is) this was partly suggested by Sterne, it is none the less a genuine fling of Diderot’s own irony and recalcitrance. And an indignant note of the earlier edition of Brière, shocked in 1821 at the substitution of Le Bossu (then much forgotten) for Boileau, who was, though on the eve of dethronement, in full dictatorship, is a valuable document for us, and for this chapter.

Footnote 163:

Œuvres, ed. cit., v. 211-227.

Footnote 164:

The éloge dates from 1761: exactly the middle point between the earliest of Hurd’s Dissertations in 1757 and his Letters in 1765 (v. sup.).

Footnote 165:

Ibid., 228-239.

Footnote 166:

V. sup., ii. p. 303.

Footnote 167:

Œuvres, vi. 366, 367.

Footnote 168:

Let us remember that this evil-famed book itself contains admirable critical passages, notably (chap. xxxviii), that attack on the French theatre which Lessing extracted in Nos. 84, 85 of the Hamburgische Dramaturgie.

Footnote 169:

Œuvres, iii. 200-407.

Footnote 170:

Fortunately the contents and indices of the Assézat-Tourneux edition are admirably abundant and clear: a merit not so common in French books as some others.

Footnote 171:

Œuvres, viii. 339-426. The English reader has at his disposal the excellent translation of Mr W. H. Pollock (London, 1883), with a preface by Sir Henry Irving. I should like also to mention here Mrs L. Tollemache’s Diderot’s Thoughts on Art and Style, an interesting selection which has, I think, been more than once published.

Footnote 172:

Œuvres, vii. 299-410 (with appendices).

Footnote 173:

Œuvres, xi. 368-373.

Footnote 174:

The chief exceptions, such as a letter to Panckoucke (May 25, 1764) and a sensible one to Chamfort (Oct. 6, same year) have a very little. The words Vous admirez Richardson to the elder Mirabeau (April 8, 1767) may raise expectations: they will be cruelly dashed. Cf. the indignant renunciation of the description homme de lettres a little later (May 13), and the long and important review of his own career to Saint-Germain, dated “1770-26/2.” The fact is, that a maniac of egotism and self-torment cannot be a critic, the subject under consideration being inevitably turned out of court by Self.

Footnote 175:

One book of some traditional note and interest from the eminence of its author in other ways, Condillac’s Art d'Écrire (which forms part of his elaborate Cours d’Étude for the Prince of Parma: Parma, 1769-1773), was not there noticed. It is of little intrinsic importance, being a mere treatise on “Composition”—a common-sense and common-place Rhetoric adjusted to late French eighteenth century standards. Its definition of style as depending on “netteté et caractère,” is an obvious attempt to combine the elder with the Buffonian ideal.

Footnote 176:

My copy is the Didot edition of the Œuvres, in three large vols. (Paris, 1873). As, however, this is very cumbrous to hold, I also use and here cite the smaller separate edition (same publishers: Paris, 1876) of the De l’Allemagne.

Footnote 177:

Even after publishing the two previous volumes, I find myself accused of “not having taken the trouble to acquaint myself with the fact that the application of psychological tests has profoundly altered criticism,” or words to that effect. εἴθ’ ὤφελ’ Ἀργοῦς μὴ διαπτάσθαι. I only wish I had not had to thread these more dismal and dangerous Symplegades! But I am at any rate trying to save others from their danger.

Footnote 178:

In the Nouvelle Héloise. The omission (perhaps due to a juvenile unwillingness to acknowledge her idol indebted to anybody) is the more striking because we know, and could have been sure if we did not know, that she was early acquainted with, and enthralled by, the English master.

Footnote 179:

I. 216 of the larger ed. cited.

Footnote 180:

220 of the larger ed. cited.

Footnote 181:

Ibid., pp. 252, 253.

Footnote 182:

Ibid., p. 257.

Footnote 183:

Ibid., p. 263.

Footnote 184:

Ibid., p. 265.

Footnote 185:

Goethe and Schiller might laugh at her; but there is no doubt that they were secretly flattered at her interest in the things of Germany.

Footnote 186:

The Duke of Rovigo’s blunt information in his letter of expulsion, that “the book is not French” (see the Preface, or any account of Mme. de Staël), summarises his master’s terror very well.

Footnote 187:

P. 176 of the smaller edition cited; i. 80, of the larger.

Footnote 188:

“De l’art dramatique.”

Footnote 189:

Chap. xxvi. L’idéal du caractère tragique consiste dans le triomphe que la volonté remporte sur le destin et sur nos passions; le comique exprime au contraire l’empire de l’instincts physique sur l’existence morale. From which it will follow that Hamlet and Lear are not tragedies, and that As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing are not comedies.

Footnote 190:

P. 340, chap. ii. 148.

Footnote 191:

Of course not in the worst English connotation, but only in that of “commonplace,” “ordinary,” “undistinguished.”

Footnote 192:

M. Des Essarts in the Petit de Julleville History.

Footnote 193:

For René is only an episode of the Génie itself; and Les Martyrs a prose-poem in illustration of its theories.

Footnote 194:

See vol. i. p. 425.

Footnote 195:

Chateaubriand’s Mélanges Littéraires contain in their later numbers some interesting reviews, especially that of February 1819 on the Annales Littéraires, which supplied almost the Défense et Illustration of the Romantic outburst. But I do not know that the early pieces on English literature dating from the last year of the eighteenth century, are not as important. In these the writer, either from policy (for though he had a friendly editor in Fontanes, he was writing under the eyes of Bonaparte’s police) or really imperfect conversion, approximates much more to the “dunghill-and-pearl” view of Shakspere than the innocent might think likely, and has not quite reached his future state (v. inf.) of illumination as to Ossian. He is very severe on Young, and has a very curious passage on the English view of the subject at the moment, which is probably not far from the truth, and at any rate helps us to understand the half-way-house attitude of men like Jeffrey and Campbell. The Queen Anne men, we are told, were at a discount—Richardson was little read, Hume and Gibbon were thought gallicisers, and so forth. But these things are at best useful sidelights on their author’s position in the Génie.

Footnote 196:

I use the 2-vol. ed. of the Collection Didot.

Footnote 197:

Six “books” of dogma, twelve of recherches littéraires, six of culte, is the author’s own summary of his scheme (Génie, II. i. 1).

Footnote 198:

Ed. cit., ii. 306-326.

Footnote 199:

II. i. 5.

Footnote 200:

II. ii. 5-8.

Footnote 201:

II. ii. 10.

Footnote 202:

Vol. I. p. 235.

Footnote 203:

II. iii. 2, 3.

Footnote 204:

Vol. I. p. 257.

Footnote 205:

II. iii. 7.

Footnote 206:

II. iv.

Footnote 207:

Ibid., chap. iii.

Footnote 208:

Chap. viii. It is a pity that Chateaubriand did not live long enough to read Mr Ruskin (who had begun to write before his death) on “The Angel of the Sea”—one of the great conceptions whose poetic suggestiveness he has himself here indicated.

Footnote 209:

This fills the whole of the Fifth or last Book of the Second Part, and shows the author at nearly his best.

Footnote 210:

Il y règne (in Saint Louis) une sombre imagination très propre à la peinture de cette Egypte, pleine de souvenirs et de tombeaux, et qui vit passer tour à tour les Pharaons, les Ptolemées, les solitaires de la Thebaide, et les soudans des barbares.

Footnote 211:

I have not thought it necessary to notice Chateaubriand’s literary judgments in the Essai sur les Révolutions at the beginning, or in the Mémoires d’Outre Tombe at the end of his career. The first, interesting as it is, is too crude (v. inf., Bk. viii. Ch. ii.), the second too much spoilt by “cooking of spleen,” and both too personal and egotistic.

Footnote 212:

Chateaubriand, Joubert’s intimate friend, printed some of this privately after the author’s death; and in 1842 Joubert’s nephew published two vols. of Pensées, Letters, &c. These, with some subsequent augmentations, had reached their 10th ed. in 1901. There is an English translation of part by Mr Attwood, and perhaps others.

Footnote 213:

Sainte-Beuve, Sylvestre de Sacy, Saint-Marc-Girardin, Géruzez, and Poitou—the last a scholarly lawyer and man of letters, who contributed to the Deux Mondes, wrote books of various kinds, and died in 1880.

Footnote 214:

At p. 203 of the usual ed., extending to the end, and filling nearly half the book.

Footnote 215:

P. 265 ed. cit.

Footnote 216:

P. 273-300.

Footnote 217:

P. 387.

Footnote 218:

xxiii. viii., pp. 303, 304.

Footnote 219:

Ibid., xvi., p. 305.

Footnote 220:

P. 376. But as there is in the book a sufficient index, I need not perhaps multiply note-indications.

Footnote 221:

The numerous articles on the individual persons named and to be named— most of which will be found indicated in the general index-volume to the Causeries du Lundi, &c.—are importantly supplemented by a more general dealing in Chateaubriand et Son Groupe Littéraire (v. inf., Bk. viii. Ch. ii.). This is a “standing order” of reference to the end of the chapter.

Footnote 222:

Especially the brilliant paper in C. du L., i. 371-391, on M. de Feletz et la Crit. Litt. sous l’Empire, February 25, 1850.

Footnote 223:

2 vols., Paris, 1839.

Footnote 224:

v. Victor upon William.

Footnote 225:

His chief work available in book-form is his Cours de Littérature Dramatique, 6 vols., Paris, 1825.

Footnote 226:

This makes the almost inevitable coupling of him with his contemporary and (mutatis mutandis) namesake, Jeffrey, a little unfair. He was a genuine critical highwayman, who fired at the coach wherever he found it: Jeffrey only peppered passengers who went the stages after he had himself got down.

Footnote 227:

Annales Littéraires, 5 vols., Paris, 1818-1824.

Footnote 228:

I have seen things of his; but have somehow missed his Œuvres, 10 vols., Paris, 1828.

Footnote 229:

Andrieux deserves a note, perhaps, as having occupied a place of strength—the chair of French Literature in the Collége de France— during the critical time 1814-1833, and as having defended the Capitol valiantly against the invaders. But his valiancy was greater than his vaillance; and instead of criticising him it is nobler to salute him, with M. de Jouy and some others, as respectably mistaken.

Footnote 230:

9 vols., Paris, 1811-1824. Ginguené died in 1816, and the book, published in part posthumously from his MSS., was completed by another hand.

Footnote 231:

It may be found subjoined to the Pantheon Littéraire edition of La Harpe vol. iii., Paris, 1840. In his Œuvres, 5 vols. (Paris, 1826), and Œuvres Posthumes, 3 vols. (Paris, 1828-30), there is not much else of importance.

Footnote 232:

Chap. iii., op. cit.

Footnote 233:

Chap. vi.

Footnote 234:

4 vols., Paris, 1817. The lectures had been delivered in 1811-14. I have had to rely on my reading of the British Museum copy, the only one which I have ever seen in a catalogue, though rather high-priced, having been sold before I could get it, and my advertisements for another (it is a book worth having) not being successful. Some accounts (e.g., that of Vapereau) are quite unfair to it.

Footnote 235:

Mélanges, 6 vols., Paris, 1828-1830.

Footnote 236:

I must find room, if only in a note, for the unfortunate Auger, who succeeded Suard as universal provider of éloges and Introductions in the classic sense, who served as victim to one of Daudet’s most ignoble transcripts of reality in L’Immortel, and whose ton sec et rogue Sainte-Beuve has somewhere despatched and impaled for ever in one of his really immortal phrases.

Footnote 237:

Some will no doubt expect that a third, Guizot, should be joined to them. He did much reviewing in his youth (as did his first wife, Pauline de Meulan), and his much later companion volumes on Corneille and Shakespeare are more than respectable. But he was perhaps even less of a critic “in his heart” than Cousin.

Footnote 238:

Besides his better known works, such as those on Plato and Descartes, and on the grandes dames of the seventeenth century, which touch the subject on different sides, his Fragments Littéraires (Paris, 1843) may be consulted. I fear that his summary dismissal may surprise some and enrage others: but I cannot help it. I have nothing to do with his psychology, and he has next to nothing to do with my criticism.

Footnote 239:

Œuvres, Paris, 1854-1858.

Footnote 240:

C. de L. I. 108, sq. on the literary work of both Cousin and Villemain.

Footnote 241:

It dates from the spring of 1823: I have used the complete posthumous edition (Paris, 1854).

Footnote 242:

For so great an ironist Beyle did lack humour to a surprising degree.

Footnote 243:

P. 6, ed. cit.

Footnote 244:

P. 14 sq.

Footnote 245:

As some have said: “When you read Twelfth Night, you are in Elysium; when you see it, you are not even in Illyria.”

Footnote 246:

P. 19.

Footnote 247:

P. 32.

Footnote 248:

Lamartine, in a letter given in the book (p. 129 sq.), says roundly of Beyle: “Il n’y a selon lui et selon nous d’autres règles que les exemples du génie”; and though I do not remember that Beyle himself formulates this Brunonian (v. vol. ii. p. 95 note) trenchancy, he evidently adopts it.

Footnote 249:

P. 180 sq., ed. cit. inf. All this passage is important, especially the reference to B.'s habit of “taking the other side,” a habit common with critics, but not critical.

Footnote 250:

C. du L., ix. 314 sq.

Footnote 251:

It is fair to say that the oddity is Beyle’s own. See for instance his Lettres Inédites, p. 235.

Footnote 252:

Lettres Intimes de Stendhal (Paris, 1892).

Footnote 253:

My copy is in 2 vols. (Paris, 1879).

Footnote 254:

Himself a terrible critic in a certain sense: hardly one at all in others, and in most parts of ours.

Footnote 255:

There is no complete edition, either of Nodier’s collected work or of his criticism: and many of his books are not at all easy to obtain separately. The editor of the Tales, &c., in the Charpentier collection, has, however, most wisely prefixed certain capital articles to the various volumes—Des Types en Littérature to the Romans; Quelques Observations sur la nouvelle école Littéraire to Les Proscrits; Du Fantastique en Littérature to the Contes. All these are important.

Footnote 256:

One of Crapelet’s best produced books (Paris, 1829).

Footnote 257:

The standard treatise on this is that of M. E. Krantz, L’Esthétique de Descartes: Paris, 1882.

Footnote 258:

Op. cit. sup., Introduction.

Footnote 259:

Halle, in the year named.

Footnote 260:

Frankfort-on-the-Oder, 1750-58.

Footnote 261:

Later, Baumgarten did formally, while admitting metre as a sort of adjunct of “perfection,” provide that a prose work such as Telémaque may be a poem, while verse compositions may not,—the old notion back again.

Footnote 262:

Frankfort: 1750 1st vol., 1758 2nd. It was never finished.

Footnote 263:

Anfangsgründe aller schönen Wissenschaften, 3 vols., Halle, 1748-50.

Footnote 264:

He is thought to have derived something from Arnold, Versuch und Anleitung zur Poesie der Deutschen (2nd ed., 1741), a book of which I am still in search, while I should like to have rather fuller opportunities than I have yet had of studying Baumgarten himself and some others of the earlier Germans.

Footnote 265:

Leipzig, 1771-74, but mostly written much earlier. It was greatly enlarged twenty years later. Blankenberg’s Zusätze came after this in 1796-98, and there are extensive Appendices by others, making 8 vols. (1792-1808).

Footnote 266:

This book actually belongs to the nineteenth century, having been published at Berlin in 1803-5 (4 vols.) But Eberhard was then a man over sixty; he had published a Theorie der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften twenty years earlier, and his general position is that of the third quarter of the eighteenth.

Footnote 267:

V. sup., ii. 513, note. First published in 1741, it was constantly reprinted. André was a Jesuit, and his full name was Yves Marc de L’Isle André, whence the rigid virtue of the British Museum insists that he shall be looked for under L.

Footnote 268:

For Vico’s æsthetic, see, in addition to Professor Flint’s admirable Vico (Edinburgh, 1882), the very interesting Estetica of Signor Benedetto Croce (Part II. chap. v. pp. 228-243: Milan, Palermo, and Naples, 1902). This chapter, with some earlier ones, had been printed separately as a specimen the year before. I owe copies of both, with one of a still earlier series on La Critica Letteraria (Rome, 1896), to Signor Croce’s kindness; and the drift of the last named, which condenses the inesattezza of the term “literary criticism,” had itself prepared me for the disapproval (not unmixed) which he expresses of the first volume of this work as “deprived of method and determinate object.” But as I still see, or seem to see, my own object quite clearly defined before me, as I have found no fault in the compass which I use, and feel the helm of my method quite solid and obedient in my hand, I fear I must hold my course all the same. I shall only say that the sketch of criticism or æsthetic before Vico which precedes the chapter above referred to, shows remarkable knowledge and faculty of statement.

Footnote 269:

The Scienza first appeared in 1725, but was practically transformed in its second ed., 1730. Its ideas on poetry were further developed later; but anticipations of them appear even earlier in the De Constantia Jurisprudentis of 1721, if not even in the still earlier Lectures—most of them but recently published—of 1699-1708.

Footnote 270:

Franciscus Baco in aureo de Aug. Sci. libello, &c., vol. ii. p. 5 of Ferrari’s Opere di G. Vico (6 vols., Milan, 1852). I owe the use of the copy of this, with which I have worked, to the kindness of Professor Flint.

Footnote 271:

Omnium scientiarum artiumque commune instrumentum est nova Critica. Ibid., p. 7.

Footnote 272:

P. 11.

Footnote 273:

Pp. 26-28.

Footnote 274:

Ed. cit., iii. 265 sq.

Footnote 275:

P. 275, note.

Footnote 276:

Ed. cit., iv. 161-245. The earlier books are not superfluous for our purpose.

Footnote 277:

I may observe that Vico, though an extremely consistent thinker in reality, is apt to lay such stress on the particular side of his thought prominent at the moment, that it may deceive the unwary and must furnish the unscrupulous with handles. Compare, as one example of many, the attack on the notion of poets being “natural Theologians,” at De Const. Jurisp. iii. 277, with the argument for their being “political Theologians” a few pages later (pp. 295, 296), comparing also with both his later passage on “Teologia Poetica” in the second Scienza (v. 155).

Footnote 278:

Ed. cit., v. 1, 151-421, 422-461.

Footnote 279:

v. 163.

Footnote 280:

P. 168. Vico had anticipated this earlier.

Footnote 281:

iv. 200. (See the First draft.)

Footnote 282:

No reasonable person will object to this the praise of Italian writers in the De Stud. Rat., p. 125.

Footnote 283:

To do Vico full justice, we must admit that his object was less to break up Homer, as they break up Cædmon and Isaiah, than to attribute the whole work to the whole early Greek people.

Footnote 284:

On Adam Smith and Gibbon a note must suffice. The former has actually left us nothing important in print concerning the subject, though he is known to have lectured on it, and though to the partisans of “psychological” criticism the Moral Sentiments may seem pertinent. His line seems to have been pretty identical with those of Hume and of Blair, who knew and used Smith’s Lectures in preparing his own. As for Gibbon, his great work did not give very much opportunity for touching our subject, and he availed himself little of what it did give: though on Byzantine literature generally, and on some individuals—Photius, Sidonius, and others—he acquits himself well enough. His early Essay on the Study of Literature is extremely general and quite unimportant.

Footnote 285:

These are to be found almost passim in the Characteristics (my copy of which is the small 3 vol. ed., s.l., 1749), but chiefly in his Advice to an Author (vol. i., ed. cit., p. 105-end) and in the Third Miscellany (iii. 92-129).

Footnote 286:

i. 147.

Footnote 287:

iii. 187 sq.

Footnote 288:

i. 224, &c.

Footnote 289:

iii. 173.

Footnote 290:

i. 35.

Footnote 291:

i. 147 sq.

Footnote 292:

i. 157 sq.

Footnote 293:

iii. 125.

Footnote 294:

i. 163 sq.

Footnote 295:

The lively fashion in which Dr George Campbell in his Philosophy of Rhetoric (v. sup., ii. 470) beats up his lordship’s quarters, on the score of precious and rococo style, is too much forgotten nowadays.

Footnote 296:

The literary essays occur almost wholly in the First part (published in 1742: my copy is the “new edition” of the Essays and Treatises, 2 vols.: London and Edinburgh, 1764).

Footnote 297:

Essay on Delicacy of Taste, pp. 5, 7, ed. cit.

Footnote 298:

On the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences, ibid., p. 125.

Footnote 299:

Ibid., p. 126.

Footnote 300:

P. 141 sq.

Footnote 301:

V. sup., vol. ii. pp. 327, 417.

Footnote 302:

V. sup., vol. ii. p. 418.

Footnote 303:

The Sceptic, p. 186.

Footnote 304:

Pp. 217-222.

Footnote 305:

“Refinement” seems here to mean “conceit,” “elaborate diction.” But the “simplicity” of Lucretius, in any sense in which the quality can be said to be pushed to excess by Sophocles, is very hard to grasp.

Footnote 306:

P. 257: “Whoever would assert an equality of genius and elegance between Ogilby and Milton, or Bunyan and Addison, would be thought to defend no less an extravagance,” &c.

Footnote 307:

P. 258.

Footnote 308:

P. 274.

Footnote 309:

“I must take pleasure in the thing represented before I can take pleasure in the representation,” v. sup., vol. i. p. 381, infra on Peacock himself.

Footnote 310:

Essay on Tragedy, p. 243.

Footnote 311:

I may be excused for referring to the parabasis at the beginning of the chapter, all the more that the text above was written considerably earlier than that digression.

Footnote 312:

A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, with an Introductory Discourse concerning Taste: 1756. I use the Bohn edition of the Works, vol. i. pp. 49-181.

Footnote 313:

Op. cit., p. 175 sq. But Burke does not seem to have reached the larger and deeper views of Lessing on this subject.

Footnote 314:

See vol. ii. p. 485 sq.

Footnote 315:

Of this in turn Blair was perhaps thinking when he wrote the unlucky passage quoted in the last volume.

Footnote 316:

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

III. § iv

Footnote 317:

Vol. ii. p. 417 sq.

Footnote 318:

III. § xxv.

Footnote 319:

IV. § xix. i. 160, ed. cit.

Footnote 320:

In the mood in which he did that eccentric frontispiece to the Maitland Club Sir Bevis of Hampton (Edinburgh, 1838) at the abgeschmackt-ness of which the late excellent Prof. Kölbing shuddered when he edited Arthur and Merlin (Leipzig, 1890, p. ix.) A picture of La Belle Dame sans Merci in the Royal Academy for 1902 seems to have been actually constructed on Mr Burke’s suggestions. For a very witty and crushing jest on The Sublime and Beautiful, v. inf., Bk. viii. ch. 3.

Footnote 321:

This was not the opinion of some person who has annotated the copy of the Essay on Taste (3rd ed., Edinburgh, 1780: the first appeared in 1758) which belongs to the University of Edinburgh, as “wonderfully profound.” Other annotators, however, both of this and the Essay on Genius (1774)—for the University authorities of the past appear to have been somewhat indifferent to the fashion in which students used books—do not agree with him. In plain truth both pieces are rather trying examples of that “saying an infinite deal of nothing” which is so common in philosophical inquiries. “Facility in the conception of an object, if it be moderate, gives us pleasure” (Taste, p. 29); “The rudest rocks and mountains ... acquire beauty when skilfully imitated in painting;” “Where refinement is wanting, taste must be coarse and vulgar” (p. 115). “Perfect criticism requires therefore” (p. 174) “the greatest philosophical acuteness united with the most exquisite perfection of taste.” “The different works of men of genius sometimes differ very much in the degree of their perfection” (Genius, p. 236). “Both in genius for the arts and in genius for science Imagination is assisted by Memory.” Certainly “here be truths,” but a continued course of reading things like them begins before long to inspire a considerable longing for falsehoods. Gerard, however, though habitually dull, is less absurd than Alison, whom he undoubtedly supplied with his principle of Association.

Footnote 322:

Ed. cit. See a little farther on a similarly uncritical criticism on the trahuntque siccas machinæ carinas of Horace.

Footnote 323:

Ibid.

Footnote 324:

The mother of Gwendolen Harleth was wiser. “Oh! my dear, any nose,” said she, “will do to be miserable with!” and if so, why not to be predatory? The only possible answer of course caps the absurdity. The conventional Bandit is an Italian; the conventional Italian has an aquiline nose: therefore, &c.

Footnote 325:

Had all æstheticians approached their subject in the spirit of our English historian of it, much of what I have said would be quite inapplicable. “The æsthetic theorist,” says Mr Bosanquet in his Preface (History of Æsthetic: London, 1892), “desires to understand the artist, not in order to interfere with the latter, but in order to satisfy an intellectual interest of his own.” With such an attitude I have no quarrel: nor, I should think, need those who take it have any quarrel with mine. I may add that from this point onwards I shall take the liberty of a perpetual silent reference to Mr Bosanquet’s treatment of subjects and parts of subjects which seem to me to lie outside of my own plan. I purposely abstained from reading his book until two-thirds of my own were published, and more than two-thirds more of the remainder were written. And I have been amused and pleased, though not surprised, to find that if we had planned the two books together from the first, we could hardly have covered the ground more completely and with less confusion. I cannot, however, help observing that Mr Bosanquet, like almost all æstheticians I know, except Signor Croce, though he does not neglect literature, at least devotes most attention to the plastic arts. This is perhaps a little significant.

Footnote 326:

The Germans, I believe, have definitely ticketed these explorers as “The Antiquarians.”

Footnote 327:

For this see in the last vol. under Dryden, Addison, Johnson, L. Racine, Voltaire, La Harpe, &c.: in the present the Zürichers and Chateaubriand.

Footnote 328:

I may once more refer to Mr Nichol Smith’s valuable edition of the Prefaces to most of these. Mrs Montagu’s famous Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare (London, 1769, and often reprinted) may expect a separate mention. It is well intentioned but rather feeble, much of it being pure tu quoque to Voltaire, and sometimes extremely unjust on Corneille, and even Æschylus. It is not quite ignorant; but once more non tali auxilio!

Footnote 329:

See vol. ii. p. 416.

Footnote 330:

See the Ode to the Queen, 1706. Prior inserts a tenth line, and makes the seamless coat an awkwardly cobbled thing of quatrain, quatrain, couplet.

Footnote 331:

See vol. ii. p. 481.

Footnote 332:

To this context perhaps best belongs Thomas Hayward’s British Muse,[333] an anthology on the lines of Poole and Bysshe, published in 1738 and dedicated to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. [Sidenote: T. Hayward.] The book has a preface of some length (which is said to be, like the dedication, the work not of the compiler but of Oldys[334] himself), criticising its predecessors (including Gildon) rather severely, and showing knowledge of English criticism generally; but the point of chief interest about the book is its own interest in, and extensive draughts from, Elizabethan Drama. Not merely “the divine and incomparable” Shakespeare, not merely the still popular sock and buskin of Ben Jonson and of Beaumont and Fletcher, but almost all the others, from Massinger and Middleton down to Goffe and Gomersall, receive attention, although, as he tells us, they were so hard to get that you had to give between three or four pounds for a volume containing some ten plays of Massinger. This is noteworthy; but that his zeal was not according to full knowledge is curiously shown by the contempt with which he speaks, not merely of Bodenham’s Belvedere, but of Allot’s England’s Parnassus, alleging “the little merit of the obsolete poets from which they were extracted.” Now it should be unnecessary to say that Allot drew, almost as largely as his early date permitted him, on “the divine and incomparable” himself, on Spenser, and on others only inferior to these. But this carping at forerunners is too common. If Oldys could write thus, what must have been the ignorance of others?

Footnote 333:

3 vols., London.

Footnote 334:

It thus connects the book with The Muses’ Library.

Footnote 335:

Even before, at, or about the date of the Reliques themselves, a good deal was being done—e.g., Capell’s well-known Prolusions, which gave as early as 1760 the real Nut-Browne Maid, Sackville’s Induction, Edward III., and Davies’ Nosce Teipsum, and the Miscellaneous Pieces of 1764, supplying Marston’s Poems and The Troublesome Reign of King John.

Footnote 336:

The most remarkable recent authority on this matter is of course M. Texte, who has appeared already and will appear again in his own place.

Footnote 337:

I hold (though as probable rather than certain) that Richardson and Fielding knew Marianne and Le Paysan Parvenu: but Marivaux frankly wrote Le Spectateur Français.

Footnote 338:

Vol. ii. p. 545. Once more Tiraboschi must be reserved as a great early example of the historical treatment of a national literature.

Footnote 339:

I include of course the Galician and Portuguese ballad-books.

Footnote 340:

It was explained, and in manner I think not open to any but wilful misunderstanding, that among the branches of so-called, and not unjustly so-called, Criticism which were excluded from this History was the greater part of merely commentatorial “scholarship”—the editing and interpretative part of the scholarship of the Renaissance and the succeeding centuries. We were able, now and then, to admit critics of the class when, like Politian in part of his work earlier, or Bentley later, they came actually within our range. But classical scholarship has lain more and more out of our path as the eighteenth century proceeded, and it was not till far into the nineteenth, and then but for a moment, that the two converged. The greatest results of this convergence in England were given by Professors Sellar and Nettleship, the former in his admirable series of works on the Roman Poets, the latter in the essays referred to above, and by Mr Pater in his dealing with Plato and other Greeks. Professor Munro, the greatest light of the younger University, touched literature rather less than pure scholarship, and may perhaps be thought to have been least infallible when he touched the former nearest. I had fully perceived the necessity for this exclusion before the appearance of Dr Sandys' admirable History of Classical Scholarship; but that book, though it has not, at the time I write, reached our present period or even that of our last volume, will serve to do what I cannot do as much better than I could have done it on this count as Mr Bosanquet’s on the other.

Footnote 341:

Les définitions ne se posent pas à priori, si ce n’est peut-être en mathématique. En histoire, c’est de l'étude patiente de la réalité qu’elles se dégagent insensiblement. Compare Mme. de Stael, sup., p. 108.

Footnote 342:

It may be barely necessary to remind the reader once more that the period of this accomplishment by no means synchronises in all cases. The “Dissolving of Neo-Classicism” takes in Germany scarcely more than fifty years at farthest—from 1725 to 1775 or thereabouts; in England about another quarter of a century, or till 1800 in round numbers; in France a good century—from 1730 to 1830. In Italy the solitary figure of Vico anticipates even the earliest of these dates, and originates vast alterations in what calls itself criticism; but they do not take effect for the time. The general state, both here and in Spain, is stationary.

Footnote 343:

Père André probably seemed, to himself or others, to do this.

Footnote 344:

This is where Hurd is so valuable.

Footnote 345:

It is doubtful whether Hurd would have accepted it; it is certain that Lessing would not: and Diderot never quite reached the point of view at which it presented itself.

Footnote 346:

Lessing’s attempt to confute the French ex ore Aristotelis is extraordinarily effective ad homines, and most valuable now and then intrinsically. But it has the drawback of ignoring the fact that, though much in Shakespeare is justified by Aristotle, much can only be justified without him, and some must be justified in his teeth.

Footnote 347:

See Index to vol. i.

Footnote 348:

With, once more, the great exception and anticipation of Vico.

Footnote 349:

It is widely usual in editions of Wordsworth to print these together and consecutively. They are so short, and accessible in so many different shapes that it seems superfluous to give page-references to any particular edition. The Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns (1816) (which Mr Rhys has included in the Literary Pamphlets noticed elsewhere) is less purely literary, but has important passages, especially that on Tam o’ Shanter.

Footnote 350:

I have had to insert “almost” since this chapter was first written, as a salute to my friend Professor Raleigh. The regular Wordsworthian is, of course, not an “impartial observer” at all. And I have generally found that the best of such observers, even if they do not agree with me, are disposed to admit that W. W. said more than he meant, and even to some extent what he did not mean.

Footnote 351:

That on the death of West.

Footnote 352:

I have used, and refer to, the Bohn edition of Coleridge’s Prose Works.

Footnote 353:

1800-1817.

Footnote 354:

In practice, though not always in theory: for his famous explanation of his Christabel metre is admitted, even by an authority who takes such different views of prosody from mine as Mr Robert Bridges, to be quite wrong.

Footnote 355:

I have, since this was written, endeavoured to do something of the kind for a practical purpose (to which nothing is sacred) in my Loci Critici (London and Boston, Mass., 1903), pp. 303-365.

Footnote 356:

Or, as he puts it in one of the great critical phrases of the world, “to produce that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith.” It derives of course from Aristotle, but the advance on the original is immense.

Footnote 357:

“And from all other species having this object in common with it, it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.” This is the dialect of “Cimmerian Lodge” with a vengeance! An attempt to expound it will be found in the abstract of the Lectures of 1811 given by J. P. Collier: but it sheds little light. And simpler Estesian definitions elsewhere—“Prose is words in good order: poetry the best words in the best order,” &c.—labour likewise under the common curse that Poetry escapes them. What better words in what better order than the Lord’s Prayer? Is that poetry?

Footnote 358:

The extraordinary critical genius of Coleridge can hardly be better shown than by his gloss here on the Petronian enigma, Præcipitandus est liber spiritus, to which we have referred so often. The poet—the image is not Coleridge’s, but I think it very fairly illustrates his view—rides the reader’s own genius, and both together attain the goal.

Footnote 359:

This (chap. xvi., not long after the beginning (p. 157, ed. Bohn)) is the reference cited above, i. 419, note. It is very slight, and merely concerns Dante’s jealousy for his mother tongue.

Footnote 360:

These terms are used with no offensive intention, but in strict reference to the matter of the poems.

Footnote 361:

Chap. xx. sub fin., p. 201, ed. cit.

Footnote 362:

Except, once more, to my friend Mr Raleigh.

Footnote 363:

Chap. xxi. Personality, partisanship, haphazard, garbling, caricature in selection of instances, are the chief faults that Coleridge finds with both Edinburgh and Quarterly. The reply is dignified in tone and not unjust; but, like other things of the same kind, it illustrates certain permanent weaknesses of human nature. All the faults, I think, which Coleridge finds with “Blue and Yellow” and “Buff” reviewing might be found with his own critique of Maturin’s Bertram, printed in this very volume. All these faults certainly found by every generation of authors with their critics, even when these authors happen to have been copious and constant writers of criticism themselves. Always is the author tempted, like Mr Baxter, to cry, “Ah, but I was in the right, and these men are dreadfully in the wrong”; always does he think, like the Archbishop of Granada, that the incriminated part of his sermon is exactly the best part; always, when he bewails the absence of the just and impartial critics of other times, does he forget the wise ejaculation of Mr Rigmarole, “Pretty much like our own, I fancy!” (There is no mental reservation in these remarks.)

Footnote 364:

Four-and-thirty closely printed pages in the Bohn ed.

Footnote 365:

Vol. i. p. 436.

Footnote 366:

Yet there are curious lapses even here. Take the extreme example, Alice Fell, of whom even her author was half-ashamed as mean and homely. How about “fierce career,” and “smitten with a startling sound,” and the inversion of “Proud creature was she”?

Footnote 367:

My friend Prof. Raleigh, in his brilliant and (for that word hath something derogated) really critical study of Wordsworth (London, 1903), is of a different opinion: but I hold my own. And I do not enter into controversy on the point, because I have nothing to add to the text, written before Prof. Raleigh’s book appeared.

Footnote 368:

I am well acquainted with the glosses on this famous phrase.

Footnote 369:

“Concluding” in strictness they are not; for Coleridge, in one of his whims, chose to transfer Satyrane’s Letters from The Friend to be a sort of coda to the Biographia, tipped it with the rather brutish sting of the Critique on Bertram, and attempted Versöhnung with a mystical peroration. But the thing really and logically ends with the words “Betty Foy,” sub fin., chap. xxi.

Footnote 370:

He somewhere sighs for Southey’s command of terse crisp sentences, and compares his own to “Surinam toads with young ones sprouting and hanging about them as they go.”

Footnote 371:

An agreeable American critic, Miss Agnes Repplier, once remarked that Coleridge must have been “a very beatable child.” This beatability continued till his death: you can only worship him in the spirit of the Portuguese sailor towards his saints.

Footnote 372:

Mrs General Baynes of the Honourable Mrs Boldero in The Adventures of Philip, chap. xx.

Footnote 373:

Mr Dykes Campbell (whose threading of the maze and piecing of the ends of Coleridgiana is a standing marvel) thought, or seemed to think, that the Introduction grew into the Biographia itself.

Footnote 374:

Satyrane’s Letters themselves contain a good deal of criticism in and out of the interview with Klopstock (p. 270 sq., ed. cit.), where the credit is claimed by some for Wordsworth. The Critique on Bertram opens well on the “Don Juan” story, but the rest of it is not muy hermosa cosa, combining, as it does, that snarling and carping tone, against which Coleridge is always and justly protesting, with more than a suspicion of personal spite. For Bertram had been preferred to Zapolya.

Footnote 375:

The usually known reprint of the 2nd ed. of 1818 is very different from the original, published in the extraordinary fashion described by Coleridge himself in the Biographia, during 1809-10, and collected in volume form thereafter. This latter is perhaps the better worth reading. It is at any rate a confirmation of the at first sight immoral maxim that you should always buy a book you want, whether you can afford it or not. Twenty years ago it was not common but comparatively cheap; now, alas! it is both uncommon and very dear.

Footnote 376:

The editor of these, the late Mr Thomas Ashe (author of a poem far too little read—The Sorrows of Hypsipyle), took much pains with them; and if he could have kept back a few flings, would have deserved unqualified thanks. “Never mind God’s will” may be noble counsel, or an unlucky advice to run worse than your head against worse than a stone wall. But it is certainly out of place in very brief and rare notes on a classical author.

Footnote 377:

The question—a puzzle like other Quæstiones Estesianæ—about the exact numbers and dates of Coleridge’s Shakespearian courses is not for us. It is enough to say that our extant materials (consisting, in regard to some lectures, of notes and reports from several different sources) chiefly, if not wholly, concern two courses delivered in London (1811-12 and 1818), and one at Bristol, 1813-14. Of the Royal Institution Lectures of 1806-7, on which he relied (throwing them even farther back) to prove his priority to Schlegel, nothing at all, unluckily, is preserved. Indeed Mr Dykes Campbell insisted, and seems to have almost proved, that none at all were delivered till Jan. 1808. And of these we have only Crabb Robinson’s brief references.

Footnote 378:

This perhaps should, and can very shortly, be demonstrated:— Observation may be either broad and sweeping, or minute and concentrated; Johnson specifies the former kind in the last half of the first line. Observation may be directed to men, to things, &c.; it is to mankind that he wishes it directed, and he says so in the first half of the second. Further, as this is too abstract, he gives the poetic and imaginative touch by filling in the waste atlas, with “China” and “Peru,” with the porcelain and the pigtails, the llamas and the gold associated with mankind in these countries. And in the name of Logic, and Rhetoric and Poetry into the bargain, “What for no?”

Footnote 379:

P. 73, ed. cit. Goethe, of course, was of the same opinion.

Footnote 380:

P. 89.

Footnote 381:

P. 138.

Footnote 382:

P. 139 sq.

Footnote 383:

E.g., p. 152 sq.

Footnote 384:

P. 207.

Footnote 385:

P. 213.

Footnote 386:

P. 441.

Footnote 387:

P. 412.

Footnote 388:

E.g., pp. 426, 427.

Footnote 389:

All men who write for the periodical press must almost necessarily repeat themselves, and Hazlitt (whose work often comes to us directly from the press itself) is not so very much less peccant in this kind than Coleridge. Coleridge’s own method exposes the peccadillo ruthlessly. The “Let Observation” criticism occurs several times: the story about the Falls of Lanark and the man who, beginning with “majestic,” spoilt it by “very pretty,” over and over again. Nor is this repetition merely due to the chaotic state of his publications; it seems to have been a congenital bias, as testified to in his conversation quite early.

Footnote 390:

P. 15, ed. cit.

Footnote 391:

V. infra on Letters.

Footnote 392:

P. 38.

Footnote 393:

P. 45.

Footnote 394:

P. 74.

Footnote 395:

P. 97.

Footnote 396:

P. 158. These were, “When the professions fell off from the Church; when literature fell off from the professions; and when the press fell off from literature.”

Footnote 397:

P. 164 sq.

Footnote 398:

P. 177.

Footnote 399:

P. 183.

Footnote 400:

P. 201.

Footnote 401:

P. 214.

Footnote 402:

P. 174, v. inf.

Footnote 403:

Miscellanies, pp. 175-187 ed. cit.

Footnote 404:

It is odd, but useful, to remember Coleridge’s fancy for stating propositions algebraically. If his definition were true, a = b or even (a + b)^2 = a^2 + 2_ab_ + b^2 would be style at its very acme (cf. Addison in Spec. 62 on Euclid and Wit).

Footnote 405:

London, 1895.

Footnote 406:

Pp. 4, 5, 30, 35, 59, 82, 88.

Footnote 407:

P. 118 sq.

Footnote 408:

P. 121.

Footnote 409:

P. 123.

Footnote 410:

Pp. 127-130.

Footnote 411:

P. 147. Cf. sup., p. 223.

Footnote 412:

Coleridge quotes neither Quintilian nor Dante, and was probably not thinking of either. But we think of them.

Footnote 413:

P. 194.

Footnote 414:

I.e., “The faculty which makes many into one”—the creative imagination. This form is much better than “es_em_plastic,” which Coleridge adopts in the Biographia, for there one stumbles over the second syllable, and supposes it to be the preposition ἐν.

Footnote 415:

P. 258.

Footnote 416:

Pp. 274, 275.

Footnote 417:

P. 293.

Footnote 418:

Ed. E. H. Coleridge, 2 vols., London, 1895.

Footnote 419:

i. 97, ed. cit.

Footnote 420:

Miss Mary Evans, Miss Sarah Fricker, and an uncertainly Christian-named Miss Brunton. More in excelsis Coleridgeano he, being engaged to No. 2 and desiring to marry No. 1, “hoped that he might be cured” by the “exquisite beauty and uncommon accomplishments” of No. 3. See a page or two (89) earlier.

Footnote 421:

P. 157.

Footnote 422:

P. 163.

Footnote 423:

P. 181.

Footnote 424:

P. 196.

Footnote 425:

P. 210. This was just after the as yet hollow healing of the first great quarrel in 1796.

Footnote 426:

P. 384. These passages are most important as showing how early Coleridge dissented from Wordsworth.

Footnote 427:

P. 549.

Footnote 428:

P. 557.

Footnote 429:

P. 663.

Footnote 430:

V. infra, chap. iii.

Footnote 431:

Coleridge (“English Men of Letters,” London, 1884), p. 156.

Footnote 432:

Ibid., pp. 46, 47.

Footnote 433:

See Life and Correspondence, ii. 316 sq. especially, for Coleridge’s magnificent “Spanish-Castlery” in connection.

Footnote 434:

6 vols., London, 1850.

Footnote 435:

4 vols., London, 1856. The Letters to Caroline Bowles (London, 1881) are even fuller proportionately: and Omniana, the Wesley, the Cowper, Espriella, the Colloquies, with almost everything, contribute.

Footnote 436:

But see a very curious glimpse of resipiscence in Letters, ii. 171 sq.

Footnote 437:

The projected Rhadamanthus, a periodical on something like the lines of the later Retrospective Review, was a real loss.

Footnote 438:

Letters, i. 69, and elsewhere, also, I think—e.g., Life and Corr., iv. 106. Wynn was evidently a precisian of Bysshism. For other noteworthy critical things in this collection, see i. 173 (Suggestion of Hist. Novels); ii. 91 (Crabbe); 214 (Engl. Hexameters); iii. (the various letters about English Hexameters); iv. 47, Sayers’ Poems. I give but few here, because the Letters have an index. I wish these and my other references may prompt and help some one to examine, at greater length than would be possible or proper here, the literary opinions of the best-read man in England for some fifty years— 1790-1840.

Footnote 439:

It is unlucky that Guest’s English Rhythms came too late in the evening of his day for him to carry out his expressed purpose of reviewing it. He evidently recognised its extraordinary value as a Thesaurus: and his summary of the earlier part as “worthless” is of course not deliberate or final, though it is a very natural expression in reference to Guest’s astonishing heresies on Shakespearian and Miltonic prosody. I know no one—not even Gray—who seems to have had, before the whole range of English verse was known, juster notions on the whole of English prosody. Even his wanderings after hexameters are not fatal.

Footnote 440:

The Doctor (1 vol., London, 1848), p. 18.

Footnote 441:

P. 34.

Footnote 442:

P. 42.

Footnote 443:

P. 65.

Footnote 444:

P. 86.

Footnote 445:

P. 99.

Footnote 446:

P. 194.

Footnote 447:

P. 245. It is curious, by the way, that Southey bewails the absence in English of any synonym for the Spanish desengaño. That shows that “disillusionment,” one of those strictly analogous and justifiable neologisms which he rightly defends, had not then come into use.

Footnote 448:

P. 315.

Footnote 449:

P. 379.

Footnote 450:

P. 476.

Footnote 451:

P. 536.

Footnote 452:

P. 610.

Footnote 453:

Such an authority, for instance, as one of the reviewers of this poor book, who decided that “no man of critical genius” would have attempted to write it.

Footnote 454:

Some readers may like a few out of hundreds of possible references to Life and Corr., which has no Index: i. 85 (Ariosto and Spenser); 122 (Construction); 316-318 (Chapelain, before and after reading); ii. 197 (Greek and Latin taste in poetry); 211, 212 (Modern Ballads); iii. 9 (Archaisms and Neologisms); 140 (the Epistles in Marmion); 145 sq. (Rhyme, &c.); 205 (the purple patch in Kehama); 213, 265 (Advice to E. Elliott); 277 (blank verse); 295 (Spenser); iv. 301, 338 (very interesting, on a prophesied return of “preciousness” and “metaphysical” style in poetry); v. 245 (a never-carried-out plan of continuing Warton); v. 99 (his own method of writing); vi. 93 (To Bowles—reasons for not reviewing poetry).

Footnote 455:

The editions of Lamb in parts are now fortunately very numerous, and there are even several of the whole, some of which have been begun since the text was written. It is therefore superfluous to give pages, especially as the individual articles are almost always short. But I generally use the late R. H. Shepherd’s 1 vol. ed. of the Works (London, 1875), and Canon Ainger’s of the Letters (London, 1888).

Footnote 456:

Table Talk, pp. 313, 314, ed. cit. inf.

Footnote 457:

Winterslow, p. 463, ed. cit. inf.

Footnote 458:

Now, alas! become, between pen and press, the late Master.

Footnote 459:

Letters, ed. Ainger, i. 162 sq., with the most amusing additional letter in the Appendix, p. 328 sq., on the wrath of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

Footnote 460:

Ibid., i. 189, 190.

Footnote 461:

P. 207.

Footnote 462:

P. 286 sq.

Footnote 463:

P. 290.

Footnote 464:

Ibid., ii. 105.

Footnote 465:

Even as the exquisite figure of Mrs Blake, sitting on the bedside, faces the sketches of gnashing fiends.

Footnote 466:

P. 138.

Footnote 467:

P. 278.

Footnote 468:

There may be people who do not know this, and those who know it already need not read it. A college cook (I think of Brasenose) was particularly famous for that most excellent dish the fondue, but would never tell his recipe. At last some Arthur Pendennis (of the other shop) got round him to this extent: “Why, sir,” said he, “you see I takes the eggs, and the butter, and the cheese, you know, and the other things; and then I just fondoos ’em.”

Footnote 469:

There is no complete ed. of Hunt, and there could not well be one. I shall refer here to the 7 vols. of Messrs. Smith & Elder’s cheap and uniform reprint of a good deal, and to the pretty American pocket issue of the Italian Poets.

Footnote 470:

At the beginning of the Essay on Restoration Drama.

Footnote 471:

Italian.

Footnote 472:

Of course it is not all unfavourable: Leigh Hunt is far too much of a critic and a lover of poetry for that. But he is constantly put off and put out by Dante’s “bigotry,” his “uncharitableness,” the “barbarous pedantries” of his age, and the like.

Footnote 473:

New ed., ut sup.: London, 1883.

Footnote 474:

This is good, but not so good: and elsewhere—though critical matter will be found in all Hunt’s collected books and in all his uncollected periodical work, from the Examiner, “whose very name is Hunt,” and the Indicator, and the Reflector, to the Tatler, and the London Journal—we shall never find him better and seldom so good.

Footnote 475:

P. 51, ed. cit.

Footnote 476:

It is curious what power that dead sorceress has had on almost all her poets.

Footnote 477:

P. 250, ed. cit.

Footnote 478:

Preference only, of course: the exceptions are numerous, but not enough to destroy the rule.

Footnote 479:

References will be made here throughout to the reprints of Hazlitt’s literary work in the Bohn Library, 7 vols. This is to The English Comic Writers, p. 33. The newer and completer edition of Messrs Waller & Glover had but begun when the text was written.

Footnote 480:

Ibid., p. 170 sq., and p. 176 sq.

Footnote 481:

He is, however, dangerously near requiring it with regard to Scott (see the end of the article on him in The Spirit of his Age), and whenever he speaks of the Duke of Wellington.

Footnote 482:

English Poets, ed. cit., pp. 92-95.

Footnote 483:

Pp. 18-25.

Footnote 484:

This favourite word of his has been adopted by all competent critics as best describing his own manner.

Footnote 485:

Pp. 19, 20.

Footnote 486:

The last page of The English Poets.

Footnote 487:

It is curious that the critic’s blunder had been anticipated, though not excused, by the author’s. Richardson of course meant to make Lovelace what Hazlitt sees in him: only he failed.

Footnote 488:

In the paper on Sir Philip’s Sonnets, noted above.

Footnote 489:

Lect. vi., p. 201 sq.

Footnote 490:

But not as unique as odd.

Footnote 491:

P. 181.

Footnote 492:

Pp. 115, 126. The elaborate characters of Bacon, &c., in this course should be compared with those of Pope, and others earlier.

Footnote 493:

P. 64, ed. cit.

Footnote 494:

P. 75.

Footnote 495:

P. 108.

Footnote 496:

P. 77.

Footnote 497:

P. 139.

Footnote 498:

P. 185.

Footnote 499:

P. 278. These passages may remind some of the story of one of George Sand’s old lovers pausing before a photograph of her in a shop-window, and saying to his companion, “Et je l’ai connue belle!”

Footnote 500:

P. 344.

Footnote 501:

The usual dog-metaphors are no triviality in regard to Hazlitt when he is in this mood. Every one who knows dogs must have noticed the way in which they often snarl, as if they could not help it; the growl and gnash are forced from them.

Footnote 502:

P. 441.

Footnote 503:

P. 449.

Footnote 504:

The end-note of this piece coincides curiously with a remark once made to me by a person unusually well acquainted with France but, I feel sure, quite unaware that he was echoing Hazlitt. “The Frenchman has a certain routine of phrases into which his ideas run habitually as into a mould; and you cannot get him out of them.”

Footnote 505:

P. 56.

Footnote 506:

P. 203.

Footnote 507:

Yet Hazlitt cannot resist a renewed fling at Sidney.

Footnote 508:

P. 351.

Footnote 509:

P. 150, ed. cit. I wish that some one, in these excerpting days, would extract and print together all Hazlitt’s passages on Burke, Scott, and Coleridge.

Footnote 510:

P. 246.

Footnote 511:

P. 248.

Footnote 512:

P. 317.

Footnote 513:

P. 431.

Footnote 514:

“We have more faith in a well-written romance than in common history.”

Footnote 515:

In 1845, reviewing Horne’s very rashly entitled New Spirit of the Age. The review will be found in the 13th vol. (1886) of the ordinary ed. of Thackeray’s Works.

Footnote 516:

P. 173.

Footnote 517:

“Its strength is in its wings” is, in idea, of course, as old as Plato. But the nearest expression of it, the “la lyre est un instrument ailé” of Joubert, though by a man more than thirty years Hazlitt’s senior, was never, I think, published till ten years after Hazlitt’s death.

Footnote 518:

Below Hazlitt (who as well as Lamb praised him, though the former more suo fell foul of him as well) may be best placed, in the note which is as much as he deserves, that much-written-of “curiosity of literature,” the poisoner, connoisseur, and coxcomb, Wainewright. “Janus,” however, was too much occupied with pictures, plays, bric-à-brac, Montepulciano, veal-pies in red earthenware dishes, the prize-ring, and other fancies or fopperies, to busy himself directly with literature, save, perhaps, in the curious paper “Janus Weatherbound,” which seems to have been his “farewell to essay-writing.” It is, however, fair to say that, odious as he was in ways not merely moral, he had something of “a taste” here also. His quotations, which are numerous, are singularly well selected; he admired not merely Fouqué but Shelley long before it was the fashion to do so; and you may pick out of the works, rather probably than certainly his (Essays and Criticisms, by T. G. Wainewright, ed. W. C. Hazlitt: London, 1880), stray literary notes not without value.

Footnote 519:

I use for Blake Gilchrist’s Life and Works (2nd ed., 2 vol., London, 1880), Mr Swinburne’s William Blake (London, 1868), Mr Rossetti’s Aldine Poetical Works (London, 1874), and Messrs Ellis and Yeats’s great Blakian Thesaurus (3 vols., London, 1893).

Footnote 520:

V. sup., ii. 391 note.

Footnote 521:

Letter to the Monthly Magazine of July 1, 1806. “O Englishmen! know that every man ought to be a judge of pictures, and every man is so who has not been connoisseured out of his senses.” The whole letter is given by Mr Swinburne, pp. 62, 63, op. cit.

Footnote 522:

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Compare with this Vico’s famous doctrine that “the criterion on truth is to have made it.”

Footnote 523:

Facsimiled in Ellis and Yeats, vol. iii. Printed as Sibylline Leaves in Gilchrist, ii. 178, 180.

Footnote 524:

See in particular his admirable review of Godwin’s Chaucer, and his just condemnation of the absurd practice—simply wallowed in since by biographers and historians—of bolstering out a book with what the subject might have seen, done, thought, or suffered.

Footnote 525:

The two qualities lauded above—knowledge and judgment—are specially noteworthy here, when we compare the article, not merely with the less fully informed work of Hurd, Percy, and Warton (not to say Ritson), but with more recent compositions by persons who had the originals easily at disposal.

Footnote 526:

They will also be found printed together in the two vols. of Biographies, of which they form the larger part.

Footnote 527:

Periodical Criticism, vol. ii.

Footnote 528:

In connection with Sir Walter, one may pay a note of tribute to the extreme and now too little known critical ability of his “discoverer,” J. L. Adolphus, whose Letters to Heber on the Authorship of Waverley would come in well as an excursus-subject. Examining, as he did, certain known works of an at least hypothetically unknown writer, he was bound to give that attention to the work itself, which was the great thing necessary; and he gave it with remarkable ability, craftsmanship, and knowledge of literature.

Footnote 529:

Those who will not take the trouble to search the Specimens themselves will find copious and admirably selected examples in Jeffrey’s article on the book (Essays, 1 vol. ed., p. 359 sq.), one of the best reviews he ever wrote, but for some superfluous, unjust, and, in the context (v. above), specially ungenerous flings at Southey.

Footnote 530:

This may be found not merely in the edd. of the Works, but in Prof. Vaughan’s interesting selection of Literary Criticism (London, 1896).

Footnote 531:

It is with some misgiving, and after more than one change of mind, that I place Shelley’s great poetical twin (or rather tally) in a note only here. I have already more than once referred (ii. 280, 412) to Keats’s perhaps one-sided but very vigorous and remarkable verse-formulation of the protest against Neo-classicism; the two prefaces (especially the final one) to Endymion have been generally recognised by the competent as perhaps the most astonishingly just judgments which any poet has ever passed on himself: and the Letters are full of critical or quasi-critical passages of the highest interest. I myself have a sheaf of them duly noted; and some persons of distinction whom I know would admit them to the very Golden Book of Criticism. I hope, however, that my own judgment is not too much sicklied o’er with crotchet in holding that Keats’s criticism of himself and others is somewhat too spontaneous and automatic, somewhat too much of a mere other phase of his creation, to deserve the name of criticism properly so-called. He speaks of Shakespeare admirably, because he has the same quintessentially English cast of poetry that Shakespeare had. When he speaks of poetry in the abstract, as he does admirably and often, it is this poetry speaking of herself, and therefore speaking truly but not critically. Even in the wonderful remark (vol. v. p. 111., ed. Forman, Glasgow, 1901) on himself and Byron, “He describes what he sees: I describe what I imagine” (where he repeats Philostratus without in the least knowing it), the thing is not criticism: it is self-speaking. And beyond this he seldom goes, and is seldomer happy in his rare excursions. He might have become a critic, as he might have become almost anything good; but I do not think he was one.

Footnote 532:

My copy is the eight-volume ed. of 1874-76: but the titles of the various pieces will enable them to be found in others.

Footnote 533:

See the opening of “Southey and Porson.” It is, of course, not improved by the presence of the Landorian irony, which is an uncertain quality, too often inclining either to horse-play or to peevishness: but this is not fatal.

Footnote 534:

See “Landor and Delille.”

Footnote 535:

V. sup., p. 66 sq.

Footnote 536:

V. sup., ii. 491.

Footnote 537:

From 1801, when his edition appeared, till well into the ’Twenties. Mr. Rhys (op. cit. sup.) has given some of Bowles’s rejoinders to Byron, with Byron’s own Letter, mentioned below, and some references to the battle in his Introduction.

Footnote 538:

They will be found usefully rearranged by himself in the extract of his answer to Byron given by Mr Rhys (Appendix to vol. ii., op. cit.)

Footnote 539:

i. 262 sq.

Footnote 540:

1821. To be found, outside the edd. of the author, in Mr Rhys’ book, ii. 162 sq.

Footnote 541:

It has been suggested to me that Byron ought to have the benefit, as well as the disadvantage, of my description of Keats’s critical utterances on the other side, as a phase of his creation. There is something in this: but Byron seems to me less genuine even on this showing.

Footnote 542:

The Censura, extending to 10 vols., but oftenest found incomplete, appeared in 1805-9. The British Bibliographer, Restituta, &c., came later.

Footnote 543:

First Series, 14 vols., 1820-26; Second, 2 vols., 1827-28. Its contributors included Hartley Coleridge, Talfourd (one of the persons whom I regretfully exclude here), and (in his earliest work) Thomas Wright.

Footnote 544:

Southern afterwards came in contact with Borrow at Madrid. See The Bible in Spain and Dr Knapp’s Life.

Footnote 545:

There is none in the dates, but the title-page is different, the former vignette of a gateway (Trinity? “I cannot tell, I am an Oxford man”) disappearing, and being replaced by the editors’ names.

Footnote 546:

A so-called “Third Series” (in 2 vols., 1854) can hardly be considered as really forming part of the original, from which it is separated by a thirty years’ interval.

Footnote 547:

It is the only adequate thing on him that I know.

Footnote 548:

Specially good are, in vol. iv., the dramatic papers; in v., one on Witchcraft; in vi., those on Coryat and Sir T. Urquhart; in vii., on Donne and Ariosto; in ix., on Chaucer (continued later); in x., on Minor French Poetry (Dorat); in xii., on Latin Plays at Cambridge, and one of singular and wide-reaching merit on the Roman Comique; in xv., an interesting tracing of Scott’s quotations in the novels; in xvi., an admirable paper on Shadwell. But there is practically nothing negligible: and good taste, good manners, good temper, and good learning abound throughout.

Footnote 549:

V. sup., ii. 534.

Footnote 550:

His best literary skit, “Bozzy and Piozzi,” deals with the Tour, not the Life.

Footnote 551:

The earlier Rolliad is partly, but less, literary. For more on most of these I may refer to an essay of mine, Twenty Years of Political Satire, which originally appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine, and it reprinted in Essays in English Literature, 2nd series, London, 1895.

Footnote 552:

I do not think it necessary to give Gifford’s prose or periodical criticism a separate place. It is by no means easily separable as such; and if separated I fancy there would be very little to say for it, and that what would have to be said against it is better summed up in the words of no less a political sympathiser and personal friend than Scott. A “cankered carle” cannot be a good critic, any more than a mildewed grape can give good wine. But Gifford was not quite so bad as he has seemed to some; and his editorial work, especially on Jonson, deserves almost the highest praise.

Footnote 553:

I know, of course, that even Coleridge spoke unadvisedly about these immortal flowers. But he had got a “philosophical” craze at the moment: and he did not call them “stuff.”

Footnote 554:

Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, London, pp. 36-63 of this the one vol. ed., 1853. The “Beauty” itself requires very little notice. It is an ingenious variation upon Alison, whose book it reviews, praises, and supports, with some unfairness to Gerard. But it abstains, almost comically and not uninstructively to an impartial thinker on æsthetics, from any definite literary applications.

Footnote 555:

He makes indeed an awkward slip by linking Machiavel as a contemporary with Shakespeare, Bacon, Montaigne, and Galileo; but it is only recently, if even recently, that literary history has been carefully attended to, and Coleridge himself makes slips quite as bad.

Footnote 556:

How much of this was got from his author herself I leave to others to decide. A comparison with what has been said of her supra may be “for thoughts.”

Footnote 557:

A fuller development of view about Jeffrey as a critic may be found in the present writer’s Essays in English Literature, First Series, pp. 100-134. Articles of his own specially worth examining are, besides the “Staël,” “Cowper,” “Ford,” “Keats,” and “Campbell’s Specimens,” those on W. Meister (very curious and interesting), Richardson, Scott, and Byron (very numerous and full of piquancies), Crabbe, Wordsworth of course (though with as much wisdom as good feeling he kept much of the most offensive matter both on Wordsworth and Southey out), and Burns. In regard to the latter I cannot help thinking that he played the Advocatus Diaboli better than either Mr Arnold, Mr Shairp, or my late friend Mr Henley.

Footnote 558:

The popularity, in late years, of the singularly uncritical words “sympathetic” and “unsympathetic” in describing Criticism, would of itself point to this necessity. It would seem impossible for a large number of persons to “like” otherwise than “grossly” in Dryden’s sense, or to imagine that any one else can like delicately, with discrimination, in the old sense “nicely.” A “sympathetic” notice or criticism is one which pours unmixed cataracts of what the cooks call oiled butter all over the patient: a notice that questions this part of him, rejects that, but gives due value to the gold and the silver and the precious stones, while discarding the hay and the stubble, is “unsympathetic.” Many years (many lustres even, alas!) ago, an old friend and colleague of mine, since distinguished in his own country as a critic, M. Paul Stapfer, complained that Englishmen, and still more Englishwomen, had only two critical categories—the “dry” and the “pretty.” These were unsatisfactory enough, but I think they were better than “sympathetic” and “unsympathetic” as now often used.

Footnote 559:

P. 5, in the convenient 1-vol. reprint of Messrs Ward and Lock (London: n. d.)

Footnote 560:

On the same page, ed. cit.

Footnote 561:

Who loved the Vulgate.

Footnote 562:

I decline to sully these pages with it: let it go to its own place, buckled neck and heels with Rapin’s on Nausicaa.

Footnote 563:

We could abandon Owen Felltham to him with more equanimity if he did not describe, as “vile English, or properly no English,” such words as “nested,” “parallel” as a verb, and “uncurtain,” all excellent English of the best brand and vintage, formed on the strictest and most idiomatic patents of analogy. There is still far too much criticastry and pedanticulism (here’s for them!) of this kind about, and men like Hallam are very mainly responsible for it. Even “obnubilate,” to which he also objects, is a perfectly good word, on all-fours with “compensate,” which he himself uses in the same context, though less usual. A sovereign of just weight, fineness, and stamp is none the worse for having been little circulated: nor is a word.

Footnote 564:

I can only think of one important blunder that he makes as a historian—the statement that Opitz “took Holland for his Parnassus.” Now Ronsard (v. sup., ii. 362) was not exactly a Dutchman.

Footnote 565:

His Critiques et Études Littéraires (2 vols., Paris, 1857) contain many things upon which I should like to dwell, especially his discussion, in the Globe, of the État de la Poésie Française in 1825. It is as good an expression of the views of the earlier, cooler, and more erudite Eclectic-Romantics as could be wished.

Footnote 566:

To be found in his Essais Historiques et Littéraires: Paris, 1862. The Essais Philosophiques et Littéraires (Paris, 1875) may also be consulted: but, as the double titles may warn the wary, there is not much pure literature in either.

Footnote 567:

See the later Conversations, passim.

Footnote 568:

This, with Quintus Smyrnæus as make-weight, is a sort of wreckage or recovery from the lectures which were howled down at the Collége de France by anti-Imperialist students. It is the largest of its author’s classical studies: not perhaps the most interesting. The French professorial method, possibly in direct tradition from the time when authors were really (and in some cases almost merely) read to students, seems to include a very large amount of simple abstract and “argument.” (“Priam conducts the young princess to the Palace: he honours her,” &c.) This is, from our point of view, rather surplusage, and at any rate more important on Quintus Smyrnæus than on Virgil. But we may note a reference (p. 73) to Mr Arnold’s Preface, then pretty new, which is an interesting thing.

Footnote 569:

There is naturally not much criticism here except the remark—in itself involving one of the few great commandments of criticism and one of the most frequently neglected—“il n’avait pas assez lu.”

Footnote 570:

In the case of a man who wrote so much and so often on the same things as Sainte-Beuve, an exhaustive general index would be a great assistance. There is a whole volume of Table to the Causeries, properly so called, the Portraits de Femmes, and the Portraits Littéraires; while the Premiers Lundis contains a succinct but very useful synopsis-index of all the works and substantive pieces, and Port-Royal has an elaborate index of its own. But my copies of the Portraits Contemporains (5 vols.) and the Chateaubriand (2), as well as the 13 of the Nouveaux Lundis, are indexless.

Footnote 571:

Sainte-Beuve could be dull, and his Senate speeches are most painful proofs of it. We know that the Senators who talked him inaudible had other reasons for their rudeness: but he almost provoked it apart from those reasons.

Footnote 572:

I know Balzac’s criticism, which is extensive, pretty well: but I shall do no such despite to his genius as to allow him to appear here in a character where he showed no genius at all.

Footnote 573:

Paris, 1828, and since.

Footnote 574:

This, however (5 vols., 1832-39), was probably the first collection that definitely announced its author to the world at large.

Footnote 575:

The first reissue (1844 ?) was only in two.

Footnote 576:

This is a crucial example. Sainte-Beuve had a just reverence for the powers of this Abdiel-Michael of aristocracy. He even seems a little daunted and dazzled by their sombre splendour. But he does not bring out their literary quality as he would have done later.

Footnote 577:

I believe this charming book—made accessible for a time by the Brussels reprint of 1868—is again very rare. I once had the pleasure of introducing it to the late Lord Houghton, who told me afterwards that he had bought it “and dressed it up all in moons and stars.”

Footnote 578:

Vigny (in a passage which Sainte-Beuve himself quotes with singular blindness or singular boldness) puts the thing finally: Il ne faut disséquer que les morts: cette manière de chercher à ouvrir le cerveau d’un vivant est fausse et mauvaise (A. de. V.'s Journal, quoted in Port. Contemp., final ed., ii. 79).

Footnote 579:

And, after all, let us remember that, on the testimony of the Goncourts (Journal, ii. 123), who have left some of the most offensive things against Sainte-Beuve, the critic, as late as 1863, rebuked Taine for belittling Hugo, in these memorable words, “Ne parlez pas d’Hugo. Vous ne le connaissez pas. Mais l'œuvre d’Hugo est magnifique!”

Footnote 580:

See for instance the opening (1832) of the “Lamartine” (i. 276).

Footnote 581:

E.g., to Crabbe, pp. 328-330; to Wordsworth and Coleridge, pp. 337-345. Sainte-Beuve, it is hardly necessary to say, was English of the quarter-blood.

Footnote 582:

The not quite “single speech” Ulric of that unforgettable piece, “Ils ont dit, L’amour passe et sa flamme est rapide.”

Footnote 583:

This contains the admirable, if in more than one sense generous, judgment of Schlegel (Wilhelm), that he a eu l'œil à toutes les grandes choses littéraires, s’il n’a pas toujour rendu justice aux moyennes. Omit grandes in the first clause; substitute it for moyennes and prefix pleine to justice in the second; and the thing becomes a fair verdict on Sainte-Beuve himself.

Footnote 584:

One of Sainte-Beuve’s defects (“for the man was mortal”) was an insufficient appreciation of the grotesque and the out-of-the-way.

Footnote 585:

He himself put it earlier—at 1840 or thereabouts. No doubt, as I have said above, the essays of the ’Forties as a whole do show a great advance. But I hardly recognise the full Sainte-Beuve before, say, the “Daunou” and the “Leopardi” of 1844.

Footnote 586:

The definitive edition was published in 1867-71 (the author died midway in 1869), in 7 vols.—6 of text, the first 5 of which average 600 pp. each, 1 of elaborate index, by that admirable student of the older French literature, M. de Montaiglon. The original dates of publication were 1840-60.

Footnote 587:

Unless we group with it Hazlitt’s, which is, in this instance, for thoughts. Your pure man of letters often has a morbid love of mere force.

Footnote 588:

The touch of we do not quite know what personal soreness breaks in whenever “René” is mentioned, even much later than this.

Footnote 589:

I fear that terrible charge, “il n'était pas gentilhomme,” is a little borne out by his intromitting with Chateaubriand’s annotated copy of the Essai sur les Révolutions, which he uses to fix anti-religious and anti-monarchical opinions on the writer. You have no business, at any rate till centuries have passed, with a man’s private comment on his published writings. It is mere eavesdropping once removed.

Footnote 590:

i. 91.

Footnote 591:

i. 132.

Footnote 592:

Ch. et s. G., i. 233, 234.

Footnote 593:

ii. 37.

Footnote 594:

ii. 91.

Footnote 595:

Ibid., 97.

Footnote 596:

Ibid., 114.

Footnote 597:

Ibid., 340.

Footnote 598:

The Constitutionnel first, then the Moniteur. Here, as elsewhere, I do not burden the text with details which are in all the biographical dictionaries.

Footnote 599:

I wonder whether Mr Arnold got “Stagirius” from Sainte-Beuve, or direct from Saint-Marc Girardin, who seems to have extracted him originally from the Golden-mouth? So, too, did Sohrab and Rustum come from the “Firdousi” article? These interesting suggestions of suggestion—as interesting as the ordinary plagiarism and parallel-passage inquiries of bad and dull critics, are dull and bad— occur with Sainte-Beuve more often than with almost any man.

Footnote 600:

The adventure was kept up, so far as I remember, for four subsequent years with equal punctuality. The Chapel, in Criticism of Our Lady of the Broken Lances has never seen such a paladin.

Footnote 601:

The same applies to the protest, interesting as a cri du cœur and a statement of life-purpose, but mistaken, against Taxile Delord (xi. 400-403). The punishment too much dignifies the offence—and the offender.

Footnote 602:

There is rhetoric enough in Gibbon, of course; but it is not the rhetoric that the French love.

Footnote 603:

Sainte-Beuve’s fancy for Feydeau was a subject of wonder to friends of his who were not in the least prudish. It waned, however, and the signs of the waning are the subject of an anecdote, slightly too Rabelaisian to quote here, but very amusing.

Footnote 604:

He himself has said truly and nobly of one of the few who did escape them—Gautier: “Jamais un sentiment mauvais, soit de hauteur soit de jalousie mesquine, n’est entre dans [son] âme.” To be thus is to be one of ten thousand: even to kick the bad thoughts out when they present themselves is no common merit (N. L., vi. 325).

Footnote 605:

Rather tantalisingly as to the number of fulfilments. But the papers on the Greek Anthology in vol. vii. are exquisite in quality.

Footnote 606:

I do not forget either Mr Arnold or Mr Pater: but they look at antiquity in a different way.

Footnote 607:

The Lundis (though that is not their fault) have perhaps given a rather terrible amount of “knowledge which is not knowledge” at second hand or further. I have often smiled at seeing some honest, if not consummate, first-hand study of a subject loftily pooh-poohed, by some one who evidently knew nothing of it but what he had learnt from Sainte-Beuve.

Footnote 608:

Longinus, c. xxxv. sub. fin.

Footnote 609:

He was Professor of it for years; he was a constant contributor to the Deux Mondes; he welcomed the new study of Old French, and took early part in it. But if any reader wants any more from me on him I must refer to “A Paradox on Quinet” in my Miscellaneous Essays (London, 1892), p. 274 sq.; on Michelet, to an article in the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Footnote 610:

Edd. so numerous that reference to particular ones would be very little helpful: the original dates of important works will be specified.

Footnote 611:

1864.

Footnote 612:

1827.

Footnote 613:

1828.

Footnote 614:

1834.

Footnote 615:

There is a very curious and interesting half-palinode, half-explanation, as to “art-for-art” here, which is worth noting.

Footnote 616:

V. sup., i. 272, note.

Footnote 617:

Paris, 1894.

Footnote 618:

Paris, 1891.

Footnote 619:

Begun in 1844, finished in 1861, and often reprinted.

Footnote 620:

In his later days, too, the very disgust at being himself kept from producing literature kept him from dealing with it, and threw him upon the theatrical and artistic subjects in which he had indeed a great, but only a secondary, interest.

Footnote 621:

There are some very noteworthy things in the early articles recovered and reprinted posthumously in Fusains et Eaux-Fortes (Paris: 1890).

Footnote 622:

Vol. i. p. 19.

Footnote 623:

But never, I think, without date—a blessing for which one cannot be too truly thankful to M. Du Camp or somebody else.

Footnote 624:

He seems to have canonised himself: his godfathers and godmothers had been contented to call him Marc.

Footnote 625:

The Cours, in 5 vols. (afterwards 4), (Paris, 1843 sq.); the Essais, in 2 (Paris, 1845).

Footnote 626:

It is fair to say that Sainte-Beuve’s references to him are not quite trustworthy. There was probably some jealously.

Footnote 627:

As Claude Vignon in Béatrix.

Footnote 628:

Part of his collected work deals with Art. The rest—Portraits Littéraires (1836-49), Nouveaux Portraits Littéraires (1854), and Études sur l'École Français, (1855)—are out of print. The copies I possess consist of Portraits Littéraires, 2 vols. (Paris, 1854), and Nouveaux P. L., 2 vols., 1855.

Footnote 629:

P. L., i. 112-181, and N. P. L., i. 193-353, consist of Hugo articles.

Footnote 630:

See N. P. L., ii. 67 sq.

Footnote 631:

Who has P. L., i. 81-112, and N. P. L., i. 45-193.

Footnote 632:

“Ce serait plus simple d'écrire en Grec.”

Footnote 633:

P. L., i. 325-367.

Footnote 634:

Paris, 1838.

Footnote 635:

2 vols., Paris, 1843.

Footnote 636:

Paris, 1845.

Footnote 637:

If any one is inclined—as some may be—to apply to this book Mérimée’s own censure of Ticknor and other literary historians for putting things in merely because they have read them, let me simply quote here the names of Henri de Latouche, of Fiorentino, and of Ozanam, to which I could add many others.

Footnote 638:

In the Introduction to Lettres à une autre Inconnue (Paris, 1875), p. xlv.

Footnote 639:

Third ed., Paris, 1876.

Footnote 640:

Ibid., 1874.

Footnote 641:

In the Portraits.

Footnote 642:

In the Mélanges.

Footnote 643:

Also in the Portraits, where the shorter paper on Nodier has some excellent criticism.

Footnote 644:

Rather oddly pitchforked into the Carmen volume; the others are in the Portraits.

Footnote 645:

Schriften, ed. Roth, 8 vols. in 9: Berlin, 1821-42. The second part of the eighth volume is wholly occupied by one of the best indices that I know in any German book—a very special blessing in the case of a writer like Hamann.

Footnote 646:

i. 509.

Footnote 647:

ii. 376-413.

Footnote 648:

iii. 81.

Footnote 649:

Who is mentioned in the same passage for his discourse on Fables.

Footnote 650:

He speaks, for instance (ii. 437, saying, of course, that he will not speak), of “our æsthetic” as “Bohemian glass”; of the “falsity of its subtlety,” &c.

Footnote 651:

He describes himself in a letter to Reichardt, of June 1777 (v. 248), as spending the livelong day in reading “the Greek Testament, some classic, or Shakespeare.” Fifteen years earlier, in one of the maddest-looking of his tract-groups (Essais à Mosaïque, vol. ii.), written in French and giving itself out as written in England, “at Bedlam,” “Tyburn Road,” &c., he had pronounced Falstaff “unique”: and his quotations from Hamlet, at a time when the future author of Wilhelm Meister was scarcely breeched, are frequent.

Footnote 652:

9 vols.: Göttingen, 1844-47.

Footnote 653:

v. 93.

Footnote 654:

v. 331.

Footnote 655:

In vols. i. and ii.

Footnote 656:

ii. 383.

Footnote 657:

i. 283 sq. He is very interesting here to compare and contrast with Goethe.

Footnote 658:

i.-xx. of the 60-vol. ed. (Stuttgart, 1827). I have in some cases sought to compare, but have not been able continuously to work with, the much better ed. of Suphan (32 vols.: Berlin, 1877-1887).

Footnote 659:

The phrase is De Quincey’s and a good one: but it does not occur in his Essay on Herder, which is one of the most unsatisfactory things he ever did.

Footnote 660:

Einleitung to the Fragmente (1767), ed. cit., i. 9.

Footnote 661:

I am not yet sure whether Vico exercised much influence on Herder in this direction: but Herder certainly ranks next to Vico as a leader in it, and had as much more immediate and wide-spreading influence as he had less originality and force. Professor Flint, I may say, thinks the actual connection of the two slight.

Footnote 662:

Ed. cit., vols. i. and ii.

Footnote 663:

The Germans had been creditably troubled about their prosodic souls ever since Opitz (see the large concernment of this matter in Borinski, op. cit. sup.); and the middle of the eighteenth century saw the strict iambic Alexandrines of Opitz himself and others deserted, partly for the so-called “British” or Miltonic scansion (decasyllables with certain licences of substitution), partly for classical metres and unrhymed “Pindarics,” both of which had a great reflex influence on ourselves.

Footnote 664:

1769. Ed. cit., vols. xiii., xiv.

Footnote 665:

V. sup. pp. 47, 48.

Footnote 666:

Vol. xv.

Footnote 667:

Vols. xv., xvi.

Footnote 668:

For this and the rest see ed. cit., vols. xvii.-xx.

Footnote 669:

See xviii. 65-99.

Footnote 670:

His Shakespearian passages are numerous; see especially xvii. 228 sq.

Footnote 671:

There can be no doubt that, here as elsewhere, Herder was administering a much-needed correction to the ridiculous Chauvinism of Klopstock, who was wont to extol German language and literature over all languages and literatures—past, present, and future, actual, possible, and impossible.

Footnote 672:

Let me only add a reference to his own interesting sketch of German criticism up to his time. Ideen, ii. 55, 56, ed. cit. xvi. 159 sq.

Footnote 673:

I have used the ed. in 36 vols., Leipzig, 1839-40.

Footnote 674:

29-36 in ed. cit.

Footnote 675:

xxix. 129 sq.

Footnote 676:

xxxiii. 255.

Footnote 677:

In same vol.

Footnote 678:

In the Bibliothek der Weltlitteratur of Cotta (Stuttgart, n. d.), which I use. Besides the texts more particularly noted above, Dichtung und Wahrheit is perhaps the chief place to be examined: but nothing can be quite neglected. Readers confined to English may profitably consult Criticism, Reflections, and Maxims of Goethe (London, n. d.), ed. by W. B. Rönnfeldt, who thinks Goethe “probably the greatest literary and art critic whom the world has seen.”

Footnote 679:

Goethe would probably not himself have refused this ascription, but might, on the contrary, have welcomed it. He even wanted the Nibelungen in prose: and more than once, I think, adopts translateableness as a criterion of Poetry (v. inf. note, p. 368). But this does not bridge, it only deepens, the gulf. Again, it may be, and has been, urged that in the Hamlet piece he was avowedly speaking from the theatrical point of view in every direction. True again: but if anybody, with such literature as Hamlet before him, can take this point of view, we know that his heart and his treasure lie, not in the book, but on the boards.

Footnote 680:

Allgemeine Begriffe und grosser Dünkel sind immer auf dem Wege entsetzliches Unglück anzurichten.—Spr. in Pro., ed. cit., p. 109.

Footnote 681:

Ibid., p. 129.

Footnote 682:

Gehöre uns an, p. 128.

Footnote 683:

P. 177.

Footnote 684:

P. 216.

Footnote 685:

P. 143.

Footnote 686:

P. 178.

Footnote 687:

Pp. 165-169.

Footnote 688:

Schönste, which, with Geist, is a little difficult to translate adequately. But it coincides interestingly with Lamb’s, “one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing,” of Hazlitt.

Footnote 689:

We all laugh with Dickens when Lord Frederick Verisopht sums up Shakespeare as “a clayver man.” Yet it may be doubted whether Goethe had not in effect anticipated his lordship. It is almost always as the “clever” man, not as the Prospero of the poetic moment, that he considers Shakespeare.

Footnote 690:

V. sup. p. 167.

Footnote 691:

xxvii. and xxviii. The former is devoted to “German,” the latter (in part) to “Foreign” literature. This last contains much of interest, especially on French and English books of the last decade of Goethe’s life, and on Folk-Verse.

Footnote 692:

Who probably meant “panoptic.” A work can be panoramic; an intellect hardly.

Footnote 693:

xxvii. 25.

Footnote 694:

xxviii. 60.

Footnote 695:

I can give one very egregious example of this. The famous phrase, “Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh,” has been seen from a very early period to have an allegorical, as well as a literal, interpretation. Indeed, in the Latin original (for the words are a translation, as genius translates, of Lucan, ii. 273, Pacem summa tenent) the context is perfectly unmistakable. I had myself fallen in love with Ueber allen Gipfeln when I got the Gedichte as a school-prize in the year 1860, and both the possible interpretations had struck me. Yet a very few years ago, for giving the poetical application, I was solemnly warned by a reviewer that there was nothing disgraceful in my not knowing German, but that to pretend to do so, and to give an impossible meaning to well-known words, was quite intolerable.

Footnote 696:

Gespräche mit Goethe (3 vols., Stuttgart), i. 50.

Footnote 697:

i. 66. It has been urged, not without justice, that this intense craftsmanship must fairly be taken into account in estimating his criticism. He is always identifying himself with the worker rather than the spectator-reader, thinking of the process rather than of the result.

Footnote 698:

i. 70.

Footnote 699:

i. 102.

Footnote 700:

Or at least “opponents”—Gegner, i. 104, 105.

Footnote 701:

i. 116.

Footnote 702:

i. 118.

Footnote 703:

i. 120.

Footnote 704:

1824.

Footnote 705:

i. 166.

Footnote 706:

i. 121.

Footnote 707:

P. 125. Cf. what has been said above.

Footnote 708:

P. 134.

Footnote 709:

“Everything Pope said and thought of his friend was good and noble”— The English Humourists.

Footnote 710:

P. 182.

Footnote 711:

P. 184. And again, the craftsman’s point of view must be allowed for. Flemming “will not help the poet of 1830,” is what he means.

Footnote 712:

P. 193.

Footnote 713:

P. 219.

Footnote 714:

P. 233.

Footnote 715:

(I.e., the poetry of the horrible and the miserable) p. 245.

Footnote 716:

P. 9.

Footnote 717:

P. 26.

Footnote 718:

P. 33.

Footnote 719:

ii. 162.

Footnote 720:

P. 180.

Footnote 721:

Pp. 184, 194.

Footnote 722:

With reinforcements from Soret, the Genevese botanist and mineralogist.

Footnote 723:

iii. 29, “Jenes ungestörte unschuldige, nachtwandlerische Schaffen.”

Footnote 724:

P. 86.

Footnote 725:

P. 99.

Footnote 726:

He had earlier said that Shakespeare and Molière did just the reverse.

Footnote 727:

P. 102.

Footnote 728:

P. 110.

Footnote 729:

P. 161.

Footnote 730:

I could make this point even clearer by putting together and enlarging upon his Shakespearian criticism: but this would take too much room, and it has been done in sample already. The English reader will find the chief texts collected in the first sixty pages of Mr Ronnfeldt’s book, cited above.

Footnote 731:

ii. 10 sq.

Footnote 732:

P. 184 sq.

Footnote 733:

I do not forget his reviews of Don Juan, Manfred, and Cain: nor the rather astonishing attribution to Don Juan itself of being the first book to supply English with “a polished comic language.”

Footnote 734:

iii. 40.

Footnote 735:

Once more the sordid “business” view which we noticed in regard to Flemming seems to have crept over him. He did, of course, admire the Nibelugen, and the Ballads, and some other things. But his general belittlement remains.

Footnote 736:

Vols. xii.-xv. of the Cotta ed.

Footnote 737:

V. sup., p. 368, and inf., p. 389.

Footnote 738:

V. inf., p. 396.

Footnote 739:

All these are in vol. xii. ed. cit.

Footnote 740:

“On the Ground of Pleasure in Tragic Objects,” and “On the Tragic Art.” Vol. xiii.

Footnote 741:

“Über Anmuth und Würde,” “Über das Pathetische,” “Zerstreute Betrachtungen,” and “Über die aesthetische Erziehung der Menschen.” All these fall under our exclusion of pure æsthetic, after the earliest examples in each country.

Footnote 742:

The adjectives do not give the force of their originals. Schiller meant the poets who are not self-conscious and those who are.

Footnote 743:

V. inf., p. 395.

Footnote 744:

In a note subjoined when the review was republished, eleven years after its first appearance, after Bürger’s death, and after Schlegel’s counter-blow.

Footnote 745:

Unfortunately the Bürger review is not the only one, of the small handful given us, in which Schiller “harps and carps” in this evil fashion. That on Egmont is almost as bad.

Footnote 746:

Herr Boas, op. cit. inf., cites Gervinus as saying that his investigations entirely confirmed the Xenien estimates. I have not verified the quotation, but I know enough of Gervinus (see on him inf.) to be certain that his judgment would have been equally accommodating whatever these estimates had been.

Footnote 747:

The most convenient subject for such a study known to me is the Schiller und Goethe im Xenien-kampf of Eduard Boas (Stuttgart und Tübingen, 2 vols., 1851), which gives the text with all necessary apparatus, and a long account, with specimens, of the retorts of the victims and the appurtenant literature generally. I exclude, of course, from the remarks in the text the Tabulæ Votivæ, &c.

Footnote 748:

No doubt there are exceptions. Goethe’s best seem to me 278 (directed, it is said, at F. Schlegel) and the rather ill-natured but clever Charade (282). Schiller was happy in 346 on Gottsched as Tantalus: but any one could, and can, shoot Gottsched sitting.

Footnote 749:

4 vols. in the Cotta collection. This also contains Schiller’s correspondence with Körner, which should be compared.

Footnote 750:

1795-96.

Footnote 751:

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