II.
“Who would has heard Sordello’s story told.”
In these three volumes an endeavour has been made to fulfil the pledge given at their beginning, and to set before the reader, in a plain tale, what men have actually done, said, and thought in Criticism of Literature, in Judging of Authors. We have seen how the art grew up, like so many other arts, as a sort of parergon, as a corollary upon the strictly practical study of Rhetoric for the purpose of the orator: and how it was long held in a sort of subjection to this techne, which, if not exactly a techne banausos, certainly must rank far below the study and the fruition of the whole of literature. We have seen how, in the times called ancient, it never got wholly free from this inferior position; how, in the times called mediæval, it hardly showed any signs of life; how it revived with the general new birth, and what have been its fortunes since. There can be no need to pad this already stout volume with abstracts of our Interchapters. The story of Criticism is actually before the reader, and if he will not take it now, that it is at last given to him, because there is wanting something that is not the story, I cannot help it. No doubt there are some, perhaps there are many, who honestly and impartially think the story not worth giving, think it a story of something, at best a superfluity, generally a failure, at worst a nuisance, redeemable and excusable only (if then) by being made to serve as illustration of some philosophic theory. But I have said often enough and positively enough, though I trust not too contumaciously, that I do not think so.
And even if the record seem too often a record of failure and mistake, there is a cheerful side to this also. Most of the dangers of criticism, as this long survey must have sufficiently taught those who care to learn, are comfortably and reassuringly (if from another point of view despairingly) old. We know they will come, and we know they will go, whether in our time or in another we cannot say, but it does not much matter.
“The Whole man idly boasts to find,” no doubt. Not many have even attempted to do it; few who have attempted it have succeeded in that comparatively initial and rudimentary adventure which consists in justly finding the parts. But Criticism is, after all, an attempt, however faulty and failing, however wandering and purblind, to do both the one and the other. No Muse, or handmaid of the Muses (let it be freely confessed) has been less often justified of her children: none has had so many good-for-nothings for sons. Of hardly any have some children had such disgusting, such patent, such intolerable faults. The purblind theorist who mistakes the passport for the person, and who will not admit without passport the veriest angel; the acrid pedant who will allow no one whom he dislikes to write well, and no one at all to write on any subject that he himself has written on, or would like to write on, who dwells on dates and commas, who garbles out and foists in, whose learning may be easily exaggerated but whose taste and judgment cannot be, because they do not exist;—these are the too often justified patterns of the critic to many minds. The whole record of critical result, which we have so laboriously arranged and developed, is a record of mistake and of misdoing, of half-truths and nearly whole errors.
So say they, and so let them say: things have been said less truly. But, once more, all this is no more Criticism itself than the crimes and the faults of men are Humanity in its true and eternal idea. Criticism is the endeavour to find, to know, to love, to recommend, not only the best, but all the good, that has been known and thought and written in the world. If its corruption be specially detestable, its perfection is only the more amiable and consummate. And the record of the quest, while it is not quite the record of the quest for other Eldorados—while it has some gains to yield, some moments of adeption, some instances of those who did not fail—should surely have some interest even for the general: it should more surely have much for those few but not unworthy, faint yet pursuing, who would rather persevere in the search for the unattainable than rust in acquiescence and defeat.
For to him who has once attained, who has once even comprehended, the ethos of true criticism, and perhaps to him only, the curse which Mr Browning has put in one of his noblest and most poetic passages does not apply. To him the “one fair, good, wise thing” that he has once grasped remains for ever as he has grasped it—if he has grasped it at first. Not twenty, not forty years, make any difference. What has been, has been and remains. If it is not so, if there is palling and blunting, then it is quite certain either that the object was unworthy or that the subject did not really, truly, critically embrace it—that he was following some will-o'-the-wisp of fancy on the one hand, some baffling wind of doctrine on the other, and was not wholly, in brain and soul, under the real inspiration of the Muse. That this adeption and fruition of literature is to a certain extent innate may be true: that it is both idle and flagitious to simulate it if it does not exist, is true. But it can certainly be cultivated where it exists, and it probably in all cases requires cultivation in order that it may be perfect. In any fair state of development it is its own exceeding great reward,—a possession of the most precious that man can have. And the practical value of the Art of Criticism, and of the History of Criticism (which, as in other cases, is merely the exposition of the art in practice), is that it can and does assist this development; that by pointing out past errors it prevents interference with enjoyment; that it shows how to grasp and how to enjoy; that it helps the ear to listen when the horns of Elfland blow.
[1104]. It does not seem necessary to follow the lines of the earlier Interchapters by summarising distributively the critical results of the period in different countries and phases. The very indefiniteness of the whole establishes a community which can be generally pointed out.