It is impossible to know anything about Southey without feeling that, both in character and in intellect, he had many of the qualities that go to make an enlightened critic. But his fine nature was warped by a strain of bigotry; and he had what, even in a man who otherwise gave conclusive proof of sincerity and whole-heartedness, must be set down as a strong touch of the Pharisee. After every allowance has been made, no feeling other than indignation is possible at the tone which he thought fit to adopt towards Shelley.
He opens the assault, and it is well that he does so, by an acknowledgment that the versification of the Revolt of Islam, the corpus delicti at that moment under the scalpel, is "smooth and harmonious", and that the poem is "not without beautiful passages, free from errors of taste". But the "voice of warning", as he himself would too generously have called it, is not long in making itself heard. "Mr. Shelley, with perfect deliberation and the steadiest perseverance, perverts all the gifts of his nature, and does all the injury, both public and private, which his faculties enable him to perpetrate. . . .He draws largely on the rich stores of another mountain poet, to whose religious mind it must be matter of perpetual sorrow to see the philosophy, which comes pure and holy from his pen, degraded and perverted by this miserable crew of atheists and pantheists."
So far, perhaps, the writer may claim not to have outstepped the traditional limits of theological hatred. For what follows there is not even that poor excuse. "If we might withdraw the veil of his private life and tell what we now know about him, it would be indeed a disgusting picture that we should exhibit, but it would be an unanswerable comment on our text. . .Mr. Shelley is too young, too ignorant, too inexperienced, and too vicious to undertake the task of reforming any world but the little world within his own breast." [Footnote: Quarterly Review, xxi. 460, &c.] For the credit of both Reviews it must be said that it would be difficult to find another instance of so foul a blow as this: [Footnote: Except in the infamous insinuations, also a crime of the Quarterly,]
Non ragioniam di lui, ma guarda e passa.
[Footnote: against the character of Currer Bell. See also the scurrilous attack on the character of Leigh Hunt in Blackwood, vol III 453]
Apart from their truculence, the early numbers of the Edinburgh and Quarterly are memorable for two reasons in the history of English literature. They mark the downfall of the absolute standard assumed by Johnson and others to hold good in criticism. And they led the way, slowly indeed but surely, to the formation of a general interest in literature, which, sooner or later, could not but be fatal to their own haphazard dogmatism. By their very nature they were an appeal to the people; and, like other appeals of the kind, they ended in a revolution.
Of the men who fixed the lines on which this revolution was to run, four stand out taller from the shoulders upwards than their fellows. These are Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and Carlyle. The critical work of all four belongs to the first thirty years or so of the present century; [Footnote: Some of the dates are as follows Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets was published in 1808, his Essays of Elia began to appear in the London Magazine, 1820, Coleridge's first Course of Lectures (on English poets) was delivered in 1808, his second Course, in 1811-12, his Biographia Literana in 1817 Hazlitt's Characters of Shakespeare's Plays was published in 1817, his Lectures on the English Poets in 1818, and on The English Comic Writers in 1819 Carlyle's Essays began to appear (in the Edinburgh and other Reviews) in 1827, that on Diderot—the last notable essay of a literary cast—in 1833 Hazlitt died in 1830, Coleridge and Lamb in 1834 By that time Carlyle had turned to history and kindred subjects] and of the four it is probable that Carlyle, by nature certainly the least critical, had the greatest influence in changing the current of critical ideas. Space forbids any attempt to treat their work in detail. All that can be done is to indicate what were the shortcomings of English criticism as it came into their hands, and how far and in what manner they modified its methods and its aims.
Till the beginning of the present century, criticism in England had remained a very simple thing. When judgment had once been passed, for good or evil, on an individual work or an individual writer, the critic was apt to suppose that nothing further could reasonably be expected of him. The comparative method, foreshadowed but only foreshadowed by Dryden, had not been carried perceptibly further by Dryden's successors. The historical method was still more clearly in its infancy. The connection between the two, the unity of purpose which alone gives significance to either, was hardly as yet suspected.
It may be said—an English critic of the eighteenth century would undoubtedly have said—that these, after all, are but methods; better, possibly, than other methods; but still no more than means to an end— the eternal end of criticism, which is to appraise and to classify. The view is disputable enough. It leaves out of sight all that criticism—the criticism of literature and art—has done to throw light upon the dark places of human thought and history, upon the growth and subtle transformations of spiritual belief, upon the power of reason and imagination to mould the shape of outward institutions. All these things are included in the scope of the historical and comparative methods; and all of them stand entirely apart from the need to judge or classify the works of individual poets.
But, for the moment, such wider considerations may be put aside, and the objection weighed on its own merits. It must then be answered that, without comparison and without the appeal to history, even to judge and classify reasonably would be impossible; and hence that, however much we narrow the scope of criticism, these two methods—or rather, two aspects of the same method—must still find place within its range. For, failing them, the critic in search of a standard—and without some standard or criterion there can be no such thing as criticism—is left with but two possible alternatives. He must either appeal to some absolute standard—the rules drawn from the "classical writers", in a sense wider or narrower, as the case may be; or he must decide everything by his own impression of the moment, eked out by the "appeal to Moliere's maid". The latter is the negation of all criticism. The former, spite of itself, is the historical method, but the historical method applied in an utterly arbitrary and irrational way. The former was the method of Johnson; the latter, of the Edinburgh and the Quarterly. Each in turn, as we have seen, had ludicrously broken down.