I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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