APPENDICES
APPENDIX I.
THE OXFORD CHAIR OF POETRY.
[THE HOLDERS]—[EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MINORS]—[LOWTH]— [HURDIS]—[THE RALLY: COPLESTON]—[CONYBEARE]— [MILMAN]—[KEBLE]—[THE ‘OCCASIONAL [ENGLISH] PAPERS’]— [THE ‘PRÆLECTIONS’]—[GARBETT]—[CLAUGHTON]— [DOYLE]—[SHAIRP]—[PALGRAVE]—[“SALUTANTUR VIVI.”]
(I have thought this sketch worth giving, partly as an example of the kind of excursus which might be appended, perhaps not without some advantage, and certainly in some numbers, to this History. But I give it also because it illustrates—in a manner which cannot be elsewhere paralleled at all in our own country, and to which I know no Continental parallel—by a continuous and unbroken chain of instances and applications, the course of European as well as English theory, practice, and taste in Criticism, from a period when the Neo-classic creed was still in at least apparently fullest flourishing, through nearly two whole centuries, to what, in the eye of history, is the present moment. The enforced vacation of the Chair after a single decade at most, and its filling by popular election, and not by the choice of an individual or a board, add to its representative character: and the usual publication of at least some of the results, in each case, makes that character almost uniquely discoverable in its continuity, while even the change of vehicles from Latin to English is not without its importance. There is no room here—and it would perhaps be unnecessary in any case—to anticipate the easy labour of summarising its lessons. But I think they may be said to emphasise the warning—frequently given or hinted already—that the result of the altered conditions and laws of criticism is not clear gain. No part of Mr Arnold’s best critical work was, I think, done for the Chair; and I should myself be inclined to select, as the best work actually done for it, that of Keble, who represents the combination of the old Classical-Preceptist tradition, with something of the new comparison and free expatiation, as well as very much of the purely appreciative tendency.)
The holders.
This Chair—founded by Henry Birkhead, D.C.L., a Trinity man, a Fellow of All Souls, and a member of the Inner Temple—began its operations in 1708, the conditions of its tenure (which have only recently been altered) providing for a first holding of five years, a single renewal for the same period, and a sort of rotation, in the sense that the same college could not supply two successive occupants. The actual incumbents have been: 1708-18, Trapp; 1718-28, Thomas Warton the elder; 1728-38, Spence; 1738-41, John Whitf(i)eld; 1741-51 (the most distinguished name as yet), Lowth; 1751-56, William Hawkins; 1756-66, Thomas Warton the younger; 1766-76, Benjamin Wheeler; 1776-83, Randolph; 1783-93, Holmes; 1793 to 1802, Hurdis. With the nineteenth century a brighter order begins, all but one or two of the Professors having made their mark out of the Chair as well as in it. They were: Copleston, 1802-12; Conybeare, 1812-21; Milman, 1821-31; Keble, 1831-42; Garbett (the dark star of this group, but, as we shall see, not quite lightless), 1842-52; Claughton, 1852-57; Matthew Arnold, 1857-67; Sir Francis Doyle, 1867-77; Principal Shairp, 1877-87; Mr Palgrave, 1887-95; while of living occupants Mr Courthope resigned the Chair after a single tenure; and Mr Bradley was elected to it under a statutory limitation to this term.
Eighteenth century minors.
Of these, Trapp, Spence, the younger Warton, and Arnold have received notice in the text, which would have been theirs had they never held the Chair. The lucubrations of the first held for some time an honourable place as an accepted handbook on the subject. Spence, profiting by the almost Elysian tolerance of his sensible century, and finding that neither residence nor lecturing was insisted on, seems to have resided very little, and to have lectured hardly or not at all. Tom Warton the younger, whose History would have dignified any cathedra, appears to have devoted himself during his actual tenure entirely to the classics, and never to have published any of his lectures except one on Theocritus. His father, in the interval between the respectable labours of Trapp and the philosophical silence of Spence, had earned no golden opinions, and though the repeated attacks of Amherst in Terræ Filius may have been due partly to political rancour, and partly to that ingenious and unlucky person’s incorrigible Ishmaelitism, it seems to have been admitted that the Professor’s understanding and erudition lay very open to criticism, and that his elocution and manner were not such as could shield them. Of Whitfield, Hawkins, Wheeler, Randolph, and Holmes, what I have been able to gather may best be set in a note.[[1105]] The first person to make any real figure in and for the Chair was the author of De Sacra Poesi Hebræorum, which at once attained not merely an English but a European reputation.
Lowth.
To discuss the Hebrew scholarship of this famous book (which was first published in 1753, and repeatedly reprinted, revised, translated, attacked, defended) would be wholly out of place here, even if the writer had not almost wholly forgotten the little Hebrew he learnt at school. It is still, I believe—even by specialists with no general knowledge of literature—admitted to have been epoch-making in its insistence on the parallelism of Hebrew poetry. But to those who take the historical view of literature and of criticism its place is secure quite apart from this. Not merely in the Renaissance, but in the Middle and even the Dark Ages, the matter of the Bible had been used to parallel and illustrate rhetorical and literary doctrines and rules. But Lowth was almost the first to treat its poetical forms from something like the standpoint of sound comparative literary criticism.[[1106]] Now this, as the whole tenor of our book has gone to contend, was the chief and principal thing that had to be done. If we have any advantage over the men of old, it is that we (or some of us) have at last mastered the fact that one literature or one language cannot prescribe anything to another, but that it may teach much. And this new instance of a literature—unique in special claims to reverence, unique likewise in the fact that in its best examples it could owe nothing to those Greeks and Romans who have so beneficently but so tyrannously influenced all the modern tongues—was invaluable in its quality and almost incalculable in its moment. That Lowth’s exposition resulted directly or indirectly in not a little maladroit imitation of Hebrew poetry was not his fault; his critical lesson was wholly good.
Hurdis.
Hurdis, a person now very much forgotten, had his day of interest and of something like position. He is not unfrequently quoted by writers, especially by Southey, of the great period of 1800-1830, which he a little preceded, and he has the honour—rare for so recent a writer—of a whole article[[1107]] on his poems in the Retrospective Review. As a poet he was mainly an imitator of his friend Cowper—a fact which, with the title of his chief work, The Village Curate, will give intending or declining readers a sufficiently exact idea of what they are undertaking or relinquishing. Easy blank verse, abundant and often not infelicitous description, and unexceptionable though slightly copybook sentiments,[[1108]] form his poetic or versifying staple. As a critic I regret to find that my note on him is “Chatter”: and I do not know anything of his that makes me, on reflection, think this unjust.
The rally: Copleston.
I should be half afraid that the interest which I feel in the next set of Prælections, those of Edward Copleston,—“the Provost,” as he anticipated Hawkins in being to Oxford men, even not of his own college of Oriel,—might be set down to that boulimia or morbid appetite for critical writings of which I have been accused, if I had not at hand a very potent compurgator. Keble, it is true, was a personal friend of Copleston’s. But he was not at all the man to let personal friendship, any more than personal enmity, bias his judgment; and he was admirably qualified to judge. Yet he says deliberately[[1109]] that the book “is by far the most distinct, and the richest in matter, of any which it has fallen to our lot to read on the subject.” I cannot myself go quite so far as that, and I doubt whether Keble himself would have gone so far when, twenty years later, he wrote his own exquisite Lectures; but I can go a long way towards it.
The future Provost and Bishop has, indeed, other critical proofs on which to rely,[[1110]]—the famous and excellent “Advice to a Young Reviewer,” which I fear is just as much needed, and just as little heeded, as it was a hundred years ago, the admirable smashing of the Edinburgh’s attack on Oxford, and other matters,—but the Prælections[[1111]] are the chief and principal thing. Keble insisted that they ought to be Englished, but I am not so sure. They form one of the severest critical treatises with which I am acquainted; and some of the features of this severity would, I think, appear positively uninviting in English dress, while they consistently and perfectly suit the toga and the sandal. But I must explain a little more fully in what this “severity” consists; for the word is ambiguous. I do not mean that Copleston rejects Pleasure as the end of Poetry; for, on the contrary, he writes Delectare boldly on his shield, and omits prodesse save as an indirect consequence. I do not mean that he is a very Draconic critic of particulars, though he can speak his mind trenchantly enough.[[1112]] Nor do I mean that he is a very abstract writer; for every page is strewn with concrete illustrations, very well selected, and, for the most part, un-hackneyed.
His severity is rather of the ascetic and “methodist” kind; he resembles nothing so much as a preceptist of the school of Hermogenes, who should have discarded triviality, and risen to very nearly the weight and substance of Aristotle. At the very beginning he makes a statute for himself, to cite no literature but Greek and Latin, and to use no language but these. And he never breaks either rule; for though, on rare occasions, he refers to English writers—Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Burke, Reynolds[[1113]]—it is a reference only to books, or poems, or passages, never a citation. And in the second place his method is throughout—constant as is his use of the actual poetic object-lesson—to proceed by general categories, not of poetic kinds (he shuns that ancient and now well-beaconed quicksand[[1114]]) but of qualities, constituents, means. His whole book, after a brief definition or apology for not defining, is distributed under four parts,—Of Imitation, Of the Emotions, Of Imagination (Phantasia), and Of Judgment,—though he never reached the fourth,[[1115]] owing to his tenure of the Chair coming to an end. After a pretty full discussion of the nature and subject of Imitation, he makes his link with his next subject by dwelling on the Imitatio morum, and so of the Passions themselves. In this part a very large share is given to the subject of Sententiæ—“sentiments,” as Keble translates it, though, as I have pointed out formerly,[[1116]] no single translation of the word is at all satisfactory. The section on Imagination is very interesting. Copleston is at a sort of middle stage between the restricted Addisonian and the wide Philostratean-Shakespearean-Coleridgean interpretation of the word. He expressly admits that other senses besides sight can supply the material of Phantasia; but his examples are mainly drawn from material which is furnished by the sight, and his inclusions of Allegory, Mythology, &c., with other things, sometimes smack of an insufficient discrimination between Imagination and Fancy. Indeed the fact that he is Præ-Coleridgean helps to give him his interest.
Keble mildly complains that Copleston does not make use of that doctrine of Association which he himself, writing so early, had perhaps adopted, not from Coleridge but direct from Hartley. We have, in our day, seen this doctrine worked to death and sent to the knacker’s in philosophy generally; but there is no doubt that it can never be neglected in poetry, being, perhaps, the most universal (though by no means the universal) means of approach to the sources of the poetic pleasure. It does not, however, seem to me that Copleston intended to mount so high, or go so far back: his aim was, I think, more rhetorical, according to a special fashion, than metacritical. But his mediate axioms are numerous and often very informing: and his illustrations, as has been said, abundant, really illustrative, and singularly recreative. He lays most Latin and many Greek poets under contribution; but some of his most effective examples are drawn from a poet whom he does not critically overvalue, but who has no doubt been, as a rule, critically undervalued, and for whom he himself evidently had a discriminating affection—that is to say, Claudian.
On the whole, the appearance of a book of this scope and scheme, at the very junction of the centuries and the ’isms, Classic and Romantic, is of singular interest. Until intelligent study of the Higher Rhetoric—reformed, adjusted, and extended—has been reintroduced, such another will not come. But such another might come with very great advantage, and would supply a very important tertium quid to the mere Æsthetics and to the sheer Impressionism between which Criticism has too often divided itself.
Conybeare.
There is almost as much significance in Copleston’s successor, though it is a significance of a different kind. For J. J. Conybeare was the first Professor of Poetry to bestow attention on Anglo-Saxon (Warton, even in his History, had not gone, with any knowledge, beyond Middle English), and so to complete the survey of all English Literature. Before his appointment he had held, as its first occupant, the chair of Anglo-Saxon itself; and while Professor of Poetry he was a country parson. He died suddenly and comparatively young, and his remarkable Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry[[1117]] were published after his death by his brother, who is actually responsible for a good part of its matter, so that the book is a composite one. It is thus mainly in its general significance—for Conybeare’s Prælections as Professor were not, so far as I know, published—that it is valuable for us. But the value thus given is unmistakable. Conybeare’s individual judgments and aperçus are always interesting, and often acute; but his real importance lies in the fact that he was almost the first—though Mitford, after Ellis, had attempted the thing as an outsider—to move back the focussing-point sufficiently to get all English Literature under view. Nothing could serve more effectually to break up the false standing-ground of the eighteenth century.
Milman.
A curious but perhaps not surprising thing about Milman’s Professorship is that it aroused the ire of an undergraduate poet of the rarest though of the most eccentric type—namely, Beddoes. If Milman really did “denounce” Death’s Jest-Book,[[1118]] it is a pity that his lectures were (so far as I know) never printed, or at least collected, for there might have been more such things of the fatally interesting kind which establishes the rule that Professors should not deal, in their lectures, with contemporary literature. It was certainly unlucky for a man to begin by objecting in one official capacity to Death’s Jest-Book, and to end by objecting in another to Stevens’s Wellington Monument. And that Milman had generally the character of a harsh and donnish critic is obvious, from Byron’s well-known suggestion of him as a possible candidate for the authorship of the Quarterly article on Keats, though the rhyme of “kill man” may have had something to do with this. If he wrote much literary criticism we have little of it in the volume of Essays which his son published, after his death, in 1870. Even on Erasmus—surely a tempting subject—he manages to be as little literary as is possible, and rather less than one might have thought to be; and his much better-known Histories are not more so.
Keble.
Ignorance may sneer, but Knowledge will not even smile, at the dictum that not the least critical genius that ever adorned the Oxford Chair was possessed by John Keble. There is some faint excuse for Ignorance. The actual Prælections[[1119]] of the author of The Christian Year, being Latin, are not read: his chief English critical works,[[1120]] though collected not so very long ago, were collected too late to catch that flood-tide, in their own sense, which is unfortunately, as a rule, needed to land critical works out of reach of the ordinary ebb. Moreover, there is no question but Keble requires “allowance”; and the allowance which he requires is too often of the kind least freely granted in the present day. If we have anywhere (I hope we have) a man as holy as Keble, and as learned, and as acute, he will hardly express the horror at Scott’s occasional use of strong language which Keble expresses.[[1121]] Our historic sense, and our illegitimate advantage of perspective, have at least taught us that to quarrel with Scott again, for not being “Catholic” enough, is almost to quarrel with Moses for not having actually led the children of Israel into Palestine. And no man, as honest as Keble was, would now echo that other accusation against the great magician (whom, remember, Keble almost adored, and of whom he thought far more highly as a poet than many good men do now) of tolerating intemperance; though some might feign it to suit a popular cant.
But in all these respects it is perfectly easy for those who have once schooled themselves to this apparently but not really difficult matter, to make the necessary allowance.[[1122]] And then, even in the English critical Essays—the “Scott,” the “Sacred Poetry,” the “Unpublished Letters of Warburton,” and the “Copleston”—verus incessu patet criticus.
The Occasional [English] Papers.
His general attitude to poetic criticism (he meddled little with any other) is extremely interesting. His classical training impelled him towards the “subject” theory, and the fact that his two great idols in modern English poetry were Scott and Wordsworth was not likely to hold him back. He has even drifted towards a weir, pretty clearly, one would think, marked “Danger!” by asking whether readers do not feel the attraction of Scott’s novels to be as great as, and practically identical with, that of his poems. But no “classic” could possibly have framed the definition of poetry which he puts at the outset[[1123]] of the Scott Essay as “The indirect expression in words, most appropriately in metrical words, of some overpowering emotion, or ruling taste, or feeling, the direct indulgence whereof is somehow repressed.” Everybody will see what this owes to Wordsworth; everybody should see how it is glossed and amplified—in a non-Wordsworthian or an extra-Wordsworthian sense. We meet the pure critical Keble again, in his enthusiastic adoption of Copleston’s preference for “Delight” (putting Instruction politely in the pocket) as the poetic criterion.[[1124]] And his defence of Sacred Poetry, however interested it may seem to be, coming from him, is one of the capital essays of English criticism. He makes mince-meat of Johnson, and he takes by anticipation a good deal of the brilliancy out of his brilliant successor, Mr Arnold, on this subject. The passage, short but substantial,[[1125]] on Spenser in this is one of the very best to be found on that critic of critics (as by an easily intelligible play he might be said to be) as well as poet of poets. Spenser always finds out a bad critic—he tries good ones at their highest.
The Prælections.
Still the Prælections themselves must, of course, always be Keble’s own touchstone, or rather his ground and matter of assay. And he comes out well. The dedication (a model of stately enthusiasm) to Wordsworth as non solum dulcissimæ poeseos verum etiam divinæ veritatis antistes, strikes the keynote of the whole. But it may be surprising to some to find how “broad” Keble is, in spite of his inflexible morality and his uncompromising churchmanship. He was kept right partly, no doubt, by holding fast as a matter of theory to the “Delight” test—pure and virtuous delight, of course, but still delight, first of all and most of all. But mere theory would have availed him little without the poetic spirit, which everywhere in him translates itself into the critical, and almost as little without the wide and (whether deliberately so or not) comparative reading of ancient and modern verse which he displays. His general definition of Poetry here is slightly different from that given above, as was indeed required by his subject and object. He presents it—at once refining and enlarging upon part of the Aristotelian one of Tragedy, and neutralising the vinum dæmonum notion at once,—as subsidium benigni numinis, the medicinal aid given by God to subdue, soften, and sanctify Passion. But his working out—necessarily, in its main lines, obvious but interesting to contrast with his successor Mr Arnold’s undogmatised and secularised application of the same idea[[1126]]—is less interesting to us in itself than the aperçus on different poets, ancient and modern, to which it gives rise. Few pages deserve to be skipped by the student: even technical discussion of the tenuis et arguta kind, as he modestly calls it, becomes alive under his hand on such subjects as the connection of Poetry and Irony (Præl. v.) But there is a still higher interest in such things as the contrast, in the same Prælection, of the undeviating self-consistency of Spenser in all his work, the bewildering apparent lack of central unity in Shakespeare with its resolution, and the actual inconsistency of Dryden. All the Homeric studies deserve reading, the discussion of the Odyssey in Præl. xi. being especially noteworthy, with its culmination in that delightful phrase about Nausicaa which we quoted in the last volume.[[1127]] Particularly wise and particularly interesting is the treatment of “Imitation” (the lower imitation) in Præl. xvi., where those who are of our mystery will not fail to compare the passage with Vida. How comfortable is it to find a poet-critic, so uncompromising on dignity of subject, who can yet admit, and that with not the faintest grudging, that it “is incredible how mightily the hidden fire is roused by single words or clauses—nay, by the sound of mere syllables, that strike the ear at a happy nick of time.”[[1128]] This is almost “the doctrine of the Poetic Moment” itself, though we must not urge it too far, and though it is brought in apropos of the suggestiveness to poets of antecedent poetic work. It is still sovereign against a still prevailing heresy. The abundant treatment of Æschylus[[1129]] is also to be carefully noted; for, as we have observed, that mighty poet had been almost neglected during the Neo-classic period.
The second score of Lectures is still technically devoted to the ancients, especially Pindar, the second and third Tragedians, Theocritus, Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace; but references to the moderns, not very rare in the first volume, become still more frequent here, and are sometimes, as those to Spenser and Bunyan in the matter of allegory,[[1130]] and the contrast of Jason and Macduff as bewailing their children,[[1131]] very notable. On his narrower subject, the judgment of Sophocles in Præl. xxviii. is singularly weighty; and I should like to have heard Mr Matthew Arnold answer on behalf of his favourite. The comparative tameness, and the want of variety and range, which some (not all, of course) feel in the “singer and child of sweet Colonos” are here put with authority by one whom no one could accuse of Sturm und Drang preferences, or of an undisciplined thirst for novelty. Only on Theocritus, perhaps, does Morality sit in banco with Taste to a rather disastrous effect, and the fact is curiously explicable. His disapproval of Scott’s strong language, and his want of ecclesiastical-mindedness, and his lenity to liquor, had not blinded Keble in the least to Scott’s poetry; he had admitted the charitable and comfortable old plea of “time, not man,” in favour of certain peccadilloes of Shakespeare; he is, in fact, nowhere squeamish to silliness. But he cannot pardon Theocritus for the Oaristys and such things, simply because the new Wordsworthian nature-worship in him is wounded and shocked insanabiliter. “Like Aristophanes,” he says, “like Catullus, like Horace, Theocritus betakes himself to the streams and the woods, not to seek rest for a weary mind, but as provocatives for a lustful one.”[[1132]] This new “sin against the Spirit” is most interesting.
On the other hand, this very nature-worship keeps his balance, where we might have thought he would lose it, on the subject of Lucretius. He contrasts the comparative triviality and childishness of Virgil, agreeable enough as it is, in regard to nature, with the mystic majesty of his great predecessor. The charges of atheism and indecency trouble him very little:[[1133]] the intense earnestness, the lofty delight in clouds and forests and the vague, the likeness to Æschylus and Dante—all these things he fixes on, and delights in. I wish he had written more on Dante himself; what he has[[1134]] is admirable.
As to Virgil in person, though sensible enough of his merits, he says things which would have elicited the choicest combinations of Scaligerian Billingsgate; and brings out, in a way striking and I think rather novel, the permolestum, the “serious irritation” caused by the fact that Virgil either could not or would not give Æneas any character at all, and that you feel sometimes inclined to think that he never himself had any clear idea what sort of a real man his hero was. This exaltation of the Character above the Action is very noteworthy.
But, in fact, Keble always is noteworthy, and more. Mere moderns may dismiss him, with or without a reading, as a mill-horse treader of academic rounds. He is nothing so little. He is, in fact, almost the first representative of the Romantic movement who has applied its spirit to the consecrated subjects of study; and he has shown, unfortunately to too limited a circle, how fresh, how interesting, how inspiring the results of this and of the true comparison of ancient and modern may be.[[1135]] Literary criticism—indeed literature itself as such—was with him, it is true, only a by-work, hardly more than a pastime. But had it been otherwise, he would, I think, twenty years before Arnold, have given us the results of a more thorough scholarship, a reading certainly not less wide, a taste nearly as delicate and catholic, a broader theory, and a much greater freedom from mere crotchet and caprice.
Garbett.
I am not quite so well acquainted with the whole work of Keble’s successor Garbett.[[1136]] Elected as he was, by the anti-Tractarian reaction, against the apparently far superior claims of Isaac Williams, his appointment has generally been regarded as a job; and I had to divest myself of prejudice in reading him. He has indeed nothing of his predecessor’s serene scholarship, and little of his clear and clean taste. His form puts him at a special disadvantage. Instead of Keble’s pure and flowing Latinity, you find an awkward dialect, peppered after the fashion of Cicero’s letters with Greek words, peppered still more highly with notes of exclamation, and, worst of all, full of words, and clauses, and even whole sentences, in capitals, to the destruction of all repose and dignity. He seems to have simply printed each Prælection as he gave it (the pagings are independent), and then to have batched them together without revision in volume form.[[1137]] But one cannot read far or fairly without perceiving that, either before his election or after it, Garbett had taken the pains to qualify by a serious study of antecedent criticism—a study, it may be added, of which there is hardly any trace in Keble. Garbett devotes especial attention to Longinus and Dryden; and though I do not (as I have formerly hinted)[[1138]] agree with him in regard to either,[[1139]] it is beyond all doubt that he had made a distinct and original attempt to grasp both as critics. He deals with Horace, of course; but it is noteworthy that he has again aimed at a systematic and fresh view, taking Horace as the master of “Art Poetic,” and comparing Boileau, &c. He has an abundant discussion of Scaliger, whom he takes as third type and (rightly) as the father of classical French criticism, while Dryden gives him his fourth. He knows the Germans—not merely Lessing and Goethe, but Kant; and whatever the failures in his execution, he can “satisfy the examiners” not merely from the point of view of those who demand acquaintance with the history and literature of the subject, but from that of those who postpone everything to what they think philosophy. He refers to the climatic view of literature,[[1140]] constantly combines historical and literary considerations, and is altogether a “modern.” As has been said, I disagree with him more often than I agree; but I do not think there can be any serious denial of the fact that he was worthy of the Chair and of a place here.
Claughton.
The tenure of his successor Claughton, afterwards Bishop, was but for a single term; and he seems to have left little memorial of it except a singularly elegant Latin address on the appointment of Lord Derby as Chancellor. Elegance, indeed, was Claughton’s characteristic as an orator,[[1141]] but I should not imagine that he had much strength or very wide or keen literary knowledge and enthusiasm. Of Mr. Arnold we have spoken.
Doyle.
There were foolish folk, not without some excuse of ignorance (if that ever be an excuse) for their foolishness, who grumbled or scoffed when he was followed by Sir Francis Doyle. There had been some hopes of Browning, which had been foiled—if by nothing else—by the discovery that an Honorary M.A. degree was not a qualification; and it must be owned that curiosity to see what Browning would do in prose on poetry was highly legitimate. Moreover, the younger generation was busy with Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Morris, who had not turned Tennyson and Browning himself out, and they knew little of Sir Francis. Better informed persons, however, reported of him as of an Oxford man of the best old type of “scholar and gentleman,” a person of very shrewd wits, of probably greater practical experience than any Professor of Poetry had ever had, and the author of certain things like The Red Thread of Honour and The Private of the Buffs, which, in their own peculiar style and division, were poetry sans phrase. The report was justified by the new Professor’s Lectures.[[1142]] They are frankly exoteric; but they are saved by scholarship from the charge of ever being popular in the bad sense. They adopt as frankly, and carry a little farther, that plan of making the lectures, if not exactly reviews of particular books new and old, at any rate causeries hung on particular texts and pegs, which the vernacularisation of the Chair had made inevitable, and to which Matthew Arnold himself had inclined gladly enough. They are, though not in the least degree slipshod or slovenly, quite conversational in style. But they deserve, I think, no mean place among the documents of the Chair. Their easy, well-bred common-sense, kept from being really Philistine (which epithet Sir Francis good-humouredly accepted), not merely by their good breeding, but by the aforesaid scholarship, by natural acuteness, and by an intense unaffected love for poetry, might not be a good staple. But if the electors could manage to let it come round again, as an exception, once in a generation or so, it would be well, and better than well.
Shairp.
Of Principal Shairp so many good men have said so many good things that it is almost unnecessary to add, in this special place and context, the praise (which can be given ungrudgingly) that he has always, in his critical work, had before him good intentions and high ideals. Much further addition, I fear, cannot be made. When I read his question, “Did not Shakespeare hate and despise Iago and Edmund?”[[1143]] when I remember how Shakespeare himself put in the mouth of the one—
“I bleed, sir, but not killed”;
in the mouth of the other—
“The wheel is come full circle; I am here”;
and—
“Yet Edmund was beloved,”
I own I sympathise with an unconventional and unsophisticated soul who, once reading this same utterance of Mr. Shairp’s, rose, strode about the room, and sitting down, ejaculated, “What are you to do? What are you to say? Where are you to go? when a Professor of Poetry, uttering such things in Oxford, is not taken out, and stoned or burnt forthwith, between Balliol and the Randolph?” And there is an only less dreadful passage[[1144]] of miscomprehension on the magnificent close of Tennyson’s “Love and Duty”—one of the greatest examples of the difficult “Versöhnung close,” the reconciliation of art, the relapse into peace.
But the lesson of criticism is a lesson of tolerance. A complete and careful perusal of Mr Shairp’s Aspects of Poetry, and of his other books, will indeed show that the apices of criticism, whether historical, or appreciative, or even philosophical, were beyond his climb. He shows that constant necessity or temptation of engaging in comment—eulogistic or controversial—upon the ephemera critica of the time, which has been one of the worst results of the change of the lectures from Latin to English. You could not, in the stately old vehicle, do more than occasionally decline upon such a lower level as this. Mr Shairp is always citing and fencing with (or extolling reviewer-fashion) Arnold or Bagehot, Hutton or Myers. Quotidiana quotidie moriuntur; and, though no doubt it saves much trouble to Professors if they can take out of a newspaper or a review, or even a recent book, on their way to Oxford, a text for an hour’s sermon, their state sub specie æternitatis is far from the more gracious. Oxford is constantly making new statutes now; I think one forbidding any citation from this Chair of critical or creative literature less than thirty years old would not be bad.
More happy, if not always more critical, were his dealings with things Scottish, where sympathy lifted him out of the peddling, and transformed the parochial. On Burns (even though there must have been searchings of heart there) he could sometimes, though by no means always, speak excellently; on Scott superexcellently; on Wordsworth almost as well; on the Highland poets (if we do not forget our salt-cellar) best of all, because he spoke with knowledge and not as Mr Arnold. His work is always amiable, often admirable: I wish I could say that it is always or often critical.[[1145]]
Palgrave.
The great achievement of Mr Shairp’s successor, Francis Turner Palgrave, in regard to literary criticism, is an indirect one, and had been mostly done years and decades before he was elected to the Chair. Indeed, I think little if anything was given to the world as the direct result of his professorial work. As an actual critic or reviewer, Palgrave was no doubt distinguished not over-favourably by that tendency to “splash” and tapage of manner which he shared with Kinglake and some other writers of the mid-nineteenth century, and which has been recently revived. But his real taste was in a manner warranted by his friendships; and his friendships must almost have kept him right if he had had less taste. He may have profited largely by these friendships in the composition of the two parts of that really Golden Treasury, which, if it does not achieve the impossible in giving everybody what he wants, all that he wants, and nothing that he does not want, is by general confession the most successful attempt in a quite appallingly difficult kind. The second part, which has of course been the most criticised, seems to me even more remarkable than the first, as showing an almost complete freedom from one easily besetting sin, the tendency not to relish styles that have come in since the critic “commenced” in criticism.
Salutantur vivi.
Of the late and the present holders of the Chair we are happily precluded from speaking critically. May the bar not soon be lifted!
[1105]. Of Whitfield (or Whitfeld, as some write) I have found nothing but that he wrote some Latin verses on William the Third. The second volume of William Hawkins’s Tracts (1758) contains, besides a ridiculous tragedy, Henry and Rosamond, an Essay on Drama, principally occupied by carpings at Mason’s Elfrida, and some Letters on Pope’s Commentary on Homer—very small critical beer. About Wheeler I find less even than about Whitfield. The piety of his son published—long after date and in our own times—1870—the Prælections of John Randolph, a man who, besides holding several other professorships at Oxford, attained to eminence in the Church, and died Bishop of London in 1813. They are very sober and respectable. There is in poetry a non contemnenda proprietas quod imitando præcipiat; and the warning, non aliunde artis suæ rudimenta desumet Criticus nisi ex sanæ Logices præceptis, might with advantage have been observed oftener than it has been. But Randolph sticks in the bark and the letter. Holmes, a poet after a fashion, a theologian, and what not, seems to have written more freely on anything than on criticism.
[1106]. He complies with the requirements of method and fashion by dealing generally with the End and Usefulness of Poetry, its Kinds and so forth. But all this we have had a thousand times. What we have here specially is a comparison, and a new comparison.
[1107]. Vol. i. p. 57 sq.
[1108]. Southey, himself a proper moral man in all conscience, but a sensible one withal, somewhere remarks, “said well but not wisely” on Hurdis’s
“Give me the steed
Whose generous efforts bore the prize away,
I care not for his grandsire or his dam.[dam.]”
A mild echo of the revolutionary period!
[1109]. In a review in the British Critic (1814), reprinted in Papers and Reviews, Oxford and London, 1877.
[1110]. See the Remains, edited by his son. London, 1871.
[1111]. First published at the end of his tenure in 1813. My copy is the 2nd ed., Oxford, 1828.
[1112]. See remarks on Trapp, pp. 6 and 7 ed. cit.
[1113]. V. pp. 187, 197, 390, 229, 177.
[1114]. Keble, however, was right in specifying the chief exception—the admirable prælection on Epitaphs (No. 27, p. 340).
[1115]. This is all the more tantalising in that his definition of Judicium in Præl. 2 seems to promise nothing less than an inquiry into the critical and appreciative faculty as regards Poetry.
[1116]. V. vol. i.
[1117]. London, 1826.
[1118]. See Beddoes’ Letters (ed. Gosse, London, 1894), p. 68: “Mr Milman (our poetry professor) has made me quite unfashionable here by denouncing me as one of a ‘villainous school.’” These Letters are crammed with matter of literary and critical interest. I was much tempted to give them a place in the text as illustrating the critical opinions of a person in whom great wits and madness were rather blended than allied; in the transition generation—the mezzanine floor—of 1800-1830.
[1119]. Prælectiones Academicæ Oxonii habitæ annis 1832-41. Oxford, 1844. 2 vols., but continuously paged.
[1120]. Occasional Papers and Reviews, by John Keble, M.A. Oxford and London, 1877.
[1121]. Occ. Pap., p. 62.
[1122]. The place most perilously aleatory is the fling in Occ. Pap., p. 87, at “Mr Leigh Hunt and his miserable followers.”
[1123]. Occ. Pap., p. 6.
[1124]. Ibid., p. 150.
[1125]. Ibid., pp. 98-102.
[1126]. Those who make the contrast will, however, I think, find out that Arnold owes more to his forerunner than might be gathered from his published lectures.
[1127]. P. 312.
[1128]. Præl. Ac., p. 281.
[1129]. It occupies seven Prælections (xvii.-xxiii.) and some 200 pages.
[1130]. ii. 415.
[1131]. ii. 586.
[1132]. ii. 641. He has a liking for Horace; but objects to him (not quite unreasonably) as sordidior quidem in his Epicureanism, when you compare him with Lucretius.
[1133]. He allows him, as well as Byron and Shelley, the plea of vix compos in certain respects.
[1134]. ii. 678 sq. and elsewhere.
[1135]. I pass, as needless to dwell on at length, the excellence of his style and expression in these lectures. “So acute in remark, so beautiful in language,” as Newman says in the letter printed in Occ. Pap., p. xii. sq.
[1136]. My only possession is De Re Critica Prælectiones. Oxford, 1847.
[1137]. My copy, which is “from the author” to some one unknown, has not a few pen-corrections, apparently in his own hand.
[1138]. Vol. ii. p. 372.
[1139]. It is particularly unfortunate that he has endeavoured to construct a theory of Longinus as a statesman-critic, comparing him with Burke. I have already said that I do not think the identification of the author of the book with Zenobia’s prime minister in the least disproved or (with the materials at present at disposal) disprovable: but it certainly is not proved to the point of serving as basis to such a theory.
[1140]. With reference to Schlegel and Madame de Staël.
[1141]. His sermons have been disrespectfully spoken of; but I think unjustly. I heard them myself in pretty close juxtaposition with those of Pusey and Wilberforce, and even with the, in both senses, rare discourses of Mansel. In vigour and body they were nowhere beside any of these; but they could fairly hold their own in the softer ways of style.
[1142]. First Series (comprising the “Inaugural,” with two others on “Provincial Poetry” and The Dream of Gerontius), London, 1869. A second appeared in 1877.
[1143]. Aspects of Poetry (London, 1881), p. 30.
[1144]. Ibid., p. 157.
[1145]. How entirely uncritical he was may be judged from the fact that he brackets Voltaire and Diderot as apostles of the Aufklärung in an anti-Romantic sense.
APPENDIX II.
AMERICAN CRITICISM.
[AN ATTEMPT IN OUTLINE ONLY]—[ITS DIFFICULTIES]— [THE EARLY STAGES]—[THE ORIGINS AND PIONEERS]— [TICKNOR]—[LONGFELLOW]—[EMERSON]—[POE]— [LOWELL: HIS GENERAL POSITION]—[‘AMONG MY BOOKS’]— [‘MY STUDY WINDOWS‘]—[‘ESSAYS ON THE ENGLISH POETS’]— [LAST ESSAYS]—[O. W. HOLMES]—[THE WHOLE DUTY OF CRITICS STATED BY HIM IN ALIA MATERIA]— [WHITMAN AND THE “DEMOCRATIC” IDEAL]—[MARGARET FULLER]— [RIPLEY]—[WHIPPLE]—[LANIER].
An attempt in outline only.
I am very well aware of the arguments which may be advanced against attempting to extend our survey of criticism across the Atlantic. I at least do not undervalue the apparently formal, but in truth real, objection that we have undertaken European criticism only: while I appreciate the opposite demur, that the space of an appendix is as uncomplimentary and as uncomplementary as total exclusion would be. But after having taken counsel of more than one American friend, by no means specially Anglophile in temper, I found that, apparently, the inclusion even in this form would be at least sometimes taken in the spirit in which it is meant, while on the other hand I had myself felt very strongly the disadvantage of excluding such a critic as Mr Lowell, who has all the characteristics of the best of our own with an inviting differentia. The bursting-point, however, of this volume is pretty nearly reached; and I must again observe that there is no invidious intention in the proportion of the notice. I have endeavoured to allot to Mr Lowell himself a space (allowing for differences of scale and type) not, I think, unfair in proportion to his English fellows; others I have had to survey more in summary. But I hope that the whole may at any rate provide a not inadequate outline-sketch of the subject; and in this hope I submit it, not merely to English readers, but to those still more nearly concerned, from some of whom this book has received attention at once of the most candid (in the better pre-Sheridanian sense of that word) and of the most searchingly competent.
Its difficulties.
The difficulties of the task are complicated by the necessity, according to our plan, of omitting living writers. The history of American criticism appears, even more than that of other departments of literature, to be very mainly a history of the present; and I could write ex abundanti on that. The “middle distance” is also well provided. But the origins are singularly obscure, and appear to be regarded with neither pride nor interest by Americans themselves. When I thought of this excursus first, some years ago, I was referred by an American friend to two articles[[1146]] which had appeared not long before in The International Monthly on “American Literary Criticism and the Doctrine of Evolution.” The title gave me some forebodings in its doubleness; yet this might be interpreted favourably, for how can you treat the “evolution” of a subject without treating its history? I found, however, that the author, though his papers lacked neither thought nor style, was wholly occupied with the doctrine of evolutionary criticism generally, as against judicial and appreciative; and that he did not even propose to meddle with the history of his subject save by occasional allusion. The histories of American literature have afforded me something more, but not much.
The early stages.
I do not mention this in any spirit of fault-finding, for few people are less likely than myself to need reminding that in literary and critical history, as elsewhere, you cannot make bricks without straw, and still less without clay. There was, and there could be, little attempt at important criticism in “colonial” times, and the immense material expansion of the earlier Republican period was very little more favourable to it than the quiescence and dependence of the Monarchical.[[1147]]
The definite entrance of the United States into the society of nations, after the second war with England and the settlement of Europe by the final suppression of Napoleon, as necessarily brought with it the organisation of critical as of other employment for the intellect. The origins and pioneers. There is something agreeably Arcadian in the idea of Longfellow, a boy of nineteen, being sent to Europe by the trustees of his college to qualify himself for a Chair of Literature; but the fact is no more and no less creditable to these functionaries than it is symbolic of the new tendencies of the time. Still, Longfellow was not actually the apostle of comparative and extensive criticism in America. Ticknor, his elder by eighteen years, had, partly no doubt by this very fact of the admission of his country to the full franchise of nations, been induced to give up the study and practice of the law, and to devote himself to literature, in the very year of Waterloo itself. And he too, after a sojourn in Europe, became, some years before his fellow at Bowdoin, Professor of Modern Languages and Belles Lettres at Harvard. Emerson, born between the two, was a little later in treading the same road than either, but he trod it; and his visit to Europe, in 1833, determined the critical writings and lectures which followed.
These three I should take to be the founders of American criticism of the adult and accomplished kind, and they represent it, interestingly enough, in three different ways. It is true that no one of them is first of all a critic, or even, as Mr. Lowell was afterwards, a critic in power at least equal to that of any other of his qualities. But this was only in the nature of things.
Ticknor.
It is not merely because Ticknor’s lifework was a literary history that one may call him first of all a literary historian. The fact that the History of Spanish Literature, more than fifty years after its publication, and nearly seventy after its inception, although the interval has been one of the fiercest in pursuing, and one of the most voluminous in recording, literary explorations, retains, and is likely to retain, its position not merely as a classic, but as an authority, shows some pre-established harmony between writer and task. Yet, though the provinces of the literary historian and the critic overlap to a very large extent,—though the historian who is not a critic must be a mere reference-monger, and the critic who is not a historian a mere bellettrist,—yet there are skirts and fringes of each province which are not necessarily part of the other. Ticknor is rather less of a critic than he is of a historian—his grouping of facts, his investigation and statement of them, his perception of origins and connections, are all a little superior to his appreciation pure and simple. Yet there are few who can afford to look down on him in this latter respect; and as historical critic and critical historian I do not know where to look for his superior, while I should have very soon done looking for his equals.
Longfellow.
Longfellow (for it will be convenient to take Emerson last) shows us, as a matter of course, a different critical phase. He never, so far as I know, wrote any connected study of literature, and I do not think that it would have been very good if he had. His lectures, which were necessarily numerous, and the articles which he wrote (I believe in no small numbers) have never taken any important position, and again I should doubt whether, if we had them or more of them, anything very remarkable would be included.[[1148]] Yet he had, and displayed in the intensest degree, that most agreeable and not least profitable function of the critical faculty which attaches itself to literature, assimilates it, transforms it into instruction and delight. This is noticeable in almost every page of his poems: it is the very genesis of many of them, and perhaps of the best of them: it is at once the explanation and the refutation of the charge of want of originality brought against him. So in his prose. Hyperion and Outre-Mer are permeated and saturated with it. The literature of Germany, the literature of Spain, have done more than colour the poet’s or prose-writer’s work; they have penetrated to its substance, fed it, been digested and absorbed into its very life. From The Golden Legend and The Spanish Student to the smallest fragments this process is noteworthy. And while it shows, on the part of the writer himself, processes necessary to the critic, in intenser and more poetic form, it performs on the reader “the office of the critic”—his hierophantic, initiating, inoculating office—in the most vivid and forcible manner and degree. No one who, susceptible to literature, but more or less ignorant of it, reads Longfellow but must, consciously or unconsciously, imbibe something of literature itself—of a literature far wider and deeper than that which the poet (though I speak as a lifelong lover of Longfellow’s poetry) himself creates.
Emerson.
That Emerson also is not first of all a critic is not surprising, because, as most people have seen, Emerson is not, first of all, anything but Emerson. But he is in some ways more of a critic than either of the others, and the reason why he is not more so still is that, like his master or analogue Carlyle, he rather refuses to look on literature as literature. His ethical preoccupations and his transcendentalism alike prevent him from doing this—he is Carlyle plus Vinet. In the second place, if I may say so without offence, he shows us, as neither Ticknor nor Longfellow, both of whom were too cosmopolitan, shows us, the American touch-me-not-ishness, the somewhat unnecessary affectation of nationality. The literary chauvinism of the famous lecture on “The American Scholar” is perhaps more apparent than real; but his query, “Who is Southey?” in the record of his interview with Landor, is awkward. “Southey is, say what you like about his poetry or his politics, one of the greatest men of letters of all time,” is the answer which a critic should have given to himself. Yet there is much good positive criticism in Emerson (if there can be said to be anything positive in him), and there is still more of that vague stimulative force which is so noticeable in these first great writers of America, and which is so interesting when we consider their circumstances, individual and national. In the English Traits and the Representative Men, in the lectures and elsewhere, there is always ringing to the fit ear the “Tolle, lege!” of the greater critics, with the comment which helps to make the book understood, when it is taken up and read.
Poe.
By the ’Thirties and ’Forties of the nineteenth century the European pilgrimage was no longer necessary to fetch the critical spark home. American criticism became abundant, and not merely abundant. In no case do I so much regret the necessity of compression as in that of Poe. The extreme and almost incomprehensible injustice with which the ill-fated author of Ligeia and The Haunted Palace was so long treated by his countrymen has, I believe, abated; and I have seen, in the article referred to, a complimentary, though merely passing, reference to him as a critic. But there is still room, I think, for some substantial Rettung, as Lessing would have said. The substance would have to be considerable, for the matter under consideration,[[1149]] which is not small in bulk, is heterogeneous, and even to some extent chaotic. More than any other part of Poe’s work it is the scapegoat of his unfavourable circumstances, of his patchy education, of his weaknesses in conduct, temper, and constitution. A great deal is mere hack-writing—chaînes de l’esclavage—stuff never meant to abide the steady judgment of posterity. You may, if you please, pick out of it the most amazing things, such[[1150]] as that “for one Fouqué there are fifty Molières” (I am no undervaluer of Fouqué, but I wish—I do wish—that I knew where to look for even one of the forty-nine additional Poquelins); and “for one Dickens ... five million ... Fieldings,” where perhaps five million marks of exclamation might not inadequately meet the case. Generous as is the praise which he heaps upon Mrs Browning and Mr Horne; true as much of what he says is; one feels that his observations want reducing, adjusting, co-ordinating under the calmer influence of comparative and universal criticism. There was not the slightest reason why he should get into such a frantic rage with, the “devilled kidneys” (a most pleasant and wholesome food) in that very pleasant and wholesome book Charles O’Malley; or why he should have so furiously resented Mr Lowell’s remarks on himself in the Fable for Critics, open as these are to criticism; or why he should have said or done a hundred other things of the kind. His “hungry heart and burning,” his ill-disciplined intellect and temper, drove him in all sorts of directions, and not unfrequently in the wrong ones.
Yet his critical instincts were almost always right; and not seldom they were remarkably original. Considering what the ways of poets are, and that Poe had his full share of the then prevailing American soreness towards “British” writers, I know few things in literature more pleasant and edifying at once than his enthusiastic and intelligent welcome of Tennyson. “The Rationale of Verse,” though there are faults in it, due to ignorance or carelessness in terminology, to haste, and to imperfect reading, is one of the best things ever written on English prosody, and quite astonishingly original. Although, when he takes a great deal of pains it is apt to be rather lost labour, as, for instance, in the comically laborious dissection of Longfellow’s Spanish Student (a delightful thing if taken in the proper way), the acuteness which he often shows even in such pieces, and much more in his lighter aperçus, is remarkable. The Marginalia are full of good things—I find, after reading them anew for this purpose, that my reference slips “stand like the corn arow.” His dislike of German criticism[[1151]] may have been half opposition to Carlyle, between whom and himself there was a gulf fixed; and he should not have said that Macaulay had more true critical spirit than both the Schlegels put together. But this very passage is worth pondering, and it was very bold at the time. I do not think he borrowed the true observation of the resemblance between Hudibras and the Satyre Menippée.[[1152]] His defence of the “rhetorician’s rules”[[1153]] is just and lively: it is not a little noteworthy that he, the most apparently irregular and spasmodic of men of genius, perfectly understands the importance of Form.
And all this, let it be remembered, was written, not merely in distress, and in disease, and sometimes in despair, but—to adapt the Dickensian and Gautieresque juxtaposition—in the ’Thirties and 'Forties, when, as we have seen, criticism in England itself had fallen into the state from which it was aroused by Matthew Arnold years after Poe’s death; when Carlyle was turning his back on it, when Macaulay was acknowledging that he was not the man for it, when the men who meddled with it were showing absolute want of comprehension of Tennyson, and passing Browning over as beneath their notice. It was written in spite of the bad influence (discernible enough, as it is, in Poe) of the swaggering, swashbuckler fashion of “British” criticism itself. It was written before—long before in most cases—Lowell came to his maturity as a critic. It is, except in flashes and indications, mostly a might-have-been. But that might-have-been, translated into fact, would, I think, have ranked with the most noteworthy critical achievements that we possess in regard to poetry and belles-lettres. On other departments Poe could probably never, in the most favourable circumstances, have laid much hold. But in his own sphere he not only did the works, but knew those who did them and how they were done.
Lowell: his general position.
On the whole, however, I suppose that a majority of the best judges would award the place of premier critic of America to Mr Lowell, and I should certainly not attempt to contest the judgment. He had, in an eminent degree, most of the qualities which our long examination has enabled us to specify as generally found in good critics; catholic and observant reading, real enthusiasm for literature, sanity of judgment, good-humour, width of view, and (though this perhaps in rather less measure than the others) methodic arrangement and grasp. He was free, not merely from the defects which are the opposites of these good qualities, but from others—the niggling and carping of the gerund-grinder and the gradus-hunter,[[1154]] the hideboundness of the type-and-kind critic, and above all the incomprehensible and yet all-pervading inability to like something because it is not something else. He could put his perceptions brightly and forcibly—in a way perhaps rather tempting to re-read than at once sinking into the memory, but not the less excellent, and perhaps (in criticism) rather the more uncommon, for that.
On the wrong side of the account there are of course some things to put. I shall not be suspected of wishing to banish quips and cranks from criticism, but Mr Lowell was perhaps a little too prodigal of them. His patriotism was a little aggressive—not in the way (which he had far too much critical good sense ever to tread) of overvaluing his countrymen’s literary performances, but in too often infusing into his criticism a sort of Nemo-me-impune-lacessit flavour which was quite unnecessary, and in fact almost entirely irrelevant. And lastly, as has been hinted above, his grasp was not always sure. To compare the two papers on Gray, written at no great interval of time, by him and by his slightly younger contemporary Mr Arnold, is very interesting and instructive. I am not sure that, if it were just (or indeed possible) to extract separate good critical things, like nuggets, from the two essays, and weigh the parcels against each other, the American would not prove the richer, even allowing weight for length. But Gray is not “put” in the Harvard man’s essay as he is in the Oxonian’s: the critical contact is less full and vital, the congress less complete. It may be urged, indeed, that the selection is not quite fair, because of the unusual sympathy, and as it were harmony pre-established, between the Graian and the Arnoldian temperaments; but the same slight shortcoming will be found elsewhere.[[1155]]
Among my Books.
Mr Lowell’s best known book of literary criticism is, no doubt, Among my Books; but though it shows his method characteristically enough, it is by no means mainly bookish: in fact, I think there is rather less in it about the literary part of the matter than in others. The famous essay on “Dryden” is of course a standard, and perhaps its author’s diploma-piece as a critic; and the “Shakespeare once More” (a title suggested by Goethe) is a very interesting literary pot-pourri. But the “Lessing” and the “Rousseau” are chiefly biographical; and such papers as “Witchcraft” and “New England,” attractive as they are, are from the literary point of view quite “off,” as literary slang has it. There is nothing to object to in this, for the general title covers subjects suggested by books, or the subjects of books, quite as amply as books-by-themselves-books; and there can be no doubt that the reader usually likes the others best. But the whole volume shows its author well as a scholar but not a pedant, a man of letters who is also a man of the world, and a judge who, though by no means ideally impartial, and even with a tolerably well-stuffed portfolio of prejudices, can give judgments not to be pooh-poohed at the worst, and at the best things worthy to take their place with the best of judge-made law in our subject.
My Study Windows.
The equally well-known My Study Windows does not contain, as the title may seem to intimate, matter of more mixed quality as regards pure literature, but the quality is still mixed. Mr Lowell was not happy in his reception of the avatar of Mr Swinburne: it is indeed so rare for a man of more than middle age to be quite at focus with a new poet, that some of the wiser or more pusillanimous of our kind decline in such cases to register a formal judgment. The “Carlyle” is much tainted by political prejudice, though it does credit to Mr Lowell’s perspicacity to have so early found out in Carlyle that real “Toryism” which was so long mistaken. But the “Chaucer” and the “Pope”—differ here and there with them as we may or must—are solid and substantive contributions to the main shelf of criticism; while in the lower ranges “The Life and Letters of James Gates Perceval” only needed more quotation and more ruthlessness to make it a pendant to Macaulay’s “Montgomery.”
Essays on the English Poets.
The Essays which have been reprinted in England, with the permission of Mr Lowell and with a Preface by his own hands, as Essays on the English Poets[[1156]] (including those on Lessing and Rousseau as a very welcome though not exceedingly relevant bonus or make-weight), are partly drawn from the two books just noticed. Some of them seem to have been written rather early; most were originally lectures to a university, and may have a little sacrificed literature to instruction. The best by a good deal is, I think, the “Wordsworth,”[[1157]] which, though there are many good essays on Wordsworth to make up for the many bad ones, deserves to rank almost with the best. It is seldom that in a single essay one finds such a capital specimen of delicate appreciation as the comparison of the fall of Goethe’s Ueber allen Gipfeln to “blossoms shaken down by a noonday breeze on turf”; so good an example of the criticism of epigram as “Wordsworth is the historian of Wordsworthshire”;[[1158]] and so fine and just a critical simile as the comparison of Milton’s verse to a mixed fleet of men-of-war and merchantmen, which comes shortly after. The “Milton” itself has more to do with Milton’s editor and biographer than with Milton, and is marred by that curious impatience of a reasoned prosody which appears in Mr Lowell so often. So is the Spenser—quite admirable in great part of it—by the author’s well-known and excessive depreciation of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century poetry.[[1159]] The “Keats” leaves off just when we are expecting the critic to begin. As if to carry out unity of cross-purpose, if of nothing more, the “Lessing” hardly says anything about Lessing’s criticism, and the “Rousseau” is chiefly about Rousseau as a man. But though, putting the “Wordsworth” aside, the contents of the volume would hardly have given us a fair idea of Mr Lowell’s critical powers by themselves, it could have been written by no bad critic as a whole, and in part could only have been written by a very good one.
Last Essays.
As nearly always, too, this critic’s last work is of his best. The “Gray” we have noticed. The “Landor” is mainly, though not wholly, personal; and the “Walton,” as a “Walton” must be and ought to be, rather of life rather than of literature. But the paper on the Areopagitica is an admirable piece, and “On the Study of Modern Languages” stands, I think, alone among the arguments on its side, distinguished at once by competent knowledge and judicial fairness in regard to ancient and modern alike.
So much critical gift, indeed, of so wide a range and so happy in its display, is seldom to be found. And though nothing is more impertinent than to recommend a representative to a constituency to which you do not yourself belong, I think that perhaps these volumes may give me the right to say that if I were an American I should vote for Mr Lowell, and that whatever might be my nationality I should say “Well done!” if he were elected.
O. W. Holmes.
To pass to yet another of the same distinguished group. There is, though a great deal of indirect, not much direct criticism in the omniform and (when the writer could keep the cant of anti-cant out) almost always agreeable trilogy of the Breakfast-Table. But there is one passage[[1160]] in the last of the three which, with hardly an alteration, is so admirable and final a description of the duty of the critic himself that I must borrow it with some slight interlineations. These, I am sure, Dr Holmes—if only as to a brother member of the Rabelais Club of pleasant memory—would not have refused me:—
The whole duty of critics stated by him in alia materia.
“Now the present case, as the (critic)
doctor sees it, is just exactly such a collection of paltry individual facts as never was before—a snarl and tangle of special conditions out of which it is his business to wind as much thread as he can. It is a good deal as when a painter goes to take the portrait of any sitter who happens to send for him. He has seen just such noses, and just such eyes, and just such mouths: but he never saw exactly such a face before, and his business is with that and no other person’s—with the features of the worthy father of a family before him, and not with the portraits he has seen in galleries, or books, or Mr Copley’s grand pictures of the fine old Tories, or the Apollos and Jupiters of Greek sculpture. It is the same with (critic’s subject)
the patient. His (production)
disease has features of its own; there never was and never will be another case in all respects exactly like it. If a (critic)
doctor has science without common-sense he treats a (book)
fever, but not this man’s (book)
fever. If he has common-sense without science he treats this man’s (book)
fever without knowing the general laws that govern (books and all literature)
all fevers and all vital movements.”
Which thing let it be frontlet and wristlet to whosoever meddles with criticism.
Whitman and the “Democratic” ideal.
The poet who seems to some possibly rash non-American persons to divide with Poe the prize due to the worthiest in American poetry, was also a critic—less of the professional kind, much more borné, but more concentrated, and in some ways more influential. The critical views of Walt Whitman are scattered all over his not inconsiderable works, but are to be found brought together and marshalled most aggressively in his prose Democratic Vistas, with their “General Notes,” and in the numeris lege solutis of the Song of the Exposition. According to these views, though Whitman speaks of individual writers (not merely Shakespeare but even Scott) with warm admiration, and with nothing of the curious blindness which has characterised some of his followers in the line, “English literature is not great” because it is anti-Democratic and Feudal. These “Notes” must develop something quite different, and of the nature of an antidote. All “warrior epics” are “void, inanimate, passed,” and so forth. The expression of this is often, as Whitman’s expression constantly is, admirable, and the temper of it is always intentionally wholesome and generous. If I regard it as hopelessly bad criticism, it is not (to repeat the refrain once more) because I disagree with its conclusions, but because it seems to me to start from a hopelessly wrong principle, and to proceed on hopelessly mistaken methods. That principle and those methods, mutatis mutandis, would justify me in dismissing—nay, would force me to dismiss—as void, inanimate, worthless, mischievous, something of Heine, much of Shelley, more of Hugo, and very nearly the whole of Whitman himself—four poets in four different countries born, whom, as it happens, if I were the responsible literary adviser of a new King Arthur of Poetry, I should bid him summon among the very first to his Round Table. To the critic, as I understand criticism (and if I may adapt a famous text of Scripture), Feudalism is nothing and Democracy is nothing, but the Spirit of Literature. Whitman did not think so, and unfortunately his ideas (which may have been partly suggested by Emerson) have found followers who have not always mellowed and antidoted the crude poison of theory with the generous wine of temperament and expression.
Of the remarkable, if somewhat abortive, “Transcendental” group in the latter part of the first half of the nineteenth century, George Ripley and Margaret Fuller seem to call for notice here: as specimens of later writers, Whipple and Sidney Lanier may suffice, in the impossibility of including a considerable numerus.[[1161]]
Margaret Fuller.
The critical writings of the Marchesa Ossoli are, I suppose, chiefly contained in the volumes of her works entitled Art, Literature, and Drama, and Life Without and Life Within. They have much interest, and I think deserve the position assigned to her[[1162]] as the first American woman who had regularly trained for criticism, and as being in a way the chief of all such to the present day. They have, however, certain characteristics which perhaps might be anticipated. The merely silly reproach of transcendentalism leaves “Margaret” unscathed. She does not talk nonsense. But she does talk a little vaguely and loosely; and it does seem rather difficult for her to keep her eye steadily on any one object. We know that she will overvalue Goethe; it was, as we have pointed out, the very form and pressure of the time that made her do so, and probably to no country was the gospel according to Wolfgang a more powerful and beneficent gospel than to the United States of America in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. But when we read, in English, that “the frail Philina, graceful though contemptible, presents the degradation incident to an attempt at leading an exclusively poetic life,” or that “not even in Shakespeare” has she “felt the organising power of genius as in” Ottilie of the Wahlverwandtschaften, we think a great deal more than there is room or necessity here to say. The article on Poe’s Poems is very curious; the critic appears as a sort of she-Balaam, without that unlucky prophet’s generous frankness when he found he could not help it; she cannot ban, and will not bless freely. That on Philip van Artevelde is more curious still in another way. It makes the most enormous and yet indecisive sweeps before attacking its subject, feints at the whole question of Classic v. Romantic, says more about Alfieri (who seems to have been Margaret’s favourite poet) than about Taylor, and finally despatches the nominal theme in very few and very inadequate words. She is always attractive[[1163]]—this “Margarita del Occidente”—this new “Margarite of America,” and the ideas which, before reading, some may have formed of her as of a sort of “mother of all such as are schoolmarms” melt at once in contact with her work. But would she ever have become a great critic? I doubt it; she certainly had not become one when she died. She was thinking of things other than the Power of the Word. Better, if anybody likes; but other.
Ripley.
Her editor, I think, and, with Emerson, certainly her teacher, the Reverend George Ripley, did very much to imbue his country with foreign literature; not a little to help it to understand that literature. Ripley has been very highly spoken of, by good authorities, for the attempts which he made to produce a higher standard and a wider range of literary scholarship in the United States: and in fact there is no doubt that the Transcendental group did yeoman’s service in this way, their work not a little resembling that done in Germany a hundred years, or a little less, earlier. But I do not know many of his later Reviews in the Tribune, and his Specimens of Foreign Literature, two volumes published at Boston in 1838 as the ushers and samples of a much larger library of the subject, are not in the least literary, but purely philosophical. They give translated extracts from Cousin, Jouffroy, and Benjamin Constant, with Introductions and rather copious notes or short excursus. The whole shows knowledge, judgment, and a real critical capacity; but these good gifts are, as has been said, devoted to the philosophic, not the literary character and achievement of their subjects, and it is very noticeable that of the nearly twenty books or parts of books which are announced as to form the intended library, more than half are purely philosophical and only a small part purely literary.
Whipple.
Of Whipple I chiefly know the two volumes of Essays and Reviews, which appeared as long ago as 1849. He must have written much else, as he did not die till 1886; but the contents of these volumes are bulky enough and varied enough, I should suppose, to afford a fair field of judgment. His countrymen have, I believe, rather outgrown him, and do not at present rank him very high; but the “perspective of the past,” as it “firms,” will probably establish him in a fair though not a very high place. He seems to me to have been one of the first American writers who set themselves to be critics without further ambitions, and took literature calmly to be their province in the judicial way. He might, no doubt, have had more style: not that his is bad, but that it is undistinguished, wanting more grace to win that prize and more vigour to win the other. He might also have had more grasp. His dicta are occasionally unfortunate: one reads that Pinkney has written “as well as Lovelace and Carew, better than Waller, Sedley, Etherege, and Dorset”; and asks for those works of Pinkney which are as good as “To Althea,” and “To Lucasta,” and “To A. L.”; better than “Phillis is my only Joy” and “To all you Ladies.”[[1164]] And it is strange to find a man in two minds about Keats, and sure that Barry Cornwall has “splendid traits of genius.” But these things will happen. I do not know what Whipple’s education was, but I should rather doubt whether he had been sufficiently brought up on the chief and principal things to keep his eye from wandering and “wobbling.” His article on the Elizabethan dramatists has a fatal look of being founded rather on Lamb and Hunt and Hazlitt than on Dodsley and Dilke. Still he is by no means a merely negligible quantity in our calculus. He has interesting separate things—a capital, and, for an American at the moment, very magnanimous article on Sydney Smith; two notable ones on Talfourd and “British Critics”; early, and so valuable, notices of Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair. A paper on “South’s Sermons” makes one regret that he did not turn his attention more to older literature—perhaps he would have had more doubts about the superiority of Pinkney if he had. Again, he saw, what has often to this very day been foolishly denied, the intellectual importance of Tennyson—in fact, he seems to have been on the whole more disposed to the philosophical than to the purely artistic side of poetry. Of perhaps his two most ambitious essays the “Byron” has the commonplaceness which Byron’s eulogists and detractors alike so commonly display; but the “Wordsworth” is much better. He could hardly be called a critic of genius or even of great talent, but he was fair, not ill-informed, interested and disinterested (both in the good senses) and evidently a “corn-and-seeds-man”—that is to say, a critic—“in his heart.” Which things, if they could be said of all of us, so much the better.
Lanier.
Mr Sidney Lanier was, I believe, greatly thought of, and was the object of still greater hopes on the part of those who knew him personally; and though his career was cut short, there appear in his remains such a love for literature, and such an ardent desire to keep that love pure and high, that one cannot but be well affected to him. It is, however, rather difficult to believe that he would ever have been a really great, or even a fairly catholic and competent, critic. Occasional utterances and aperçus, when the planets were kind, must at most have been his portion. In the literature of criticism, which has many strange things, there is hardly anything odder than his The English Novel and the Principle of its Development,[[1165]] which is simply a long, rather discursive, and wholly laudatory review of George Eliot. The selection of the individual is a matter of little consequence: I wish that I could save myself constant repetition by printing across the dog’s-ear place of these pages the warning, “Never judge a critic by your agreement with his likes and dislikes.” But the narrowing down of so mighty a theme to the glorification of any single novelist of a passing day would have been enough to throw the gravest doubts on Mr Lanier’s competence.
Unluckily there is more. “The quiet and elegant narratives of Miss Austen,” as the sole notice dealt out to its subject by the author of a treatise on the English Novel, “speaks” that author with a disastrous finality. A man need not go all lengths for Miss Austen, just as he need not for Milton or Virgil; but if in a study of Latin or English poetry as a whole he contented himself with referring obiter to “the elegant and scholarly verse of Virgil” and the “serious and careful productions of Milton,” we should know what to think of him. The oddest thing in Mr Lanier’s book, however, is his intense, his obviously genuine, and I think his quite nationally disinterested abhorrence[[1166]] of the “Four Masters”—of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. Pamela is “a silly and hideous realisation” of a really immoral idea. Fielding’s morality is similar, but “more clownish.” Sterne “spent his life in low, brutish, inane pursuits.” He “can read none of these books without feeling as if his soul had been in the rain, draggled, muddy, miserable.” He would “blot them from the face of the earth.” They are “muck.” Praise of them is simply “well-meaning ignorance.” Is it ungenerous in face of this last statement to ask whether it is well-meaning knowledge which represents “Mr B.” not once but often as not an orphan but a widower, and Pamela as the servant, not of his mother but of his wife? I know that Mr Lanier died before he could revise these lectures for publication. But the point happens to be of some, if slight, importance, and when we take it in conjunction with the facts that Mr Lanier thought admirers of Tom Jones must centre their admiration on Allworthy, and that he accounted for the unpopularity of Daniel Deronda by asserting that English society felt its satire too keenly, our old brocard of judicia ignorantium doth something buzz i’ the ear.
But Mr Lanier, though a younger man than Mr Lowell, was, to say nothing of his inferiority in genius, practically a member of an older school, corresponding, as I have already remarked, to one which not all contemporaries of his had outgone in England itself, and which, for the matter of that, we have not universally outgone even now. Since his day American criticism (except for that in all probability passing diversion into “Democratic” parochialism which has been noticed) has become very much more cosmopolitan, very much more fully developed, and in particular very much more learned. It has perhaps, of the very latest years, gone a little too much to Germany for patterns, and plunged too often into the German cul-de-sac maze of specialist monographs—a dangerous and soul-killing wilderness, wherein many positively foolish and hurtful things are done, and where at the best the places are all too often dry. Yet some of these very monographs have been executed in a manner escaping the dangers and avoiding the drynesses, and not a few both of the authors of them and of others have shown soul and sight considerably above the mere trail-hunting of the specialist. If all living American critics were to be carried off by a special epidemic, I should be sorry for two reasons—first of all, because several of them are my personal friends, and secondly, because I should have to extend this appendix to an altogether unmanageable length. But meanwhile there is no doubt that Mr Lowell handed in, once for all, the “proofs” of American criticism, and that it has nothing now to do but to go on and prosper.
[1146]. Vol. ii., Nos. 1 and 2, July and August 1900 (Burlington, Vt.) The author is Mr W. M. Payne.
[1147]. In the colonial period not even the untiring industry and the microscopic enthusiasm of Professor Tyler have discovered anything critical. Mr Charles F. Richardson in American Literature, 1607-1885 (New York and London: Putnams, 1887), i. 396, says plumply, “Criticism did not exist in this country during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, nor did it make much showing until the nineteenth century was well advanced.” There is far less of it, for instance, in Washington Irving than one might expect. Perhaps some may think that an exception ought to be made for Channing. But his Essay on Milton, which is the chief critical thing of his known to me, produces that sense of bafflement which, if I remember rightly, Renan expresses in regard to him on other grounds: “We are aware that it is objected to poetry that it gives wrong views of life....” “We gaze on Satan with an awe not unmixed with mysterious pleasure....” &c., &c. With such matter we have known how to deal in the sixteenth, the seventeenth, the eighteenth century; in the nineteenth it loses significance.
[1148]. The chief source of my direct knowledge of his work of the kind is the collection called Drift-Wood, which I have known for very many years. Somewhat later—the Drift-Wood papers date from before 1840—he inserted critical introductions in his Poets and Poetry of Europe (1845).
[1149]. It fills half the third volume and all the fourth in Mr Ingram’s edition of the works (4 vols., Edinburgh, 1874).
[1150]. In the article on Lever, where some special gadfly seems to have stung Poe.
[1151]. Marg., 76.
[1152]. Ibid., 114.
[1153]. Ibid., 177.
[1154]. He comes perhaps too close to this in his paper on “The Library of Old Authors”; but there was certainly no little provocation in the editing, and even in the selection, of some of the volumes of that always comely and mainly comfortable series.
[1155]. On some minor defects it is not worth while to dwell. Lowell could see that Guest had no ear for verse: yet he was all his life long as impatient as Guest himself of that duly transferred and adapted “classical” system of English prosody which could be easily shown to justify almost all the things he himself liked, and to explain the badness of those which he thought bad. He began this impatience quite early with Poe in the Fable for Critics; and he never shook it off.
[1156]. London, n. d. The Preface is dated 1888.
[1157]. Ed. cit., pp. 184-239.
[1158]. Unfortunately the readers of that very peculiar kind of literature the “County History” are not often critical students of literature itself: so the charm of this remark may be missed.
[1159]. This intolerance of things not quite “best and principal” was almost as much a tic with him as with Mr Arnold. I was once praising some recently printed Old French poems to him. “Are they better than Chrestien?” he said. And he would not read them.
[1160]. The Poet at the Breakfast-Table, chap. v.
[1161]. The poets Bryant and Whittier have respectable reputations as critics, and, from what I know of their other work, are likely to have deserved them. But on the same ground I rather doubt whether it is necessary to investigate their criticism for the present purpose. Nor do I think that the critical work of Bayard Taylor, of which I have some knowledge, imperatively calls for notice. American Shakespeare-critics (with Richard Grant White at their head) might occupy a special excursus, not without advantage.
[1162]. As, for instance, by Professor Brander Matthews, Introduction to American Literature (New York, 1896), p. 226.
[1163]. And she can sometimes be piquant. This of the Schlegels: “Men to find plausible meaning for the deepest enigma, or to hang up each map of literature, well painted and dotted, on its proper roller,” is quite inspiriting and tempts one to regret that she was thrown away on Transcendentalism and Italomania.
[1164]. One might add the question, “What has ‘Gentle George’ Etherege to do in this galley?” though he pulls a good oar in another.
[1165]. New York, 1883. The characteristics here noted appear also in the recently and handsomely produced book on the Elizabethan period, Shakespeare and his Forerunners, 2 vols., 1903. The much earlier Science of English Verse, 1880, attempts to explain prosody by musical signs, and is thus out of the pale.
[1166]. The expressions quoted and others will be found at pp. 169-183, op. cit. Lanier, though quite unprejudiced, I think, by nationality, was badly bitten by the equally fatal though less ignoble mania of “Progress,” and by the moral heresy. He shows the same marks as do so many pre-Arnoldian English critics of the mid-nineteenth century.