INTERCHAPTER V.
In the present Interchapter we come to a sort of Omphalos of the whole projected History. Here and here only, up to the present day, do we find a Catholic Faith of criticism, not merely at last constituted, but practically accepted over the whole literary world. In ancient times, though it is not difficult to discern a creed of a not wholly dissimilar character, yet that creed was arrived at in roundabout fashion, and was never applied universally to poetry and prose as literature. In the Middle Ages there was no such creed at all. In the century which—or rather a certain aspect of it—will furnish us with the subject of the last Book of the present volume, the catholic faith still maintains, and even, as is the wont of such things, rather tightens, its hold as received orthodoxy; but there are grumblings, and threatenings, and upheavals on the one hand, and on the other the tendency to a dangerous latitudinarianism. In that which, with the permission of the fates, will, with the Dissidents of the Eighteenth, give the subject of the next volume, there is no parallel consensus even of a prevailing party. Take a dozen critics of any distinction, at different times and in different countries of the seventeenth century in Europe, and ask them to enunciate some general laws and principles of literary criticism. The results, if not slavishly identical, would be practically the same, putting aside particular and half unreal squabbles of Ancient and Modern and the like. Do the same at any time for the last hundred—certainly for the last seventy or eighty—years, and the result would be a Babel. If any two of the utterances did not betray direct contradiction, it would probably be because the speakers began at entirely different facets of the subject.
Whether this literary unanimity—which resembles the ecclesiastical unanimity, on the ruins of which it grew, not least in being a little unreal—was a good thing or a bad thing in itself, is one of those larger questions which we do not purpose to argue out here. The point for us is that it existed. It was compatible, as in the other case, with a good deal of minor difference: there might be literary Scotists and Thomists; there might even (as in the Ancient and Modern case) be a Great Schism of the most apparently important kind. But this was as a rule mere jangling; and the more serious of the Moderns generally tried to make out little more than that their favourites could claim as much, or more, of the graces which both esteemed, as the other people’s favourites possessed.
We have seen in the last Interchapter how something like this creed had been achieved—though not without a good deal of opposition, and hardly, in any case, with the result of authoritative and complete statement—in Italy, and to some extent borrowed thence, in other countries, before the end of the sixteenth century itself. The seventeenth did little more than crystallise it, lay stress on particular points, fill up some gaps, arrange, codify, illustrate. The absence of dissidence, except on the minor points, is most remarkable. In regard to Aristotle, in particular, there are no Patrizzis and hardly any Castelvetros. Men tack on a considerable body of Apocrypha to the canonical books of the Stagirite, and misinterpret not a little that he actually said. But they never take his general authority in question, seldom the authority of any ancient, and that of Horace least of all. The two great artificial conceptions of the elaborate “Unities” drama, with Acts and Scenes taking the place of the choric divisions, and of the still more artificial “Heroic Poem,” with its Fable, its Epic Unity, its Machines, and so forth, acquire in theory—if luckily, as, for instance, in England, by no means in practice—greater and greater dignity. It becomes a sort of truism that the drama is the most beautiful and ingenious, the heroic poem the noblest, thing on which the human mind can exercise itself. But they are difficult things, sir! very difficult things. Each is sharply isolated as a Kind: and the other Kinds are ranged around and below them. You never criticise any thing first in itself, but with immediate reference to its Kind. If it does not fulfil the specifications of that Kind, it is either cast out at once or regarded with the deepest suspicion.
Further, all the Kinds in particular, as well as Poetry itself in general, possess, and are distinguished by, Qualities which are, in the same way, rigidly demanded and inquired into. It is generally, if not quite universally, admitted that a poem must please: though critics are not quite agreed whether you are bound to please only so as to instruct. But you must please in the Kind, by the Quality, according to the Rule. There is no room for nondescripts; or, if they are admitted at all, they must cease to be nondescripts, and become Heroi-comic, Heroi-satiric, “Tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,”[[538]] or what not.
This general view may seem unorthodox to those who put faith in the notion—to be found in some books of worth, as well as of worship—that there was a “Romantic revolt” in the beginning of the seventeenth century—that there was even a kind of irruption or recrudescence of mediæval barbarism, and that the pronounced and hardened classicism of the later century was a fresh reaction—a case of Boileau à la rescousse! The texts, and the facts, and the dates, do not, to my thinking, justify this view of history, in so far, at least, as criticism is concerned. The crystallising of the classical creed goes on regardless of Euphuism, earlier and later, in England, of Marinism in Italy, of Culteranism and Conceptism in Spain, of the irregular outburst of similar tastes in France, which marks the reign of Louis XIII. As we have seen, Ogier, in the last named country, at the very moment of striking a blow for Romantic drama, admits that the critics are against him; and we have also seen how they were. In England, Sidney, at the beginning of the great Elizabethan period, holds out hands to Jonson at the end. The very Spanish Romantics, when they come to consider the matter critically, make an unblushing transaction between conscientious theory and popular practice: and such an Italian iconoclast as Beni is classical, in the very act and process of belittling the classics.
At the same time, this accepted faith of Criticism, when we come to examine it, is a very peculiar Catholicity. Uncompromisingly Aristotelian in profession, its Aristotelianism, as has been recognised by an increasing number of experts from the time of Lessing downwards, is hopelessly adulterated. Many of the insertions and accretions are purely arbitrary: others come from a combination of inability to forget, and obstinate refusal frankly to recognise, the fact that the case is quite a different case from that which Aristotle was diagnosing. But, by the time at least when the creed became triumphant, a new Pope, a new Court of Appeal, has been foisted in, styling itself Good Sense, Reason, or even (though quite Antiphysic) Nature. That this anti-Pope, this Antiphysis, was partly created by the excesses of the Euphuist-Gongorist movements, need not be denied; but this is comparatively irrelevant. We have traced above, in almost all their principal exponents, the curious, and sometimes very ludicrous, attempt to conciliate that furor poeticus which the ancients had never denied, with those dictates of good sense which the ancients were presumed to have accepted and embodied. A professed satirist could evolve, in his happiest moments, nothing more comic than the eirenicon of Mambrun,[[539]] or, rather, than his clinical examination of the poet in fury, and his observation of the poet in his right mind.
The survey of the development of this phenomenon, or group of phenomena, in different countries, requires less minuteness than was needed in the last Interchapter, because the central stage of the movement is both of less importance and of less complexity than the beginnings of it: but it is essential to the scheme of these Interchapters, and to that of the whole book, that some such survey should be given.
In Italy, as we have seen, the results of the period were almost insignificant—a fact no doubt connected with, though in no sense necessarily caused by, the declension of the Italian creative genius after Tasso. We have, it may be hoped, established, by the slow but irresistible process of reciting the actual history, the truth that no constant ratio exists between periods of creation and periods of criticism—that they may go hand in hand, or that one may follow the other, or that both may fail to put in any important appearance, as Fate and metaphysical aid may determine. This, for Italy, was a period of the last kind, though not one of its very worst examples. The Italians continued both to play at criticism in their Academies, and to accumulate solid though second-hand work in such laboratories as those of Aromatari. They fought out the half-mock battle of the Ancients and Moderns, as became them, before other nations meddled with it: and they still maintained, for long, though not for the whole time, that position of supremacy, as masters in title to Europe, which the great achievements of the preceding century had given them. But they added nothing to their claims, and by degrees the supremacy passed from them.[[540]]
That it passed to France is an accepted truth, and like most, though not all, accepted truths, this has so much of the real quality that it is idle to cavil at it. That it has been abused there can be little doubt—or could be little if people would take the small trouble necessary to ascertain the facts. I do not know who first invented the term “Gallo-Classic,” which, to judge by those Röntgen rays which the reader of examination-papers can apply, has sunk deep into the youthful mind of this country. It is a bad word. I have taken leave to call it “question-begging, clumsy, and incomplete,” before now; and I repeat those epithets with a fresh emphasis here. It begs the question whether “Italo-Classic” would not, in its own kind, be the properer term: it is clumsy because the two parts of it are not used in the same sense; and it is incomplete because it does not intimate that much beside French influence, and that a very peculiar and sophisticated kind of Classical influence, went to the making of the thing. But there was French influence: and for some three-quarters of a century France was the head manufactory in which Italian, Classical, and other ideas were torn up and remade into a sort of critical shoddy with which (as with other French shoddy in that and other times) Europe was rather too eager to clothe itself. Some pains have been taken in the foregoing Book to put the reader in a position to appreciate the real rise, progress, and history of French criticism of the Neo-classic[[541]] type. The survey, whatever difference may exist as to its justice in matter of opinion, will not, I think, be found erring in matters of fact: and it will show that the position usually accorded to Boileau requires some reconsideration. But Boileau was undoubtedly the greatest man of letters who, holding these views, devoted himself specially and definitely to the expression of them; and, for good or for ill, his name is associated with the movement. I agree with Keats,[[542]] who here, as in so many other matters, came right by genius. Those of us who do not possess this royal key can, at any rate, if we choose to take the trouble, come right by knowledge.
The Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns—though we have spoken hard words of it—might look like revolt against the tyranny of Despréaux, and it undoubtedly spread seeds of the more successful revolution which followed; but the more one studies it, the more one sees that the revolt was in the main unconscious. As we have partly shown, and as might be shown much more fully, the Moderns were, as a rule, just as “classical” in their ideas as the Ancients. They were as incapable of catholic judgment; they were even more ignorant of literature as a whole: they were at least as apt to introduce non-literary criteria; they were as much under the obsession of the Kind, the Rule (cast-iron, not leaden), the sweeping generalisation. Too commonly the thing comes to this—that the man who can conjugate tupto will not hear of anything which lessens the importance of that gift, and that the man who cannot conjugate tupto will not hear of any virtue attaching to it.
Most other countries require little notice here. The Germans make practically no figure; the Dutch confine themselves to classical study and the popularisation of reviewing; and the Spaniards, with characteristic indolence, refuse to work out the interesting problem presented to them by the recalcitrance of their national drama to the consecrated ideas of the general creed. England is of more importance. I have tried to show that it is of very much more; but this importance belongs entirely to one man. This one man in his time played many parts: and as the main aim of literature is to give pleasure, and to produce original sources thereof, we cannot perhaps say that his critical part was the greatest. But we may almost say that it was the most important. We can imagine English literature without the poetry of Dryden: it would be wofully impoverished, but somebody would take up the burden, probably before Pope. Certainly Pope would take it up, though with much more to do. But English criticism, and, what is more, European criticism of the best and most fruitful kind, would have had, if Dryden had been absent, to seek some totally new source: and it is impossible to tell where that source would have been found. There is no precedent—Lilius Giraldus and Patrizzi between them might have produced one in Italy, but it is of the highest significance that they did not—for Dryden’s peculiar way of shaking different literatures and different examples of literature together, of indicating the things that please him in all, and of at least attempting to find out why they please him. It is this, not his parade of Rules, and his gleanings from the books, that makes his critical glory: and it is this in which, among critics up to his own time, he is alone.
Yet even he does parade “rules”; even he does belaud Rapin, and Le Bossu, and even Rymer; even he would have been, no doubt, quite as ready to take the oath to Boileau as he was nobly determined not to take it to William. His genius is recalcitrant to the orthodoxy of the time; but something else in him accepts it. It is not for nothing that he never published that word of power which dissolves all the spells of Duessa—“Had Aristotle seen our plays he might have changed his mind.”
That, however, there was, at any rate in the earlier part of the time, much blind, and even a little conscious revolt against classicism, independent of the Ancient and Modern quarrel, is not to be wholly denied. I have hinted doubts as to the correctness of regarding the Euphuist-Metaphysical extravagances in England, Marinism in Italy, Gongorism in Spain, and the fantastic and “precious” fancies which mark the reign of Louis XIII. and the Fronde in France, as either deliberate reactions against classicism, or abortive births and false dawns of Romance. They are in almost every case direct results of the Romantic or mediæval side of the earlier Renaissance—last things, not first. But, by the end of the century, they were almost everywhere got well under; though in Spain, their greatest stronghold, it was not till the eighteenth century itself was some way advanced that Luzán administered the critical miséricorde, or, if we must use the language of the country, played despeñador to them. Any other interpretation of the phenomena seems to me to distort them and make them unintelligible, while the procession of the Metaphysical from the Spenserian stage, of Marinism from Tasso, of Gongorism from the great Spanish age, and of the French extravagants from the Spaniards and Marino, working not a little on the Pléiade itself, is natural, historical, and consistent with logic. But these very facts prepare and lead up to the triumph of Neo-Classicism.
By dint, however, of these actions and interactions, there was actually evolved, towards the end of the century, a sort of false Florimel or Duessa, who was called Taste. She was rather a Protean Goddess, and reflected the knowledge or the want of it, the real taste or the want of it, possessed by her priests and worshippers. The Taste of Dryden and the Taste of Rymer are two totally different things; there is even a very considerable difference between the taste of Hédelin and the taste of Bouhours. But in all save the very happiest minds the Taste of this time, as far as Poetry is concerned almost wholly, and to a great extent as regards prose, is vitiated by all manner of mistaken assumptions, polluted by all manner of foolish and hurtful idolatries. There is the Idol of the Kind which has been noticed; the Idol of the Quality; the Idol of Good Sense, the most devouring of all.[[543]] It is agreed, and agreed very pardonably, that it is not well to write
“And periwig with snow the baldpate woods.”
But the baser folk go on from this—and all but the very noblest have some difficulty in preventing themselves from going on—to think that a man should not write
“The multitudinous seas incarnadine.”
There is a sense, and a very proper sense, that, in a certain general way, style must suit subjects: that you ought not to write to a Child of Quality, aged five, as you would do to Queen Anne, aged fifty.[[544]] But this topples over into the most absurd limitations, so that, a little later than our actual time, we shall find Pope taking modest credit to himself with Spence for that, though Virgil in his Pastorals “has sometimes six or eight lines together that are epic,” he had been so scrupulous as “scarce ever to have two together, even in the Messiah.” Indeed it is hardly possible to find a better reductio ad absurdum of Neo-Classicism than this. You lay down (as we saw long ago that Servius did lay it down), from a general induction of the practice of a particular poet, such and such a rule about Virgil’s styles in his various works. Then you turn this individual observation into a general rule. And then you go near to find fault with the very poet from whom you have derived it because he does not always observe it—as if his unquestionable exceptions had not as much authority as his supposed rules. Nor is there any doubt that this fallacy derives colour and support from the false Good Sense, the Pseudo-Reason. The induction from practice is hitched on to Reason so as to become a deduction and a demonstration, and once established as that, you deduce from it anything you like. Meanwhile Good Sense, as complaisant to the critic as stern to the victim of his criticism, will approve or disapprove anything that you choose to approve or disapprove, will set her seal to any arbitrary decision, any unjust or purblind whim, and can only be trusted with certainty to set her face invariably against the highest poetry, and often against certain kinds not so high.[[545]]
The result of all this is that, with the exception of Dryden and somewhat later Fontenelle (see next Book), hardly any critics of the time achieve, with any success, the highest function of the true critic of literature, the discovery and celebration of beautiful literary things. It is not their business, or their wish, to set free the “lovely prisoned soul of Eucharis.” If Eucharis will get a ticket from the patronesses of the contemporary Almack’s, and dress herself in the prescribed uniform, and come up for judgment with the proper courtesy, they will do her such justice as Minerva has enabled them to do; but if not, not. Sometimes (as in the case of the immortal Person of Quality who took the trouble to get Spenser into order[[546]]) they will good-naturedly endeavour to give her a better chance, poor thing! But they will never kiss the Daughter of Hippocrates on the mouth, and receive the reward thereto appropriated.[[547]]
That, on the other hand, there is observable, throughout the century, a certain interpenetration of the older and more Romantic spirit—in the creative work chiefly, but even there dying down, in the critical overmastered from the first, and less and less perceptible,—this opinion will meet with no contradiction here, but, on the contrary, with the strongest support. All the eccentric phenomena, as they may be called, which have been noticed from Euphuism to Gongorism, are symptoms of this on the larger scale; and other things—the fancy of Chapelain himself for the Romances, the lingering attraction which Gongorism exercises even on such a man as Bouhours—confirm it. Yet even this was, as has been said, steadily dying down; and by the end of the century the old Phœnix was nearly in ashes, though the new bird was to take slow rebirth from them. I am myself inclined to think that the signs of Romantic leaning in Dryden belong to the new, not to the old, chapter of symptoms; and that in this way England, the last, save perhaps Spain, to give up, was the first to feel again for, the standard of Romanticism. But in this Dryden was in advance, not merely of all his countrymen, but of all Europe; and he did not himself definitely raise any flag of revolt. On the contrary, he always supposed himself to be, and sometimes was, arguing for a reasonable and liberal Classicism.
It was not in flippancy, but in logical connection with the present subject, that attention was drawn above[[548]] to a certain aporia of Tassoni’s on the admitted lovesomeness, body and soul, of le donne brutte, and on the tricks which bruttezza and bellezza play to each other. If that ingenious poet and polemic had but pushed his inquiries a little further, and extended them in purview as well as lineally, he might have come to great things in criticism. It might, for instance, have struck him whether the accepted notions of literary beauty were not peculiarly like those of physical beauty, which were also those of his century. These laws laid it down that “from the chin to the pit betwixt the collar-bones there must be two lengths of the nose,” that the whole figure must be “ten faces high,” and that “the inside of the arm, from the place where the muscle disappears to the middle, is four noses”; while the careful calculators noted all the while with dismay that both the Apollo Belvidere and the Medicean Venus set these proportions at the most godlike defiance.[[549]] He would (or he might) have observed that, just as when you have settled exactly what a bella donna must not have, there is apt to sail, or slip, into the room somebody with that particular characteristic to whom you become a hopeless slave, so, when you have settled the qualifications of the drama with the infallibility of Hédelin, and those of the Epic with the finality of Le Bossu, there comes you out some impudent production which is an admirable poem, while the obedient begettings of your rules are worthless rubbish. Tassoni, I say, might have done this; he seems to have had quite the temper to do it; but he did it not. It was doubtless with him, as with others, a case of Di terrent et Jupiter hostis—the gods of their world and their time forbade them.
But the angry gods were not wholly able to maintain their anger; and at the other end of the century, in that Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns which, for all its irritating ignorationes elenchi, did certainly assist in the discussion of general æsthetic problems, we find, among other glimpses, an advance, though only a partial advance, on this suggestion of the Pensieri. Perrault, who doubtless knew Tassoni (one of his brothers had translated the Secchia), has a curious passage on the diversity of the forms of feminine beauty. He had,[[550]] he says, visited the gallery of a connoisseur who had collected portraits of the most famous beauties of Europe for a century past. There were not two of the same type of loveliness; and of the spectators there were not two who fixed on the same portrait as the most beautiful. But Perrault, though he has had this glimpse of the true path opened up to him, does not dare pursue it. He is as convinced as the rest of them that you can reduce ideas of beauty to a minimum which is always invariable, though you may add others which vary; and he is perfectly arbitrary in his admissions and exclusions of these latter. He hates Gothic architecture; it may be strongly suspected that he would fall far short of Chapelain in appreciating Romance, for all his fairy tales. His criticisms of the Ancients belie his theory itself; for he will not open his eyes to see the beauty of their peculiarity. His remarks on Homer are pitiable. My always estimable and not seldom admirable predecessor, Blair, was no doubt sadly “left to himself” when he selected,[[551]] as the awful example of a man of bad taste, the person who said that Homer was no better than “some old tale of chivalry.” But Perrault, I fear, is a more terrible spectacle when he says that none of the Three Tragedians will bear comparison with Corneille (and I think I may claim the merit of not undervaluing Corneille), that nobody but professed scholars can read Aristophanes, and that Ovid is the inferior of Benserade. When we read these things—and except in Fontenelle, the eternal exception, they are to be found in every espouser of the Modern side, just as the corresponding absurdities are to be found in every defender of the Ancients—there is nothing to say but “This is all out of focus. Both of you see men as trees walking.”
A summary of the whole merits and defects of neo-classicism must again be postponed; though with no further prorogation than to the end of the next Book and the present volume. As for the special defects of this special period we have said enough; and we may conclude this Interchapter with a glance at its special merits. They are partly of a negative kind, but they certainly exist. In the Middle Ages, as we have seen, there was no code of criticism at all; in the sixteenth century only a growing approach to one, though the approach had become very near at the last. Some outbreaks of heterodoxy—the last stand of Romance for the time—had, as usually happens, drawn the orthodox together, had made them sign a definite, or almost definite, instrument or confession. Just or unjust, adequate or inadequate, even consistent or inconsistent, as it may be, from the point of view of a very searching and all-inspecting logic, the neo-classicism of the late seventeenth century was a thing about which there could be no mistake. It knew its own mind about everything which it chose to consider, and valiantly shut its eyes to everything which it chose to ignore. For a time—a short time only, of course, for the triumph of a religion is always the signal for the appearance of a heresy—the majority of people had not much more doubt about what was the proper thing to believe in and admire in literature, than they had about the multiplication table. It became possible—and it was done, as we shall see, first in Italy, then elsewhere—to write real literary histories: it became still more easily possible to criticise new books on a certain basis of accepted postulates. And it is by no means certain that this provisional orthodoxy was not a necessary condition of the growth of the new study of Æsthetic, which, though it has done criticism harm as well as good, has certainly done it good as well as harm.
Nor is it possible to deny that there was something to admire in the creed itself. It was weakest—it was in fact exceedingly weak—on the poetical side; but the world happened to have accumulated a remarkably good stock of poetry in the last two centuries or so, and a fallow, or a cessation of manufacture, was not undesirable. Prose, on the other hand, had never been got into proper order in the vernaculars; and it was urgently desirable that it should be so got. The very precepts of the classical creed which were most mischievous in poetry were sovereign for prose. Here also they might hinder the development of eccentric excellence; but it was not eccentric excellence that was wanted. Unjust things have been said about the poetry of the Augustan ages; just things may be said against the criticism which mainly controlled that poetry. But it is hardly excessive to say that every precept—not purely metrical—contained in the Arts of Boileau and of Pope, is just and true for Prose. You may fly in the face of almost every one of these precepts and be the better poet for it; fly in the face of almost any one of them in prose, and you must have extraordinary genius if you do not rue it.
Even as to poetry itself some defence may be made. This poetry needed these rules; or rather, to speak more critically, these rules expressed the spirit of this poetry. The later and weaker metaphysicals in England, and fantasts in France, the Marinists and Gongorists in Spain and Italy, had shown what happens when Furor [vere] Poeticus ceases to ply the oars, and Good Sense has not come to take the helm. It is pretty certain that if this criticism had not ruled we should not have had good or great Romantic poetry; we should at best have had (to take England) a few more Dyers and Lady Winchelseas. But if it had not ruled we should have had a less perfect Pope and less presentable minorities of this kind, and have been by no means consoled by a supply of eighteenth-century Clevelands. Once more, the period has the criticism that it wants, the criticism that will enable it to give us its own good things at their own best, and to keep off things which must almost certainly have been bad.
[538]. It may be doubted whether there is anything more wonderful in Shakespeare than the way in which this Polonian speech, at one slight side-blow, impales sixteenth-seventeenth-century criticism, with the due pin, on the due piece of cork, for ever.
[540]. The attitude of Milton and Dryden respectively illustrates this well. There was scarcely more than twenty years between the two poets. But Milton looks to the Italians first, if not also last, among the moderns, for criticism. Dryden, though he knows and cites them, does not.
[541]. “Neo-classic” itself is not a very “blessed” word; but it has been long recognised, and the objections to it are mainly formal.
[542]. In the well-known and early lines on “Sleep and Poetry.”
[543]. Perhaps there is not a more unhappy gibe in literature (which has many such) than that in The Rehearsal on Bayes, who is made to say that “Spirits must not be confined to talk sense.” They certainly must not; even Addison (Sp., 419) admits that “their sense ought to be a little discoloured.” There is much virtue in this “discolour.”
[544]. It may be said that this was later. But Prior was a man of thirty-six in 1700.
[545]. Yet it is not for the twentieth century to throw stones at the seventeenth, till we leave off laying down rules of our own manufacture for still earlier ages, and reproving Marlowe and the youthful Shakespeare for being “too lyrical” in tragedy.
[546]. See Spenser Redivivus. London, 1686-87. The Person of Quality “delivers” Spenser “in Heroick numbers,” as per sample—
“Then to the lady gallant Arthur said,
All grief repeated is more grievous made.”
This is “what Spenser ought to have been instead of what is to be found in himself.”
[547]. Dryden and Fontenelle themselves are of course not quite sinless. The latter (v. infra, p. [505]) proposes emendations in the magnificent couplet which he cites from Saint-Louis; and Dryden, let us say, does not improve Shakespeare and Chaucer. But it was on Shakespeare and Chaucer as they were, not as he travestied them for popular use, that Dryden passed the immortal eulogies; and Fontenelle thought that the couplet even as it stood “might easily not have been found by distinguished poets,” which is from him equivalent to a blare of superlatives from our modern critics.
[548]. P. 325.
[549]. See the whole absurd scheme in the appendix-matter to Dryden’s Translation of Du Fresnoy (ed. cit. sup., xvii. 429).
[550]. Parallèle, ii. 45; cf. Rigault, p. 187.
BOOK VI
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ORTHODOXY
“Voilà un tableau poétique aussi neuf, et produit par un enthousiasme aussi vif qu’il soit possible.... Il étoit bien aisé, même à de grands poëtes, de ne le pas trouver.”—Fontenelle.
CHAPTER I.
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
CRITICISM AT DRYDEN’S DEATH—BYSSHE’S ‘ART OF ENGLISH POETRY’—GILDON—WELSTED—DENNIS—ON RYMER—ON SHAKESPEARE—ON “MACHINES”—HIS GENERAL THEORY OF POETRY—ADDISON—THE ‘ACCOUNT OF THE BEST KNOWN ENGLISH POETS’—THE ‘SPECTATOR’ CRITICISMS—ON TRUE AND FALSE WIT—ON TRAGEDY—ON MILTON—THE “PLEASURES OF THE IMAGINATION”—HIS GENERAL CRITICAL VALUE—STEELE—ATTERBURY—SWIFT—‘THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS’—THE ‘TALE OF A TUB’—MINOR WORKS—POPE—THE ‘LETTERS’—THE SHAKESPEARE PREFACE—SPENCE’S ‘ANECDOTES’—THE ‘ESSAY ON CRITICISM’—THE ‘EPISTLE TO AUGUSTUS’—REMARKS ON POPE AS A CRITIC, AND THE CRITICAL ATTITUDE OF HIS GROUP—PHILOSOPHICAL AND PROFESSIONAL CRITICS—TRAPP—BLAIR—THE ‘LECTURES ON RHETORIC’—THE ‘DISSERTATION ON OSSIAN’—KAMES—THE ‘ELEMENTS OF CRITICISM’—CAMPBELL—THE ‘PHILOSOPHY OF RHETORIC’—HARRIS—THE ‘PHILOLOGICAL ENQUIRIES’—“ESTIMATE” BROWN: HIS ‘HISTORY OF POETRY’—JOHNSON: HIS PREPARATION FOR CRITICISM—‘THE RAMBLER’ ON MILTON—ON SPENSER—ON HISTORY AND LETTER-WRITING—ON TRAGI-COMEDY—“DICK MINIM”—‘RASSELAS’—THE SHAKESPEARE PREFACE—THE ‘LIVES OF THE POETS’—THEIR GENERAL MERITS—THE ‘COWLEY’—THE ‘MILTON’—THE ‘DRYDEN’ AND ‘POPE’—THE ‘COLLINS’ AND ‘GRAY’—THE CRITICAL GREATNESS OF THE ‘LIVES’ AND OF JOHNSON—MINOR CRITICISM: PERIODICAL AND OTHER—GOLDSMITH—VICESIMUS KNOX—SCOTT OF AMWELL.
The death of Dryden punctuates, with an exactness not often attainable in literary history, the division between seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature in England.[[552]] Criticism at Dryden’s death. In general letters it is succeeded—not at all immediately—by the great school of Queen Anne men. In criticism[[553]] one of the greatest of these, a special pupil of Dryden, takes up the running at this interval, and others a little later; but the succession is steadily maintained. Dennis, an unhappily belated person, continues his exercitations; but has very much the worse fortune, critical as well as pecuniary, in his later days. And in the very year of the death there appears an egregious work—extremely popular, maleficently powerful beyond all doubt throughout the eighteenth century, and now chiefly known to non-experts in our days by the humorous contradiction which gave its author’s name to Shelley, and by the chance which made a literary connection, towards the very end of its period of influence, between three such extraordinarily assorted persons as Afra Behn, Bysshe himself, and William Blake.[[554]]
Edward Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry[[555]] puts the eighteenth-century theory of this art with a rigour and completeness which can only be attributed either to something like genius, or to a wonderful and complete absence of it. Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry. His Rules for Making English Verse are the first part of the book in order, but much the least in bulk. Then follow, first a collection of “the most natural and sublime thoughts of the best English poets,” or, in other words, an anthology, reasoned under headings, from poets of the seventeenth century, extending to about four hundred and fifty pages; and last a Dictionary of Rhymes. The “best English poets” may be useful to give in a note.[[556]] The Dictionary is preceded by a few prefatory remarks, including one important historically, “Rhyme is by all allowed to be the chief ornament of versification in the modern languages.” The killing frost which had fallen on the flowers of Elizabethan poetry had killed one weed at any rate—the craze against rhyme.
The Rules are preceded by a partly apologetic Preface, which disclaims any wish to furnish tools to poetasters, and puts the work “under the awful guard of the immortal Shakespeare, Milton [note that this was before Addison’s critique], Dryden, &c.” The keynote is struck, in the very first sentence of the text, with that uncompromisingness which makes one rather admire Bysshe. “The Structure of our verses, whether blank or in rhyme, consists in a certain number of syllables; not in feet composed of long and short syllables, as the verse of the Greeks and Romans.” And he adds that, though some ingenious persons formerly puzzled themselves in prescribing rules for the quantity of English syllables, and composed verses by the measure of dactyls and spondees, yet that design is now wholly exploded. In other words, he cannot conceive classical feet without classical arrangement of feet.
“Our poetry admits, for the most part, of but three sorts of verses, those of 10, 8, and 7 syllables. Those of 4, 6, 9, 11, 12, and 14 are generally employed in masks and operas.” But 12 and 14 may be used in Heroic verse with grace. Accent must be observed; and the Pause must be at or near the middle, though in Heroics it may be at the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, or 7th syllable, determined by the seat of the accent. Still, pauses at the 3rd and 7th must be used sparingly. The 2nd and 8th “can produce no true harmony”; and he seems to have refused to contemplate anything so awful as a pause at the 1st or 9th. After decasyllables, octosyllables are commonest. As for lines of 9 and 11 syllables, “with the accent on the last [i.e., anapæstic measures], the disagreeableness of their measure has wholly excluded them from serious subjects.” The refining effected since the days of Chaucer, Spenser, and other ancient poets consists especially in the avoidance of the concourse of vowels and in the rigid elision of the article, the contraction of preterperfect tenses (“amaz’d,” not “amazed”), the rejection of alliteration (an instance in Dryden is apologised for), of splitting words closely connected at the end of a verse, and of polysyllables.
And a very large number of minute rules follow, the one guiding principle of which is to reduce every line to its syllabic minimum, never allowing trisyllabic substitution.
The book, base and mechanical as it may seem, is of the first historical importance. It will be seen, even from these few extracts, that the excellent Bysshe has no doubts, no half-lights. The idea, which we have seen crystallising for a century and a half, that English poetry is as strictly and inexorably syllabic as French, and much more so than Greek or Latin, is here put in its baldest crudity. Bysshe will have no feet at all: and no other division within the line but at the pause, which is to be as centripetal as possible, like the French cæsura. It follows from this that, except the feminine or double ending, which is allowed ostensibly as a grace to rhymes, though also in blank verse, nothing extra to the ten, the eight, or whatever the line-norm may be, is permitted on any account. Articles, prepositions that will stand it, pronouns, are to be rigidly elided; weak or short syllables in the interior of words must be slurred out. There is (only that Bysshe will not have even the name of foot) no room for a trisyllabic foot anywhere, in what he equally refuses to call iambic or trochaic verse.
But what is more startling still is that trisyllabic feet disappear, not merely from the octosyllable and the heroic, but from English prosody, or are admitted only to “Compositions for Musick and the lowest sort of burlesque.” Dryden might have written, “After the pangs of a desperate lover”; Prior might be writing “Dear Chloe, how blubbered is that pretty face”: but Bysshe sternly averts his face from them.
Now, if this astonishing impoverishment of English poetry had been the isolated crotchet of a pedant or a poetaster, it would at most deserve notice in a note. But it was nothing of the kind. “He,” this insignificant person, “said it”: they went and did it. It expressed the actual poetic practice of serious poets from Pope to Goldsmith: and it expressed the deliberate theoretic creed of such a critic as Johnson. The contrary practice of the great old poets was at best a “licence,” at worst a “fault.” What had actually happened to French—that it had been reduced to the iamb—what Gascoigne had lamented and protested against, long before, was here threatened—or rather, with bland ignoring, even of threat, laid down—as the unquestioned and unquestionable law of English. The whole eighteenth century did not, indeed, go the entire length of Bysshe. Prior—it is his everlasting glory in English poetical history—took care of that, and not only saved anapæstic cadence for us, but made it more popular than ever. But the eighteenth century continued, charmingly as it wrote them, to be a little ashamed of its anapæsts, to write them affectedly as a relaxation, if not even a derogation—to indulge in them (just as it might indulge in leap-frog with wig and long-skirted coat laid aside) avowedly for a frolic. And about the decasyllable—not quite so rigidly about the octosyllable—it accepted Bysshe almost without a protest. All the infinite variety of true English prosody, all the gliding or melting trochees, all the passion and throb which trisyllabic feet give to iambic verse, were sacrificed, all freedom of pause was relinquished, and the decasyllable tramped, the octosyllable tripped, as regularly and as monotonously as a High Dutch grenadier or a Low Dutch clock.
Bysshe had been frankly formal; it is not a small merit in him that he knew what he had to do and did it: but persons who were little if at all above him in taste or in intellect affected to despise him for this, and Mr Charles Gildon in his Complete Art of Poetry,[[557]] published a few years later, is very high and mighty with Bysshe. Gildon. As for himself he does not think that Poetry consists even in “colouring,” but in Design: and he hashes up his French originals into some would-be modish dialogues, in which ladies of fashion attack and defend poetry on the old lines, before he comes to minuter recommendations. These differ chiefly from Bysshe’s in that they are wordier, less peremptory, and given to substitute the vagueness of the journalist for the precision of the schoolmaster. Nor was this by any means Gildon’s only contribution to criticism. Among the others perhaps the most interesting is an anonymous and undated, but apparently not doubtful, rifacimento of Langbaine,[[558]] which is curious as an example of peine du talion. Gildon (who has employed his own or some other “careful hand” to give himself an ingeniously, because not extravagantly, complimentary notice in the Appendix) serves Langbaine in Langbaine’s own fashion; and, not contented with reversing his judgments, indulges freely in such phrases as “Mr Langbain mistakes,” “those scurrilous and digressory remarks with which Mr Langbain has bespattered him [Dryden],” &c. The book is in the main bibliographic and biographic rather than critical.
A name which has something to do with criticism, and which associates itself naturally with those of Dennis and Gildon in the regiment of Pope’s victims, is that of Leonard Welsted, who in 1712 published a translation of Longinus, “with some remarks on the English Poets.” Welsted. Welsted’s translation, whether made directly from the Greek or not,[[559]] is readable enough, and his alternative title, “A treatise on the Sovereign Perfection of Writing,” is not unhappy. Neither are his Preface and his appended “Remarks” contemptible. He can appreciate not merely Milton but Spenser; is (how unlike Rymer!) transported with Othello, and especially with its conclusion; and if he is not superior to others in scorning “Latin rhymes,” at least has sufficient independence to be very irreverent to Buchanan.
But there was a contemporary of Bysshe’s, more famous than either Gildon or Welsted, whose soul was equally above mere prosodic precept, and to whom, as it happens, Gildon himself pays a compliment, as to a denizen of Grub Street, of whom Grub Street could not but feel that he did it some honour by herding with its more native and genuine population.[population.] Of him we must say something—not, as we might almost have said it, in juxtaposition with the great poet and critic whom he had earlier admired, but before coming to the lesser, but still great, successors of Dryden, with whom he came into collision in his evil days.
If John Dennis had been acquainted with the poetry of Tennyson (at which he would probably have railed in his best manner, in which he would certainly have detected plagiarisms from the classics), he too might have applied to himself the words of Ulysses, “I am become a name.” Dennis. Everybody who has the very slightest knowledge of English literature knows, if only in connection with Dryden, Addison, and Pope, the surly, narrow, but not quite ignorant or incompetent critic, who in his younger and more genial days admired the first, and in his soured old age attacked the second and third. But it may be doubted whether very many persons have an acquaintance, at all extensive, with his works. They were never collected; the Select Works of John Dennis[[560]] mainly consist of his utterly worthless verse. Much of the criticism is hidden away in prefaces which were seldom reprinted, and the original editions of which have become very rare. Even good libraries frequently contain only two or three out of more than a dozen or a score of separate documents: and though the British Museum itself is well furnished, it is necessary to range through a large number of publications to obtain a complete view of Dennis as a critic.
That view, when obtained, may perhaps differ not a little from those which have, in a certain general way, succeeded each other in current literary judgment. During the reign of Pope and Addison, the scurrilous assailant of the first, and the more courteous but in part severe censor of the second, was naturally regarded as at best a grumbling pedant, at worst a worthless Zoilus. The critics of the Romantic school were not likely to be much attracted by Dennis. More recently, something of a reaction has taken place in his favour; and it has become not unusual to discover in him, if not exactly a Longinus or a Coleridge, yet a serious and well-equipped critic, who actually anticipated not a little that after-criticism has had to say.[[561]]
That this more charitable view is not entirely without foundation may be at once admitted. On Rymer. As compared with Rymer, in whose company he too often finds himself in modern appreciation, Dennis shows, indeed, pretty well. He very seldom—perhaps nowhere—exhibits that crass insensibility to poetry which distinguishes “the worst critic who ever lived.” One of his earliest and not his worst pieces, The Impartial Critic of 1693, is an answer to Rymer himself, points out with acuteness and vigour that “Tom the Second” would ruin the English stage if he had his way, and even approaches the sole causeway of criticism across the deep by advancing the argument that the circumstances of the Greek drama were perfectly different from those of the English.[[562]] Yet already there are danger-signals. That the piece (which includes a Letter to a Friend and some dialogues) contains a great deal of clumsy jocularity, does not much matter. But when we find Dennis devoting some of this jocularity to Antigone’s lamentation over her death unwedded, we feel sadly that the man who can write thus is scarcely to be trusted on the spirit of poetry. And the admission that Rymer’s censures of Shakespeare are “in most of the particulars very sensible and just” is practically ruinous.[[563]]
Dennis’s answer to Collier is a little later,[[564]] but still earlier than most of his better known work; and it is very characteristic of his manner, which has not often, I think, been exactly described. As elsewhere, so in this tract, which is entitled The Usefulness of the Stage to the Happiness of Mankind, to Government and to Religion, Dennis is uncompromisingly ethical; but he had here the excuse that Collier, to whom he was replying, had taken the same line. There is less, either here or elsewhere, for his method. This is to make a loud clatter of assertions, arranged in a kind of pseudological order, which seems to have really deceived the author, and may possibly have deceived some of his readers, into believing it syllogistic and conclusive. Dennis is very great at the word “must.” “As Poetry is an Art it must be an imitation of nature”[[565]] and so forth; seldom shall you find so many “musts” anywhere as in Dennis, save perhaps in some of his modern analogues. Like all who argue in this fashion, he becomes unable to distinguish fact and his own opinion. Collier, for instance, had quoted (quite correctly) Seneca’s denunciation of the Stage. To which Dennis replies, “It is not likely that Seneca should condemn the drama, ... since ... he wrote plays himself.” That the identity of the philosopher and the dramatist is not certain does not matter: the characteristic thing is the setting of probability against fact. But with Dennis hectoring assertion is everything. “It cannot possibly be conceived that so reasonable a diversion as the drama can encourage or incline men to so unreasonable a one as gaming or so brutal a one as drunkenness.” With a man who thinks this an argument, argument is impossible.
The fact is that, though he has, as has been admitted, a certain advantage over Rymer, Lord Derby’s observation that “He never knew whether it was John or Thomas who answered the bell” will too often apply here. On Shakespeare. Rymer himself was not ignorant; Dennis, especially in regard to ancient criticism, was still better instructed: and though both were bad dramatists, with, in consequence, a conscious or unconscious bias on dramatic matters, Dennis was not so bad as Rymer. His devotion to Dryden does him credit, though we may suspect that it was not the best part of Dryden that he liked: and, amid the almost frantic spite and scurrility of his later attacks on Pope, he not unfrequently hits a weak place in the “young squab short gentleman’s” bright but not invulnerable armour. Yet Dennis displays, as no really good critic could do, the weaknesses of his time and school both in generals and particulars. It is perfectly fair to compare him (giving weight for genius of course) with Johnson, a critic whose general views (except on port and claret) did not materially differ from his own. And, if we do so, we shall find that while Johnson is generally, if not invariably, “too good for such a breed,” Dennis almost as constantly shows its worst features. He altered The Merry Wives of Windsor into The Comical Gallant[[566]]—a most illaudable action certainly, yet great Dryden’s self had done such things before. But he aggravated the crime by a preface, in which he finds fault with the original as having “no less than three actions” [would there were thirty-three!] by remarking that, in the second part of Henry the Fourth, Falstaff “does nothing but talk” [would he had talked so for five hundred acts instead of five!] and by laying down ex cathedra such generalities as that “Humour, not wit, is the business of comedy,” a statement as false as would be its converse. In his Essay on the Genius of Shakespeare[[567]] he is not so very far from Rymer himself in the drivelling arbitrariness of his criticism. Shakespeare has actually made Aufidius, the general of the Volscians, a base and profligate villain! Even Coriolanus himself is allowed to be called a traitor by Aufidius, and nobody contradicts! The rabble in Julius Cæsar and other such things “show want of Art,” and there is a painful disregard of Poetical Justice. The same hopeless wrong-headedness and (if I may so say) wrong-mindedness appear in a very different work, the Remarks on the Rape of the Lock.[[568]] I do not refer to Dennis’s mere scurrilities about “Ap—e” and the like. On “Machines.” But part of the piece is quite serious criticism. Few of us in modern times care much for the “machinery” of this brilliantly artificial poem; but fewer would think of objecting to it on Dennis’s grounds. Machines, it seems, must be—
| i. | Taken from the religion of the Poet’s country. |
| ii. | Allegorical in their application. |
| iii. | Corresponding though opposed to each other. |
| iv. | Justly subordinated and proportioned. |
And Pope’s machines, we are told, fail in all these respects.
Now, putting the fourth ground aside as being a mere matter of opinion (and some who are not fervent Papists think the machines of the Rape very prettily and cleverly arranged in their puppet-show way), one may ask Dennis “Who on earth told you so?” in respect of all the others. And if he alleged (as he might) this or that sixteenth or seventeenth century authority, “And who on earth told him so? and what authority had the authority? Why should machines be taken only from the religion of the country? Why should they be allegorical? Why should Machine Dick on the one side invariably nod to Machine Harry on the other?” And even if some sort of answer be forthcoming, “Why should the poet not do as he please if he succeeds thereby in giving the poetic pleasure?” To which last query of course neither Dennis nor any of his school could return any answer, except of the kind that requires bell, book, and candle.
Nor would he have hesitated to use this, for he is a rule-critic of the very straitest kind, a “Tantivy” of poetic Divine Right. His general theory of Poetry. In his three chief books of abstract criticism[[569]] he endeavours to elaborate, with Longinus in part for code, and with Milton for example, a noble, indeed, and creditable, but utterly arbitrary and hopelessly narrow theory of poetry as necessarily religious, and as having for its sole real end the reformation of the mind, by a sort of enlarged Aristotelian katharsis as to spirit, and by attention to the strict laws of the art in form. Poetical Justice was a sort of mediate divinity to Dennis: as we have seen, he upbraided Shakespeare for the want of it; he remonstrated, in the Spectator, No. 548, and elsewhere, with Addison for taking too little account of it; part at least of his enthusiasm for Milton comes from Milton’s avowed intention to make his poem a theodicy.
A noble error! let it be repeated, with no hint or shadow of sarcasm or of irreverence; but a fatal error as well. That Poetry, like all things human, lives and moves and has its being in God, the present writer believes as fervently and unhesitatingly as any Platonic philosopher or any Patristic theologian; and he would cheerfully incur the wrath of Savonarola by applying the epithet “divine,” in its fullest meaning, not merely to tragedy and epic and hymn, but to song of wine and of love. But this is not what Dennis meant at all. He meant that Poetry is to have a definitely religious, definitely moral purpose—not that it is and tends of itself necessarily ad majorem Dei gloriam, but that we are to shape it according to what our theological and ethical ideas of the glory of God are. This way easily comes bad poetry, not at all easily good; and it excludes poetic varieties which may be as good as the best written in obedience to it, and better. Moreover, putting Dennis’s notion of the end of Poetry together with his notion of its method or art (which latter is to be adjusted to some at least of the straitest classical precepts), we can easily comprehend, and could easily have anticipated, the narrow intolerance and the hectoring pedantry which he shows towards all who follow not him. In a new sense—not so very different from the old mediæval one, though put with no mediæval glamour, and by an exponent full of eighteenth-century prosaism, yet destitute of eighteenth-century neatness and concinnity—Poetry becomes a part of theology; and the mere irritableness of the man of letters is aggravated into the odium theologicum. Bad poets (that is to say, bad according to Dennis) are not merely faulty artists but wicked men; of this Dennis is sure. “And when a man is sure,” as he himself somewhere naïvely observes, “’tis his duty to speak with a modest assurance.” We know, from examples more recent than poor Dennis, that, when a man is thus minded, his assurance is very apt to eat up his modesty, taking his charity, his good manners, and some other things, as condiments to the meal.
Dennis and Addison, though the latter did not escape the absolute impartiality of the former’s carping, were on terms of mutual respect which, considering all things, were creditable to both. Addison. During the latter part of his rather short lifetime Addison, it is hardly necessary to say, enjoyed a sort of mild dictatorship in Criticism as in other departments of literature; and his right to it was scarcely disputed till near the close of the century, though Johnson knew that he was not deep, and tells us that, in his own last days, it was almost a fashion to look down on Addisonian criticism. If, like others, he was displaced by the Romantic revival, he received more lenient treatment than some, in virtue partly of his own general moderation, partly of his championship of Milton. Yet while his original literary gifts recovered high place during the nineteenth century, his criticism has often been considered to possess scarcely more than historic interest, and has sometimes been rather roughly handled—for instance, by Mr Matthew Arnold. But a recent writer,[[570]] by arguing that Addison’s treatment of the Imagination, as a separate faculty, introduced a new principle into criticism, has at any rate claimed for him a position which, if it could be granted, would seat him among the very greatest masters of the art, with Aristotle and Longinus among his own forerunners. As usual let us, before discussing these various estimates, see what Addison actually did as a critic.[[571]]
His début as such was not fortunate. He was, it is true, only three-and-twenty when at “dearest Harry’s” request (that is to say Mr Harry Sacheverell’s) he undertook an Account of the greatest English Poets.[[572]] The Account of the Best known English Poets. In 1694 nobody, except Dryden, could be expected to write very good verse, so that the poetical qualities of this verse-essay need not be hardly dwelt upon, or indeed considered at all. We may take it, as if it were prose, for the matter only. And thus considered, it must surely be thought one of the worst examples of the pert and tasteless ignorance of its school. Before Cowley nobody but Chaucer and Spenser is mentioned at all, and the mentions of these are simply grotesque. The lines convict Addison, almost beyond appeal, of being at the time utterly ignorant of English literary history up to 1600, and of having read Chaucer and Spenser themselves, if he had read them at all, with his eyes shut. The Chaucer section reads as if it were describing A C. Merry Tales or the Jests of George Peele. Where Dryden, if he did not understand Chaucer’s versification, and missed some of his poetry, could see much even of that, and almost all the humour, the grace, the sweetness, the “God’s plenty” of life and character that Chaucer has, Addison sees nothing but a merry-andrew of the day before yesterday.[[573]] So, too, the consummate art of Spenser, his exquisite versification, his great ethical purpose, and yet his voluptuous beauty, are quite hidden from Addison. He sees nothing but a tedious allegory of improbable adventures, and objects to the “dull moral” which “lies too plain below,” much as Temple had done before him.[[574]] Cowley, Milton, and Waller are mentioned next, in at least asserted chronological order. Cowley is “a mighty genius” full of beauties and faults,
“Who more had pleased us had he pleased us less,”
but who is a perfect “milky way” of brilliancy, and has made Pindar himself “take a nobler flight.” Milton alternately strikes Addison with awe, rapture, and shock at his politics. He
“Betrays a bottom odious to the sight.”
So we turn to Waller, who is not only “courtly” but “moves our passion,” (what a pity that he died too soon to "rehearse Maria’s charms"!) to Roscommon, who “makes even rules a noble poetry,” and Denham, whose Cooper’s Hill “we must,” of course, not “forget.” “Great Dryden” is then, not unhappily, though not quite adequately, celebrated, and the line on his Muse—
“She wears all dresses, and she charms in all,”
is not only neat, but very largely true. When Dryden shall decay, luckily there is harmonious Congreve: and, if Addison were not tired with rhyming, he would praise (he does so at some length) noble Montague, who directs his artful muse to Dorset,
“In numbers such as Dorset’s self might use,”—
as to which all that can be said is that, if so, either the verses of Montague or the verses of Dorset referred to are not those that have come down to us under the names of the respective authors.
To dwell at all severely on this luckless production of a young University wit would be not only unkind but uncritical. It shows that at this time Addison knew next to nothing[[575]] about the English literature not of his own day, and judged very badly of what he pretended to know.
The prose works of his middle period, the Discourse on Medals and the Remarks on Italy, are very fully illustrated from the Latin poets—the division of literature that Addison knew best—but indulge hardly at all in literary criticism. It was not till the launching of the Tatler, by Steele and Swift, provided him with his natural medium of utterance, that Addison became critical. This periodical itself, and the less known ones that followed the Spectator, all contain exercises in this character: but it is to the Spectator that men look, and look rightly, for Addison’s credentials in the character of a critic. The Spectator criticisms. The Tatler Essays, such as the rather well known papers on Tom Folio and Ned Softly, those in the Guardian, the good-natured puff of Tom D’Urfey, &c., are not so much serious and deliberate literary criticisms, as applications, to subjects more or less literary, of the peculiar method of gently malicious censorship, of laughing castigation in manners and morals, which Addison carried to such perfection in all the middle relations of life. Not only are the Spectator articles far more numerous and far more weighty, but we have his own authority for regarding them as, in some measure at least, written on a deliberate system, and divisible into three groups. The first of these groups consists of the early papers on True and False Wit, and of essays on the stage. The second contains the famous and elaborate criticism of Milton with other things; and the third, the still later, still more serious, and still more ambitious, series on the Pleasures of the Imagination. Addison is looking back from the beginning of this last when he gives the general description,[[576]] and it is quite possible that the complete trilogy was not in his mind when he began the first group. But there is regular development in it, and whether we agree or not with Mr Worsfold’s extremely high estimate of the third division, it is quite certain that the whole collection—of some thirty or forty essays—does clearly exhibit that increasing sense of what criticism means, which is to be observed in almost all good critics. For criticism is, on the one hand, an art in which there are so few manuals or trustworthy short summaries—it is one which depends so much more on reading and knowledge than any creative art—and, above all, it is necessary to make so many mistakes in it before one comes right, that, probably, not one single example can be found of a critic of importance who was not a much better critic when he left off than when he began.
In Group One[[577]] Addison is still animated by the slightly desultory spirit of moral satire, which has been referred to above; and, though fifteen or sixteen years have passed since the Account, he does not seem to be so entirely free as we might wish from the crude sciolism, if not the sheer ignorance, of the earliest period. On True and False Wit. He is often admirable: his own humour, his taste, almost perfect within its own narrow limits, and his good sense, made that certain beforehand. But he has rather overloaded it with somewhat artificial allegory, the ethical temper rather overpowers the literary, and there is not a little of that arbitrary “blackmarking” of certain literary things which is one of the worst faults of neo-classic criticism. The Temple of Dulness is built (of course) “after the Gothic manner,” and the image of the god is dressed “after the habit of a monk.” Among the idolatrous rites and implements are not merely rebuses, anagrams, verses arranged in artificial forms, and other things a little childish, though perfectly harmless, but acrostics—trifles, perhaps, yet trifles which can be made exquisitely graceful, and satisfying that desire for mixing passion with playfulness which is not the worst affection of the human heart.
He had led up to this batch, a few weeks earlier, by some cursory remarks on Comedy, which form the tail of a more elaborate examination of Tragedy, filling four or five numbers.[[578]] On Tragedy. Readers who have already mastered the general drift of the criticism of the time before him, will scarcely need any long précis of his views, which, moreover, are in everybody’s reach, and could not possibly be put more readably. Modern tragedies, he thinks, excel those of Greece and Rome in the intricacy and disposition of the fable, but fall short in the moral. He objects to rhyme (except an end-couplet or two), and, though he thinks the style of our tragedies superior to the sentiment, finds the former, especially in Shakespeare, defaced by “sounding phrases, hard metaphors, and forced expressions.” This is still more the case in Lee. Otway is very “tender”: but it is a sad thing that the characters in Venice Preserved should be traitors and rebels. Poetic justice (this was what shocked Dennis), as generally understood, is rather absurd, and quite unnecessary. And the tragi-comedy, which is the product of the English theatre, is “one of the most monstrous inventions that ever entered into a poet’s thought.” You “might as well weave the adventures of Æneas and Hudibras into one poem” [and, indeed, one might find some relief in this, as far as the adventures of Æneas are concerned]. Tragedies are not even to have a double plot. Rants, and especially impious rants, are bad. Darkened stages, elaborate scenery and dresses, troops of supers, &c., are as bad: bells, ghosts, thunder, and lightning still worse. “Of all our methods of moving pity and terror, there is none so absurd and barbarous as the dreadful butchering of one another,” though all deaths on the stage are not to be forbidden.
Now, it is not difficult to characterise the criticism which appears in this first group, strengthened, if anybody cares, by a few isolated examples. It contains a great deal of common sense and good ordinary taste; many of the things that it reprehends are really wrong, and most of what it praises is good in a way. But the critic has as yet no guiding theory, except what he thinks he has gathered from Aristotle, and has certainly gathered from Horace, plus Common Sense itself, with, as is the case with all English critics of this age, a good deal from his French predecessors, especially Le Bossu and Bouhours. Which borrowing, while it leads him into numerous minor errors, leads him into two great ones—his denunciations of tragi-comedy, and of the double plot. He is, moreover, essentially arbitrary: his criticism will seldom stand the application of the “Why?” the “Après?” and a harsh judge might, in some places, say that it is not more arbitrary than ignorant.
The Second Group,[[579]] or Miltonic batch, with which may be taken its “moon,” the partly playful but more largely serious examen of Chevy Chase, is much the best known, and has been generally ranked as the most important exhibition of Addison’s critical powers. On Milton. It is not, however, out of paradox or desire to be singular that it will be somewhat briefly discussed here. By the student of Addison it cannot be too carefully studied; for the historian of criticism it has indeed high importance, but importance which can be very briefly summed up, and which requires no extensive analysis of the eighteen distinct essays that compose the Miltonic group, or the two on Chevy Chase. The critic here takes for granted—and knows or assumes that his readers will grant—two general positions:—
1. The Aristotelian-Horatian view of poetry, with a few of the more commonplace utterances of Longinus, supplies the orthodox theory of Poetics.
2. The ancients, especially Homer and Virgil, supply the most perfect examples of the orthodox practice of poetry.
These things posed, he proceeds to examine Chevy Chase at some, Paradise Lost at great, length by their aid; and discovers in the ballad not a few, and in the epic very great and very numerous, excellences. As Homer does this, so Milton does that: such a passage in Virgil is a more or less exact analogue to such another in Paradise Lost. Aristotle says this, Horace that, Longinus the third thing; and you will find the dicta capitally exemplified in such and such a place of Milton’s works. To men who accepted the principle—as most, if not all, men did—the demonstration was no doubt both interesting and satisfactory; and though it certainly did not start general admiration of Milton, it stamped that admiration with a comfortable seal of official orthodoxy. But it is actually more antiquated than Dryden, in assuming that the question whether Milton wrote according to Aristotle is coextensive with the question whether he wrote good poetry.
The next batch is far more important.
What are the Pleasures of the Imagination? It is of the first moment to observe Addison’s exact definition.[[580]] The “Pleasures of the Imagination.” Sight is the “sense which furnishes the imagination with its ideas; so that by the ‘Pleasures of the Imagination’ or Fancy, which I shall use promiscuously, I here mean such as arise from visible objects, either when we have them actually in our view, or when we call up their ideas into our minds by paintings, statues, descriptions, or any the like occasion.” We can have no images not thus furnished, though they may be altered and compounded by imagination itself. To make this quite sure, he repeats that he means only such pleasures as thus arise. He then proceeds, at some length, to argue for the innocence and refinement of such pleasures, their usefulness, and so on; and further, to discuss the causes or origins of pleasure in sight, which he finds to be three—greatness, uncommonness, and beauty. The pleasantness of these is assigned to such and such wise and good purposes of the Creator, with a reference to the great modern discoveries of Mr Locke’s essay.
Addison then goes on to consider the sources of entertainment to the imagination, and decides that, for the purpose, art is very inferior to nature, though both rise in value as each borrows from the other. He adduces, in illustration, an odd rococo mixture of scene-painting and reflection of actual objects which he once saw (p. 404). Italian and French gardens are next praised, in opposition to the old formal English style, and naturally trained trees to the productions of the ars topiaria; while a very long digression is made to greatness in Architecture, illustrated by this remark (p. 409), “Let any one reflect on the disposition of mind in which he finds himself at his first entrance into the Pantheon at Rome, ... and consider how little in proportion he is affected with the inside of a Gothic cathedral, though it be five times larger than the other,” the reason being “the greatness of the manner in the one, and the meanness in the other.”
So the “secondary” pleasures of the imagination—i.e., those compounded and manufactured by memory—are illustrated by the arts of sculpture and painting, with a good passage on description generally, whence he turns to the Cartesian doctrine of the association of ideas, and shows very ingeniously how the poet may avail himself of this. Next comes a curious and often just analysis of the reasons of pleasure in description—how, for instance, he likes Milton’s Paradise better than his Hell, because brimstone and sulphur are not so refreshing to the imagination as beds of flowers and wildernesses of sweets. Or we may like things because they “raise a secret ferment in the mind,” either directly, or so as to arouse a feeling of relief by comparison, as when we read of tortures, wounds, and deaths. Moreover, the poet may improve Nature. Let oranges grow wild, and roses, woodbines, and jessamines flower at the same time. As for “the fairy way of writing”[[581]]—that is to say, the supernatural—it requires a very odd turn of mind. We do it better than most other nations, because of our gloominess and melancholy of temper. Shakespeare excels everybody else in touching “this weak superstitious part” of his reader’s imagination. The glorifying of the imagination, however, is by no means confined to the poet. In good historians we “see” everything. None more gratify the imagination than the authors of the new philosophy, astronomers, microscopists. This (No. 420) is one of Addison’s most ambitious passages of writing, and the whole ends (421) with a peroration excellently hit off.
It is upon these papers mainly that Mr Worsfold[[582]] bases his high eulogium of Addison as “the first genuine critic,” the first “who added something to the last word of Hellenism,” the bringer of criticism “into line with modern thought,” the establisher of “a new principle of poetic appeal.” Let us, as uncontroversially as possible, and without laying any undue stress on the fact that Mr Worsfold practically omits Longinus altogether,[[583]] stick, in our humdrum way, to the facts.
In the first place, supposing for the moment that Addison uses “imagination” in our full modern sense, and supposing, secondly, for the moment also, that he assigns the appeal to the imagination as the special engine of the poet, is this an original discovery of his? By no means: there are many loci of former writers to negative this—there is one that is fatal. And this is no more recondite a thing than the famous Shakespearian description of
“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,”
as
“Of imagination all compact,”
with what follows. But this is a mere question of property, plagiarism, suggestion; and such questions are at best the exercises of literary holiday-makers, at the worst the business of pedants and of fools.
A more important as well as a more dangerous question is this. Does Addison make “the appeal to the imagination” the test of poetry? It can only be answered that, by his own explicit words, he does nothing of the kind. If he advances anything, it is that the appeal to the imagination is the appeal of art generally—of prose (even of scientific) literary art as well as of poetry, of painting, sculpture, architecture, as well as of literature. In doing this he does a good thing: he does something notable in the history of general æsthetics; but in so far as literature, and especially poetry, is concerned, he scarcely goes as far as Longinus in the well-known passage,[[584]] though he works out his doctrine at much greater length, and with assistance from Descartes and Locke.
But the most important and the most damaging question of all is this, “Are not Addison and his panegyrist using words in equivocal senses? Does Imagination in Addison’s mouth bear the meaning which we, chiefly since Coleridge’s day, attach to the word? Does it even mean what it meant to Longinus, much more what it meant to Shakespeare?”
I have no hesitation in answering the two latter questions with an absolute and unhesitating “No!”
It seems indeed extraordinary that, in face of Addison’s most careful and explicit limitations, any one should delude himself into thinking that even the Shakespearian and Addisonian Imaginations are identical—much more that Addison’s Imagination is the supreme faculty, creative, transcending Fancy,[[585]] superior to fact, not merely compounding and refining upon, but altogether superseding and almost scorning, ideas of sensation, which we mean by the word, and which Philostratus or Apollonius[[586]] partly glimpsed. Addison tells us—tells us over and over again—that all the ideas and pleasures of the imagination are pleasures of sense, and, what is more, that they are all pleasures of one sense—Sight. Why he should have limited himself in this singular manner it is hard to say; except that he was evidently full of Locke when he wrote, and, indeed, almost entirely under the influence of the Essay. That he had a contempt for music is elsewhere pretty evident; and this probably explains his otherwise inexplicable omission of the supplies and assistance given to Imagination by Hearing. His morality, as well as old convention, excluded Touch, Taste, and Smell as low and gross, though no candid philosophy could help acknowledging the immense influence exercised upon Imagination by at least the first and the last—Taste, because the most definite, being perhaps the least imaginative of all. But the fact that he does exclude even these senses, and still more rigidly excludes everything but Sense, is insuperable, irremovable, ruthless. Addison may have been the first modern critic to work out the appeal of art to the pleasures and ideas furnished by the sense of sight. He is certainly nothing more.
But is he therefore to be ignored, or treated lightly, because of this strange overvaluation of him? Certainly not. His general critical value.Though by no means a very great critic, he is a useful, an interesting, and a representative one. He represents the classical attitude tempered, not merely by good sense almost in quintessence, but by a large share of tolerance and positive good taste, by freedom from the more utterly ridiculous pseudo-Aristotelianisms, and by a wish to extend a concordat to everything good even if it be not “faultless.” In his Account he is evidently too crude to be very censurable: in his first group of essays much of his censure is just. The elaborate vindication of Milton, though now and for a long time past merely a curiosity, is again full of good sense, displays (if not altogether according to knowledge) a real liking for real poetic goodness, and had an inestimable effect in keeping at least one poet of the better time privileged and popular with readers throughout the Eighteenth Century. As for the essay on the Pleasures of the Imagination, the fact that it has been wrongly praised need not in the least interfere with a cordial estimate of its real merits. It is not an epoch-making contribution to literary criticism; it is rather one-sided, and strangely limited in range. But it is about the first attempt at a general theory of æsthetics in English; it is a most interesting, and a very early, example of that application of common-sense philosophy to abstract subjects which Locke taught to the English eighteenth century; and many of its remarks are valuable and correct. Moreover, it did actually serve, for those who could not, or who did not, read Longinus, as a corrective to pure form-criticism, to Bysshe with his rigid ten syllables, to bare good sense and conventional rule. Its Imagination was still only that which supplies Images, and was strangely cramped besides; but it was better than mere correctness, mere decency, mere stop-watch.
Between Addison and Pope, Steele, Atterbury, and Swift call for notice. Steele. Steele has little for us.[[587]] There are few things more curious than the almost entire abstinence from any expression, in the slightest degree really critical, to be found in the eulogy of Spenser, which he generously enough inserted in Sp. 540 to express “his passion for that charming author.” The numerous friends whom he has so justly won for himself may perhaps insist that there is criticism of the best in this very phrase; and that the rather rash encomium on the poet’s “old words” as being “all truly English” is balanced by the justice of the reference to his “exquisite numbers.” But the fact is that Steele had neither the knowledge, nor the patience, nor the coolness for critical work.
Atterbury gives rather more. He was himself a man of great intellectual power, a scholar, an eloquent and delicate writer, and possessed independent taste enough to admire Milton fervently at a time when Addison had not yet made it wholly orthodox to admire that poet at all, and when most Tories detested him. Atterbury. But his observations on Waller[[588]] are the very quintessence of pseudodoxy, as to that respectable person; and, by a curious combination, though Waller is a rhymer confirmed and complete, Atterbury joins with his admiration for him an antipathy to rhyme—“this jingling kind of poetry,” “this troublesome bondage, as Mr Milton well calls it.” As for this we need say little; the danger lay not there. But it lay in the direction of such remarks as that “English came into Waller’s hands like a rough diamond; he polished it first,” that, “for aught I know, he stands last as well as first in the list of refiners” [imagine the excellent Waller as be-all and end-all of English!], that “verse before Waller was downright prose tagged with rhyme,” &c., &c. Once more let our impatience of this talk not be ignorant—as is the impatience of those who nowadays cannot see music in Dryden, poetry in Pope, “cry” and clangour now and then even in persons like Langhorne and Mickle. He expressed an opinion; but in expressing it he showed this same ignorance from which we should abstain. Instead of pointing out that Waller introduced a different kind of music, he insisted that Waller substituted music for discord: instead of saying that he introduced a new fashion of cutting the diamond, he would have it that the diamond was merely rough before. This was the culpa, the maxima culpa of eighteenth-century criticism, and Atterbury illustrates and shares it.[[589]]
The critical work of Swift[[590]] is much more important, and though a good deal of it is inextricably mixed up with the work of Pope and of Arbuthnot, the lion’s claw is generally perceptible enough. Swift. The famous Tatler of September 28, 1710, on the conceptions of English style and writing, ought to hold place in every history and course of lectures on the subject, next to Sprat’s passage in the History of the Royal Society forty years before, as the manifesto of a fresh stage in English style-criticism; and it practically precedes everything that Addison, Steele, and Pope published on, or in connection with, the subject. But long before this, in the wonderful volume which first (1704) revealed his genius to the world, Swift had shown how critical the Gods had made him.
The Battle of the Books is one of the most eccentric documents in the whole History of our subject. The Battle of the Books. Directly, and on its face, it may be said to be of the first critical importance; because it shows how very little subject, intention, accuracy to fact, verisimilitude, and half-a-dozen other indispensables according to certain theories, have to do with the goodness of a book. The general characteristics of The Battle of the Books in all these named respects, and some of the unnamed ones, are deplorable. In a tedious and idle quarrel which, at least as it was actually debated, never need have been debated at all, Swift takes the side which, if not the intrinsically wrong one, is the wrong one as he takes it. To represent Bentley, or even Wotton, as enemies of the Ancients might seem preposterous, if it were not outdone by the preposterousness of selecting Temple as their champion. The details are often absurd—from that ranking of “Despréaux” side by side with Cowley as a Modern brigadier, which is probably a slip (perhaps for “Desportes”) of pen or press, to the spiteful injustices on Dryden. The idea of the piece was probably taken from Callières.[[591]] Its composition, from the rigid “Ancient” point of view, is sadly lax; and the two most brilliant episodes—the “Sweetness and Light” quarrel of the Spider and the Bee, and the “machine” of the Goddess of Criticism—have little or nothing to do with the action. But yet it is—and one knows it is—a masterpiece; and it is pretty certain from it that in certain kinds of destructive criticism, and even in certain kinds of what may be called destructive-constructive, the author will be able to accomplish almost anything that he is likely to try.
Though the Tale of the Tub is less ostensibly bookish, it shows even greater purely critical power: for the power of the Battle is mainly that of a consummate craftsman, who can accomplish by sheer craftsmanship whatsoever his hand findeth to do. The Tale of a Tub.In the Tale the crusade against bad writing and bad writers, which Swift carried on more or less for the whole of his middle and later years, and in which he enlisted Addison and Pope, Arbuthnot and Gay, is all but formally proclaimed, and is most vigorously waged with or without proclamation. In the “Dedication to Somers” the sword is being something more than loosened in the sheath; it flashes out in “The Bookseller to the Reader”; it is doing sanguinary work in the great “Epistle to Prince Posterity;” and it has only momentary rests in the “Preface” and the “Induction”: while there is hardly a section of the main text in which the quarters of Grub Street are not beaten up, and the Conclusion is even as the preludes and the main body.
A shrewd judge could hardly fail to perceive, from these famous twin-books, that a new genius of thoroughly critical character had arisen: but such a judge might well have doubted how far its exercise could be anything but negative. Minor works. His doubts, as we have already hinted, were to be justified. Indirectly, indeed, not merely in the Tatler paper above referred to and elsewhere, but by that almost uncanny influence which he seems to have exerted in so many ways on men only less than himself, Swift had very much to do with the rescuing of Style, by the hands of Addison and the rest, from the vulgarisation which it was undergoing at the close of the seventeenth century, not merely in common writers, not merely in the hands of an eccentric like L’Estrange, but in those of scholars like Collier and Bentley. But even this was a task of destruction rather than of positive construction, and he was always most at home in such tasks. The Meditation on a Broomstick and the Tritical Essay, though every good reviewer should know them by heart, and will have but too many opportunities of using his knowledge, are delivered with the backward, not the forward, speech of the critic; the Proposal for correcting the English Tongue, which falls in with the Tatler paper, aims at a sort of stationary state of language and literature alike, at proscriptions and ostracisings; the Letter to a Young Clergyman and the Essay on Modern Education, though both touch on literature, are exceedingly general in their precepts; and though all persons with a true English appreciation of shameless puns and utter nonsense must delight in The Antiquity of the English Tongue, it cannot be called serious criticism. There is more in the Advice to a Young Poet: but even here Swift is rather “running humours” on his subject than discussing it in the grave and chaste manner.
We shall therefore hardly be wrong if, after excepting the literary directions of the universal satiric douche in the Tale of a Tub, and the useful but somewhat rudimentary warnings of the Tatler paper, we see the most characteristic critical work of Swift in Martinus Scriblerus and the Peri Bathous, especially in the latter, which, though it be principally attributed to Arbuthnot and Pope, is as surely Swiftian in suggestion as if the Dean had written and published it alone. Often as it has been imitated, and largely as its methods have been drawn upon, it has never been surpassed as an Art of General and Particular “Slating”: and the sections on the Figures, with the immortal receipt for making an epic poem (the full beauty of which is lost on those who do not know how appallingly close it is to the approved prescriptions of the best neo-classic critics), cannot be too highly praised. But, once more, the critic is here at hangman’s work only: he allows himself neither to admire nor to love.
These principles, put in various ways by writers of more or less genius for half a century, found what seemed to more than two generations (always with a few dissidents) something like consummate expression in certain well-known utterances of Pope. Pope. As expression these utterances may still receive a very high degree of admiration: as anything else it is difficult to believe that any turn of fashion, unless it brings with it oblivion for large districts of noble literature, can restore them to much authority. Pope, though better read than he seems in his poems, was by no means a learned man; and it is now pretty generally admitted that his intellect was acute rather than powerful. The obstinate superficiality—the reduction of everything, even the most recondite problems of philosophy, even the most far-ranging questions of erudition, to a jury of “common-sense” persons, decorated with a little of the fashion of the town—which had set in, found in him an exponent as competent to give it exquisite expression as he was indisposed, and probably incompetent, to deepen or extend its scope. He attained early to nearly his full powers, and it does not much matter whether the Essay on Criticism was written at the age of twenty or at that of twenty-two. He could have improved it a little in form, but would hardly have altered it at all in matter, if he had written it thirty years later. The Imitation of the Epistle of Horace to Augustus, which was actually written about that time, is, though superior as verse, almost inferior as criticism, and more “out” in fact. The two together give a sufficient view of Pope as he wished to be taken critically. The Letters. But to be perfectly fair we must add the critical utterances in his Letters,[[592]] his Preface to Shakespeare, and (with caution of course) the remarks attributed to him by Spence. The Preface has received much praise; and has deserved some even from those who follow not Pope generally. It would be unfair to blame him for adopting the mixed “beauty and fault” system which had the patronage of great names in antiquity, and found hardly even questioners in his own time. And it is something that he recognises Shakespeare’s power over the passions, the individuality of his characters, his intuitive knowledge of the world and of nature. He is moderate and sensible on the relations of Shakespeare and Jonson; he has practically said all that is to be said, in an endless and tiresome controversy, by writing, The Shakespeare Preface. “To judge Shakespeare by Aristotle’s rules is like trying a man by the laws of one country who acted under those of another.” And for such utterances we may excuse, or at least pass over with little or no comment, the remarks that Shakespeare kept bad company, that he wrote to please the populace, that he resembles “an ancient majestic piece of Gothic architecture [so far, so good], where many of the details are childish, ill-placed, and unequal to its grandeur.” The littleness of this patchy, yea-nay criticism beside the great and everlasting appreciation of his master Dryden speaks for itself; it is only fair to remember that the very existence of Dryden’s for once really marmoreal inscription almost inevitably belittled and hampered Pope. He was obliged to be different; and internal as well as external influences made it certain that if he were different he would be less.
The Popiana of Spence[[593]] add more to our idea of Pope’s critical faculty, or at least of its exercises; in fact, it is possible to take a much better estimate of Pope’s “literature” from the Anecdotes than from the Works. Spence’s Anecdotes. Although the Boswellian spirit was, fortunately enough for posterity, very strong in the eighteenth century, there was no particular reason why Spence should toady Pope—especially as he published nothing to obtain pence or popularity from the toadying. That rather remarkable collection, or re-collection, of Italian-Latin poetry of the Renaissance,[[594]] of which not much notice has been taken by Pope’s biographers, would, of itself, show critical interest in a part, and no unnoteworthy part, of literature: and a few of the Spencean salvages bear directly upon this. He need not have been ashamed of his special liking for Politian’s Ambra: and he was right in thinking Bembo “stiff and unpoetical,” though hardly in joining Sadolet with him in this condemnation. We know perfectly well why he did not like Rabelais, for which Swift very properly scolded him: indeed, he tells us himself, twice over, that “there were so many things” in Master Francis, “in which he could not see any manner of meaning driven at,” that he could not read him with any patience. This is really more tale-telling than the constantly quoted passage about Walsh and correctness. For, after all, everybody aspires to be correct: only everybody has his own notions of what is correctness. It is not everybody—and, as we see, it was not the great Mr Pope—who could, or can, appreciate nonsense, and see how much more sensible than sense the best of it is. It would skill but little to go through his isolated judgments: but there are one or two which are eloquent.
Still, it is to the Essay and the Epistle that we must turn for his deliberate theory of criticism, announced in youth, indorsed and emphasised in age. The Essay on Criticism. And we meet at once with a difficulty. The possessor of such a theory ought, at least, to have something like a connected knowledge, at least a connected view, of literature as a whole, and to be able to square the two. All Pope seems to have done is to take the Arts of Horace, Vida, and Boileau, to adopt as many of their principles as he understood, and as would go into his sharp antithetic couplet, to drag their historical illustrations head and shoulders into his scheme without caring for the facts, and to fill in and embroider with criticisms, observations, and precepts, sometimes very shrewd, almost always perfectly expressed, but far too often arbitrary, conventional, and limited. He is most unfortunate of all in the historical part, where Boileau had been sufficiently unfortunate before him. The Frenchman’s observations on Villon and Ronsard had been ignorant enough, and forced enough: but Pope managed to go a little beyond them in the Essay, and a great distance further still in the Epistle. The history of the famous passage,
“We conquered France, but felt our captive’s charms,”[[595]]
is like nothing on earth but the history-poetry of the despised monkish ages, in which Alexander has twelve peers, and Arthur, early in the sixth century, overruns Europe with a British force, and fights with a Roman Emperor named Lucius. And the sketch of European literature in the Essay, if it contains no single statement so glaringly absurd, is as much a “tissue of gaps” as the Irishman’s coat.
Attempts have been made (including some by persons deserving all respect, and thoroughly acquainted with the subject) to give Pope a high place, on the score of his charges to “follow nature.” Unfortunately this is mere translation of Boileau, of Vida, and of Horace, in the first place: and, still more unfortunately, the poet’s own arguments on his doctrine show that what he meant by “following nature,” and what we mean by it, are two quite different things. He, usually at least, means “stick to the usual, the ordinary, the commonplace.” Just so the legendary King of Siam, had he written an Art of Poetry, would have said “Follow nature, and do not talk about such unnatural things as ice and snow.”
Regarded merely as a manual of the art of Pope’s own poetry, without prejudice to any other, and as a satire on the faults of other kinds, without prejudice to the weaknesses of his own, the Essay is not merely an interesting document, but a really valuable one. Its cautions against desertion of nature in the directions of excess, of the unduly fantastic, are sound to this day: and its eulogies of ancient writers, though perhaps neither based on very extensive and accurate first-hand knowledge, nor specially appropriate to the matter in hand, contain much that is just in itself. One of the weakest parts, as might have been expected, is the treatment of rules, licences, and faults. The poet-critic practically confesses the otiosity of the whole system by admitting that a lucky licence is a rule, and that it is possible, as one of his own most famous and happiest lines says,
“To snatch a grace beyond the reach of art.”
And when he paraphrases Quintilian to the effect that you must criticise
“With the same spirit that the author writ,”
and judge the whole, not the parts, he again goes perilously near to jettison his whole system.
In the same way consistency is the last thing that can be claimed for his chapters, as they may be called, on conceit, on language, “numbers” (the most famous and the most ingenious passage of the Essay), extremes, “turns,” the Ancient and Modern quarrel, &c. The passage on Critics is among the best—for here sheer good sense (even in the temporary, much more in the universal, meaning) tells—and the historical sketch of them, though not too accurate, is vigorous.
The much later Epistle is far more desultory, and inevitably tinged by those personal feelings which many years of literary squabble had helped ill-health and natural disposition to arouse in Pope. The Epistle to Augustus. But its general critical attitude is not different. He is angry with the revival of old literature which Watson and Allan Ramsay in Scotland, Oldys and others in England, were beginning, hints sneers even at Milton and the “weeds on Avon’s bank,” is at least as hackneyed as he is neat in his individual criticisms on poets nearer his own day, and defends poetry and literature generally in a patronising and half-apologetic strain. In fact, what he has really at heart is to be politely rude to George II.; not to give any critical account of English literature.
But the Essay on Criticism is too important a thing not to require a little more notice here. Remarks on Pope as a critic, It is extremely desultory; but so is the Epistola ad Pisones, and it is by no means certain that Pope was not wise in falling back upon the Roman method, instead of emulating the appearance of system in the Art Poétique. This latter emphasises faults; Pope’s causerie veils promiscuousness in the elegant chit-chat of conversation. A bad critic is a more dangerous person than a bad poet; and true taste is as uncommon as true genius. Bad education is responsible for bad taste, and we must be very careful about our own. Nature is the guide; the “rules” are but methodised nature. We derive them, however, not from nature but from the ancient poets, whom we must study. Even in licences we must follow them. Bad critics are made by various causes, from ignorance and party spirit to personal animus. A good critic is candid, modest, well-bred, and sincere. The sort of history of criticism which concludes the piece makes it specially surprising that Johnson should have been so much kinder to Pope’s learning than he was to Dryden’s; but the author of the actual Essay on Criticism, and the author of the unhappily but projected History of it, were too thoroughly in agreement about poetry, and even about criticism itself, to make the latter quite an impartial judge of the former.
When we pass from generals to particulars Pope’s cleverness at least appears more than ever. The sharply separated, neatly flying, and neatly ringing couplets deliver “one, two” in the most fascinating cut-and-thrust style, not without a brilliant parry now and then to presumed (and never very formidable) objections. The man’s perfect skill in the execution of his own special style of poetry raises, and in this case not delusively, the expectation that he will know his theory as well as his practice. The “good sense,” the “reason,” are really and not merely nominally present. A great deal of what is said is quite undoubtedly true and very useful, not merely for reproof and correction in point of critical and poetical sin, but actually for instruction in critical and poetical righteousness.
But on further examination there is too often something wanting; nay, there is too often no real root of the matter present. The preliminary flourishes are well enough. And certainly no school will quarrel—though each school may take the privilege of understanding the words in its own way—with the doctrine “Follow Nature.” But
“One science only will one genius fit”
is notoriously false to nature, and if intended as a hint to the critic, can only result in too common mistakes and injustices. So, too, when we pass from the glowing eulogy of Nature, and of her union with Art, to the Rules, there is a most deplorable gap. Those Rules, “discovered not devised,” are “nature methodised.” Very good. This means, if it means anything, a very true thing—that the Rules are extracted from observed works of genius. But how, a most fervent admirer of the Greeks may ask, did it happen that the Greeks discovered all these rules? How, especially, did it happen that they did so, when some kinds of literature itself were notoriously neither discovered nor devised? And when we get a little further, and are bidden to
“Know well each Ancient’s proper character,”
we may, or rather must, reply, “It is most necessary; but you will neglect the Moderns at your peril.”
In short, here as elsewhere, Pope’s dazzling elocution, winged with a distinct if narrow conception of his general purpose, flies right enough in the inane, but makes painfully little progress when it lights on the prosaic ground. The picture of “young Maro,” with a sort of ciphering book before him, “totting up” Homer, Nature, and the Stagirite, and finding them all exactly equivalent, is really far more ludicrous than those flights of metaphysical fancy at which critics of Pope’s school delight to gird; while the very climax of another kind of absurdity is reached by the accordance to the Ancients, not merely of the prerogative of laying down the rule always to be followed, but of the privilege of making the not-to-be-imitated exception. So again, fine as is the Alps passage, the famous doctrine of a “little learning” is an ingenious fallacy. It is not the little learning acquired, but the vast amount of ignorance left, that is dangerous. The admirable couplet,
“True Wit is nature to advantage drest;
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed,”
though in itself the best thing in the whole poem, is unluckily placed, because this sensation of familiarity beneath novelty is constantly given by those very “conceits” which Pope is denouncing. On “Language” and “Numbers” he is too notoriously speaking to a particular brief. And as for his more general cautions throughout, they are excellent sense for the most part, but have very little more to do with criticism than with any other function of life. A banker or a fishmonger, an architect, artist, or plain man, will no doubt be the better for avoiding extremes, partisanship, singularity, fashion, mere jealousy (personal or other), ignorance, pedantry, vice. And if he turns critic he will find these avoidances still useful to him, but not more specially useful than in his former profession.
What then was the critical attitude which was expressed so brilliantly, and which gave Pope a prerogative influence over all the orthodox criticism of his own century in England and even elsewhere? and the critical attitude of his group. It can be sketched very fairly as being a sort of compromise between a supposed following of the ancients, and a real application, to literature in general and to poetry in particular, of the general taste and cast of thought of the time. The following of the Ancients—it has been often pointed out already—was, as the Articles of the Church of England have it, a “corrupt following”: those who said Aristotle meant now nobody more ancient than Boileau, now no one more ancient than Vida, scarcely ever any one more ancient than Horace. The classics as a whole were very little studied, at least by those who busied themselves most with modern literature; and it had entered into the heads of few that, after all, the standards of one literature might, or rather must, require very considerable alteration before they could apply to another.[[596]] But Greek and Roman literature presented a body of poetry and of most other kinds, considerable, admittedly excellent, and mostly composed under the influence of distinct and identical critical principles. Very few men had a complete knowledge of even a single modern literature; hardly a man in France knew Old French as a whole, hardly a man in England, except mere antiquaries, knew Old English even as a part. There was probably not a man in Europe till Gray (and Gray was still young at Pope’s death) who had any wide reading at once in classical literature and in the mediæval and modern literatures of different countries. Accordingly the principles of ancient criticism, not even in their purity fully adequate to modern works, and usually presented, not in their purity but in garbled and bastardised form, were all that they had to stand by.
This classical, or pseudo-classical, doctrine was further affected, in the case of literature generally, by the ethos of the time, and, in the case of poetry, by the curious delusion as to hard and fast syllabic prosody which has been noticed in connection with Bysshe. Classicism, in any pure sense, was certainly not to blame for this, for everybody with the slightest tinge of education knew that the chief Latin metre admitted the substitution of trisyllabic for dissyllabic feet in every place but one, and most knew that this substitution was even more widely permitted by Greek in a standard metre, approaching the English still nearer. But it had, as we have seen, been a gradually growing delusion, for a hundred and fifty years, in almost every kind of non-dramatic poetry.
As for the general tendency, the lines of that are clear—though the arbitrary extension and stiffening of them remain a little incomprehensible. Nature was to be the test; but an artificialised Nature, arranged according to the fashion of a town-haunting society—a Nature which submitted herself to a system of convention and generalisation. In so far as there was any real general principle it was that you were to be like everybody else—that singularity, except in doing the usual thing best, was to be carefully avoided. Pope, being a man of genius, could not help transcending this general conception constantly by his execution, not seldom by his thought, and sometimes in his critical precepts. But it remains the conception of his time and of himself.
The writers whom we have been discussing, since we parted with Dennis, have all been considerable men of letters, who in more or less degree busied themselves with criticism. Philosophical and Professional Critics. We must now pass to those who, without exactly deserving the former description, undertook the subject either, as part of those “philosophical” inquiries which, however loosely understood, were so eagerly and usefully pursued by the eighteenth century, or as direct matter of professional duty. The first division supplies Lord Kames in Scotland and “Hermes” Harris in England. Whether we are right in reserving Shaftesbury, Hume, Adam Smith, &c., from it, so as to deal with them from the Æsthetic side in the next volume, may be matter of opinion.
To the second belong Trapp, Blair, and Campbell. Trapp. Trapp need not detain us very long; but as first occupant of the first literary chair in England, and so the author of a volume of Prælections respectable in themselves, and starting a line of similar work which, to the present day, has contributed admirable critical documents, he cannot be omitted. He was the author of one of the wittiest epigrams[[597]] on record, but he did not allow himself much sparkle in his lectures.[[598]] Perhaps, indeed, he was right not to do so.
Hugh Blair, half a century later than Trapp, in 1759, started, like him, the teaching of modern literature in his own country. Blair. He had the advantage, as far as securing a popular audience goes, of lecturing in English, and he was undoubtedly a man of talent. The Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres,[[599]] which were delivered with great éclat for nearly a quarter of a century from the Chair of their subject, are very far, indeed, from being devoid of merit. They provide a very solid, if a somewhat mannered and artificial instruction, both by precept and example, in what may be called the “full-dress plain style” which was popular in the eighteenth century. They are as original as could be expected. The critical examination of Addison’s style, if somewhat meticulous, is mostly sound, and has, like Johnson’s criticisms of Dryden and Pope, the advantage of thorough sympathy, of freedom from the drawback—so common in such examinations—that author and critic are standing on different platforms, looking in different directions, speaking, one may almost say, in mutually incomprehensible tongues. The survey of Belles Lettres is, on its own scheme, ingenious and correct: there are everywhere evidences of love of Literature (as the lover understands her), of good education and reading, of sound sense. Blair is to be very particularly commended for accepting to the full the important truth that “Rhetoric” in modern times really means “Criticism”; and for doing all he can to destroy the notion, authorised too far by ancient critics, and encouraged by those of the Renaissance, that Tropes and Figures are not possibly useful classifications and names, but fill a real arsenal of weapons, a real cabinet of reagents, by the employment of which the practitioner can refute, or convince, or delight, as the case may be.
But with this, and with the further praise due to judicious borrowings from the ancients, the encomium must cease. The Lectures on Rhetoric. In Blair’s general critical view of literature the eighteenth-century blinkers are drawn as close as possible. From no writer, even in French, can more “awful examples” be extracted, not merely of perverse critical assumption, but of positive historical ignorance. Quite early in the second Lecture, and after some remarks (a little arbitrary, but not valueless) on delicacy and correctness in taste, we find, within a short distance of each other, the statements that “in the reign of Charles II. such writers as Suckling and Etheridge were held in esteem for dramatic composition,” and later, “If a man shall assert that Homer has no beauties whatever, that he holds him to be a dull and spiritless writer, and that he would as soon peruse any legend of old knight-errantry as the Iliad, then I exclaim that my antagonist is either void of all taste,” &c. Here, on the one hand, the lumping of Suckling and Etherege together, and the implied assumption that not merely Suckling, but Etherege, is a worthless dramatist, gives us one “light,” just as the similar implication that “an old legend of knight-errantry” is necessarily an example of dulness, spiritlessness, and absence of beauty, gives us another. That Blair lays down, even more peremptorily than Johnson, and as peremptorily as Bysshe, that the pause in an English line may fall after the 4th, 5th, 6th, or 7th syllable, and no other, is not surprising; and his observations on Shakespeare are too much in the usual “faults-saved-by-beauties” style to need quotation. But that he cites, with approval, a classification of the great literary periods of the world which excludes the Elizabethan Age altogether, is not to be omitted. It stamps the attitude.
These same qualities appear in the once famous but now little read Dissertation on Ossian.[[600]] The Dissertation on Ossian. That, in the sense of the word on which least stress is laid in these volumes, this “Critical Dissertation” is absolutely uncritical does not much matter. Blair does not even attempt to examine the evidence for and against the genuineness of the work he is discussing. He does not himself know Gaelic; friends (like Hector M’Intyre) have told him that they heard Gaelic songs very like Ossian sung in their youth; there are said to be manuscripts; that is enough for him. Even when he cites and compares parallel passages—the ghost-passage and that from the book of Job, Fingal’s “I have no son” and Othello—which derive their whole beauty from exact coincidence with the Bible or Shakespeare, he will allow no kind of suspicion to cross his mind. But this we might let pass. It is in the manner in which he seeks to explain the “amazing degree of regularity and art,” which he amazingly ascribes to Macpherson’s redaction, the “rapid and animated style,” the “strong colouring of imagination,” the “glowing sensibility of heart,” that the most surprising thing appears. His citations are as copious as his praises of them are hard to indorse. But his critical argument rests almost (not quite) wholly on showing that Fingal and Temora are worked out quite properly on Aristotelian principles by way of central action and episode, and that there are constant parallels to Homer, the only poet whom he will allow to be Ossian’s superior. In short, he simply applies to Ossian Addison’s procedure with Paradise Lost. The critical piquancy of this is double. For we know that Ossian was powerful—almost incredibly powerful—all over Europe in a sense quite opposite to Blair’s; and we suspect, if we do not know, that Mr James Macpherson was quite clever enough purposely to give it something of the turn which Blair discovers.
The charge which may justly be brought against Blair—that he is both too exclusively and too purblindly “belletristic”—cannot be extended to Henry Home, Lord Kames. Kames. Johnson, whom Kames disliked violently, and who returned the dislike with rather good-natured if slightly contemptuous patronage, dismissed the Elements of Criticism, 1761,[[601]] as “a pretty Essay, which deserves to be held in some estimation, though much of it is chimerical.”[[602]] The sting of this lies, as usual, in the fact that it is substantially true, though by no means all the truth. The Elements of Criticism is a pretty book, and an estimable one, and, what is more, one of very considerable originality. Its subtlety and ingenuity are often beyond Johnson’s own reach; it shows a really wide knowledge of literature, modern as well as ancient; and it is surprisingly, though not uniformly, free from the special “classical” purblindness of which Johnson and Blair are opposed, but in their different ways equal, examples. Yet a very great deal of it is “chimerical,” and, what is worse, a very great deal more is, whether chimerical or not in itself, irrelevant. It presents a philosophical treatise, vaguely and tentatively æsthetic rather than critical, yoked in the loosest possible manner to a bundle of quasi-professorial exercises in Lower and Higher Rhetoric. The second part might not improperly be termed “Critical Illustrations of Rhetoric.” The first could only be properly entitled “Literary Illustrations of Morals.”
Of course this excellent Scots lawyer and ingenious “Scotch metaphysician” had strong precedents to urge for making a muddle of Moral Philosophy and Literary Criticism. The Elements of Criticism. It has been pointed out that Aristotle himself is not a little exposed to the same imputation. But Kames embroils matters to an extent never surpassed, except by those, to be found in every day, who are incapable of taking the literary point of view at all, and who simply treat literature as something expressing agreement or disagreement with their moral, political, religious, or other views. He seems himself to have had, at least once, a slight qualm. “A treatise of ethics is not my province: I carry my view no farther than to the elements of criticism, in order to show that the fine arts are a subject of reasoning as well as of taste.”[[603]] If this was his rule he certainly gives himself the most liberal indulgence in applying it. His First Chapter is devoted to “Perceptions and Ideas in a Train”; the second (an immensely long one, containing a good third of the first volume) to “Emotions and Passions”; while the whole of the rest till the end of the seventeenth chapter is really occupied by the same class of subject. Kames excels in that constantly ingenious, and often acute, dissection of human nature which was the pride and pleasure of his century and his country, but which is a little apt to pay itself with clever generalisations as if they were veræ causæ. In one place we find a distribution of all the pleasures of the senses into pain of want, desire, and satisfaction. In another[[604]] the philosopher solemnly informs us, “I love my daughter less after she is married, and my mother less after a second marriage; the marriage of my son or my father diminishes not my affection so remarkably.” An almost burlesque illustration of the procedure of the school is given in the dictum,[[605]] “Where the course of nature is joined with Elevation the effect must be delightful; and hence the singular beauty of smoke ascending in a calm morning.” When one remembers this, and comes later[[606]] to the admirable remark, “Thus, to account for an effect of which there is no doubt, any cause, however foolish, is made welcome,” it is impossible not to say “Thou sayest it”; as also in another case, where he lays it down that “Were corporeal pleasures dignified over and above [i.e., beside the natural propensity which incites us to them] with a place in a high class, they would infallibly disturb the balance of the mind by outweighing the social affections. This is a satisfactory final cause for refusing to these pleasures any degree of dignity.”[[607]] I am tempted to quote Kames’s philosophy of the use of tobacco[[608]] also, but the stuff and method of his first volume must be sufficiently intelligible already.
The second, much more to the purpose, is considerably less interesting. A very long chapter deals with Beauty of Language with respect to Sound, Signification, Resemblance between Sound and Signification, and Metre. It is abundantly stocked with well-chosen examples from a wide range of literature, and full of remarks, generally ingenious and sometimes both new and bold, as where at the outset Kames has the audacity to contradict Aristotle, by implication at least, and lay it down that “of all the fine arts, painting and sculpture only are in their nature imitative.”[[609]] But it is not free from the influence of the idols of its time. Of such, in one kind, may be cited the attribution to Milton of “many careless lines”;[[610]] for if there is one thing certain in the risky and speculative range of literary dogmatism, it is that Milton never wrote a “careless” line in his life. If his lines are ever bad (and perhaps they are sometimes), they are bad deliberately and of malice. In another and more serious kind may be ranged the predominating determination to confuse the sensual with the intellectual side of poetry. This, of course, is Kames’s root-idea; but that it is a root of evil may be shown sufficiently by the following passage in his discussion of the pause—in relation to which subject he is as wrong as nearly all his contemporaries. He is talking of a pause between adjective and substantive.[[611]] What occurs to him is that “a quality cannot exist independent of a subject, nor are they separable even in imagination, because they make part of the same idea, and for that reason, with respect to melody as well as to sense, it must be disagreeable to bestow upon the adjective a sort of independent existence by interjecting a pause between it and its substantive.” His examples are no doubt vitiated by the obsession of the obligatory “middle” pause, which makes him imagine one between adjective and substantive in
“The rest, his many-coloured robe concealed,”
where the only real pause, poetic as well as grammatical, is at “rest.” But his principle is clear, and it is as clearly a wrong principle. It ignores the great fact glanced at above, that the pleasure of poetry is double—intellectual and sensual—and that the two parts are in a manner independent of each other. And in the second place, even on its own theory, it credits the mere intellect with too sluggish faculties. In the first line which Kames suggests as “harsh and unpleasant” for this reason,
“Of thousand bright inhabitants of air,”
the pause at “bright” is so slight a one that some might deny its existence. But if it be held necessary, can we refuse to the subtilitas intellectus the power of halting, for the second of a second, to conceive the joint idea of number and brightness, before it moves further to enrich this by the notion of “inhabitants of air”? The mere and literal Lockist may do so; but no other will. The Figures enjoy a space which, without being surprised at it, one grudges; and the Unities are handled rather oddly, while a digression of some fifty pages on Gardening and Architecture speaks for itself. The conclusion on the Standard of Taste is singularly inconclusive; and an interesting appendix on “terms defined and explained” presents the singularity that not, I think, one of the terms so dealt with has anything specially to do with literature or art at all.
Nevertheless, though it is easy to be smart upon Kames, and not very difficult to expose serious inadequacies and errors both in the general scheme and the particular execution, the Elements of Criticism is a book of very great interest and importance, and worthy of much more attention than it has for a long time past received. To begin with, his presentation, at the very outset of his book, of Criticism as “the most agreeable of all amusements”[[612]] was one of those apparently new and pleasant shocks to the general which are, in reality, only the expression of an idea for some time germinating and maturing in the public mind. Even Addison, even Pope, while praising and preaching Criticism, had half-flouted and half-apologised for it. Swift, a great critic on his own day, had flouted it almost or altogether in others. The general idea of the critic had been at worst of a malignant, at best of a harmless, pedant. Kames presented him as something quite different,—as a man no doubt of learning, but also of position and of the world, “amusing,” as well as exercising himself, and bringing the fashionable philosophy to the support of his amusement.
But he did more than this. His appreciation of Shakespeare is, taking it together (and his references to the subject are numerous and important), the best of his age. His citations show a remarkable relish for the Shakespearian humour, and though he cannot clear his mind entirely from the “blemish-and-beauty” cant, which is ingrained in the Classical theory, and which, as we saw, infected even such a critic as Longinus, he is far freer from it than either Johnson or Blair. In his chapter on the Unities he comes very near to Hurd[[613]] (to whom, as the Elements of Criticism preceded the Letters on Chivalry in time, he may have given a hint) in recognising the true Romantic Unity of Action which admits plurality so far as the different interests work together, or contrast advantageously. He has a most lucid and sensible exposure of the difference between the conditions of the Greek theatre and ours. In short, he would stand very high if he were not possessed with the pseudological mania which makes him calmly and gravely write[[614]]—“Though a cube is more agreeable in itself than a parallelopipedon,[[615]] yet a large parallelopipedon set on its smaller base is by its elevation more agreeable, and hence the beauty of a Gothic tower.” But this amabilis insania is in itself more amiable than insane. He wants to admit the Gothic tower, and that is the principal thing. Magdalen, and Merton, and Mechlin may well, in consideration of his slighting in their favour the more intrinsic charms of a cube, afford to let a smile flicker round their venerable skylines at his methodical insistence on justifying admiration of them by calling them large parallelopipeda set on their smaller ends. And the cube can console herself with his admission of her superior intrinsic loveliness.
The faults of Blair and of Kames are both, for the most part, absent, while much more than the merit of either, in method and closeness to the aim, is present, in the very remarkable Philosophy of Rhetoric[[616]] which Dr George Campbell began, and, to some extent, composed, as early as 1750; though he did not finish and publish it till nearly thirty years later (1777). Campbell. It may indeed be admitted that this piecemeal composition is not without its effect on the book, which contains some digressions (especially one on Wit, Humour, and Ridicule, and another on the cause of the pleasure received from the exhibition of painful objects) more excrescent than properly episodic. It is, moreover, somewhat weighted by the author’s strictly professional and educational design, in retaining as much of the mere business part of the ancient Rhetoric as would or might be useful to future preachers, advocates, or members of Parliament. Campbell, too, is a less “elegant” writer than Blair; and his acuteness has a less vivacious play than that of Kames. But here concessions are exhausted; and the book, however much we may disagree with occasional expressions in it, remains the most important treatise on the New Rhetoric that the eighteenth century produced. Indeed, strange as it may seem, Whately’s, its principal formal successor in the nineteenth, is distinctly retrograde in comparison.
The New Rhetoric—the Art of Criticism—this is what Campbell really attempts. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. He is rather chary of acknowledging his own position, and, in fact, save in his title, seldom employs the term Rhetoric, no doubt partly from that unlucky contempt of scholastic appellations which shows itself in his well-known attack on Logic. But his definition of “Eloquence”—the term which he employs as a preferred synonym of Rhetoric itself—is very important, and practically novel. The word “Eloquence, in its greatest latitude, denotes that art or talent by which the discourse is adapted to its end.” Now this, though he modestly shelters it under Quintilian’s scientia bene dicendi and dicere secundum virtutem orationis, asserting also its exact correspondence with Cicero’s description of the best orator as he who dicendo animos delectat audientium et docet et permovet, is manifestly far more extensive than the latter of these, and much less vague than the former. In fact Rhetoric, new dubbed as Eloquence, becomes the Art of Literature, or in other words Criticism.
It has been allowed that this bold and admirable challenge of the whole province—for “discourse” is soon seen to include “writing”—is not always so well supported. After an interesting introduction (vindicating the challenge, and noting Kames more especially as one who, though in a different way, had made it before him), Campbell for a time, either because he is rather afraid of his own boldness, or to conciliate received opinions on the matter (or, it has been suggested, because the book was written at different times, and with perhaps slightly different ends), proceeds to discuss various matters which have very little to do with his general subject. Sometimes, as in the Chapter, before referred to, on “The Nature and Use of the Scholastic Art of Syllogising,” he wrecks himself in a galley which he had not the slightest need to enter. The longer discourse on Evidence which precedes this is, of course, fully justified on the old conception of Rhetoric, but digressory, or at least excursory, on his own. The above-mentioned sections on Ridicule, and on the æsthetic pleasure derivable from painful subjects, are excursions into the debatable kinds between literature and Ethics, though much less extravagant than those of Kames, and perhaps, as excursions, not absolutely to be barred or banned; while chapters vii.-x., which deal with the “Consideration of Hearers,” &c., &c., are once more Aristotelian relapses, pardonable if not strictly necessary. But not quite a third part of the whole treatise is occupied by this First Book of the three into which it is divided; and not a little of this third is, strictly or by a little allowance, to the point. The remaining two-thirds are to that point without exception or digression of any kind, so that the Aristotelian distribution is exactly reversed.
The titles of the two Books, “The Foundations and Essential Properties of Elocution,” and “The Discriminating Properties of Elocution,” must be taken with due regard to Campbell’s use of the last word.[[617]] But they require hardly any other proviso or allowance. He first, with that mixture of boldness and straight-hitting which is his great merit, attacks the general principles of the use of Language, and proceeds to lay down nine Canons of Verbal Criticism, which are in the main so sound and so acute that they are not obsolete to the present day. There is more that is arbitrary elsewhere, and Campbell seems sometimes to retrograde over the line which separates Rhetoric and Composition. But it must be remembered that this line has never been very exactly drawn, and has, both in Scotland and in America, if not also in England, been often treated as almost non-existent up to the present day. In his subsequent distinction of five rhetorical Qualities of Style—Perspicuity, Vivacity, Elegance, Animation, and Music—Campbell may be thought to be not wholly happy. For the three middle qualities are practically one, and it is even questionable whether Music would not be best included with them in some general term, designating whatever is added by style proper to Perspicuity, or the sufficient but unadorned conveyance of meaning. As, however, is very common, if not universal, with him, his treatment is in advance of his nomenclature, for the rest of the book—nearly a full half of it—is in fact devoted to the two heads of Perspicuity and Vivacity, the latter tacitly subsuming all the three minor qualities. And there is new and good method in the treatment of Vivacity, as shown first by the choice of words, secondly by their number, and thirdly by their arrangement, while a section under the first head on “words considered as sounds” comes very near to the truth. That there should be a considerable section on Tropes was to be expected, and, as Campbell treats it, it is in no way objectionable. His iconoclasm as to logical Forms becomes much more in place, and much more effective, in regard to rhetorical Figures.
One, however, of the best features of the work has hardly yet been noticed; and that is the abundance of examples, and the thorough way in which they are discussed. To a reader turning the book over without much care it may seem inferior as a thesaurus to Kames, because the passages quoted are as a rule embedded in the text, and not given separately, in the fashion which makes of large parts of the Elements of Criticism a sort of anthology, a collection of beauties or deformities, as the case may be. But this is in accordance with the singularly businesslike character of Campbell’s work throughout. And if it also seem that he does not launch out enough in appreciation of books or authors as wholes, let it be remembered that English criticism was still in a rather rudimentary condition, and that the state of taste in academic circles was not very satisfactory. It would not, of course, be impossible to produce from him examples of those obsessions of the time which we have noticed in his two compatriots, as we shall notice them in the far greater Johnson. But he could not well escape these obsessions, and he suffers from them in a very mild form.
James Harris,[[618]] author of Hermes (and of the house of Malmesbury, which was ennobled in the next generation), is perhaps the chief writer whom England, in the narrower sense, has to set against Blair, Kames, and Campbell in mid-eighteenth century. Harris. But he is disappointing. It would not be reasonable to quarrel with the Hermes itself for not being literary, because it does not pretend to be anything but grammatical; and the Philosophical Arrangements, though they do sometimes approach literature, may plead benefit of title for not doing so oftener. But the Discourse on Music, Painting, and Poetry, and the Philological Enquiries—in which Philology is expressly intimated to mean “love of letters” in the higher sense—hold out some prospects. The performance is but little. Readers of Boswell will remember that Johnson, though the author of Hermes was very polite to him, both personally and with the pen, used, to his henchman’s surprise and grief, to speak very roughly of Harris, applying to him on one occasion the famous and damning phrase, “a prig, and a bad prig,” and elsewhere hinting doubts as to his competency in Greek. That the reproach of priggishness was deserved (whether with the aggravation or not) nobody can read half-a-dozen pages of Harris without allowing,—his would-be complimentary observation on Fielding[[619]] would determine by itself. But the principal note of Harris, as a critic, is not so much priggishness as confused superficiality. These qualities are less visible in the Dialogue (which is an extremely short, not contemptible, but also not unimportant, exercitation in the direction of Æsthetic proper) than in the Enquiries, which were written late in life, and which, no doubt, owe something of their extraordinary garrulity to “the irreparable outrage.”
This book begins, with almost the highest possible promise for us, in a Discussion of the Rise of Criticism, its various species, Philosophical, Historical, and Corrective, &c. The Philological Enquiries. It goes on hardly less promisingly, if the mere chapter-headings are taken, with discourses on Numbers, Composition, Quantity, Alliteration, &c.; the Drama, its Fable and its Manners, Diction, and, at the end of the second part, an impassioned defence of Rules. But the Third, which promises a discussion of “the taste and literature of the Middle Age,” raises the expectation almost to agony-point. Here is what we have been waiting for so long: here is the great gap going to be filled. At last a critic not merely takes a philosophic-historic view of criticism, but actually proposes to supplement it with an inquiry into those regions of literature on which his predecessors have turned an obstinately blind eye. As is the exaltation of the promise, so is the aggravation of the disappointment. Harris’s first part, though by no means ill-planned, is very insufficiently carried out, and the hope of goodness in the third is cruelly dashed beforehand by the sentence, “At length, after a long and barbarous period, when the shades of monkery began to retire,” &c. The writer’s mere enumeration of Renaissance critics is very haphazard, and his remarks, both on them and their successors, perfunctory in the extreme. He hardly dilates on anybody or anything except—following the tradition from Pope and Swift—on Bentley and his mania for correction and conjecture.
In the second part he gives himself more room, and is better worth reading, but the sense of disappointment continues. In fact, Harris is positively irritating. He lays it down, for instance, that “nothing excellent in a literary way happens merely by chance,” a thesis from the discussion of which much might come. But he simply goes off into a loose discussion of the effects and causes of literary pleasure, with a good many examples in which the excellence of his precept, “seek the cause,” is more apparent than the success of his own researches. The rest is extremely discursive, and seldom very satisfactory, being occupied in great part with such tenth-rate stuff as Lillo’s Fatal Curiosity. As for Harris’s defence of the Rules, he does not, in fact, defend them at all; but, as is so common with controversialists, frames an indictment, which no sensible antagonist would ever bring, in order to refute it. He says that “he never knew any genius cramped by rules, and had known great geniuses miserably err by neglecting them.” A single example of this last would have been worth the whole treatise. But Harris does not give it. Finally, “the Taste and Literature of the Middle Age” seem to him to be satisfactorily discussed by ridiculing the Judgment of God, talking at some length about Byzantine writers, giving a rather long account of Greek philosophy in its ancient stages, quoting freely from travellers to Athens and Constantinople, introducing “the Arabians,” with anecdotes of divers caliphs, saying something of the Schoolmen, a little about the Provençal poets, something (to do him justice) of the rise of accentual prosody,[[620]] and a very, very little about Chaucer, Petrarch, Mandeville, Marco Polo, Sir John Fortescue, and—Sannazar! “And now having done with the Middle Age,” he concludes—having, that is to say, shown that, except a pot-pourri of mainly historical anecdote, he knew nothing whatever about it; or, if this seem harsh, that his knowledge was not of any kind that could possibly condition his judgment of literature favourably. In fact, no one shows that curious eighteenth-century confusion of mind, which we shall notice frequently in other countries, better than Harris. He is, as we have seen, a fervent devotee of the Rules—he believes[[621]] that, before any examples of poetry, there was an abstract schedule of Epic, Tragedy, and everything else down to Epigram, which you cannot follow but to your good, and cannot neglect but to your peril. Yet, on the one hand, he feels the philosophic impulse, and on the other, the literary and historical curiosity, before which these rules were bound to vanish.
“Estimate” Brown: his History of Poetry.
A few allusions,[[622]] in contemporaries of abiding fame, have kept half alive the name—though very few, save specialists, are likely to be otherwise than accidentally acquainted with the work—of John Brown of Newcastle, author of the once famous Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times,[[623]] and afterwards, when he had gained reputation by this, of a Dissertation on the Rise of Poetry and Music,[[624]] later still slightly altered, and re-christened History of the Rise and Progress of Poetry.[[625]] The Estimate itself is one of those possibly half-unconscious pieces of quackery which from time to time put (in a manner which somehow or other tickles the longer ears among their contemporaries) the old cry that everything is rotten in the state of Denmark. There is not much in it that is directly literary; the chief point of the kind is an attack on the Universities: it may be noted that quacks generally do attack Universities. The Dissertation-History is a much less claptrap piece, but far more amusing to read. Brown is one of those rash but frank persons who attempt creation as well as criticism; and those who will may hear how
“Peace on Nature’s lap reposes [why not vice versa?]
Pleasure strews her guiltless roses,”
and so forth. The difference of the two forms is not important. In the second, Brown simply left out Music, so far as he could, as appealing to a special public only. He believes in Ossian, then quite new. He thinks it contains “Pictures which no civilised modern could ever imbibe in their strength, nor consequently could ever throw out”—an image so excessively Georgian (putting aside the difficulty of imbibing a picture) that one has to abbreviate comment on it. For the rest, Brown rejoices and wallows in the naturalistic generalisation of his century. He begins, of course, with the Savage State, lays it down that, at religious and other festivals, men danced and sang, that then organised professional effort supplemented unorganised, and so poets arose. Then comes about a sort of Established Choir, whence the various kinds are developed. And we have the Chinese—the inevitable Chinese—Fow-hi, and Chao-hao, and all their trumpery. Negligible as an authority, Brown perhaps deserves to rank as a symptom.
But we must leave minorities, and come to him who is here ὁ μέγας.
There is no reason to doubt that Johnson’s critical opinions were formed quite early in life, and by that mixture of natural bent and influence of environment which, as a rule, forms all such opinions. Johnson: his preparation for criticism. There has been a tendency to regard, as the highest mental attitude, that of considering everything as an open question, of being ready to reverse any opinion at a moment’s notice. As a matter of fact, we have record of not many men who have proceeded in this way; and it may be doubted whether among them is a single person of first-rate genius, or even talent. Generally speaking, the men whose genius or talent has a “stalk of carle hemp” in it find, in certain of the great primeval creeds of the world, political, ecclesiastical, literary, or other, something which suits their bent. The bent of their time may assist them in fastening on to this by attraction or repulsion—it really does not much matter which it is. In either case they will insensibly, from an early period, choose their line and shape their course accordingly. They will give a certain independence to it; they will rarely be found merely “swallowing formulas.” It is the other class which does this, with leave reserved to get rid of the said formulas by a mental emetic and swallow another set, which will very likely be subjected to the same fate. But the hero will be in the main Qualis ab incepto.
Johnson was in most things a Tory by nature, his Toryism being conditioned, first by that very strong bent towards a sort of transcendental scepticism which many great Tories have shown; secondly, by the usual peculiarities of social circumstance and mental constitution; and lastly, by the state of England in his time—a state to discuss which were here impertinent, but which, it may be humbly suggested, will not be quite appreciated by accepting any, or all, of the more ordinary views of the eighteenth century.
His view of literature was in part determined by these general influences, in part—perhaps chiefly—by special impinging currents. His mere birth-time had not very much to do with it—Thomson, Dyer, Lady Winchelsea, who consciously or unconsciously worked against it, were older, in the lady’s case much older, than he was; Gray and Shenstone, who consciously worked against it in different degrees, were not much younger.[[626]] The view was determined in his case, mainly no doubt by that natural bent which is quite inexplicable, but also by other things explicable enough. Johnson, partly though probably not wholly in consequence of his near sight, was entirely insensible to the beauties of nature; he made fun of “prospects”; he held that “one blade of grass is like another” (which it most certainly is not, even in itself, let alone its surroundings); he liked human society in its most artificial form—that provided by towns, clubs, parties. In the second place, his ear was only less deficient than his eye. That he did not care for music, in the scientific sense, is not of much importance; but it is quite clear that, in poetry, only an extremely regular and almost mathematical beat of verse had any chance with him. Thirdly, he was widely read in the Latin Classics, less widely in Greek, still more widely in the artificial revived Latin of the Renaissance and the seventeenth century.[[627]] Fourthly, he was, for a man so much given to reading—for one who ranged from Macrobius in youth to Parismus and Parismenus in age, and from Travels in Abyssinia to Prince Titi—not very widely read either in mediæval Latin or in the earlier divisions of the modern languages; indeed, of these last he probably knew little or nothing. Fifthly, the greatest poet in English immediately before his time, and the greatest poet in English during his youth and early manhood, had been exponents, the one mainly, the other wholly, of a certain limited theory of English verse. Sixthly, the critical school in which he had been brought up was strictly neo-classic. Seventhly, and to conclude, such rebels to convention as appeared in his time were chiefly men whom he regarded with unfriendly dislike, or with friendly contempt. Nor can it be said that any one of the contemporary partisans of “the Gothick” was likely to convince a sturdy adversary. Walpole was a spiteful fribble with a thin vein of genius; Gray a sort of Mr Facing-Both-Ways in literature, who had “classical” mannerisms worse than any of Johnson’s own, and whose dilettante shyness and scanty production invited ridicule. Both were Cambridge men (and Johnson did not love Cambridge men, nor they him), and both were Whigs. Percy and Warton were certainly not very strong as originals, and had foibles enough even as scholars. But whether these reasons go far enough, or do not so go, Johnson’s general critical attitude never varies in the least.[[628]] It was, as has been said, probably formed quite early; it no doubt appeared in those but dimly known contributions to periodical literature which defrayed so ill the expense of his still more dimly known first twenty years in London. We have from him no single treatise, as in the cases of Dante and Longinus, no pair of treatises, as in the case of Aristotle, to go upon. But in the four great documents of The Rambler, Rasselas, the Shakespeare Preface, and the Lives, we see it in the two first rigid, peremptory, in the Preface, curiously and representatively uncertain, in the last conditioned by differences which allow it somewhat freer play, and at some times making a few concessions, but at others more pugnacious and arbitrary than before.
The critical element in The Rambler is necessarily large; but a great deal of it is general and out of our way.[[629]] The Rambler on Milton. Directly concerning us are the papers on the aspects (chiefly formal) of Milton’s poetry—especially versification—on which Addison had not spoken, with some smaller papers on lesser subjects. The Miltonic examen begins at No. 86. Johnson is as uncompromising as the great Bysshe himself on the nature of English prosody. “The heroick measures of the English language may be properly considered as pure or mixed.” They are pure when “the accent rests on every second syllable through the whole line.” In other words, “purity” is refused to anything but the strict iambic decasyllable. Nay, he goes further; this is not only “purity” and “the completest harmony possible,” but it ought to be “exactly kept in distichs” and in the last line of a (verse) paragraph.
Nevertheless, for variety’s sake, the “mixed” measure is allowed; “though it always injures the harmony of the line considered by itself,” it makes us appreciate the “harmonious” lines better. And we soon perceive that even this exceedingly grudging, and in strictness illogical, licence is limited merely to substitution of other dissyllabic feet for the pure iamb. In
“Thus at their shady lodge arrived, both stood,
Both turned,”
the rigid Johnson insists on the spondaic character, “the accent is on two syllables together and both strong”; while he would seem to regard “And when,” in the line
“And when we seek as now the gift of sleep,”
as a pyrrhic (“both syllables are weak”). A trochee (“deviation or inversion of accent”) is allowed as a “mixture” in the first place, but elsewhere is “remarkably inharmonious,” as, for instance, in Cowley’s beautiful line,
“And the soft wings of peace cover him round.”
The next paper (88) passes, after touching other matters, to “elision,” by which he means (evidently not even taking tri-syllabic possibility into consideration) such a case as
“Wisdom to folly as nourishment to wind.”
This licence, he says, is now disused in English poetry; and adds some severe remarks on those who would revive or commend it. He even objects to the redundant ending in heroic poetry.
In the third paper (90) he comes to Pauses; and once more plays the rigour of the game. The English poet, in connecting one line with another, is never to make a full pause at less than three syllables from the beginning or end of a verse; and in all lines pause at the fourth or sixth syllable is best. He gives a whole paper to Milton’s accommodation of the sound to the sense, and winds up his Miltonic exercitations, after a very considerable interval, with a set critique (139) of Samson Agonistes, partly on its general character as an Aristotelian tragedy (he decides that it has a beginning and end, but no middle, poor thing!) and partly on details. These papers show no animus against Milton. There are even expressions of admiration for him, which may be called enthusiastic. But they do show that the critic was not in range with his author. Almost every one of his axioms and postulates is questionable.
Of the remaining critical papers in the Rambler it is very important to notice No. 121, “On the Dangers of Imitation, and the Impropriety of imitating Spenser.” On Spenser. Johnson’s acuteness was not at fault in distrusting, from his point of view, the consequences of such things as the Castle of Indolence or even the Schoolmistress; and he addresses a direct rebuke to “the men of learning and genius” who have introduced the fashion.[[630]] In so far as his condemnation of “echoes” goes he is undoubtedly not wrong, and he speaks of the idol of Neo-Classicism, Virgil, with an irreverent parrhesia[[631]] which, like many other things in him, shows his true critical power. But on Spenser himself the other idols—the idola specus rather than fori—blind him. In following his namesake in the condemnation of Spenser’s language he is, we may think, wrong; yet this at least is an arguable point. But in regard to the Spenserian stanza things are different. Johnson calls it “at once difficult and unpleasing; tiresome to the ear from its uniformity, and to the attention by its length,” while he subsequently goes off into the usual error about imitating the Italians. No truce is here possible. That the Spenserian is not easy may be granted at once, but Johnson was certainly scholar enough to anticipate the riposte that, not here only, it is “hard to be good.” As for “unpleasing,” so much the worse for the ear which is not pleased by the most exquisite harmonic symphony in the long and glorious list of stanza-combinations. As for monotony, it is just as monotonous as flowing water. While as for the Italian parallel, nothing can probably be more to the glory of Spenser than this; just as nothing can be more different than the pretty, but cloying, rhyme even of Tasso, nay, sometimes even of Ariosto, and the endless unlaboured beauty of Spenser’s rhyme-sound. It is no valid retort that this is simply a difference of taste. If a man, as some men have done, says that Spenser is pleasing and Dryden and Pope are not, then the retort is valid. When the position is taken that both rhythms are pleasing, both really poetical, but poetical in a different way, the defender of it may laugh at all assailants.
The criticism of the English historians which immediately follows has an interest chiefly of curiosity, because it was written just at the opening of the great age of the department with which it deals. On History and Letter-writing. Prejudices of different kinds would always have prevented Johnson from doing full justice to Robertson, to Hume, and, most of all, to Gibbon; but, as it is, he deals with nobody later than Clarendon, and merely throws back to Raleigh and Knolles. Very much the same drawback attends the criticism on Epistolary writing: for here also it was the lot of Johnson’s own contemporaries, in work mostly not written, and hardly in a single case published, at the date of the Rambler, to remove the reproach of England. But the paper on Tragi-Comedy (156) is much more important.
For here, as in other places, we see that Johnson, but for the combination of influences above referred to, might have taken high, if not the highest, degrees in a very different school of criticism. On Tragi-comedy. He puts the great rule Nec quarta loqui into the dustbin, with a nonchalance exhibiting some slight shortness of sight; for the very argument he uses will sweep with this a good many other rules to which he still adheres. “We violate it,” he says coolly, “without scruple and without inconvenience.” He is equally iconoclastic about the Five Acts, about the Unity of Time, while he blows rather hot and cold about tragi-comedy in the sense of the mixing of tragic and comic scenes. But the close of the paper is the most remarkable, for it is in effect the death-knell of the neo-classic system, sounded by its last really great prophet. “It ought to be the first endeavour of a writer to distinguish nature from custom, or that which is established because it is right from that which is right only because it is established; that he may neither violate essential principles by a desire of novelty, nor debar himself from the attainment of beauties within his view by a needless fear of breaking rules which no literary dictator had authority to enact.”
“Oh! the lands of Milnwood, the bonny lands of Milnwood, that have been in the name of Morton twa hundred years; they are barking and fleeing, infield and outfield, haugh and holme!” With this utterance, this single utterance, all the ruling doctrines of sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century criticism receive notice to quit.[[632]]
The well-known “Dick Minim” papers in the Idler (60, 61) are excellent fun, and perhaps Johnson’s chief accomplishment in the direction of humour. “Dick Minim.” The growth of criticism in Dick, his gradual proficiency in all the critical commonplaces of his day (it is to be observed that Johnson, like all true humourists, does not spare himself, and makes one of Minim’s secrets de Polichinelle a censure of Spenser’s stanza), his addiction to Johnson’s pet aversion, “suiting the sound to the sense,” and his idolatry of Milton, are all capitally done. Indeed, like all good caricatures, the piece is a standing piece to consult for the fashions and creeds which it caricatures. But it neither contains nor suggests any points of critical doctrine that we cannot find elsewhere, and it is only indirectly serious.[[633]]
The Dissertation upon Poetry of Imlac in Rasselas (chap. x.) may be less amusing; but it is of course much more serious. Rasselas. There can be no reasonable doubt that Imlac gives as much of Johnson’s self as he chose to put, and could put, in character: while it is at least possible that his sentiments are determined in some degree by the menacing appearances of Romanticism. Imlac finds “with wonder that in almost all countries the most ancient poets are reputed the best”; that “early writers are in possession of nature and their successors of art”; that “no man was ever great by imitation”; that he must observe everything and observe for himself, but that he must do it on the principle of examining, “not the individual, but the species.” He is to remark “general properties and large appearances. He does not number the streaks of the tulip or describe the different shapes in the verdure of the forest,” but must “exhibit prominent and striking features,” neglecting “minuter discriminations.” In the same way his criticism of life must be abstracted and generalised; he must be “a being superior to time and place”; must know many languages and sciences; must by incessant practice of style “familiarise to himself every delicacy of speech and grace of harmony.”
Surely a high calling and election! yet with some questionable points in it. If the poet must not count the streaks of the tulip, if he must merely generalise and sweep; if he must consult the laziness and dulness of his readers by merely portraying prominent and striking features, characteristics alike obvious to vigilance and carelessness—then even Dryden will not do, for he is too recondite and conceited. Pope alone must bear the bell. Lady Winchelsea’s horse in twilight, the best part of a century earlier; Tennyson’s ashbuds in the front of March, the best part of a century later, are equally “streaks of the tulip,” superfluous if not even bad. Habington’s picture of the pitiless northern sunshine on the ice-bound pilot, and Keats’s of the perilous seas through the magic casements, must be rejected, as too unfamiliar and individual. The poetic strangeness and height are barred en bloc. Convention, familiarity, generalisation—these are the keys to the poetical kingdom of heaven. The tenant of Milnwood has a fresh enfeoffment!
The Shakespeare Preface is a specially interesting document, because of its illustration, not merely of Johnson’s native critical vigour, not merely of his imbibed eighteenth-century prejudices, but of that peculiar position of compromise and reservation which, as we have said and shall say, is at once the condemnation and the salvation of the English critical position at this time. The Shakespeare Preface. Of the first there are many instances, though perhaps none in the Preface itself quite equal to the famous note on the character of Polonius, which has been generally and justly taken as showing what a triumph this failure of an edition might have been. Yet even here there is not a little which follows in the wake of Dryden’s great eulogy, and some scattered observations of the highest acuteness, more particularly two famous sentences which, though Johnson’s quotation is directed to a minor matter—Shakespeare’s learning—settle beforehand, with the prophetic tendency of genius, the whole monstrous absurdity of the Bacon-Shakespeare theory.[[634]] The rest, however, is, if not exactly a zigzag of contradiction, at least the contrasted utterance of two distinct voices. Shakespeare has this and that merit of nature, of passion; but “his set speeches are commonly cold and weak.” “What he does best he soon ceases to do.” Johnson, here also, has no superstitious reverence for the Unities, and even speaks slightly of dramatic rules; nay, he suggests “the recall of the principles of the drama to a new examination,” the very examination which Lessing was to give it. But he apologises for the period when “The Death of Arthur was the favourite volume,” and hints a doubt whether much of our and his own praise of Shakespeare is not “given by custom and veneration.” “He has corrupted language by every mode of depravation,” yet Johnson echoes Dryden “when he describes anything you more than see it, you feel it too.” A singular triumph of “depraved language.” In short, throughout the piece it is now Johnson himself who is speaking, now some one with a certain bundle of principles or prejudices which Johnson chooses to adopt for the time.
It was with these opinions on the formal and substantial nature of poetry and of criticism that Johnson, late in life, sat down to the Lives of the Poets,[[635]] one of the most fortunate books in English literature. The Lives of the Poets. In very few cases have task and artist been so happily associated. For almost all his authors, he had biographical knowledge such as no other living man had, and the access to which has long been closed. If, now and then, his criticism was not in touch with his subjects, this was rare: and the fact gave a certain value even to the assertions that result—for we, do what we will, cannot see Milton quite as Johnson saw him, and so his view is valuable as a corrective. By far the greater part of these subjects belonged to one school and system of English poetry, a school and system with which the critic was at once thoroughly familiar and thoroughly in sympathy. And, lastly, the form of the work, with its subdivision into a large number of practically independent and not individually burdensome sections, was well suited to coax a man who suffered from constitutional indolence, and who for many years had been relieved from that pressure of necessity which had conquered his indolence occasionally, and only occasionally, earlier. No other man, it is true, has had quite such a chance: but he must indeed have a sublime confidence, both in the strength of his principles and in the competence of his talents, who thinks that, if he had the chance, he could do the task better than Johnson did his.
The work, of course, is by no means equal throughout: and it could not be expected to be. Their general merits. Some was merely old work, dating from a much less mature period of the writer’s genius, and made to serve again. Some was on subjects so trivial that good nature, or simple indolence, or, if any one pleases, an artistic reluctance to break butterflies on so huge a wheel, made the criticisms almost as insignificant as the criticised. Here and there extra-literary prejudice—political-ecclesiastical, as in the case of Milton; partly moral, partly religious, and, it is to be feared, a little personal, as in that of Swift—distorted the presentation. And it is quite possible that a similar distortion, due to the same causes or others, was in the case of Gray intensified by a half-unconscious conviction that Gray’s aims and spirit, if not his actual poetical accomplishments, were fatal to the school of poetry to which the critic himself held.
But make allowance for all this, and with how great a thing do the Lives still provide us! In that combination of biography and criticism, which is so natural that it is wonderful it should be so late,[[636]] they are all but the originals, and are still almost the standard. They are full of anecdote, agreeably and crisply told, yet they never descend to mere gossip: their criticism of life is almost always just and sound, grave without being precise, animated by the same melancholy as that of the Vanity of Human Wishes, but in milder mood and with touches of brightness. Their criticism of literature is all the more valuable for being the criticism of their time. When we read Johnson’s remarks on Milton’s minor poems it is foolish to rave, and it is ignoble to sneer. The wise will rejoice in the opportunity to understand. So when Johnson bestows what seems to us extraordinary and unintelligible praise on John Pomfret’s Choice,[[637]] he is really praising a moral tract couched in verse not unpleasing in itself, and specially pleasing to his ear. When he speaks less favourably of Grongar Hill, he is speaking of a piece of nature-poetry, not arranged on his principle of neglecting the streak of the tulip, and availing itself of those Miltonic licences of prosody which he disapproved. But we shall never find that, when the poetry is of the stamp which he recognises, he makes any mistake about its relative excellence: and we shall find that, in not a few cases, he is able to recognise excellence which belongs to classes and schools not exactly such as he approves. And, lastly, it has to be added that for diffused brilliancy of critical expression, subject to the allowances and conditions just given, the Lives are hardly to be excelled in any language. It is not safe to neglect one of them, though no doubt there are some six or seven which, for this reason or that, take precedence of the rest.
The “Cowley” has especial interest, because it is Johnson’s only considerable attempt at that very important part of criticism, the historical summary of the characteristics of a poetical period or school. The Cowley. And, though far from faultless, it is so important and so interesting in its kind that it ranks with his greatest Essays. Only that singular impatience of literary history, as such, which characterised the late Mr Matthew Arnold, and which not infrequently marred his own critical work, can have prevented him from including, in his Johnsonian points de repère, the Essay which launched, and endeavoured to make watertight, the famous definition of the “Metaphysical” School—of the school represented earlier by Donne, and later by Cowley himself.
The phrase itself[[638]] has been both too readily adopted and too indiscriminately attacked. Taken with the ordinary meaning of “metaphysical,” it may indeed seem partly meaningless and partly misleading. Taken as Johnson meant it, it has a meaning defensible at least from the point of view of the framer, and very important in critical history. Johnson (it is too often forgotten) was a scholar; and he used “metaphysical” in its proper sense—of that which “comes after” the physical or natural. Now, it was, as we have seen, the whole principle of his school of criticism—their whole critical contention—that they were “following nature.” The main objection to the poetry of what Dryden calls the “last Age”—what we call, loosely but conveniently, “Elizabethan” poetry—was that its ideas, and still more its expressions, went beyond and behind nature, substituted afterthoughts and unreal refinements for fact. It would be delightful to the present writer to defend the Metaphysicals here—but it would not be to the question.
Political and religious prejudice accounts, as has been said, for much in the Milton. The Milton. But it will not fully account for the facts. The at first sight astonishing, and already often referred to, criticisms on the minor poems show a perfectly honest and genuine dislike to the form as well as to the matter, to the manner as well as to the man. If Johnson calls Lycidas “harsh,” it is because he simply does not hear its music; he can even call the songs in Comus “not very musical in their numbers.” When of the, no doubt unequal but often splendid, sonnets he can write, “of the best it can only be said that they are not bad,” he gives us the real value of his criticism immediately afterwards by laying it down that “the fabric of a sonnet, however adapted to the Italian language, has never succeeded in ours.” And when he has earlier stated that “all that short compositions can commonly attain is sweetness and elegance,” we see in this the whole thing. Milton is condemned under statute (though the statute is hopelessly unconstitutional and unjust) on certain counts; on others his judge, though capable and perfectly honest, does not know the part of the code which justifies the accused. Johnson is listening for couplet-music or stanzas with regular recurrence of rhyme, for lines constituted entirely on a dissyllabic, or entirely on a trisyllabic, basis. He does not find these things: and he has no organ to judge what he does find.
With the lives of Dryden and Pope we are clear of all difficulties, and the critic is in his element. The poets whom he is criticising occupy the same platform as he does; they have in fact been themselves the architects of that platform. The Dryden and Pope. There is no fear of the initial incompatibilities which, when aggravated by accident, lead to the apparent enormities of the Milton Essay, and which, even when not so aggravated, condition the usefulness, though they may positively increase the interest, of the Cowley. But there is more than this. In no instance, perhaps, was Johnson so well in case to apply his biographical and critical treatment as in regard to Dryden and Pope. With the latter he had himself been contemporary; and when he first came to London the traditions even of the former were still fresh, while there were many still living (Southerne the chief of them) who had known glorious John well. Further, Johnson’s peculiar habits of living, his delight in conversation and society, his excellent memory, and his propensity to the study of human nature, as well as of letters, furnished him abundantly with opportunities. Yet, again, his sympathy with both, on general literary sides, was not unhappily mixed and tempered by a slight, but not uncharitable or Puritanic, disapproval of their moral characters, by regret at Dryden’s desertion of the Anglican Church, and at the half-Romanist half-freethinking attitude of Pope to religion.
The result of all this is a pair of the best critical Essays in the English language. Individual expressions will of course renew for us the sense of difference in the point of view. We shall not agree that Dryden “found English poetry brick and left it marble,” and we shall be only too apt to take up the challenge, “If Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found?” even if we think the implied denial, to which the challenge was a reply, an absurdity. And we may find special interest as well as special difference in the condemnation even of these masters for attempting Pindarics, because Pindarics “want the essential constituent of metrical compositions, the stated recurrence of settled numbers,” seeing in it a fresh instance of that Procrustean tyranny of suiting the form to the bed, not the bed to the form, which distinguishes all neo-classic criticism. But these points occur rarely. The criticism, as a whole, is not merely perfectly just on its own scheme, but requires very little allowance on others; nor, in the difficult and dangerous art of comparative censorship, will any example be found much surpassing Johnson’s parallel of the two poets.
In the Milton and the Cowley we find Johnson dealing with schools of poetry which he regards as out of date and imperfect; in the Dryden and the Pope, with subjects which are not to him subjects of any general controversy, but which he can afford to treat almost entirely on their merits. The Collins and Gray. In the Collins and the Gray we find a new relation between poet and critic—the relation of decided, though not yet wholly declared, innovation on the part of the poets, and of conscious, though not yet quite wide-eyed and irreconcilable, hostility on the part of the critic. The expression of this is further differentiated by the fact that Johnson regarded Collins with the affection of a personal friend, and the generous sympathy of one who, with all his roughness, had a mind as nearly touched by mortal sorrows as that of any sentimentalist; while it is pretty clear, though we have no positive evidence for it, that he reciprocated the personal and political dislike which Gray certainly felt for him.
The result was, in the case of Collins, a criticism rather inadequate than unjust, and not seldom acute in its indication of faults, if somewhat blind to merits; in that of Gray, one which cannot be quite so favourably spoken of, though the censure which has been heaped upon it—notably by Lord Macaulay and Mr Arnold—seems to me very far to surpass its own injustice. Johnson’s general summing up—that Gray’s “mind had a large grasp; his curiosity[[639]] was unlimited, and his judgment cultivated; he was likely to love much where he loved at all, but fastidious and hard to please”—is acute, just, and far from ungenerous. That on the Elegy—“The four stanzas beginning, ‘Yet even these bones,’ are to me original; I have never seen the notions in any other place. Yet he that reads them here persuades himself that he has always felt them. Had Gray written often thus, it had been vain to blame and useless to praise him”—is a magnificent and monumental compliment, said as simply as “Good morning.” He is absolutely right when he says that in all Gray’s Odes “there is a kind of cumbrous splendour that we wish away,” for there never was such an abuser of “poetic diction” (to be a poet) as Gray was. Yet undoubtedly the Essay is not satisfactory; it has not merely, as the Collins has, blindness, but, what the Collins has not, that obvious denigration, that determination to pick holes, which always vitiates a critique, no matter what learning and genius be bestowed on it. And the probable reasons of this are interesting. It has been said that they were possibly personal in part. We know that Gray spoke rudely of Johnson; and there were many reasons why Johnson might rather despise Gray, though he certainly should not have called him “dull.”
On the whole, however, I have little doubt—and it is this which gives the essay its real interest for me—that one main reason of Johnson’s antipathy to Gray’s poetry was the same as that for which we like it. He suspected, if he did not fully perceive, the romantic snake in Gray’s classically waving grass. And he had on his own grounds good reason for suspecting it. Gray might use Greek and Latin tags almost extravagantly. But he sedulously eschewed the couplet; and, while preferring lyric, he chose lyrical forms which, though Johnson was too much of a scholar to dare to call them irregular, violated his own theories of the prompt and orderly recurrence of rhyme, and the duty of maintaining a length of line as even as possible. The sense of nature, the love of the despised “prospect,” was everywhere; even the forbidden “streak of the tulip” might be detected. And, lastly, Gray had too obvious leanings to classes of subject and literature which lay outside of the consecrated range—early English and French, Welsh, Norse, and the like. It is no real evidence of critical incapacity, but of something quite the reverse, that Johnson should have disliked Gray. He spied the great Romantic beard under the Pindaric and Horatian muffler—and he did not like it.
On the whole, it may be safely said that, however widely a man may differ from Johnson’s critical theory, he will, provided that he possesses some real tincture of the critical spirit himself, think more and more highly of the Lives of the Poets the more he reads them, and the more he compares them with the greater classics of critical literature. The critical greatness of the Lives and of Johnson. As a book, they have not missed their due meed of praise; as a critical book, one may think that they have. The peculiarity of their position as a body of direct critical appraisement of the poetical work of England for a long period should escape no one. But the discussion of them, which possesses, and is long likely to possess, prerogative authority as coming from one who was both himself a master of the craft and a master of English, admirable and delightful as it is and always will be, is not, critically speaking, quite satisfactory. Mr Arnold speaks of the Six Lives which he selected in very high terms: but he rather pooh-poohs the others, and, even in regard to the chosen Six, he puts upon himself—and in his amiable, but for all that exceedingly peremptory, way, insists in putting on his readers—a huge pair of blinkers. We are to regard the late seventeenth and the whole of the eighteenth century as an Age of Prose: and we are to regard Johnson, whether he was speaking of the poets of this age or of others, as the spokesman of an age of prose. Far be it from me to deny that there is an element of truth in this: but it is not the whole truth, and the critic must strive, though he may not boast, to “find the whole.”
The whole truth, as it seems to me, about Johnson is that he was very much more than the critic of an age of prose, though he was not (who has been? even Longinus? even Coleridge?)
“The King who ruled, as he thought fit,
The universal monarchy of wit”
as regards poetic criticism. He saw far beyond prose, as in those few words of the concluding and reconciling eulogy of Gray which have been quoted above. It is poetry and not prose which has the gift of putting new things so that the man who reads them ingenuously thinks that they are merely a neat statement of what he has always thought. And Johnson was far more than merely a critic of the eighteenth-century Neo-Classic theory, though he was this. A most noteworthy passage in the Rambler (No. 156), which I have purposely kept for comment in this place, though it is delivered on the wrong side, shows us, as the great critics always do show us, what a range of sight the writer had. In this he expresses a doubt whether we ought “to judge genius merely by the event,” and, applying this to Shakespeare, takes the odd, but for an eighteenth-century critic most tell-tale and interesting, line that if genius succeeds by means which are wrong according to rule, we may think higher of the genius but less highly of the work. It is hardly necessary to point out that this is, though in no way a discreditable, a transparent evasion of the difficulty which is pressing on the defenders of the Rules. “Show me,” one may without irreverence retort, “thy genius without thy works; and I will show thee my genius by my works.” If Shakespeare shows genius in neglecting the Rules, the inexorable voice of Logic, greater than Fortune, greater than all other things save Fate, will point out that the Rules are evidently not necessary, and, with something like the Lucretian Te sequar, will add, “Then for what are they necessary?” But Johnson’s power is only a little soured and not at all quenched by this. He has seen what others refused—perhaps were unable—to see, and what some flatly denied,—that a process of literary judgment “by the event” is possible, and that its verdicts, in some respects at any rate, cannot be challenged or reversed. These great critical aperçus, though sometimes delivered half unwillingly or on the wrong side, establish Johnson’s claim to a place not often to be given to critics; but they do not establish it more certainly than his surveys of his actual subjects. It was an unfortunate consequence of Mr Arnold’s generous impatience of all but “the chief and principal things,” and of his curious dislike to literary history as such, that he should have swept away the minor Lives. One may not care for Stepney or Yalden, Duke or King, much more, or at all more, than he did. But with a really great member of the craft his admissions and omissions, his paradoxes, his extravagances, his very mistakes pure and simple, are all critically edifying. How does he apply his own critical theory? is what we must ask: and, with Johnson, I think we shall never ask it in vain.
His idea of English poetry was the application to certain classes of subjects, not rigidly limited to, but mainly arranged by, the canons of the classical writers—of what seemed to him and his generation the supreme form of English language and metre, brought in by Mr Waller and perfected by Mr Pope, yet not so as to exclude from admiration the Allegro of Milton and the Elegy of Gray. We may trace his applications of this, if we have a real love of literature and a real sense of criticism, nearly as profitably and pleasantly in relation to John Pomfret as in relation to Alexander Pope. We may trace his failures (as we are pleased, quite rightly in a way, to call them), the failures arising from the inadequacy, not of his genius, but of his scheme, not less agreeably in relation to Dyer than in relation to Dryden. We are not less informed by his passing the Castle of Indolence almost sub silentio than we are by that at first sight astounding criticism of Lycidas. This Cæsar never does wrong but with just cause—to use the phrase which was too much for the equanimity or the intelligence of his great namesake Ben, in the work of one whom both admired yet could not quite stomach.
Now, this it is which makes the greatness of a critic. That Johnson might have been greater still at other times need not necessarily be denied; though it is at least open to doubt whether any other time would have suited his whole disposition better. But, as he is, he is great. The critics who deserve that name are not those who, like, for instance, Christopher North and Mr Ruskin, are at the mercy of different kinds of caprice—with whom you must be always on the qui vive to be certain what particular watchword they have adopted, what special side they are taking. It may even be doubted whether such a critic as Lamb, though infinitely delightful, is exactly “great” because of the singular gaps and arbitrariness of his likes and dislikes. Nay, Hazlitt, one of the greatest critics of the world on the whole, goes near to forfeit his right to the title by the occasional outbursts of almost insane prejudice that cloud his vision. Johnson is quite as prejudiced; but his prejudice is not in the least insane. His critical calculus is perfectly sound on its own postulates and axioms; and you have only to apply checks and correctives (which are easily ascertained, and kept ready) to adjust it to absolute critical truth. And, what is more, he has not merely flourished and vapoured critical abstractions, but has left us a solid reasoned body of critical judgment; he has not judged literature in the exhausted receiver of mere art, and yet has never neglected the artistic criterion; he has kept in constant touch with life, and yet has never descended to mere gossip. We may freely disagree with his judgments, but we can never justly disable his judgment; and this is the real criterion of a great critic.
Johnson is so much the eighteenth-century orthodox critic in quintessence (though, as I have tried to show, in transcendence also) that he will dispense us from saying very much more about the rank and file, the ordinary or inferior examples, of the kind. Minor Criticism: Periodical and other. If we were able to devote this Book, or even this volume, to the subject of the present chapter, there would be no lack of material. Critical exercitations of a kind formed now, of course, a regular part of the work of literature, and a very large part of its hack-work. The Gentleman’s Magazine devoted much attention to the subject; and for a great part of the century two regular Reviews, the Critical and the Monthly,[[640]] were recognised organs of literary censorship, and employed some really eminent hands, notably Smollett and Goldsmith. The periodicals which, now in single spies, now (about the middle of the century) in battalions, endeavoured to renew the success of the Tatler and Spectator, were critical by kind; and dozens, scores, hundreds probably, of separate critical publications, large and small, issued from the press.[[641]] But, with the rarest exceptions, they must take the non-benefit of the warning which was laid down in the Preface to the First Volume. Something we must say of Goldsmith; then we may take two contrasted examples, Knox and Scott of Amwell, of the critic in Johnson’s last days who inclined undoubtingly to the classical, and of the critic of the same time who had qualms and stirrings of Romanticism, but was hardly yet a heretic. And then, reserving summary, we may close the record.
Of Goldsmith as a critic little need be said, though his pen was not much less prolific in this than in other departments. But the angel is too often absent, and Poor Poll distressingly in evidence. Goldsmith. The Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe is simply “prodigious.” It is admirably written—Macaulay owes something to its style, which he only hardened and brazened. The author apes the fashionable philosophastering of the time, and throws in cheap sciolism like the prince of journalists that he was. It is almost always interesting; it is, where it touches life, not literature, sometimes excellently acute; but there is scarcely a critical dictum in it which is other than ridiculous. So in the Citizen of the World the Author’s Club is of course delightful; but why should a sneer at Drayton have been put in the mouth of Lien Chi Altangi? And the miscellaneous Essays, including the Bee, which contain so much of Goldsmith’s best work, are perhaps the best evidences of his nullity here. When one thinks how little it would cost anybody of Goldsmith’s genius (to find such an one I confess would cost more) to write a literary parallel to the magnificent Reverie, which would be even finer, it is enough to draw iron tears down the critic’s cheek. Goldsmith on Taste, Poetry, Metaphor, &c.,[[642]] is still the Goldsmith of the Inquiry. His “Account of the Augustan Age,”[[643]] though much better, and (unless I mistake) resorted to by some recent critics as a source of criticism different from that mostly prevalent in the nineteenth century, has all the limitations of its own period. And the Essay on Versification,[[644]] though it contains expressions which, taken by themselves, might seem to show that Goldsmith had actually emancipated himself from the tyranny of the fixed number of syllables, contains others totally irreconcilable with these, supports English hexameters and sapphics,[[645]] and as a whole forces on us once more the reluctant belief that he simply had no clear ideas, no accurate knowledge, on the subject.
Vicesimus Knox[[646]] is a useful figure in this critical Transition Period. Vicesimus Knox. A scholar and a schoolmaster, he had some of the advantages of the first state and some of the defects of the less gracious second, accentuated in both cases by the dying influences of a “classical” tradition which had not the slightest idea that it was moribund. He carries his admiration for Pope to such a point as to assure us somewhere that Pope was a man of exemplary piety and goodness, while Gay was “uncontaminated with the vices of the world,” which is really more than somewhat blind, and more than a little kind, even if we admit that it is wrong to call Pope a bad man, and that Gay had only tolerable vices. He thinks, in his Fourteenth Essay on the “Fluctuations of Taste,” that the Augustans “arrived at that standard of perfection which,” &c.; that the imitators of Ariosto, Spenser, and the smaller poems of Milton are “pleasingly uncouth” [compare Scott, infra, on the metrical renaissance of Dyer], depreciates Gray, and dismisses the Elegy as “a confused heap of splendid ideas”; is certain that Milton’s sonnets “bear no mark of his genius,” and in discussing the versions of “the sensible[[647]] Sappho” decides that Catullus is much inferior to—Philips! “The Old English Poets [Essay Thirty-Nine] are deservedly forgotten.” Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Occleve “seem to have thought that rhyme was poetry, and even this constituent they applied with extreme negligence”—the one charge which is unfair against even Occleve, and which, in reference to Chaucer, is proof of utter ignorance. Patriotism probably made him more favourable to Dunbar, Douglas, and Lyndsay, though he groans over the necessity of a glossary in their case also. In fact, Knox is but a Johnson without the genius. Let it, however, be counted to him for righteousness that he defended classical education, including verse-writing, against its enemies, who even then imagined vain things.
John Scott of Amwell, once praised by good wits, now much forgotten, was a very respectable critic and a poet of “glimmerings.” Scott of Amwell. In fact, I am not at all sure that he does not deserve to be promoted and postponed to the next volume, as a representative of the rising, not the falling, tide. His Essays on poetry[[648]] exhibit in a most interesting way the “know-not-what-to-think-of-it” state of public opinion about the later years of Johnson. He defends Lycidas against the Dictator; yet he finds fault with the “daystar” for acting both as a person and an orb of radiance, and admits the “incorrectness” of the poem, without giving us a hint of the nature or authority of “correctness.” He boldly attacks the consecrated Cooper’s Hill, and sets the rival eminence of Grongar against it, pronouncing Dyer “a sublime but strangely neglected poet,” yet picking very niggling holes in this poet himself. He often anticipates, and oftener seems to be going to anticipate, Wordsworth, who no doubt owed him a good deal; yet he thinks Pope’s famous epigram on Wit “the most concise and just definition of Poetry.” In Grongar Hill itself he thinks the “admixture of metre [its second, certainly, if not its first great charm] rather displeasing to a nice ear”; and though he defends Gray against Knox, he is altogether yea-nay about Windsor Forest, and attacks Thomson’s personifications, without remembering that Gray is at least an equal sinner, and without giving the author of the Seasons, and still more of the Castle of Indolence, any just compensation for his enthusiasm of nature. In fact, Scott is a man walking in twilight, who actually sees the line of dawn, but dares not step out into it.
[552]. An interesting monograph on our subject, before and after 1700, is Herr Paul Hamelius’s Die Kritik in der Engl. Literatur des 17 und 18 Jahrhunderts (Leipsic, 1897). I was able, as I always prefer to do, to postpone the reading of this till I had finished the English part of this volume, and I do not think I owe Herr Hamelius much. I am all the more glad to find that we agree on the Romantic element in Dryden (though not as to that in Dennis), and as to reducing the importance of French influence in England.
[553]. The excessively rare Parliament of Critics (London, 1702), a copy of which has been kindly lent me by Mr Gregory Smith, is more of what it calls itself, a “banter,” than of a serious composition. But it connects itself not obscurely with the Collier quarrel.
[554]. See Mr Swinburne’s William Blake, p. 130 note, for the sortes Bysshianæ of Blake and his wife.
[555]. My copy is the Third Edition, “with large improvements,” London, 1708. Some put the first at 1702, not 1700. Before Bysshe, Joshua Poole, a schoolmaster, had given posthumously (1657: I have ed. 2, London, 1677), with a short dedication and a curious verse proem of his own, and an Institution signed J. D., The English Parnassus. This contains a double gradus of epithets and passages (the authors named only in a general list), an “Alphabet of [Rhyming] Monosyllables,” and some “Forms of Compliment,” &c. The Institution stoutly defends “Rhythm” [i.e., rhyme], notices Sidney, Daniel, Puttenham, &c., shortly defines Kinds, objects to excessive enjambment (note the time, 1657) and to polysyllables, but is sensible if rather general and scrappy.
[556]. Addison, Atterbury, Beaumont and Fletcher, Afra Behn, Blackmore, Tom Brown, Buckingham, Cleveland, Congreve, Cowley, Creech, Davenant (2), Denham, Dennis, Dorset, Dryden, Duke, Garth, Halifax, Harvey, Sir R. Howard, Hudibras, Jonson, Lee, Milton, Mulgrave, Oldham, Otway, Prior, Ratcliff, Rochester, Roscommon, Rowe, Sedley, Shakespeare, Southern, Sprat, Stafford, Stepney, Suckling, Tate, Walsh, Waller, Wycherley, and Yalden. Observe that no non-dramatic poet earlier than Cowley is admitted.
[557]. London, 1718.
[558]. The Lives and Characters of the English Dramatic Poets, &c., First begun by Mr Langbain, improved and continued down to this time by a Careful Hand (London, printed for Tho. Leigh, &c. No date in my copy, but the Dict. Nat. Biog. gives 1699).
[559]. I hope the passing suspicion is not illiberal. But why should he call the Palmyrene “Zenobie” in English? Cela sent furieusement son Français. (For the critical work of yet another who felt the lash of Pope—James Ralph—v. inf., p. [554 note].)
[560]. 2 vols., London, 1718.
[561]. See, among others, Herr Hamelius, op. cit. Yet it is interesting to find that the passage of Dennis to which his panegyrist gives the single and signal honour of extract in an appendix is purely ethical: it is all on “the previous question.”
[562]. Had Dryden let his Cambridge admirer see the Heads? (v. supra, pp. [373], [397 notes].)
[563]. Although Dennis’s fun is heavy enough, there are some interesting touches, as this: “Port [then a novelty in England, remember] is not so well tasted as Claret: and intoxicates sooner.”
[564]. It appeared in the very year of the Short View (1698). I have a reprint of it, issued many years later (1725), but long before Dennis’s death, together with The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry and the tragedy of Rinaldo and Armida, all separately titled, but continuously paged.
[565]. This is from the Advancement and Reformation, which contains its author’s full definition of Poetry itself—not the worst of such definitions. “Poetry is an Imitation of Nature by a pathetic and numerous speech.”
[566]. London, 1702.
[567]. London, 1712.
[568]. London, 1728.
[569]. The Advancement and Reformation of Poetry, 1701; A Large Account of the Taste in Poetry, next year; and Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, 1704.
[570]. Mr W. Basil Worsfold in his Principles of Criticism (London, 1897). I hope that nothing which, in a politely controversial tone, I may have to say here, will be taken as disparagement of a very interesting and valuable essay.
[571]. The most convenient edition of Addison’s Works is that of Bohn, with Hurd’s editorial matter and a good deal more (London, 6 vols., 1862).
[572]. It is fair to say that he never published this, and that, as Pope told Spence, he used himself to call it “a poor thing,” and admitted that he spoke of some of the poets only “on hearsay.” Now when Pope speaks to Addison’s credit it is not as “what the soldier said.” It is evidence, and of the strongest.
“In vain he jests in his unpolished strain,
And tries to make his readers laugh in vain.”
[574]. “His moral lay so bare that it lost the effect” (Ess. on Po., iii. 420, ed. cit. sup.) Indeed it has been suggested that Addison’s debt to Temple here is not confined to this.
[575]. He proposes to give an account of “all the Muse possessed” between Chaucer and Dryden; and, as a matter of fact, mentions nobody but Spenser between Chaucer and Cowley.
[576]. In the last paragraph of Sp. 409. The whole paper has been occupied by thoughts on Taste and Criticism: it contains the excellent comparison of a critic to a tea-taster, and it ends with this retrospect, and the promise of the “Imagination” Essays (v. ed. cit., iii. 393).
[577]. Sp. 58-63.
[578]. Sp. 39, 40, 42, 44, 45.
[579]. These began in Sp. 267, and were the regular Saturday feature of the paper for many weeks. References to Milton outside of them will be found in the excellent index of the ed. cit. or in that of Mr Gregory Smith’s exact and elegant reproduction of the Spectator (8 vols., London, 1897).
[580]. Sp. 411, ed. cit., iii. 394.
[581]. This phrase is originally Dryden’s (dedication to King Arthur, viii. 136, ed. cit.), who, however, has “kind” for “way”.
[582]. Op. cit., pp. 93-107, and more largely pp. 55-93.
[583]. Students of the Stagirite may be almost equally surprised to find Aristotle regarded as mainly, if not wholly, a critic of Form as opposed to Thought.
[584]. See vol. i. p. [165] sq.
[585]. It would be unfair to lay too much stress on his identification of Imagination and Fancy; but there is something tell-tale in it.
[586]. See vol. i. p. [118] sq.
[587]. Herr Hamelius, op. cit. sup., p. 103, and elsewhere, thinks much more highly of Steele than I do, and even makes him a “Romantic before Romanticism.” Steele’s temperament was undoubtedly Romantic, and both in essays and plays he displayed it; but he was not really critical.
[588]. In his Preface to the Second Part of the Poems (1690).
[589]. Of course he might, to some extent, have sheltered himself under Dryden’s own authority for all this.
[590]. I have thought it useless to give references to particular editions of the better known writings of Swift and Pope, as they are so numerous. Of their whole works there is, in the former case, no real standard, Scott’s being much inferior to his Dryden; but in the latter that of the late Mr Elwin and Mr Courthope is not likely soon to be superseded.
[591]. V. inf., p. [553 note].
[592]. The most important of these is the sentence on Crashaw (with whom Pope has some points of sympathy), that he is wanting in “design, form, fable, which is the soul of poetry,” and “exactness or consent of parts, which is the body,” while he grants him “pretty conceptions, fine metaphors, glittering expressions, and something of a neat cast of verse, which are properly the dress, gems, or loose ornaments” of it. See my friend Mr Courthope (in his Life, ed. cit. of the Works, v. 63), with whom, for once, I am in irreconcilable disagreement.
[593]. Spence (whose Anecdotes were printed partly by Malone, and completely by Singer in 1820, reprinted from the latter edition in 1858, and re-selected by Mr Underhill (London, n. d.) in the last decade of the nineteenth century) has sometimes received praise as a critic himself. His Polymetis usefully brought together classical art and letters, and the Anecdotes themselves are not without taste. But his elaborate criticism of Pope’s Odyssey, published in 1726, is of little value, neither praising nor blaming its subject for the right things, and characterised as a whole by a pottering and peddling kind of censorship.
[594]. Selecta Poemata Italorum qui Latine Scripserunt. Cura cujusdam Anonymi anno 1684 congesta, iterum in lucem data, una cum aliorum Italorum operibus. Acccurante A. Pope. 2 vols., London, 1740. The title-page contains absolutely all the ostensible editorial matter, and, as I have not got hold of the work of the Anonymus, I do not know how much Pope added. But his collection, as I can testify from some little knowledge of the subject, is good.
[595]. Ep. to Aug., l. 263.
[596]. Pope, v. supra, p. [454], actually admitted this as regards Aristotle and Shakespeare; yet the admission practically revokes most of the Essay.
[597]. Individual preference, in the case of the famous pair of epigrams on the books and the troop of horse sent by George I. to Cambridge and to Oxford respectively, may be biassed by academical and by political partisanship. But while it is matter of opinion whether “Tories own no argument but force,” and whether, in certain circumstances, a University may not justifiably “want loyalty,” no one can ever maintain that it is not disgraceful to a university to “want learning.” This it is which gives the superior wing and sting to Trapp’s javelin.
[598]. Prælectiones Poeticæ, London, 3rd ed., 1736. The first of the first batch was printed as early as 1711, and an English translation (not by the author) was published in 1742. I hope to give in the next volume, as a prelude to notice of Mr Arnold’s work in the Oxford Chair, a survey of all the more noteworthy of his predecessors.
[599]. The first ed. is that of Edinburgh, 1783: mine is that of London, 1823.
[600]. I have it with The Poems of Ossian, 2 vols., London, 1796. Blair had taken Macpherson under his wing as early as 1760.
[601]. It had reached its eighth edition in 1807, the date of my copy. Perhaps some may think that Kames, as being mainly an æsthetician, ought to be postponed with Shaftesbury, Hume, &c. My reason for not postponing is the large amount of positive literary criticism in his book.
[602]. Boswell, Globe ed., p. 132. He was elsewhere more, and less, kind.
[603]. Vol. i. chap. iii., on “Beauty”; i. 195 ed. cit.
[604]. i. 77.
[605]. i. 26.
[606]. i. 288, note. Kames had just before, in his chapter on “Motion and Force” (i. 250-255), referred complacently to his own indulgence in this foible, and had accumulated others of the same kind.
[607]. i. 359.
[608]. i. 405, 410, 411, 416, 417.
[609]. ii. 3.
[610]. ii. 163.
[611]. ii. 129.
[612]. i. 33.
[613]. Hurd is reserved for the next volume.
[614]. ii. 457.
[615]. Kames has this spelling, which is indeed so universal that any other may seem pedantic. Yet it is needless to say that the word so spelt is a vox nihili, and should be “parallelepipedon.”
[616]. I use the Tegg edition, London, 1850.
[617]. He had, of course, good authority for it, including that of Dryden; but it is obviously better to limit it in the modern sense than to use it equivocally. Mason (not Gray’s friend, but an interesting and little-known person to whom I hope to recur in the next volume) had already seen this, and expressly referred to it.
[618]. Works, Oxford, 1841.
[619]. Note to Pt. II. chap. vii. of the Enquiries, p. 433, ed. cit.
[620]. Harris deserves a good word for his prosodic studies, which may entitle him to reappear in the next volume.
[621]. “There never was a time when rules did not exist; they always made a part of that immutable truth,” &c.—P. 450.
[622]. The best known is Cowper’s, in Table Talk, ll. 384, 385—
“The inestimable Estimate of Brown
Rose like a paper-kite and charmed the town.”
See also Chesterfield, to the Bishop of Waterford, April 14, 1758. Chesterfield was no Bottom, but, being melancholy at the time, he was tickled.
[623]. London, 1757, 8vo.
[624]. London, 1763, 4to.
[625]. Newcastle, 1764, 8vo.
[626]. His birth-year was 1709; Thomson’s 1700; Dyer’s perhaps the same; Shenstone’s 1714; Gray’s 1716. Lady Winchelsea had been born as far back as 1660.
[627]. He was perhaps the last man of very great power who entertained the Renaissance superstition of Latin. He was horrified at the notion of an English epitaph; and in the first agony of his stroke in 1783 he rallied and racked his half-paralysed brains to make Latin verses as the best test of his sanity.
[628]. Let it be noted, however, that in Johnson, as in most strong men, there were certain leanings to the other side, certain evidences of the “identity of contradictories.” His sense of mystery, his religiosity, his strong passions, his tendency to violence in taste and opinions—were all rather Romantic than Classical.
[629]. The Allegory on Criticism (daughter of Labour and Truth, who gives up her task to Time, but is temporarily personated by Flattery and Malevolence) in No. 3 almost speaks itself in the parenthetical description just given. Cf. also 4, on Ancient and Modern Romances; 22, another Allegory on Wit and Learning; 23, on the Contrariety of Criticism; and 36, 37, on “Pastoral Poetry.”
[630]. He was no doubt thinking also of Gilbert West, in his Life of whom he introduces a caveat against West’s Imitations of Spenser as “successful” indeed and “amusing” but “only pretty.”
[631]. “The warmest admirers of the great Mantuan poet can extol him for little more than the skill with which he has ... united the beauties of the Iliad and Odyssey,” and he adds a longish exposure of the way in which Virgil, determined to imitate at all costs, has put in his borrowed matter without regard to keeping.
[632]. The chief remaining critical loci in the Rambler are the unlucky strictures in No. 168 on “dun,” “knife,” and “blanket” in Macbeth as “low”; and the remarks on unfriendly criticism in 176.
[633]. There are, of course, other passages in the Idler touching on Criticism,—59 on the Causes of Neglect of Books, 68, 69 on Translation, 77 on “Essay Writing,” 85 on Compilations. But they contain nothing of exceptional importance.
[634]. “Jonson, ... who besides that he had no imaginable temptation to falsehood, wrote at a time when the character and acquisitions of Shakespeare were known to multitudes. His evidence ought therefore to decide the controversy, unless some testimony of equal force could be opposed.”
[635]. With Johnson, as with some other writers, I have not thought it necessary to specify editions. I must, however, mention Mr J. H. Millar’s issue of the Lives (London, 1896) for the sake of the excellent Introduction on Johnson’s criticism.
[636]. There are blind attempts at it even in antiquity; but Dryden’s Lives of Lucian and Plutarch are, like other things of his elsewhere, the real originals here.
[637]. Let me draw special attention to “John.” I once, unwittingly or carelessly, called him “Thomas,” and I am afraid that I even neglected to correct the error in a second edition of the guilty book. A man who writes “Thomas” for “John,” in the case of a minor poet, can, I am aware, possess no virtues, and must expect no pardon. But I shall always henceforth remember to call him “Pomfret, Mr John.” “Let this expiate,” as was remarked in another case of perhaps not less mortal sin.
[638]. It was of course probably suggested by Dryden (Essay on Satire, “Donne ... affects the metaphysics”), but in Johnson’s hands is much altered and extended.
[639]. It must be remembered that this word had no unfavourable connotation with Johnson. It meant intelligent and scholarly interest.
[640]. Johnson’s relative estimates of the two (Boswell, Globe ed., pp. 186, 364) are well known; as is his apology for the Critical Reviewers’ habit [he had been one himself] of not reading the books through, as the “duller” Monthly fellows were glad to do. Later generations have perhaps contrived to be dull and not to read.
[641]. For instance, here is one which I have hunted for years—Essay on the New Species of Writing founded by Fielding, with a word or two on Modern Criticism (London? 1751). The better-known Canons of Criticism of Thomas Edwards (4th ed., London, 1750) may serve as a specimen of another kind. It is an attack on Warburton’s Shakespeare, uncommonly shrewd in all senses of the word, but, as Johnson (Boswell, Globe ed., p. 87 note) justly enough said, of the gad-fly kind mainly. A curious little book, which I do not remember to have seen cited anywhere, is the Essay upon Poetry and Painting of Charles Lamotte (Dudlin (sic), 1742). La Motte, who was an F.S.A., a D.D., and chaplain to the Duke of Montagu, and who has the still rarer honour of not appearing in the Dict. Nat. Biog., never, I think, refers to his namesake, but quotes Voltaire and Du Bos frequently. He is very anxious for “propriety” in all senses, and seems a little more interested in Painting than in Poetry. As to the latter, he is a good example of the devouring appetite for sense and fact which had seized on the critics of this time (save a few rebels) throughout Europe. The improbabilities of Tasso and of “Camoenus, the Homer and Virgil of the Portuguese,” afflict him more, because they amuse him less, than they do in Voltaire’s own case, and to any liberty with real or supposed history he is simply Rhadamanthine. “That which jars with probability—that which shocks Sense and Reason—can never be excused in Poetry.” Mrs Barbauld and The Ancient Mariner sixty years before date!
[642]. Essays, xii.-xvii.
[643]. The Bee, viii.
[644]. Essay xviii.
[645]. It is perhaps only fair to hope that this fancy, as later with Southey and others, was a blind motion for freedom. Yet Goldsmith commits himself to the hemistich theory of decasyllables.
[646]. Essays, Moral and Literary, 2nd ed., London, 1774, 8vo.
[647]. This is perhaps the most delightful instance in (English) existence of the change which has come over the meaning of the word.
[648]. Critical Essays, London, 1785, 8vo.
CHAPTER II.
THE CONTEMPORARIES OF VOLTAIRE.
CLOSE CONNECTION OF FRENCH SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURY CRITICISM: FONTENELLE—EXCEPTIONAL CHARACTER OF HIS CRITICISM—HIS ATTITUDE TO THE “ANCIENT AND MODERN” QUARREL—THE ‘DIALOGUES DES MORTS’—OTHER CRITICAL WORK—LA MOTTE—HIS “UNITY OF INTEREST”—ROLLIN—BRUMOY—RÉMOND DE SAINT-MARD—L. RACINE—DU BOS—STIMULATING BUT DESULTORY CHARACTER OF HIS ‘RÉFLEXIONS’—MONTESQUIEU—VOLTAIRE: DISAPPOINTMENT OF HIS CRITICISM—EXAMPLES OF IT—CAUSES OF HIS FAILURE—OTHERS: BUFFON—“STYLE AND THE MAN”—VAUVENARGUES—BATTEUX—HIS ADJUSTMENT OF RULES AND TASTE—HIS INCOMPLETENESS—MARMONTEL—ODDITIES AND QUALITIES OF HIS CRITICISM—OTHERS: THOMAS, SUARD, ETC.—LA HARPE—HIS ‘COURS DE LITTÉRATURE’—HIS CRITICAL POSITION AS “ULTIMUS SUORUM”—THE ACADEMIC ESSAY—RIVAROL.
The later seventeenth and at least the earlier eighteenth century in France are perhaps more closely connected than any other literary periods, if, indeed, they are not practically one, like the two halves of our own so-called “Elizabethan” time. Close connection of French seventeenth and eighteenth century criticism. Fontenelle. And this connection we can duly demonstrate, as far as criticism is concerned. Boileau himself outlived the junction of the centuries by more than a decade: and the birth of Voltaire preceded it by more than a lustrum. The Quarrel of Ancients and Moderns—a very poor thing certainly—revived in the new century, as if on purpose to show the connection with the old. And, lastly, the prolonged life of one remarkable and representative critic was almost equally distributed over the two. Fontenelle is one of the most interesting, if not exactly one of the most important, figures in our whole long gallery; and if he has never yet held quite his proper place in literary history, this is due to the facts, first, that he was a critic more than he was anything else; and, secondly, that he forgot the great “Thou shalt not” which Criticism lays upon her sons, and would lay (if she had any) on her daughters. No critic is in the least bound to produce good work, or any work, of the constructive kind: but he is bound not to produce that which is not good. The author of Aspar and the Lettres du Chevalier d’Her ... forgot this, and paid the penalty.[[649]]
Yet his attractions are so great that few people who have paid him much attention have failed to be smitten with them. M. Rigault,[[650]] who does not approve of him generally, is a conspicuous example of this. Exceptional character of his criticism. But what we must look to is what he has actually written himself. His utterances are almost too tempting. In such a book as this the expatiation which they invite must be perforce denied them. Yet one may break proportion a little in order to do something like justice to a critic whose like, for suggestiveness, delicacy, and range, we shall hardly meet in the French eighteenth century. It is indeed curious that of the three men of his own earliest years from whom Voltaire inherits—Saint-Evremond, Hamilton, and Fontenelle—every one should have surpassed him in the finer traits, while all fall short of him in force and, as he himself said, diable au corps. Saint-Evremond we have dealt with; Hamilton[[651]] does not come into our story. Fontenelle is for the moment ours.
It must be confessed that he is an elusive if an agreeable possession. From wisdom, from worldly-wisdom, from whim, or from what not, he seems to have wished to be an enigma; and—to borrow one of Scott’s great sentences—“the wish of his heart was granted to his loss, and the hope of his pride has destroyed him”—at least has certainly made him rank lower than he would otherwise have ranked. However délié—to use a word of his own language for which we have no single English equivalent—however watchful, mercurial, sensitive the reader’s spirit may be, he will, over and over again in Fontenelle, meet passages where he cannot be sure whether his author is writing merely with tongue in cheek, or applying an all-dissolving irony, hardly inferior to Swift’s in power, and almost superior in quietness and subtlety. Moreover, his critical position is a very peculiar one, and constantly liable to be misunderstood—if, indeed, it be not safer to say that it is almost always difficult to apprehend with any certainty of escaping misprision. The good folk who magisterially rebuke Dryden as to Gorboduc, because he made mistakes about the form of the verse and the sex of the person—even those (one regrets to say this includes M. Rigault himself) who are shocked at that great critic’s laudatory citations of, and allusions to, Le Bossu—need never hope to understand Fontenelle.
Few things (except that he was the author of that Plurality of Worlds which happily does not concern us) are better known concerning him than that he was a champion of the Moderns. His attitude to the “Ancient and Modern” Quarrel. Yet, when we come to examine his numerous and elusive writings on the subject, the one principle of his that does emerge is a principle which, if it chastises the Ancients with whips, chastises the Moderns with scorpions. A man writing, as M. Rigault wrote, in 1856, would have been a wonderful person if he had not been misled by the great idol of Progress. But Fontenelle was at least as far from the delusion as he was from the date. His argument is just the contrary—that as human wisdoms and human follies, human powers and human weaknesses, are always the same, it is absurd to suppose that any one period can have general and intrinsic superiority over any other.
The Dialogues des Morts.
Assuredly no “modern,” whether of his days or of our own, can find aught but confusion of face in the quiet axiom of Laura at the end of her controversy with Sappho,[[652]] “Croyez moi, après qu’on a bien raisonné ou sur l’amour, ou sur telle autre matière qu’on voudra, on trouve au bout du compte que les choses sont bien comme elles sont, et que la réforme qu’on prétendroit y apporter gâterait tout.” Pulveris exigui jactus! but one with a fatally magical effect in the quarrels of criticism as of other things. And the same is the lesson of the dialogue which follows immediately—the best of the whole, and almost a sovereign document of our library,—that between Socrates and Montaigne. Not only is there no example in the literature of the dialogue, from Plato to Mr Traill, much more apt than the “maieutic” feat of Socrates, by which he induces Montaigne to commit himself to the dogma, “Partout où il y a des hommes, il y a des sottises, et les mêmes sottises”; but the rest of the piece is as powerfully, though as quietly, worked out as this crisis of it. There is no Progress; there is no Degeneration. The distribution may vary: the sum will not. Erasistratus maintains the same thesis on a different matter a little later in his dialogue with Harvey,[[653]] laying down the doctrine, outrageous to all the Royal Societies of the world (though they were glad to welcome Fontenelle as populariser, and have perhaps never had such an one since, except Mr Huxley), that “the things which are not necessary perhaps do get discovered in the course of ages, the others not.” And Charles V. preaches no very different sermon when he “makes a hare” of Erasmus by pointing out to that dilettante republican that les biens de l’esprit are just as much things of time and chance as crown and sceptre.[[654]]
It is, however, in Fontenelle’s actual concrete deliverances of criticism that the resemblance to Dryden comes in most. Other critical work. Those who insist that such deliverances shall be Medic-Persian, unalterable, mathematical, true without relation and adjustment, will not like him. To take his utterances down in a notebook, and reproduce them at the next examination (to provide for which process seems to be held the be-all and end-all of modern criticism), would not do at all. When Fontenelle praises Corneille at the expense of Racine, you have to think whether he is speaking what he thinks or merely as le neveu de son oncle; when he says other things, whether he is a “Modern” at the time and to the extent of saying something which he knows will cause the “Ancients” grinding torments; when he sketches[[655]] a theory of poetic criticism of the most sweeping a priori kind from Principles of Beauty down through Kinds to Rules, whether he really means this, or is conciliating somebody, or laughing in his sleeve at somebody, or the like. But this—at least for some tastes—only adds piquancy to his observations, and they have now and then surprising justice, freshness, freedom from the prejudices of time, country, and circumstance. The Histoire du Théâtre Français, for instance, which he has prefixed to his Vie de Corneille, may be based on second-hand information, and, with our fuller knowledge, it may not be very hard to pick holes in it. But it is an extraordinary production for a representative man of letters at a time when hardly any such man, in any country of Europe, was free from ignorant contempt of the early vernaculars. The brief eleven-articled “parallel between Racine and Corneille” is of course somewhat partisan; but it will give the partisans on the other side some trouble to prove it unjust. The “Remarks on Aristophanes,” and on the Greek theatre generally, are obviously “modern” and intended to tease; but they are uncommonly shrewd, and so are the Réflexions sur la Poétique and those on “Poetry in General.” It is wonderful that even an antagonist of Boileau, and a sworn paradoxer, should, at this time, have been able to see the beauty of the Père Le Moyne’s splendid couplet on the Sicilian Vespers,—
“Quand du Gibel ardent les noires Euménides
Sonneront de leur cor ces Vêpres homicides,”—
where we are more than half-way from Du Bartas and Aubigné to Victor Hugo. The mere image—this new “vision of the guarded mount,” with the black Furies silhouetted against the flaming cone, and the explosions of the volcano deepening the bugle-call to massacre—is fine: the means taken to make it poetical are finer. The use of the proper names, and the cunning arrangement of epithet and noun in noires Euménides and Vêpres homicides, and the sharp blasts of the long and short o's in the second line, are more than Hugonian, they are positively Miltonic: and the couplet will serve to keep a man in Mr Arnold’s “torpid and dismal” stage of later middle life cheerful for an evening, and whensoever he remembers it afterwards. True, Fontenelle admits demurely that he knows “vespers” and “Eumenides” are something of an anachronism in conjunction, and proposes a slight alteration to suit this objection of “correctness.” But this is his way; and the wonderful thing is that he should have admired it at all—should have actually tasted this heady wine of poetry. As he finishes the paragraph in his own quaint style,[[656]] “Il était bien aisé, même à de grands poètes, de ne pas trouver” this couplet: and in his time it would have been still easier even for great critics not to do justice to it, and not to see that it is to these things “so easy for the poet not to find” that it is the critic’s business to look.
The general remarks on Comedy which he prefixed to a collection of his efforts in that kind are not negligible; but in those on Eclogue,[[657]] and still more in the Digression sur Les Anciens et Les Modernes, the curse, or at least the gainsaying, of the Quarrel is upon him, and the main drift is not merely digressive but aggressive and excessive. In the Digression he anticipates (as he did in so many things) the materialist-rationalist explanations of the later eighteenth century by climate, fibres of the brain, &c. Here he becomes scientific, and therefore necessarily ceases to be of importance in literature.
But he always regains that importance before long—in his Discourse of the Origin of Fable, in his Academic Discourses and Replies, in many a fragment and isolated remark. Even in his Eloges—mostly devoted (there are nearly two volumes of them) to scientific personages from Leibniz and Newton downwards—the unconquerable critical power of the man shows itself, subject to the limitations noted. The world is sometimes not allowed to know anything of its greatest critics, and Fontenelle is an example of this. But those who have won something of that knowledge of criticism which it is the humble purpose of this book to facilitate, will not slight the man who, at the junction of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, could flirt in the face of Ancients and Moderns alike the suggestion (which Mr Rigmarole doubtless borrowed from him) that all times are “pretty much like our own,” and could see and hear the sable sisters sounding the tocsin on the flaming crest of Mongibel.
Fontenelle is elusive, but comprehensible by the imagination. La Motte,[[658]] his inseparable companion in the renewed sacrilege of the Moderns, seems an easier, but is really a harder, personage to lay hold of. La Motte. It is indeed not extremely difficult to explain his attitude to the Ancients by the fact that he knew no Greek; and his exaltation of prose by a consciousness (wherein he has left a family by no means extinct) that his own verses were worth very little. But it is so easy not to write verses if you cannot; and not to write about Greek if you do not know it! And the problem is further complicated by the facts that at least some judges, who are not exactly the first comers, such as Fontenelle himself and Voltaire, maintained that La Motte could write verses,—and that, so far from being “a fellow who had failed,” he had obtained the greatest scenic success of the early eighteenth century with Inès de Castro, and, what is more, had deserved it. But for once, as also again in Pope’s case, the dangerous explanation of physical defects and constitutional weakness seems to have some validity. The invulnerable nonchalance of his friend Fontenelle had met the damnation of Aspar by a cool tearing up of the piece, and an undismayed advance upon the fate of the plusquam semel damnatus; La Motte, at twenty or at little more, felt the similar misfortune of Les Originaux so severely that he actually went to La Trappe for a time. Before middle life he was blind and a cripple. The irritability which did not show itself in his temper (for he was the most amiable of men) would seem to have transferred itself to his literary attitude, not affecting his politeness of expression, but inducing a sort of “rash” of paradox.
To trace the vagaries of this might not be unamusing, but would certainly be excessive here. His “Unity of Interest.” La Motte, it seems to me, had considerably less natural literary taste than Fontenelle; and of the controversy[[659]] (it was not his antagonist’s fault if it was not a very acrimonious one) between him and Madame Dacier one cannot say much more than that the lady is very aggressive, very erudite, and very unintelligent; the gentleman very suave, rather ignorant, and of an intelligence better, but not much better, directed; while both are sufficiently distant from any true critical point of view. Yet once, as was not unnatural in the case of a very clever man who was at least endeavouring to form independent conclusions, La Motte did hit upon a great critical truth when,[[660]] discussing the Three Unities, he laid it down that there is after all only one Unity which is of real importance, and that this is the “Unity of Interest,” to which all the others are subsidiary, and but as means to an end. “Self-evident,” some one may say; but in how many critics have we found the fact acknowledged hitherto? and by how many has it been frankly acknowledged since? That the aim of the poet is to please, to satisfy the thirst for pleasure—that is to say, to interest—all but the extremest ethical prudery will admit. But critics, especially classical and neo-classical critics, have always been in the mood of Christophero Sly when he railed at the woman of the house and threatened her with presentation at the leet,
“Because she brought stone jugs and no sealed quarts.”
Without the “sealed quart” of the Unity—of the Rule generally—these critics will not slake, nor let others slake, their thirst. But the affirmation of the Unity of Interest, in La Motte’s way, does inevitably bring with it licence to use the stone jug or anything else, so only that the good wine of poetry be made to do its good office.
The Quarrel left its traces for a long time on criticism, and seems to have partly determined the composition, as late as 1730, of two books of some note, the Traité des Études of the excellent Rollin, and the elaborate Théâtre des Grecs of the Père Brumoy. Rollin. Of neither need we say very much. The first-named[[661]] had considerable influence at home and abroad, especially in Germany; but Rollin’s successor, Batteux, was justified in the good-humoured malice of his observation,[[662]] “Je trouve à l’article de la Poésie un discours fort sensé sur son origine et sa destination, qui doit être toute au profit de la vertu. On y cite les beaux endroits d’Homère; on y donne la plus juste idée de la sublime Poésie des Livres Saints; mais c'était une définition que je demandais.” Alas! we have experienced the same disappointment many times; nor is it Batteux himself who will cure us of it.
Brumoy’s imposing quartos[[663]] have at least the advantage (how great a one the same experience has shown us) of tackling a definite subject in a business-like way. Brumoy. His book consists of actual translations of a certain number of Greek pieces, of analyses of all the rest that we have, and of divers discourses. He leads off with a forcible and well-founded complaint of the extreme ignorance of Greek tragedy and drama generally which the Quarrel had shown; his observations on individual writers and pieces are often very sensible; and his “Discourse on the Parallel between the Theatres” has a bearing which he probably did not suspect, and might not have relished. He dwells with vigour and knowledge on the differences between them in order to show that not merely preference, as in the Quarrel, but even strict comparison, is impossible between things so different. It could not be but that sooner or later it would dawn, on some readers at least, that it was even more ridiculous to try to make the two obey the same laws.
As has been already shown in the last book, literary criticism had, even by the middle of the seventeenth century, established so firm a hold on French taste that the representative system becomes more and more imperative upon the historian thereof. To represent the later days of Fontenelle and those when Voltaire, though attaining, had not entirely attained his almost European dictatorship of letters, three names will serve very well; one perhaps new to many (if there be many) readers of these pages, another one of the conscript names of literary history, respected if not read, and the third a classic of the world—in plainer words, Rémond de Saint-Mard, the Abbé Du Bos, and Montesquieu.
Saint-Mard has been rather badly treated by the books,—for instance, Vapereau’s Dictionnaire des Littératures, often no despicable compilation, not only dismisses him as médiocre, but misspells his name Saint-Marc. Rémond de Saint-Mard. He had, however, some influence in his own day, especially on the Germans;[[664]] and there is an extremely pretty little edition[[665]] of his works, most of which had been issued separately earlier. To some extent he is a follower of Fontenelle, writes Dialogues of Gods, &c., Lettres Galantes et Philosophiques, and the like, to please the town and the ladies, but with a constant turning to criticism. In the “Discourse,” which precedes his Dialogues in the collected edition, there is a very odd and, as it seems to me, a very noteworthy passage, in which, though there may be some would-be fine-gentleman nonchalance, there is also a dawning of that sense of the unnaturalness and inconvenience of “the rules” which is constantly showing itself in the early eighteenth century. He admits[[666]] that he has not followed his own rules; for the orthodox dialogue ought to have one subject, led up to for some time, announced at last. But somehow or other most of his dialogues have more. So few ideas are fertile enough for a whole Dialogue!—a sentence which obviously cuts away the theory of the rule, and not merely its practice.
Nor are his other works by any means destitute of original ideas worthily put. In one of his definition-descriptions of poetry,[[667]] if there is something of eighteenth-century sensualism, there is much also of the acute and practical psychology of the period. L. Racine.The words do account—whether in “low” or “high” fashion—for the poetic delight, as “Philosophy teaching by example” and other arid abstractions do not. His theory elsewhere, that Custom communicates the charm of versification (he does not quote usus concinnat, but inevitably suggests it), has probably a great deal of truth in it, if it is not the whole truth; and though we know that his explanation of the origin of Poetry—that it came because Prose was too common—is historically inaccurate, it is evidently only a false deduction, uncorrected by actual historic knowledge, from the real fact that the “discommoning of the common” is a main source of the poetic pleasure. In points such as these Rémond de Saint-Mard rises commendably above the estimable dulness of his contemporary Louis Racine,[[668]] with his admiration oddly distributed between Milton and his own papa, and in the former case more oddly conditioned by respect for Addison and Voltaire; his laborious rearrangement of most of the old commonplaces about poetry and poets; and his obliging explanation that “Ces images de magiciennes et de sorcières de Laponie ne paraissaient pas extravagantes aux Anglais dans le temps que Milton écrivit.”
By this time “Æsthetics” were breaking the shell everywhere; but in many cases, as we have seen, they did not consciously affect the critical principles of writers. Du Bos. Du Bos, a solid inquirer, and a man of considerable ability in that striking out of wide generalisations which delighted his time, could hardly have avoided them. His Réflexions Critiques sur la Poésie et sur la Peinture[[669]] have sometimes been credited with considerable precursorship on the literary side. It is certain that he lays some stress (Part II., § 14 sq.) on the effect of Climate upon Art, and if this “seem such dear delight, Beyond all other,” he must have the credit due therefor from those to whom it so seems. To those who reflect on the climatic authorship, say of Romeo and Juliet and the sonnets of La Casa, doubts may occur. Du Bos is certainly an interesting and stimulating writer; but his very excursions into generality seem to have precluded him from studying any particular author carefully; and the crotchet and paradox which appear in his more famous and later Histoire de la Monarchie Française are not absent from the Réflexions. These take, moreover, a distinctly “classic” bent. Dr Johnson would have loved, and very possibly did love, him for arguing in a masterly manner that French poetry simply cannot equal Latin, either in style or in cadence and harmony of verse; nor perhaps would Mr Matthew Arnold on this occasion have disdained to say ditto to Dr Johnson. Latin words are more beautiful than French. Harmony is easier to attain in Latin than in French. The rules are less troublesome in Latin than in French, and their observance results in more beauties in the mother than in the daughter. This is “Thorough” with a vengeance.[[670]]
On the great question of katharsis Du Bos holds the view that art operates by imitating the things which would have excited strong passions in us if real, but which, as not being real, only excite weak ones; and makes fair fight for it (Part I., § 3). Stimulating but desultory character of his Réflexions. He thinks that while execution is everything in painting it is not everything in poetry, but still much. He quotes English critics, especially Addison, pretty freely, and is not far from holding with them that French drama deals too much with love. He has some really acute remarks on what he calls poetry of style, distinguishing this style from mere diction and versification, and connecting this directly with his Latin-French paradox. He even ventures close to the sin unpardonable, in the eyes of Classicism, by arguing that the beauty of the parts of a poem contributes more to its effect than the justness and regularity of the plan, and that a poem may be “regular” to the nth and yet quite a bad poem. He has respect for the popular judgment—a respect suggesting a not impossible acquaintance with Gravina (v. infra, p. 538), who had written a good many years before him: and he distinctly postulates, after the manner of the century, an Æsthetic Sense existing in almost all, and capable of deciding on points of taste (Part II., § 22). He has some direct and more indirect observations in reference to the Quarrel, speaking with trenchant, but not too trenchant, disapproval (Part II., § 36) of those who endeavour to judge works of art by translations and criticisms. On the main question he is pretty sound. He is good on genius, and on what he calls the artisan, the craftsman without genius. Taking him altogether, Du Bos may be allowed the praise of a really fertile and original writer,[[671]] who says many things which are well worth attention and which seldom received it before him, in regard to what may be called the previous questions of criticism. His connection of poetry with painting sometimes helps him, and seldom leads him absolutely wrong; but it to some extent distracts him, and constantly gives an air of desultoriness and haphazard to his observation. It is, moreover, quite remarkable how persistently he abides in generalibus, scarcely ever descending below the mediate examination of Kinds. When he touches on individual works of art he confines himself in the most gingerly fashion to illustration merely; there is never an appreciation in whole or in considerable part.
When Voltaire denounced Montesquieu for lèse-poésie, the accused, if he had chosen, might have brought formidable counter accusations; but there was certainly some ground for the actual charge. Montesquieu. When a man says[[672]] that “the four great poets are Plato, Malebranche, Shaftesbury, and Montaigne,” he is evidently either a heretic or a paradoxer; and the hundred and thirty-seventh of the Lettres Persanes gives a sad colour to the worse supposition. There is perhaps less actual high treason to poetry here than in the remarks of Signor Pococurante, that noble Venetian, but there is more intended; the whole treatment is ostentatiously contemptuous. Dramatists are allowed some merit, but poets in general “put good sense in irons, and smother reason in ornament.” As for epic poems, connoisseurs themselves say that there never have been but two good ones, and never will be a third.[[673]] Lyric poets are contemptible creatures who deal in nothing but harmonious extravagance and so forth. As for romances in prose, they have the faults of poems and others to boot. Elsewhere, in Letter xlviii., a “poet is the grotesque of the human race.” It is scarcely surprising that, when we turn to the Essai sur le Goût, there is hardly any definite reference to literature at all, and that Montesquieu is entirely occupied in tracing or imagining abstract reasons for the attractiveness of abstract things like “surprise,” “symmetry,” “variety,” and even of the je ne sais quoi. The je ne sais quoi in an attractive, but not technically beautiful, girl is, it seems, due to surprise at finding her so attractive, which, with all respect to the President, seems to be somewhat “circular.” In fact, Montesquieu is chiefly interesting to us, first, because he made no literary use of his own theories as to climate and the rest—which later writers have used and abused in this way; and secondly, because he shows, in excelsis, that radically unliterary as well as unpoetical vein which, for all its remarkable literary performance, is characteristic of his time.
It will surprise no one who has any acquaintance with the subject that but a few lines should have been given to Montesquieu; it may shock some to find but a very few pages given to Voltaire.[[674]] Voltaire: Disappointments of his criticism. But while I have never been able to rank the Patriarch’s criticism high, a reperusal of it in sequence, for the purpose of this book, has even reduced the level of my estimate. The fact is that, consummate literary craftsman as he was, and wanting only the je ne sais quoi itself (or rather something that we know too well) to rank with the very greatest men of letters, Voltaire was not a man with whom literary interest by any means predominated. It is not merely that his anti-crusade against l’infâme constantly colours his literary, as it does all his other, judgments; and that once at least it made him certainly indorse, and possibly enounce, the astounding statement that the Parables in the Gospels are “coarse and low.”[[675]] But when this perpetually disturbing influence is at its least active point, we can see perfectly that neither Voltaire’s treasure nor his heart is anywhere, with the doubtful exception of the drama division, in literature. In mathematics and in physical science there is no doubt that he was genuinely interested; and he was perhaps still more interested (as indeed men of his century generally were) in what may be vaguely called anthropology, the moral, social, and (to some, though only to some, extent) political history of mankind. But for literature he had very little genuine love; though the vanity in which he certainly was not lacking could not fail to be conscious of his own excellence as a practitioner in it; and though he could not but recognise its power—its almost omnipotence—as a weapon. It was probably the more human character of the drama that attracted him there.
However this may be, it is impossible, for me at least, to rank him high as a critic: and this refusal is hardly in the least due to his famous blasphemies against Shakespeare and Milton. Examples of it. As we have seen—as we shall see—it is possible to disagree profoundly with some, nay, with many, of a critic’s estimates, and yet to think highly of his critical gifts. But Voltaire scarcely anywhere shows the true ethos of the critic: and that “smattering erudition” of his is nowhere so much of a smattering, and so little of an erudition, as here. His two famous surveys of English and French literature, in the Lettres sur les Anglais and the Siècle de Louis Quatorze, show, on the French side at least, a more complete ignorance of literary history than Boileau’s own: and the individual judgments, though admirably expressed, are banal and without freshness of grasp. The extensive Commentary on Corneille contains, of course, interesting things, but is of no high critical value. The Essai sur la Poésie Épique[Épique] opens with some excellent ridicule of “the rules”—a subject which indeed might seem to invite the Voltairian method irresistibly; but after this and some serious good sense of the same kind, he practically deserts to the rules themselves. He admits fautes grossières in Homer, finds “monstrosity and absurdity up to the limits of imagination” in Shakespeare, thinks that Virgil is “Homer’s best work,” discovers in the supernatural of Tasso and Camoens only “insipid stories fit to amuse children,” dismisses, as everybody knows, the great Miltonic episode of Satan, Death, and Sin as “disgusting and abominable,” and keeps up throughout his survey that wearisome castanet-clatter of “fault and beauty—beauty and fault” which, whensoever and wheresoever we find it, simply means that the critic is not able to see his subject as a whole, and tell us whether it is foul or fair.
Perhaps no better instance of the feebleness of Voltaire’s criticism can be found than in his dealings with Rabelais.[[676]] Here there are practically no disturbing elements. Yet no one is more responsible than Voltaire is for the common notion, equally facile and false, of Rabelais as a freethinker with a sharp eye to the main chance, who disguised his freethinking in a cloak of popular obscenity, who is often amusing, sometimes admirable, but as a whole coarse, tedious, and illegible, or at best appealing to the most vulgar taste. Take the famous sentence that Swift is a “Rabelais de bonne compagnie,”[[677]] work it out either side, and it will be difficult to find anywhere words more radically uncritical. Or turn to the Dictionnaire Philosophique. Not only are the literary articles very few, and in some of these few cases mere rechauffés of the Lettres sur Les Anglais, &c., but the head “Literature” itself contains the singular statement that criticism is not literature—because nobody speaks of “une belle critique.” The articles “Esprit” and “Goût” are attractive—especially the latter, because it is on the critical watchword of the century: but we are sent away, worse than empty, with some abuse of Shakespeare, and with the statement, “No man of letters can possibly fail to recognise the perfected taste of Boileau in the Art Poétique.” Only, perhaps, the article on Art Dramatique is worthy of its title, and the reason of this has been indicated.
The numerous Mélanges Littéraires are again interesting reading—indeed, when is Voltaire not interesting, save when he is scientific, or when he shows that “the zeal of the devil’s house” can inspire a man of genius with forty-curate-power dulness? They include almost every kind of writing, from actual reviews (Lettres aux Auteurs de La Gazette Littéraire) on books French and foreign, upwards or downwards. But all those that are probably genuine exhibit just the same characteristics as the more elaborate works. The reviews of Sterne and of Churchill will show how really superficial Voltaire’s literary grip was; though both of them (as being Voltaire’s they could not well help doing) contain acute remarks. The too famous argument-abstract of Hamlet[[678]] is perhaps the most remarkable example of irony exploding through the touch-hole that literature affords. The “Parallel of Horace, Boileau, and Pope” from such a hand might seem as if it could not be without value: but it has very little. And perhaps nowhere does Voltaire appear to much less critical advantage than in the Lettre de M. de La Visclède on La Fontaine, where, as in the case of Rabelais, it might be thought that no prejudice could possibly affect him. The superfine condemnation of the bonhomme’s style, as filled with expressions plus faites pour le peuple que pour les honnêtes gens (not, let it be observed, in the Fables, but in the Contes), could hardly tell a more disastrous tale. Philistia by its Goliath in Paris echoes Philistia by its common folk in London, at this special time. La Fontaine and Goldsmith are “low.”
The fact would appear to be that, independently of that lack of purely literary interest which has been noted above, other causes kept Voltaire back from really original and valuable criticism. Causes of his failure. The sense of the necessity of clinging to and conserving something, which has often been shown by iconoclasts, seems to have directed itself in him towards literary orthodoxy: while, on the other hand, as we have already seen, his natural acuteness refused to blink entirely some of the absurdities of the “Rule” system. His craftsmanship made it possible for him to succeed in certain kinds of artificial poetry—the regular tragedy, the formal heroic poem, the light piece, epigram, or epistle, or what not—which were specially favoured by Classical criticism. He was not well equipped by nature for success in any Romantic kind—not to mention that Romance was almost indissolubly connected with those Ages of Faith which he scorned. Moreover, though no man has committed more faults of taste, in the wider and nobler sense, than did Voltaire, yet within a narrower and more arbitrary circle of “taste” of the conventional kind, no one could walk with more unerring precision. Yet again, the Great Assumption by which the neo-classics made a changeling of their Taste with Good Sense, and mothered it on Nature, appealed strongly to such philosophical theories as he had. Accordingly, both in public and private,[[679]] the great heretic, with very few exceptions, plays the part of a very Doctor of the Literary Sorbonne, and leaves the attempt at a new criticism to the more audacious innovation, and the more thorough-going naturalism, of Diderot.[[680]]
Of the other Di majores of the philosophe school, Rousseau would always have been prevented by his temperament from expressing critically the appreciations which the same temperament might have suggested: and, if he had been a critic at all, he would have been on the revolting and Romantic side. Others: Buffon. Diderot actually was so. The critical utterances of D’Alembert,[[681]] chiefly if not wholly given in his Éloges, express the clear understanding and by no means trivial good sense of their writer. But, like Voltaire’s, D’Alembert’s heart was elsewhere. Buffon remains; and by a curious accident he, though totus in the things of mere science, has left us one of the most noteworthy phrases of literary criticism in the history of literature. Moreover, this phrase is contained in a discourse[[682]] which is all literary and almost all critical, which is very admirable within its own range and on its own side, and which practically provides us with one of the first, and to this day one of the best, discussions of Style as such. That we have in these latter days “heard too much of Style” is often said, and may be true: “where” we have seen too much of it “you shall tell me” as Seithenin said to the Prince. But we, in the restricted sense of students of criticism, have not “seen too much” of discussions of style hitherto. On the contrary, we have seen that the ancients were constantly shy of it in its quiddity; that even Longinus seems to prefer to abstract and embody one of its qualities and discuss that; and that after the revival of criticism the old avoidances, or the old apologies for the phortikon ti, were too often renewed. Buffon has none of this prudery: though he lays the greatest possible stress on the necessity of there being something behind style, of style being “the burin that graves the thought.”
Perhaps he does not quite keep at the height of his famous and often misquoted[[683]] dictum—“Le style est l’homme même”—in itself the best thing ever said on the subject, and, as is the case with most good things, made better by the context. “Style and the man.” He has been showing why only well-written books go down to posterity. Information can be transferred; fact becomes public property; novelty ceases to be novel. Ces choses sont hors de l’homme; le style est [de?] l’homme même. In other words, the style—the form—is that which the author adds to the matter; it is that inseparable, but separably intelligible, element which cannot be transferred, taken away, or lost. It is clear that Buffon would not have lent himself to that discountenancing of the distinction of Matter and Form which some have attempted. Perhaps his other remarks are less uniformly, though they are often, admirable. He should not, as a man of natural science, have congratulated the Academicians on contemning “le vain son des mots,” which, he should have known, always has something, and may have much, to do with style; and it is certainly inadequate to say that style is “the order and movement given to our thoughts.” There is much that is true, but also something of mere neo-classic orthodoxy, in his painful repetitions of the necessity of unity and greatness of subject; and to say that “l’esprit humain ne peut rien créer” is sheer lèse-littérature. Rather is it true that, except God, the human mind is the only thing that can create, and that it shows its divine origin thereby. But Buffon was only a man of science, and we must excuse him. The special curse of the time[[684]] is curiously visible in his enumeration, among the causes of nobility in style, of “L’attention à ne nommer les choses que par les termes les plus généraux.” The “streak of the tulip” barred again! But he is certainly right when he says that “jamais l’imitation n’a rien créé”: though here it may be retorted, “Yes; but imitation teaches how to discard itself, and to begin to create,” while, as he has just extended the disability to the human faculties generally, his point seems a blunt one. Still, his directions for ordonnance as a preliminary to style, his cautions against pointes, traits saillants, pomposity [he might have recked this rede a little more himself], and other things, are excellent. The piece is extraordinary in its combination of originality, brilliancy, and sense, and in it Science has certainly lent Literature one of the best critical essays of the eighteenth century.
Not an unimportant document of the time for the history of criticism is the critical attitude of that remarkable Marcellus of philosophism, Vauvenargues.[[685]] The few Réflexions Critiques which he has left are very curious. Vauvenargues was a man of an absolute independence of spirit so far as he knew; but conditioned by the limits of his knowledge. He had neither time nor opportunity for much reading; he probably knew little of any literature but his own. It must be remembered also that his main bent was ethical, not literary. Such a man should give us the form and pressure of the time in an unusual and interesting way.
Vauvenargues does so. We find him, after a glowing and almost adequate eulogy of La Fontaine, gibbeting him for showing plus de style que d’invention, et plus de négligence que d’exactitude—not the happiest pair of antitheses. Vauvenargues. The subjects of his Tales are “low”—unfortunate word which “speaks” almost every one who uses it—and they are not interesting, which is more surprising. Boileau, on the contrary, is extolled to the skies. He has really too much genius (like the 'Badian who was really too brave), and this excess, with a smaller excess of fire, truth, solidity, agrément, may have perhaps injured his range, depth, height, finesse, and grace. Molière again is trop bas (at least his subjects are), while La Bruyère escapes this defect—you might as well set together Addison and Shakespeare, and no doubt Vauvenargues would have done so. How different is Racine, who is always “great”—“gallantly great,” let us add, like Mr Pepys in his new suit. Voltaire, who had certainly prompted some of these sins, made a little atonement by inducing Vauvenargues to admire Corneille to some extent. But Corneille, he says, from his date, could not have le goût juste, and the parallel with Racine is one of the most interesting of its numerous kind. J. B. Rousseau might have been nearly as good a poet as Boileau, if Boileau had not taught him all he knew in poetry, but his vieux langage is most regrettable. Such were the opinions of a young man of unusual ability, but with little taste in literature except that which he found prevalent in the middle of the eighteenth century.
This middle, and the later part of it, saw in the Abbé Batteux the last of that really remarkable, though not wholly estimable, line of législateurs du Parnasse which had begun with Boileau, and whose edicts had been accepted, for the best part of a century, with almost universal deference. Batteux. Still later, and surviving into the confines of the nineteenth century, La Harpe gives us almost the last distinguished defender, and certainly a defender as uncompromising as he was able, of neo-classic orthodoxy. Some attention must be given to each of these, and to Marmontel between them, but we need not say very much of others—except in the representative way.
Batteux began as an extoller of the Henriade, after many years spent in schoolmastering and the occasional publication of Latin verses, but before the century had reached the middle of its road. He essayed, a little later, divers treatises[[686]] on Poetic and Rhetoric, all of which were adjusted and collected in his Principes de la Littérature,[[687]] while he also executed various minor works, the most useful of which was Les Quatre Poétiques,[[688]] a translation, with critical notes, of Aristotle, Horace, and Vida, with Boileau added. In so far as I am able to judge, Batteux is about the best of the seventeenth-eighteenth century “Preceptists.”[[689]] The Introduction to his introductory tractate, Les Beaux Arts réduits à un même Principe, indulges in some mild but by no means unbecoming irony on his predecessors,[[690]] and expresses the candid opinion that few of them had really consulted Aristotle at all. He admits the multiplicity and the galling character of “rules”; but he thinks that these can be reduced to a tolerable and innoxious, nay, in the highest degree useful, minimum, by keeping the eye fixed on the Imitation of Nature, and of the best nature. But how is this to guide us? Here Batteux shows real ingenuity by seizing on the other great fetich of the eighteenth-century creed—Taste—as a regulator to be in its turn regulated.
Indeed a careful perusal of Batteux cannot but force on us the consideration that the mechanical age, the age of Arkwright and Watt, was approaching, or had approached. His adjustment of Rules and Taste. His Rules and his Taste “clutch” each other by turns, like the elaborate plant of the modern machinist. If the Rules are too narrow and precise, Taste holds them open; if Taste shows any sign of getting lawless, the Rules bring it to its bearings. It is extremely ingenious; but the questions remain—Whether it is natural? and Whether any good came from the exercise of the principles which it attempts to reconcile and defend? The manner of Batteux, it must be allowed, is as much less freezing and unsatisfactory than Le Bossu’s, as it is less arbitrary and less aggressive than Boileau’s. These two would, in the face of fact and history, have identified Taste and a certain construction of Rule. Batteux rather regards the two as reciprocal escapements, easing and regulating each other. It is part of his merit that he recognises, to some extent, the importance of observation. In fact, great part of this introductory treatise is a naïf and interesting complaint of the difficulty which the results of this observation are introducing into Rule-criticism. “Rules are getting so many,” he admits in his opening sentence; and, no doubt, so long as you find it necessary to make a new rule whenever you find a new poet, the state of things must be more and more parlous. But, like all his century-fellows without exception on the Classical, and like too many on the other side, he does not think of simply marching through the open door, and leaving the prison of Rule and Kind behind him.
From these idols Batteux will not yet be separated: he hardens his heart in a different manner from Pharaoh, and will not let himself go. The utile is never to be parted from the dulce; “the poems of Homer and Virgil are not vain Romances, where the mind wanders at the will of a mad imagination; they are great bodies of doctrine,” &c. Anacreon [Heaven help us!] was himself determined to be a moral teacher.[[691]] Again, there must be Action, and it must be single, united, simple, yet of variety; the style must not be too low, or too high, &c., &c.
When Batteux has got into the old rut, he remains in it. We slip into the well-known treatises by Kinds—Dialogue, Eclogue, Heroic Poem, and the rest—with the equally well-known examination afterwards of celebrated examples in a shamefaced kind of way—to the extent of two whole volumes for poetry, and a third (actually the fourth) for prose. Finally, we have what is really a separate tractate, De la Construction Oratoire. The details in these later volumes are often excellent; but obviously, and per se, they fall into quite a lower rank as compared with the first. If we were to look at nothing but the fact, frankly acknowledged by Batteux, that he is now considering French classical literature only, we should be able to detect the error. In his first volume he had at least referred to Milton.
In other words Batteux, like the rest of them, is not so much a halter between two opinions as a man who has deliberately made up his mind to abide by one, but who will let in as much of the other as he thinks it safe to do, or cannot help doing. His incompleteness. Let him once extend his principle of observation in time, country, and kind, and, being a reasonably ingenious and ingenuous person, he must discover, first, that his elaborate double-check system of Rule and Taste will not work, and, secondly, that there is not the least need of it. You must charge epicycle on cycle before you can get, even with the freest play of Taste, the Iliad and the Æneid and the Orlando to work together under any Rule. Epicycle must be added to epicycle before you can get in the Chanson de Roland and the Morte d’Arthur as well. Drop your “rule,” ask simply, “Are the things put before me said poeticamente?” “Do they give me the poetic pleasure?” and there is no further difficulty. Batteux, though, as we have seen, by no means a bigot, would probably have stopped his ears and rent his clothes if such a suggestion had been made to him.
Batteux is a remarkable, and probably the latest, example of neo-classicism sitting at ease in Zion and promulgating laws for submissive nations; in La Harpe, with an even stronger dogmatism, we shall find, if not the full consciousness that the enemy is at the gates of the capital, at any rate distinct evidence of knowledge that there is sedition in the provinces.[[692]] Marmontel. Between the two, Marmontel[[693]] is a distinguished, and a not disagreeable, example of that middle state which we find everywhere in the late eighteenth century but which in France is distinguished at once by greater professed orthodoxy, and by concessions and compromises of a specially tell-tale kind. The critical work of the author of Bélisaire and Les Incas is very considerable in bulk. He has written an Essay on Romance in connection with the two very “anodyne” examples of the kind just referred to; an Essay (indeed two essays) on Taste; many book reviews for the Observateur Littéraire, &c.; prefaces and comments for some specimens of French early seventeenth-century drama—Mairet’s Sophonisbe, Du Ryer’s Scévole, &c.; and, besides other things, a mass of articles on literary and critical subjects for the Encyclopédie, which are generally known in their collected form as Éléments[Éléments] de Littérature. He has been rather variously judged as a critic. There is no doubt that he is a special sinner in that perpetual gabble about la vertu, la morale, and the rest, which is so sickening in the whole group; and which more than justified Mr Carlyle’s vigorous apostrophe, “Be virtuous, in the Devil’s name and his grandmother’s, and have done with it!” He has also that apparent inconsistency, something of which (as we have seen once for all in Dryden’s case) often shows itself in men of alert literary interests who do not very early work out for themselves a personal literary creed, and who are averse to swallowing a ready-made one. But at the same time he never openly quarrels with neo-classicism, and is sometimes one of its most egregious spokesmen; while he is “philosophastrous,” in the special eighteenth-century kind, to a point which closely approaches caricature. Oddities and qualities of his criticism. I have quoted elsewhere, but must necessarily quote again here, his three egregious and pyramidal reasons[[694]] for the puzzling excellence of English poetry. Either, it seems, the Englishman, being a glory-loving animal, sees that poetry adds to the lustre of nations, and so he goes and does it; or being naturally given to meditation and sadness, he needs to be moved and distracted by the illusions of this beautiful art; or [Shade of Molière!] it is because his genius in certain respects is proper for Poesy.
To comment on this would only spoil it; but let it be observed that Marmontel does admit the excellence of English poetry. So also, though he never swerves, in consciousness or conscience, from neo-classic orthodoxy, he insinuates certain doubts about Boileau, and quotes,[[695]] at full length, two pieces of the despised Ronsard as showing lyrical qualities in which the legislator of Parnassus is wanting. His article Poétique is, considering his standpoint, a quite extraordinarily just summary and criticism of the most celebrated authorities on the subject—Aristotle, Horace, Vida, Scaliger, Castelvetro, Vauquelin, Boileau, Le Bossu, Gravina, &c.—and the attitude to Boileau,[[696]] visible, as has been said, elsewhere, is extremely noteworthy. Marmontel speaks of Despréaux with compliments: but some, even of his praises, are not a little equivocal, and he contrives to put his subject’s faults with perfect politeness indeed, but without a vestige of compromise. Boileau, he says, gives a precise and luminous notion of all the kinds, but he is not deep on a single one: his Art may contribute to form the taste if it be well understood, but to understand it well one must have the taste already formed.
It would be possible, of course,—indeed, very easy,—to select from Marmontel’s abundant critical writings, which covered great part of a long lifetime in their composition, a bundle of “classical” absurdities which would leave nothing to desire. But the critic is almost always better than his form of creed. He takes an obviously genuine, if of necessity not at first a thoroughly well instructed, interest in the Histoire du Théâtre of the Frères Parfait, the first systematic[[697]] dealing with old French literature since Fauchet and Pasquier: his Essai sur les Romans, though of course considered du côté moral, is, for his date, a noteworthy attempt in that comparative and historical study of literature which was to lead to the new birth of criticism. It is most remarkable to find him, in the early reviews of his Observateur,[[698]] dating from the midst of the fifth decade of the eighteenth century, observing, as to Hamlet in La Place’s translation, that the ghost-scene and the duel with Laertes inspire terror and pathetic interest at the very reading, asking why “our poets” should deny themselves the use of these great springs of the two tragic passions, admiring the taste and justice of the observations to the players, and actually finding Titus Andronicus, though “frightful and sanguinary,” a thing worth serious study. That it is possible to extract from these very places, as from others, the usual stuff about Shakespeare’s “want of order and decency,” &c., is of no moment. This is matter of course: it is not matter of course that, in the dead waist and middle of the eighteenth century, a French critic should write of the description of Cleopatra on the Cydnus: “Ce morceau présente Shakespeare sous un nouveau point de vue. On n’a connu jusqu'à présent que la force du génie de cet auteur: on ne s’attendait pas à tant de délicatesse et de légèreté.”[[699]]
I should like to dwell longer on Marmontel if it were only for two or three phrases which appear in one short article,[[700]] “Depuis que Pascal et Corneille, Racine et Boileau ont épuré et appauvri la langue de Marot et de Montaigne.... Boileau n’avait pas reçu de la nature l’organe avec lequel on sent les beautés simples et touchantes de notre divin fabuliste [La Fontaine of course].... Il est à souhaiter qu’on n’abandonne pas ce langage du bon vieux temps ... on ferait un joli dictionnaire des mots qu’on a tort d’abandonner et de laisser vieillir.” It must be clear to any one who reads these phrases that there is the germ of mil-huit-cent-trente in them—the first and hardly certain sound of the knell of narrow, colourless vocabulary and literature in France. But enough has probably been said. It would be difficult to make out a case for Marmontel as in any way a great critic. He has not cleared his mind of cant enough for that. But he is an instance, and an important instance, of the way in which the clearing agents were being gradually thrown into the minds of men of letters at this time, and of the reaction which they were—at first partially and accidentally—producing. Even his Essai sur le Goût, fantastically arbitrary as it is, wears at times almost an air of irony, as if the writer were really exposing the arbitrariness and the convention of the thing he is ostensibly praising. He is comparing and tasting, not simply deducing: and however much he may still be inclined to think with his master that the Satan, Sin, and Death piece is an unimaginable horror, and the citizen scenes in Shakespeare’s Roman plays a vulgar excrescence, he is far from the obstinate sublimity-in-absurdity of La Harpe. He at least does not hold that a beauty, not according to rule, has no business to be a beauty; that the tree is not to be judged by the fruit, but the fruit by the ticket on the tree.
In the mare magnum of critical writing at this period, constantly fed by books, literary periodicals, academic competitions, and what not, it would be idle to attempt to chronicle drops—individuals who are not in some special way interesting or representative. Others. It would be especially idle because—for reasons indicated more than once in passing already—the bulk of the criticism of this time in France is really of little value, being as doctrine make-believe, and destitute of thoroughness, and as appreciation injured by narrowness of reading and want of true literary interest. It cannot have been quite accidental, although the great collaborative Histoire de la Littérature Française of the late M. Petit de Julleville is not a model of methodic adequacy, that there is no strictly critical chapter in the volume on the eighteenth century. Thomas, Suard, &c. Take, for instance, two such representative men as Suard and Thomas, both of them born near the beginning of the second generation of the century, and therefore characteristic of its very central class and crû. Both enjoyed almost the highest reputation in the second rank. Marmontel somewhere speaks of Thomas’s Essai sur les Éloges as the best piece of critical inquiry which had appeared since Cicero on the Orator; but it is fair to remember that Thomas had refused to stand against Marmontel for the Academy. Suard, for many years Secretary of the Academy itself, seriously endeavoured, and was by his contemporaries thought not to have endeavoured in vain, to make that office a sort of Criticship Laureate or King’s Remembrancership of Literature. He has left volumes on volumes of critical work; and even now prefaces, introductions, &c., from his pen may be found in the older class of standard editions of French classics. Yet the work of neither of these would justify us in doing more than refer to them in this fashion. It is excellently written in the current style, inclining to declamation and solemnity in Thomas,[[701]] to persiflage and smartness in Suard. It says what an academic critic of the time was supposed to say, and knows what he was supposed to know. But it really is, in Miss Mills’ excellent figure, “the desert of Sahara,” and a desert without many, if any, oases.
La Harpe is a different person. He is not very kind to Batteux. La Harpe. He patronises his principles, and allows his scholarship to be sound; but finds fault with his style, calls his criticism commune—“lacking in distinction” is perhaps the best equivalent—his ideas narrow, and his prejudices pedantic. It would not be quite just to say De te fabula, but this is almost as much as we could say if we were judging La Harpe, after his own fashion of judgment, from a different standpoint. But the historian cannot judge thus. La Harpe is really an important person in the History of Criticism. He “makes an end,” as Mr Carlyle used to say; in other words, whether he is or is not the last eminent neo-classical critic of France, he puts this particular phase of criticism as sharply and as effectively as it can be put. Nay, he does even more than this for us; he shows us neo-classicism at bay. Already, by the time of his later lectures, when by the oddest coincidence he was defending Voltaire and abusing Diderot, making head at once against the Jacobins and against that party of revived mediævalism which was the surest antidote to Jacobinism, there were persons—Népomucène Lemercier, and others—who held that Boileau and Racine had killed French poetry. Against these La Harpe takes up his testimony; and the necessity of opposition makes it all the more decided.
His Cours de Littérature is a formidable—I had almost called it an impossible—book to tackle, composed of, or redacted from, the lectures of many years, and unfortunately, though not unnaturally, dwelling most fully on the parts of the subject that are of least real importance. His Cours de Littérature. Its first edition[[702]] was a shelf-full in itself. It now fills, with some fragments, nearly the whole of three great volumes of the Panthéon Littéraire, and nearly two-thirds, certainly three-fifths, of this are devoted to the French literature of the eighteenth century, a subject for which, to speak frankly, it may be doubted whether any posterity will have time corresponding to spare. Even in the earlier and more general parts there are defects, quite unconnected with the soundness or unsoundness of La Harpe’s general critical position. There is nothing which one should be slower to impute, save on the very clearest evidence, than ignorance of a subject of which a writer professes knowledge; and one should be slow, not merely on general principles of good manners, but because there is nothing which the baser kind of critic is so ready to impute. But I own that, after careful reading and reluctantly, I have come to the conclusion that La Harpe’s knowledge of the classics left a very great deal to desire. That, in his survey of Epic, he omits Apollonius Rhodius in his proper place altogether and puts him in a postscript, might be a mere oversight, negligible by all but the illiberal: unfortunately the postscript itself shows no signs of critical appreciation. It is more unfortunate still that he should say that all the writers of ancient Rome loaded Catullus with eulogy, when we know that Horace only spares him a passing sneer, that Quintilian has no notice for anything but his “bitterness,” and that hardly anybody but Martial does him real justice. However, we need not dwell on this. If La Harpe was not very widely or deeply read in old-world or in old-French literature, he certainly knew the French literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries very well indeed.
On the other hand, it is significant, and awkward, that, in dealing with English, German, and other modern literatures, he always seems to refer to translations, and hardly ever ventures a criticism except on the mere matter of the poem. His critical position as ultimus suorum. Moreover, which is of even more importance for us, he was not in the slightest doubt about his point of view either of these or of any other literature. His censures and his praises are adjusted with almost unerring accuracy to the neo-classic creed, as we have defined and illustrated it in this volume. His Introduction pours all the scorn he could muster on those who contemn the art of writing. Even Shakespeare, coarse as he is, was not without learning. That poet, Dante, and Milton executed “monstrous” works; but in these monsters there were some beautiful parts done according to “the principles.” And, to do him justice, he never swerves or flinches from this. English has “an inconceivable pronunciation.”[[703]] The Odyssey is an Arabian Nights’ tale, puerile, languid, seriously extravagant, even ignoble in parts. The sojourns with Calypso and Circe offer nothing interesting to La Harpe. The wonderful descent to Hades is as bad as that of Æneas is admirable. La Harpe tells us that these and other similar judgments are proofs of his severe frankness. They certainly are; he has told us what he is.
That after this he should pronounce the Georgics “the most perfect poem transmitted to us by the Ancients”; fix on the Prometheus his favourite epithet of “monstrous,” and say that it “cannot even be called a tragedy”; think Plutarch thoroughly justified in his censure of Aristophanes; read Thucydides with less pleasure than Xenophon; and decide that Apuleius wrote vers le moyen age, which was un désert,—these things do not surprise us, nor that he should tolerate Ossian after not tolerating Milton. It is in his fragment on the last-named poet that he gives us his whole secret, with one of those intentional, yet really unconscious, bursts of frankness which have been already noticed. “La poésie,” he says, “ne doit me peindre que ce que je peux comprendre, admettre, ou supposer.” That “suspension of disbelief” in which, at no distant date, Coleridge was to discover the real poetic effect would, it is clear, have been vehemently resisted and refused by La Harpe, or rather it could never have entered his head as possible.
He remains therefore hopelessly self-shut out of the gates of Poetry—only admitting and comprehending those beauties which stray into the precinct of Rhetoric; discerning with horror “monsters” within the gates themselves; and in his milder moments conjecturing charitably that, if Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton had only always observed the rules, which they sometimes slipped into, they might have been nearly as good poets—he will not say quite—as Racine and Voltaire. Never have we met, nor shall we ever meet again, a critical Ephraim so utterly joined to idols. It is unnecessary—it would even be useless—to argue about him; he must be observed, registered, and passed. Yet I do not pretend to regret the time which I have myself spent over him. He writes well; he sees clearly through his “monstrous” spectacles and subject to their laws; above all, he has, what is, for some readers at any rate, the intense and unfailing charm of “Thorough.” He is no cowardly Braggadochio or inconstant Paridell: he is Sansfoy and Sansloy in one—defending his Duessa, and perfectly ready to draw sword and spend blood for her at any moment. Nor does he wield the said sword by any means uncraftsmanly. Give him his premisses and his postulates, his Rules, his false Reason and sham Nature, his criterion of the admissible and comprehensible, and he very seldom makes a false conclusion. Would that all Gloriana’s own knights were as uncompromising, as hardy, and as deft!
Of the immense mass of Academic Éloges, and prize Essays generally, composed during the eighteenth century, no extended or minute account will be expected here. The Academic Essay. I have myself, speaking without the slightest exaggeration, read hundreds of them: indeed it is difficult to find a French man of letters, of any name during the whole time, in whose works some specimens of the kind do not figure. But—and it is at once a reason for dealing with them generally and a reason for not dealing with them as individuals—there is hardly any kind of publication which more fatally indicates the defects of the Academic system, and of that phase of criticism and literary taste of which it was the exponent. They were written in some cases—it is but repeating in other words what has been just said—by men of the greatest talent; they constituted with a play of one kind or another, the almost invariable début of every Frenchman who had literary talent, great or small. They exhibit a relatively high level of a certain kind of literary, or at least rhetorical, attainment. But the last adjective has let slip the dogs on them, for they are almost always rhetorical in the worst senses of the word. Extensive reading in literature was not wanted by the forty guards of the Capitol; original thinking was quite certain to alarm them. The elegant nullity of the Greek Declamation, and the ampullæ of the Roman, were the best things that were likely to be found. Yet sometimes in literature, as in philosophy, the Academic Essay produced remarkable things. And we may give some space to perhaps its most remarkable writer towards the close of the time, a writer symptomatic in the very highest degree, as showing the hold which neo-classic ideas still had in France—that is to say, Rivarol.[[704]]
That “the St George of the epigram” might have been really great as a critic there can be little doubt; besides lesser exercises in this vocation, which are always acute if not always quite just, he has left us two fairly solid Essays, and a brilliant literary “skit,” to enable us to judge. Rivarol. The last of the three, the Almanach des Grands Hommes de nos jours, does, with more wit, better temper, and better manners, what Gifford was to do a little later in England; it is a sort of sprinkling of an anodyne but potent Keating’s powder on the small poets and men of letters of the time just before the Revolution. But the treatise De l’Universalité de la Langue Française, laid before the Academy of Berlin in 1783, and the Preface to the writer’s Translation of the Inferno, are really solid documents. Both are prodigies of ingenuity, acuteness, and command of phrase, conditioned by want of knowledge and by parti pris. How praise Dante better than by saying that Italian took in his hands “une fierté qu’elle n’eut plus après lui”?[[705]] how better describe what we miss even in Ariosto, even in Petrarch? Yet how go further astray than in finding fault with the Inferno because “on ne rencontre pas assez d’épisodes”?[[706]] What a critical piercing to the joints and marrow of the fault of eighteenth-century poetry is the remark that Dante’s verses “se tiennent debout par la seule force du substantif et du verbe sans le concours d’une seule épithète!” And what a falling off is there when one passes from this to the old beauty-and-fault jangles and jars!
The Universality of French[[707]] has many points of curiosity; but we must abide by those which are strictly literary. The temptation of the style to rhetoric, and, at the same time, “the solace of this sin,” could hardly be better shown than in Rivarol’s phrasing of the radical and inseparable clearness of French, as “une probité attachée à son génie.”[[708]] How happy is the admission that poets of other countries “give their metaphors at a higher strength,” “embrace the figurative style closer,” and are deeper and fuller in colour! Yet the history, both of French and English literature, given in each case at some length, is inadequate and incorrect, the comparisons are childish, and the vaticinations absurd. In fact, Rivarol was writing up to certain fixed ideas, the chief of which was that the French literature of 1660-1780 was the greatest that had ever existed—perhaps that ever could exist—in the world.
This notion—to which it is but just to admit that other nations had given only too much countenance and support, though England and Germany at least were fast emancipating themselves—and the numbing effect of the general neo-classic creed from which it was no very extravagant deduction, mar a very large proportion[[709]] of French criticism during the century, and, almost without exception, the whole of what we here call its orthodox criticism. So long as it, or anything like it, prevails in any country, at any time, the best criticism is impossible; the “He followeth not us” interferes with all due appreciation.[[710]]
[649]. The standard edition of Fontenelle (8 vols., Paris, 1790) is an agreeable book, excellent in print and paper.
[650]. Op. cit. sup., especially Part I., chaps, ix. and xi.
[651]. Though there is a good deal of the critical spirit in him, too, and the famous advice to “Bélier, mon ami” has fellows of critical application.
[652]. Œuvres, ed. cit., i. 234.
[653]. Œuvres, i. 249.
[654]. Ibid., p. 270. The Dialogues, it should perhaps be said, appeared first, as early as 1683.
[655]. Ed. cit., iii. 1-67.
[656]. Ed. cit., iii. 181.
[657]. As if, however, to show that one must never speak of Fontenelle without reserves, there are some extremely interesting things here also. For instance, the characteristic malice, with a serious and sensible side to it, of the law that the sentiments and language of the artificial pastoral shall bear the same relation to nature as ces habits que l’on prend dans des ballets pour représenter les paysans.
[658]. My copy is the Œuvres (Paris, 1754) in 10 vols. (the first divided into two parts).
[659]. The main documents of which are Madame Dacier’s Traité des causes de la corruption du goût (Paris, 1714) and La Motte’s Réflexions sur la Critique, which will be found in the third volume of the ed. just mentioned.
[660]. In his Premier Discours sur la Tragédie, ed. cit. sup., iv. 23 sq.
[661]. 4 vols., Paris, 1720-1731.
[662]. Op. cit. inf., I. xx.
[663]. 3 vols., Paris, 1730.
[664]. I have found him repeatedly quoted in those interesting early gropings of the German nonage, which will be referred to in the next chapter. Had he anything to do with Lady Mary W. Montagu’s tormentor, Rémond?
[665]. 5 vols., Amsterdam, 1750. It is rather too pretty, and so rare. But it is in the British Museum: and I have a copy (which I owe to the kindness of Mr Gregory Smith) of the Réflexions (v. inf.) It has only initials (“R. D. S. M.”) on the title-page.
[666]. i. 65, ed. cit. The Dialogues themselves had appeared as early as 1711.
[667]. The Réflexions sur la poésie suivies de lettres, &c., had originally appeared in 1733-34 at The Hague. The passage is this: On y rapproche de nous les objets qui sont les plus éloignés—on leur donne du corps—on les anime. Toute la Nature est agitée des mêmes passions que nous.
[668]. 6 vols., Paris, 1808. For in this kind of work one must often read six volumes to justify the writing of six lines. And Racine, to do him justice, if not a great genius, is no small symptom. When a Frenchman of his time and associations reads Milton reverently, something will happen soon.
[669]. 2 vols., Paris, 1719. In English by T. Nugent: 3 vols., 1748.
[670]. Op. cit., Part I., § 35. His justest strictures are on the extravagantly syllabic quality of French prosody, and its neglect of quantity. His ear seems to have been good for rhythm, bad for rhyme.
[671]. Why did he think that Hudibras was written par un homme de la maison Hovvart? [i.e., Howard] (i. 132). I may note here that Père Andrè, with his Essai sur le Beau, is postponed, as a pure Æsthetician, to the next volume.
[672]. Pensées Diverses (Œuvres, ed. Laboulaye, Paris, 1875, 7 vols., or with Vian’s Life 8), vii. 171.
[673]. It has been thought that this passage, as glancing at the Henriade, was one of the reasons of Voltaire’s affection for Montesquieu. It is perhaps worth observing that there is a strong resemblance, with some minor differences, between Montesquieu’s attitude to literature, and that of his friend Chesterfield.
[674]. I use the thirteen-vol. ed. of the Panthéon Littéraire (Paris, 1876) because, though cumbrous individually, it is the only one that will go in moderate shelf-room.
[675]. This comes, it is true, from the Sentiments du Curé Meslier (vi. 542). But it is allowed that Voltaire rewrote this, and I should not be surprised if he did a little more.
[676]. These are to be found in more places than one: the Lettres sur les Anglais (originally Lettres Philosophiques), those to the Prince of Brunswick, the dialogue in which Rabelais figures with Lucian and Erasmus, &c.
[677]. This, the usually quoted form, runs in the Lettres sur les A., “un Rabelais dans son bon sens, et vivant en bonne compagnie.”
[678]. Ed. cit., ix. 56.
[679]. I have not thought it necessary to waste time and space by selecting additional justificatory pieces from his enormous Correspondence.
[680]. This attitude was emphasised (perhaps by his dislike of Rousseau) in his later years; and was handed on to men like Condorcet and La Harpe.
[681]. The gibe of Gautier (Caprices et Zigzags, “Un tour en Belgique”), where he calls the Sun “un astre à qui M. de Malfilâtre fait une ode trouvée admirable par D’Alembert” contains no doubt something of youthful Romantic naughtiness in it: but also something more. The ode has a frigid Akensidish grace; but there is too much about axes and orbits therein: and it is to be feared that this, rather than the poetry, attracted the philosophe critic.
[682]. His Academic Discours de Réception (Aug. 25, 1753). It is easily accessible—for instance in the Didot Œuvres Choisies, i. 19-25.
[683]. It is generally quoted “Le style c’est l’homme.” There is a further dispute whether it ought to be “de l’homme même.” For what is probably the nearest anticipation of it, v. sup., p. [336].
[684]. So again in the remark, not made formally, but often thrown in his face, that certain verses were “as fine as fine prose.” But this heresy, as readers of this volume will know, is only that of Fénelon and La Motte revived.
[685]. His literary work has only one small section to itself, the Réflexions Critiques sur quelques Poètes; but some of it appears in the Fragments, the Dialogues, and elsewhere. All is in Gilbert’s excellent edition of the Œuvres, (2 vols., Paris, 1857), some in that volume of the Didot Collection which gives Vauvenargues’ Maxims with those of La Rochefoucauld and Montesquieu.
[686]. Les Beaux Arts réduits[réduits] à un même principe, Paris, 1746; Cours de Belles-Lettres, 4 vols., Paris, 1750; Traité de la Construction Oratoire, Paris, 1764.
[687]. 5 vols., Paris, 1764. This is the edition I have used; later ones seem to be in 6 vols., but without addition so far as I know.
[688]. 2 vols., Paris, 1771.
[689]. It is perhaps right to warn the reader that this is not, I believe, the general opinion.
[690]. See on Rollin, sup., p. [509].
[691]. Op. cit., i. 60.
[692]. He, with Condorcet and M. J. Chénier, is sometimes spoken of as showing a classical reaction against the eighteenth-century toleration of English and other vagaries which we shall see in Marmontel. I think “reaction” is rather too strong a word, though “recrudescence” might do. Condorcet was only a critic par interim, if even that, nor need we occupy ourselves with him: justice shall be done (Fortune permitting) in the next volume to the person who had the honour to be brother to André Chénier.
[693]. Œuvres Complètes, 7 vols., Paris 1819; Éléments[Éléments] de Littérature by themselves, 3 vols. in the Didot Collection.
[694]. El. de Litt., article Poésie.
[695]. Ibid., art. Anacréontique.
[696]. The enemy will perhaps say, parodying Hegel: “With this historian of criticism, anybody is a critic who does not believe in Boileau.” 'A will have a little galled me: but not seriously.
[697]. I use this word not as synonymous with “methodical,” but as contrasting the book with fragmentary commentaries like those of La Monnoye and Le Duchat.
[698]. These will be found in vol. vii. of ed. cit.
[699]. M. Texte must have forgotten these remarkable passages, or perhaps not have known them, when in M. Petit de Julleville’s large History (vi. 754) he wrote that La Place’s version could only confirm readers in the idea that Shakespeare was a chaos of monstrosity and triviality. Evidently it had quite a different effect on Marmontel.
[700]. Under the head Marotique.
[701]. L’emphatique Thomas, as he is duly called in that traditional distribution of epithets which is so dear to the French mind, and which helps to explain why it is always, in its depths, neo-classic.
[702]. 18 vols. (Paris, 1825 sq.)
[703]. La Harpe here anticipated the Malay chief whom Mr Wallace met in the farthest isles of the Bird of Paradise, and who chased him therefrom with contumely when he said he came from a place called “England.” “Unglung,” said the chief, was not a word that a man could pronounce. And therefore—this is La Harpe all over—there could be no such place, and Mr Wallace was a liar.
[704]. There is not, I think, even yet any complete edition of Rivarol, though M. de Lescure some years ago devoted much attention to him. All the work referred to below will be found in the older Œuvres de Rivarol (published by Delahays, Paris, 1857), with a useful selection of criticisms. The present writer contributed to the Fortnightly Review for January 1879 an essay on Rivarol and Chamfort, which will be found reprinted in Miscellaneous Essays (2nd ed., London, 1895). Chamfort himself can only be mentioned here as showing, in his Éloges on Molière and La Fontaine, how insignificant such things, written even by such a man, can be.
[705]. Ed. cit., p. 277 sq.
[706]. This is neo-classic criticism in its quintessence of corruption. What fit reader wants, or could endure, an episode between Per me si va and riveder le stelle? You might as well demand “half an hour’s interval for refreshments.” But your Epic must have your Episode. It is like “Where is your brown tree?”
[707]. Ed. cit., p. 79 sq.
[708]. This, however, is not in the Essay, but in a separate “Maxim.”
[709]. Cf., for instance, Batteux, quite a reasonable person on the whole. He has no doubt (i. 80, 81) of the excellence, the almost perfection, at which French taste has arrived; he only fears that it may be impossible to guard against falling from so high an estate. This extraordinary self-complacency is a little less noticeable in England, but only a little. When we thought that Mr Pope had improved even upon Mr Dryden, and was in a sort of Upper House of Literature as compared with Shakespeare and Chaucer, we could not throw many stones at those who considered Voltaire a better poet than Ronsard.
[710]. The corresponding chapter to this in that “History of Critical Ana,” which we must not write, would be particularly rich. Every branch of French literature at the time is full of such things; the most amusing of all, perhaps, being Crébillon’s malicious eulogy-satire on Marivaudage at the end of the 2nd book of L’Ecumoire, where Tanzäi condemns, and Néadarné is charmed with, the juxtaposition of words “that never met before, and thought they could not possibly get on together,” and the depicting “not merely of what everybody has done and said and thought, but of what they would like to have thought but did not!”
CHAPTER III.
CLASSICISM IN THE OTHER NATIONS.
PRELIMINARY REMARKS—TEMPORARY REVIVAL OF ITALIAN CRITICISM—GRAVINA—MURATORI: HIS ‘DELLA PERFETTA POESIA’—CRESCIMBENI—QUADRIO—THE EMERGENCE OF LITERARY HISTORY—FURTHER DECADENCE OF ITALIAN CRITICISM—METASTASIO—NEO-CLASSICISM TRIUMPHS IN SPAIN—THE ABSURDITIES OF ARTIGA—LUZÁN—THE REST UNINERESTING—FEYJÓO, ISLA, AND OTHERS—RISE AT LAST OF GERMAN CRITICISM—ITS SCHOOL TIME—CLASSICISM AT BAY ALMOST FROM THE FIRST: GOTTSCHED—THE ‘VERSUCH EINER CRITISCHEN DICHTKUNST’—ITS CHIEF IDEA—SPECIMEN DETAILS—GELLERT: HE TRANSACTS.
It would be scarcely more than one of those sweeping generalisations which attract a certain class of readers, if one were to say that, during the eighteenth century, England and France exercised a reciprocal influence over one another in literature, the results of which the remaining nations did little but imitate. Preliminary remarks. It is certainly true that, as regards the special subject of this particular Book—the criticism of orthodox neo-classicism in the eighteenth century—Germany, Italy, and Spain play a part to which justice can be very briefly done, while the rest may well be silence. Nor will Spain and Italy at least have much more to give us when, and if, in the next volume, we turn from the setting to the rising sun. But it will be very different with Germany, where almost the entire interest lies in the restless struggles and obstinate questioning which lead to Romanticism, and which practically show themselves from the very moment when the Swiss School aroused German criticism from its long sleep after Opitz. What has to be said of the Gottscheds and Gellerts of the Northern Country had better be said last, so as to bring the matter into closer juxtaposition with the account of the Romantic Revolt itself. Italy (which has some interest in at least the beginning of the century) and Spain, which has very little in any part of it, must be taken first.
For some reason, or for none, the closing years of the seventeenth century, and the opening of the eighteenth, in Italy saw a very considerable revival of that critical spirit which, as we know, had died away so strangely, after its vigorous flourishing a hundred years earlier. Temporary revival of Italian Criticism. It is true that this new Italian criticism is of a rather tell-tale kind—that it is, in great part at least, criticism of erudition and of retrospect. But Gravina, Muratori, Crescimbeni, and even Quadrio, form a group of no small interest. The first is a real critic of great, if not always well-directed, ability; the second, something of a real critic too, with amazing erudition; the third, the author of the first really literary history of a national literature; and the fourth, the first pioneer—no Lynceus, certainly, but still a pioneer-guide—in the ways of general and comparative literary study.
Gianvincenzo Gravina is one of those persons who particularly invite the student to idle ægri somnia as to what they might have been in other times and circumstances. Gravina. A lawyer, a littérateur, the adoptive father of Metastasio, the joint founder of the Arcadian Academy, a critic of remarkable shrewdness, who wrote excellent things on tragedy, and thought his own bad tragedies excellent—he tempts one strangely. His most famous and most often quoted critical work is Della Ragion Poetica,[[711]] but it is necessary, in order to appreciate his criticism, to go to his Works[[712]] and read also the Della Tragedia and the Discorso delle Favole. The total effect is, as with most other eighteenth-century critics, a conclusion that the writer has not “found his way”: though he is nearer to it than some others writing later. The Della Ragion Poetica is a most interesting labyrinth of cross-purposes. The strongly scholastic character of Italian serious thought, which we have noticed in Rinaldini only a few years earlier,[[713]] betrays itself in Gravina’s opening del vero e del falso; del reale e del finto; and in an episodic discussion of the origin of Idolatry, which may seem absolutely preposterous at first sight, but which works itself into the consideration of Fable not so ill. The admirable description of Homer as “the potentest of mages and the wisest of enchanters, in that he makes use of words not so much for the complacency of the ear as for the advantage of the imagination,”[[714]] is balanced, at a page or two’s distance, by a fling at the perniciosa turba de' Romanzi. The utility of poetry is gravely insisted on, and we are invited as usual to the study of the Kinds; but section xiv., on “Popular Judgment,” is instinct with that Italian common-sense which had shown itself in various ways during the sixteenth century, through mouths so different as those of Castelvetro and Cinthio Giraldi, a sense almost epigrammatically concentrated in the phrase ne con solo popolo ne senza il popolo. In these passages of Gravina’s there is to be found, put not indeed quite clearly, but unmistakably on fair allowance, a doctrine which hardly any critic of any day has sufficiently digested—that there is something in poetry corresponding, in measure and degree, to a poetical sentiment which only needs waking in all but the exceptions of mankind. What libraries of vain or positively mischievous disquisition should we have been spared, what unintelligent laudation of Burns when the intelligent is so easy, what unintelligent depreciation of Béranger when the abstinence from it is surely not so difficult, what idle and obstinate questionings about Donne or Whitman, Macaulay or Moore, and a hundred others of the most opposite kinds, if people would only have remembered our author’s sound and sober law[[715]] that "in all men there gleams through [traspare] I know not what discernment of the Good "to which poets, if they know how, can appeal!
A large part of Gravina’s work in the Ragion consists of an actual historical survey of poets and poetry in the spirit which, as we have seen and shall see, was so prevalent in his day; and his judgments, if a little traditional, are almost always sound, whether he is dealing with the classics or with the great Renaissance group of Italian-Latin poets.[[716]] Nor should he lack due meed for the word of praise he gives to Folengo, a writer little likely to appeal to the ordinary eighteenth-century spirit. When one thinks of the extreme inadequacy of French judgments of Rabelais himself at this time, it is no small merit in Gravina to have said, of one of not the least of Rabelais’ creditors, that “he wanted only will, not strength, to write a noble poem,” and actually possessed learning, invention, and fancy. The first book of the Della Ragion Poetica ends thus with an author who must have seemed, to the usual eighteenth-century critic, nearly as sad and bad and mad as Rabelais and Shakespeare,[[717]] and in whom it is not now difficult to see much Rabelaisian and even some Shakespearian quality. The second deals with the Italian vernacular. Gravina duly admires Dante; but his elaborate apology for rhyme is noteworthy and amusing. It was the way of the eighteenth century to apologise for all sorts of things—from the Bible downwards—that were not in the least need of it. He is a little less shamefaced on the question of the vulgar tongue; and says excellent things about the De Vulgari itself—that “discourse so subtle and so true.” Indeed he conducts his whole discussion on the Vernacular, which is long, in accordance with the principles of the tractate, and gives to Dante in all nearly fifty pages, or more than half of the book, announcing his deliberate intention giudicare spediatamente of the rest from Boiardo and Ariosto downwards. The whole forms a very interesting survey of Italian poetry, though perhaps the most interesting of Gravina’s separate critical utterances is to be found, not in it but, in his short Latin Letter De Poesi to Maffei, in which he speaks of La Casa as qui alter potest haberi a Petrarca Lyricorum princeps. It is a bold saying, but not hard to justify, concerning the author of Errai gran tempo and O sonno, o de la queta.
The monumental work of Muratori in history and antiquities has overshadowed his accomplishment in literature; and some respectable books of reference hardly mention this; but it is in fact considerable. Muratori: his Della Perfetta Poesia. We have already had occasion to refer to the service that he did in editing the miscellaneous critical papers of Castelvetro, and he also did important work on the Italian Theatre; but his Della Perfetta Poesia Italiana[[718]] is a more original title-deed. There is no doubt that it had great influence: some have even thought that Luzán (v. infra, p. 548) was indebted to it for the impulse which enabled him finally to overcome the remnants of Romantic resistance in Spain, and to seat Neo-classicism at last triumphant in the country of Don Quixote. But it does not need this doubtful and reflected honour. The book is, given its lights and its time, a very good book. It accepts, without much or any demur, that notion of Good Taste which the seventeenth century excogitated and the eighteenth almost universally accepted, postponing inquiry whether it were the false Florimel or the true. But Muratori is both a historian and a philosopher; and he makes good use of both his qualifications. He contrasts, effectively enough, the supposed infallibility of Petrarch in Taste, the variety (without deserting this) of the sixteenth century, and the pessimo gusto of that which had just closed when he wrote. He will have it that Poetry is “a daughter and servant of Moral Philosophy”—in which case it must be sadly admitted that the mother is too often not justified of the daughter, and that the service is not seldom unprofitable. But he comes (perhaps inspired by Tasso) nearer to universal acceptance when he tells us that Poetic Beauty is “a new and marvellously delightful Truth,” and he is specially copious on the Fancy—so much so that one imagines it not impossible that Addison may have seen the treatise, more particularly as there is much about “True and False Wit” in the Second Book of the Perfetta Poesia. He is, in his Third Book, liberal on the question of Useful or Delightful—the latter will do very well if it is healthy delight[[719]]—and he discusses the defects of poets, and the various parts of poetry, with sense and discrimination. All this is of course still too much “in the air”; it makes the old mistake of taking for granted that poesis can be in some way strained off, or distilled from, poeta and poema. But this defect is to some extent repaired in the sequel, and the whole is a book far from despicable. The chief defect of it (a defect which extends also to Gravina) is the absence of comparative criticism—of the attempt, at least, to study literature as a whole.
The two historians, especially Quadrio, are freer from this defect, though by no means free from it; but they compensate for this advantage by a much weaker dose of really critical spirit. Crescimbeni. Crescimbeni is not an unimportant figure in the History of his own literature, to which he contributed, after writing in 1700 on La Bellezza del Volgar Poesia, a regular work[[720]] on the whole subject as far as poetry is concerned. Part, and the best part, of this is made up of a refashioning of the Bellezza. Its contents, which are not contemptible, though too like much that we have already gone through to require minute attention, are almost indicated by its title—an enumeration of poetical beauties, cautions against defects and mistakes in the application of them, and the usual analysis of Kinds. The rest of the book is a really valuable literary encyclopædia, with extracts, commentaries, lists, indices, &c., “all very capital” in their own way, but somewhat out of ours.
If Quadrio seems to invite more attention, it is partly because of his goodly bulk which fills the eye, and partly because of the oddity of some of his judgments, but partly also (in a third part) because he really intends to be critical, and because he extends his view far beyond Italian. Quadrio. The Della Storia e della Ragione d’Ogni Poesia[[721]] is a sufficiently ambitious attempt; and I do not think I know anything of the kind, by a single man, which is at any rate more voluminous. Seven big quartos, tightly packed, give Quadrio ample room and verge enough for proceedings alike methodical and far-ranging in their method; and his Distinzioni—the sub-divisions of his Books—leave few things unattempted. He is able to include both branches of Patrizzi’s old division, Disputata and Istoriale, and he extends the purview of the latter as widely as he can, if not as happily. The good faith, and the less than doubtful judgment, of some of his excursions will be sufficiently, and here most interestingly, demonstrated by some instances from his English notes. After devoting great space to the usual general questions of the nature, origin, position, &c., of poetry, he has a proportionately large distribution of Kinds, extending not merely into Acrostic-land but into Cento and Macaronic. He deals further with Poetic Art and Poetic Fury, and, in successive Distinzioni, with Plot and Manners, Erudition, Verse in general, Italian verse, &c. Then he attacks the actual contents of his subject, and devotes the whole of a volume of 800 pages to “Melic” or Lyric poetry. It cannot but be interesting to the reader to note who represented English Lyric poetry to the eyes of a learned and laborious Italian Jesuit in the second quarter of the eighteenth century; but it is pretty safe to say that not one of a hundred guessers would name the trio in a hundred guesses each. They are Gower, “Arthur Kelton,” and “Wicherley.”[[722]]
He proceeds through all the divisions in the same way. His notice of Shakespeare is obviously a recollection of the milder view of Voltaire, who was a friend of Quadrio’s. Dryden wrote a “tragedy” entitled King Arthur; Addison is treated at length, and with evident sympathy, as well as with at least more direct knowledge than that shown of “Il Benjanson” (sic). There is a whole chapter on Milton, in which Rapin and the Chevalier Ramsay[[723]] are quoted. The critic is aware of (let us hope he had not read) Glover’s Leonidas; and he is naturally copious on Pope, though his section on The Rape of the Lock shades itself off in the oddest manner into a Discourse on Hair, with references to Apuleius and the obliging Fotis, to Dion Chrysostom, and to Firenzuola. But Chaucer and Spenser are not (unless I have missed them) discussed by the citer of Arthur Kelton.
Of course there is no need to laugh at Quadrio; and if we do it must be done only in the most good-humoured and politest way possible. Doubtless we all make mistakes in dealing with foreign Literatures; and those of us who have dealt most with them have doubtless sinned most. But what is important to notice here about the Historian of All Poetry is—first, that he has shrewdly seen and manfully accepted, if not the necessity, at least the immense advantage, of comparative literary study; and secondly, that while emancipating himself to this extent, he is still under the domination of Kinds. If he had gone to A. Kelton himself, and had examined that worthy’s works—not to range him under Melic or Epic or anything quod exit in ’ic, but—to see whether he wrote good or bad poetry, he would at least have been in a fairer way of escape. But the mania for Kind- and Subject-division, instead of studying poetic treatment, can hardly be better illustrated than in Quadrio, whose schedule of narrative poetry, for instance, is as complicated and as meticulous as a Government return.
Yet the value of his attempt, and in a less degree of Crescimbeni’s, is very great: and it perhaps exceeds in general critical importance the results of the exercise of the superior talent of Muratori and Gravina. The emergence of literary history. These latter said more noteworthy things than the others: but they said them in a kind of criticism which, to speak our best for it, had already done all the good that was in it to do. Nay, their method of handling was likely to stand in the way of real critical advance or recovery, not to help it. Crescimbeni and Quadrio, especially the latter, recognised indeed, if they did not themselves quite understand, or lay down in so many words for the instruction of others, the great fact that before all things, and for some time at any rate instead of all things, it was time for criticism to “take stock”—that instead of theorising at large, and controlling the theory at best by a partial study of the classics and a very limited and arbitrary selection of the literature of the student’s own country, it was time for him to take the whole of that literature, to compare it with the whole of the classics, and, so far as he possibly could, with the whole of foreign modern literature as a third standard. That is practically what we have been doing for nearly two hundred years past, more or less—for more than a hundred years past, pretty steadily and with a will. It is not done yet; and it never can be done wholly, because every generation and every country adds, in its varying measure and degree, fresh supplies of matter which cannot be digested all at once, but which must sooner or later be added to the rest, and may affect conclusions drawn from that rest, as vitally as did the work of Dante or that of Shakespeare. But it has been done, and is being done, after a fashion in which, before the time of these two Italian historians, it had hardly been done by anybody.
The promise, however, of this group—the elder of whose members almost belong to the seventeenth century, while the youngest does not come below the middle of the eighteenth—was not fulfilled. Further decadence of Italian Criticism. Hardly a single person among the other (and chiefly later) Italian critics of the time has achieved, or, so far as I have been able to inform myself, has deserved to achieve, any great reputation. Tiraboschi indeed continued the merely historical part of Crescimbeni’s labour with an industry probably unparalleled in any other country.[country.] Metastasio. Metastasio, in his later days, occupied himself a good deal with criticism, and at an earlier time his Estratto dell' Arte Poetica d’Aristotile[[724]] would have deserved a good deal of attention from us. At his own date Metastasio is partly an eminent example of that halting between two opinions which has been so often mentioned, partly an inheritor of others’ thoughts. He is in hardly any sense a Romantic; yet he observes, against the Dacierian extension and hardening of Aristotle’s definition of poetry, that if this be so “it will be very difficult to find any writer who is not a poet”, and a little farther he has excogitated, or borrowed from the æestheticians, the all-important doctrine that the object of the sculptor is “not the illusion of the spectator but his own victory over the marble.” But these things are late, transitional, and, perhaps, as has been hinted, borrowed. The earlier critical work of the polygraphic, polyglottic, and polypragmatic Marquis Scipione Maffei has no distinction: and the very names[[725]] of Palesi, Salio, Denina, Zanotti are unknown to all but special students of Italian literature, and probably to not a few of these. We must come to quite modern times—to times indeed so near our own that the rule of silence as to living contemporaries may often come into operation—before we can find any heirs to the glory of Castelvetro and Patrizzi, if we can find them then.
The singularity which in so many ways besets Spanish literature shows itself, perhaps not least, in the fact that the establishment of the neo-classic creed in Spain does not take place till that creed is beginning to be, in one way or another, deserted or undermined in other countries. Neo-classicism triumphs in Spain. It must be admitted that there was some excuse for Don Ignacio de Luzán Claramunt de Suelves y Gurrea, whose Poética in 1737 argued Spain’s poetry away, far more actually than Cervantes had ever laughed away her chivalry. It has been usual to represent Luzán as a mere populariser of Boileau in Spain: but this is not just. Any one who has followed the course of reading which this book represents will see that it was the antiqua mater of Spanish criticism, Italy, which really started Luzán’s inquiries—that Muratori, and perhaps Gravina, rather than Boileau and the French schoolmen, were his masters. Indeed it seems that he had actually sketched, in Italian and in Italy (or at least Sicily), certain Ragionamenti sopra la Poesia, nearly a decade before his Spanish book appeared.
There was, it has been said, some excuse for him. The absurdities of Artiga. We have seen in the last Book that, though isolated expressions and aperçus of remarkable promise and acuteness appear in Spanish criticism of the seventeenth century, it was always impar sibi, and was constantly aiming at the establishment of a kind of illegitimate compromise between the national drama, which the critics would not give up, and the general theories of literature which they did not dare—perhaps did not wish—to impugn. In fact, this state of compromise, by yet another of the anomalies above referred to, anticipates the similar things which we see in England and in France, in Italy and in Germany, much later. At the same time, Spain had been a special victim, with Gongorism and Culteranism and Conceptism, of those contortions of the Romantic agony which, all over Europe, invited the tyranny of neo-classicism. Also its great creative period had closed for some considerable time. Lastly, there had survived in Spain a kind of childishly scholastic rhetoric, which the rest of Europe, with some slight exceptions in Italy, had long outgrown. Ticknor, the most amiable of Historians (when Protestantism is not in point), calls by the name of “a really ridiculous book” the Epitome de la Eloquencia Española of Don Francisco José Artiga or Artieda, to which he gives the date of 1725, but of which the British Museum copy bears a date more than thirty years earlier.[[726]] People are apt to be so unkind to technical Rhetorics and Poetics that I own I had a faint hope, before I actually read this book, of being able to remonstrate with the Ticknorian judgment: but no puede ser. The work is dedicated to Francesco Borgia, Duke of Gandia—the tragic elder associations of the name serving, to those who are susceptible to such things, as a sort of heightening of the farce. It consists of verse-dialogues, in octosyllabic quatrain, between a Hijo and a Padre by way of question and answer. Eloquence is angelic, celestial, ethereal, elementary, mixed, dumb, and several other things. Receipts and formulas are given for all sorts of compositions down to visiting cards: and the style of exposition may perhaps best be appreciated from an extract of two quatrains—
P. La Imágen o Icon se haze,
bosquejando una pintúra
de algúnas cosas con otras
con propriedád y hermosúra.
And a little later the Hijo says—
H. En entrambos ejempláres
resplandecen las figúras:
mostradme, si [la Apostrofe] la Adversion
encierra tanta hermosúra.
One is too apt to forget, in censuring eighteenth-century flippancy and superficiality in regard to the past, that all over Europe, more or less, this kind of childish stuff was still actually taught.
Luzán is at least not childish, though he betrays the insufficient historical examination and the hasty generalising which beset the whole school. Luzán. He devotes the principal attention of his folio,[[727]] after generalities avowedly taken from Muratori, to Epic and Tragedy, and while using complimentary words to Lope and Calderon, indicates, without doubt or hesitation, that his heart is with Corneille and Racine. It is true that he is himself—as all these Eighteenth-century “classics” are without exception, save the mere school dogmatists or the obstinate reactionaries like La Harpe—inconsistent. Mr Fitzmaurice Kelly[[728]] goes so far as to say that there is hardly a proposition in his book which is not contradicted elsewhere in it. But that he at least meant to be a neo-classic, a Unitarian, a Nicolaitan, there can be no doubt, nor any that he met with no markworthy or effectual resistance.
The rest of the Spanish criticism of the eighteenth century has, save for special students of Spanish literature, and perhaps even for them, very little interest; The rest uninteresting. and it is noticeable that, from this point, even the accomplished and indefatigable historian of the subject[[729]] practically breaks away from Spain itself, and gives a history of æsthetic ideas, not as they arose, and developed, and changed, and fell there, but rather as they went through these phases in Europe at large. The better known names of Spanish authors of the time, such as Isla and Feyjóo, have a certain right to figure here, but their literary critical work is only a part, and not a very important or interesting part, of the extension of the Aufklärung, especially in the forms which it assumed in France, to the most bigoted and conservative (except its sister Portugal) of European countries. This process, though perhaps necessary, is not in any department, political, religious, or other, particularly grateful to study; for Spain lost venerable and fascinating illusions—if illusions they were—to gain a very shallow, dubious, and second-rate civilisation and enlightenment. And this was almost more the case in literature than anywhere else.
Feyjóo’s Teátro Crίtico, a series of Essays published between 1726 and 1738, and his Letters, which after a short interval he began in 1742, and continued at intervals for eighteen years more, are more philosophical and “moral,” in the French sense, than literary. The rest uninteresting. But the “Spanish Hotel de Rambouillet”—the “Academy of good taste” which met about the middle of the century at the house of the Countess de Lemos—included not only Luzán, but another littérateur of high rank, Luis José Velasquez, Marquis of Valdeflores, with Nasarre y Ferriz, and others. The whole school was rather anti-national, but Gregorio Mayáns y Siscar, their contemporary, did great service to Spanish literature by publishing the Origins, to which we have been indebted above,[[730]] and some by compiling a Rhetoric, traditional enough, but not specially “Gallo”-Classic. The famous Father Isla not only attacked the remnants of extravagant style, which had sought refuge in the Spanish pulpit, in Fray Gerundio, the one Spanish book of this time, which became a European possession, but left unpublished other critical work, especially in his poem of Ciceron, much of which is satirically critical of literature. Isla was probably more of a patriot than of a critic in his well-known attempt to claim Gil Blas for Spain, not merely in suggestion but in direct original. Nor should we omit to mention with honour, as members of that invaluable class of restorers of ancient literature which arose in almost all countries in the latter half of the century, Sedano of the Spanish Parnassus, Sanchez of the Poesias Anteriores al Siglo XV, and Sarmiento, the first general Historian of Old Spanish Poetry. Their work was, if a somewhat slow, a sure and certain antidote to the Gallicism of Moratin (Luzán’s chief successor) and others of the later time.[[731]]
Despite some exceptions (which only prove the rule rather more than is usual), and despite the immense dead-lift which at one time they gave, or helped to give, to criticism, the Germans have never been very good critics. Rise at last of German Criticism. There has always been too much in them of the girl in the fable who jumped on the floor to hunt mice, instead of attending to the more important business and pleasure of the occasion. And though that dead-lift which has been referred to began extremely early in the eighteenth century, its history belongs to our next volume. It is, indeed, less easy to effect the separation which our plan demands here than anywhere else; for hardly had German vernacular criticism begun to exert itself once more, after its long inertia since Opitz, than the double current of abstract æstheticism, and of study of Romantic literature, began to appear. But it would be impossible to omit from a gallery or panorama of Neo-classicism such a typical specimen of the perruque as Gottsched, such an eminent example of the “man who looks over his shoulder” as Gellert. And though we must leave substantive dealings with Bodmer, Breitinger, and their fellows and followers to that early division of the next volume in which, with leave of Nemesis, Germany will be compensated for the little pride of place she has hitherto enjoyed, it will be very proper here at least to mention the singular and interesting process of novitiate by which the Germans vindicated their character as the good boys of technical education; and, by sheer hard study and omnivorous reading, put the national abilities into a condition to turn out a Lessing and a Goethe.
The means—sufficiently obvious, but not often resorted to save by those nations which have not “decayed through pride”—were those of abundant translation from the more forward vernaculars, as well as from the classics. Its school time. The German Sammlungen of the first half of the eighteenth century[[732]] are very interesting things. From French, from English, from the Latin writings of the previous century, they selected, and batched together, critical tractates which they thought might do them good, taking these to heart with Aristotle and Horace, with Boileau and Vida. That the assemblage had sometimes something of a “Groves of Blarney” character—that people like Camusat[[733]] find themselves jostling Pope and Addison among writers of Belles-Lettres, and Vossius and Casaubon among scholars, mattered not so very much. Manure, seed, patterns (to take various lines of metaphor) were what the German mind wanted; and it received them in plenty, and certainly not without good result.
There are some very good authorities[[734]] who do not see much difference between Gottsched and his adversaries of the Swiss school, Bodmer and Breitinger. Classicism at bay almost from the first: Gottsched. I am not able to agree with them. That there are characteristics in common nobody can deny,—that Gottsched is of the evening and Bodmer and Breitinger of the morning of the same day on the older arrangement, I do most sincerely think. And “the German Johnson”—so echt-deutsch and so little Johnsonian—is much too characteristic and agreeable a figure not to have some substantive place here. It is interesting no doubt—and it would give an excellent subject for one of the many not-to-be-written excursus of this history—that he, the analogue, to some extent, in Germany, of Johnson himself in England and of La Harpe in France, comes far earlier than these representatives of the neo-classicism which “makes an end” in countries far more accomplished in literature. But this is natural. The seventeenth century in Germany had but been one long fallow, producing nothing but not unfascinating weeds, like Lohenstein and Hoffmanswaldau, or wildings like Grimmelshausen. But, as in other cases of fallow, the rains of heaven had descended, and the winds had blown, and the worms had done their work of breaking up, and the soil, if technically “foul,” was also fertile. Its production was necessarily mixed; but it was at any rate not subject to the desperate hook of the preceptist weeder, or to the traditional courses of the orthodox agriculturist. The German man of letters of 1700-1750 had the “Y” before him as few men of letters have had.
Gottsched took the classical branch of the letter unflinchingly, and quarrelled with others, like a good party man, as he realised that they were taking the Romantic. The Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst. His Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst[[735]] is frontispieced with a striking picture of Apollo, and the Muses, and Pegasus looking benignly at Bellerophon(?), whom he is just pitching off, and Mercury, probably flying, but in appearance rather tumbling, down the Holy Hill, with a copy of Horace in his hand, and a group of critics and poets and personified Kinds of poetry waiting to receive it in ecstatic attitudes at the bottom. It has three separate dedication-pages, in the largest print, to three fair ladies of the same family,—the high-born Countess and Lady, Lady Ernestine Wilhelmine, widowed Baroness von Plotho, born Reichsgräfinn von Manteufel, “my especially gracious Countess and Lady”; the high-born Countess Johanna Henrietta Constantia, born the same, “my especially gracious Countess”; and my ditto the high-born Countess Louisa Marianne, born the same,—not to mention a beautiful Ode, several Prefaces, an Introduction, and the full text, with translation in German Alexandrines, of the Ars Poetica itself. If writer and reader do not feel themselves safe under the convoy of all these charming spells and periapts, it is surely a pity.
It would, however, be most uncritical, and entirely unjust to Gottsched, to assert or insinuate that his apparatus is mere matter of parade. Its chief idea. On the contrary, the preface to the second edition first enumerates as “the greatest connoisseurs and masters of Poetic,” Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Scaliger, Boileau, Bossu, Dacier, Perrault, Bouhours, Fénelon, Saint-Evremond, Fontenelle, La Motte, Corneille, Racine, Callières, Furetière, Shaftesbury, Addison, Steele, Castelvetro, Muralt, and Voltaire. For all of whom, except where (like Béat de Muralt, for instance) they have been reserved for reasons,[[736]] reference may be made to other pages of the present History. It afterwards specially alleges, as additional authorities, Riccoboni’s history of the Italian Stage, an anonymous Paragone della Poesia Tragica d' Italia con quella de Francia which I have not seen, Rapin, Brumoy [spelt Brumois], Hédelin, Rémond de Saint-Mard, an English anonymus[[737]] on The Taste of the Town, Ramsay, Pope, Casaubon, Heinsius, Voss, Rappolt, and Sebastian Regulus his Imitations of the First Book of the Æneis (which last I have not read and do not think I intend to read). In the Preface to the Third Edition his quarrel with the Swiss school breaks out. We shall see in future, I trust, what this school taught; it is here of chief, if not of only, import to know what, according to Gottsched, the “Zürichers” (i.e., those about Bodmer) did not teach and he did. “While I,” he says in mingled pride and indignation, “after treating of poetry in general, have dealt with all its Kinds, and given its own rules to each, so that beginners may turn them out impeccably, the Zürich poetic has nothing of the sort.” “Man would,” adds Gottsched incredulously and detesting, “thereout neither an Ode nor a Cantata, neither an Eclogue nor an Elegy, neither a Verse Epistle nor a Satire, neither an Epigram nor a Song of Praise, neither an Epic nor a Tragedy, neither a Comedy nor an Opera to make learn!”[[738]]
The Slurk-and-Pott objurgation which follows concerns us little. But the passage just quoted has real weight. For it shows how, to the absolute and half-incredulous horror of one party, and probably by the not entirely conscious or intentional purpose of the other, the battle of Rule-poetic against Appreciation-poetic had begun. To Gottsched the Art, or Science, or what-not, of Poetry is a huge schedule, which may be quite emptied of actual contents and yet retain its pre-established compartments and the rules for filling them; to his adversaries Poetry itself is a library, a treasury, a new world full of things and persons that cause, or do not cause, the poetic pleasure.
It would be unnecessary to analyse this not quite “the poor last” of Classical Poetics. Specimen details. It may be sufficient to say that Gottsched has his first or general and his second or particular book, the first dealing with the origin and growth of poetry, the character and taste of a poet, the species of poetic imitation, the Wonderful in poetry, the Admirable in poetry, and the like, the second with the usual Kinds in regular order. His occasional utterances are, at this stage of the history, of far greater importance. We find (p. 86) the sonnet classed with madrigals, rondeaux, and other “little things which are worth little.” The old German Heldengedichten are (p. 88), if not so good as Homer, Virgil, and Voltaire, yet not so bad as Marino, Ariosto, Chapelain, Saint-Amand, and Milton.[[739]] Later (p. 109), “Among Englishmen, who are specially inclined to excessive fantasy, Milton in his Paradise Lost has exhibited everything that man can possibly do in this kind of schwärmerei.” It is well to remember that the detested Zürichers were special admirers of Milton; but there is no reason to suspect Gottsched of being unduly biassed by this, either here or in the longer examination which he gives to Milton’s sins afterwards. He is almost as severe on Ariosto (p. 209), arguing with unruffled gravity that the discoveries of Astolfo (which he sums up as solemnly as a judge) are not probable, and finishing with the sad observation that the Italian’s fantasies are really more like a sick man’s dream than like the reasonable inventions of a poet.
The good Gottsched, in fact, is an apostle not so much even of classicism as of that hopeless prosaism to which classicism lent itself but too easily.[[740]] Even Voltaire is not sufficiently wahrscheinlich for him; and he asks (pp. 183, 215) in agitated tones whether Herr Voltaire, who has elsewhere such sound ideas on the Highest of Beings, has not made a mistake in the magic scenes of the Henriade? He is, however, no friend to prosaic diction, and stoutly defends what he calls (p. 263) “good florid expression,”[[741]] giving some better examples, from poets like Amthor and Flemming, than those who regard the German seventeenth century as a mere desert might expect. So long as he can get these flights under the recognised Figures, and so long as they do not outstep “the rules of prudence” (273), all is well. But the outstepping, as may be guessed, is not very far off. He finds it, under the guidance of Bouhours, in Malherbe of all remarkable places, and naturally much more in Hoffmanswaldau and Lohenstein, as well as in Ariosto and Marino and Gracián,—being as severe on galimatias and “Phébus” as he had previously (and quite justly) been against that medley of German-French which Opitz had long before condemned. There is, in fact, a good deal of sense as well as of minuteness in Gottsched’s particular rules, both as to poetry in general and as to the Kinds. In dealing with these last he gives very extensive examples, and since these are taken from a division of poetry not much in most readers’ way, they are distinctly interesting. But we must not follow him into these details; nor is it at all necessary to do so. The neo-classic critic has at least the virtue of adhering to his own rules, and observing his own type, with Horatian strictness. There is little danger of finding in him a politic Achilles, a prudent youth, or an old man who is good-humoured and does not praise the past. Gottsched says of Epic and Romance, of Comedy and Tragedy, exactly what we should expect him to say, if not exactly what we may think he ought to have said. He cannot understand how Tasso could hope to “unite this Gothic taste of chivalrous books” (p. 682) with the Greek rules of Heroic poetry; and he makes so bold as almost to rebuke the great Voltaire for according the name of Heroic poem to the Lusiad and the Araucana. But there is a characteristic note in the words, “It is time to leave the historic-critic part and come to the dogmatic,” which, it seems, we shall find—all of it—in Aristotle, Dacier, and Le Bossu. It is, in a different relation, like Balzac’s passons aux choses réelles—“Never mind the Poems: come to the Rules!”
Gellert, a pupil of Gottsched, at any rate for a time, and a pretty poet in his own way, betrays that tendency to compromise, if not actually to capitulate, which we have seen in parts of French Classicism. Gellert: he transacts. His principal critical tractate[[742]] carries a confession in its very title, “How far the Use of the Rules extends in Rhetoric and Poetry,” and the confession is emphasised in the text. It comes to this—that the Rules are useful, but only generally so, and with a “thus far and no further.” It is evident that, when this point is reached, the Oppression of Gwenhidwy is on the eve of descending upon the land of Gwaelod, the dykes are bursting, and the sea is flowing in.[[743]] We saw just now Gottsched’s indignant horror at the idea of writing upon poetry without giving rules to anybody how he shall do anything. He must have been more horrified still, because there is an element of treacherous surrender instead of bold defiance in it, at this other view of the rules as not bad things in their way—to be followed when it is convenient and when you please, and broken or left behind when it is convenient, or when you please again. In fact, any such admission at once reduces the whole Neoclassic system to an absurdity. A law which may be obeyed or not exactly as people choose—a sealed pattern which is followed or not at the taste and fancy of the tailor or other craftsman—you surely cannot too soon repeal the first and throw the second into the dustbin. And this was, as we shall see, what Germany very speedily did.