We have, in short, in Dryden the first very considerable example in England, if not anywhere, of the critic who, while possessing fairly wide knowledge of literature, attributes no arbitrary or conventional eminence to certain parts of it, but at least endeavours to consider it as a whole; of the critic who is never afraid to say “Why?”; of the critic who asks, not whether he ought to like such and such a thing, but whether he does like it, and why he likes it, and whether there is any real reason why he should not like it; of the critic, finally, who tries, without prepossession or convention, to get a general grasp of the book or author, and then to set forth that grasp in luminous language, and with a fair display of supporting analysis and argument. Dryden, of course, is far—very far—from being a faultless monster of criticism. The application of his own process to his own theory will discover in it many mistakes, independent of the imperfect knowledge which has been already admitted, of the inconsistencies which are more of a virtue than of a defect, and of the concessions to tradition and fashion which are almost wholly unfortunate. Nay, more, it may be granted that Dryden did not escape the dangers of the process itself, the dangers of vagueness, of desultoriness, of dilettantism. But he has the root of the matter in him. He knows that art exists to give pleasure, and when he says “I am pleased with this,” he insists on strong reasons being given to show that he ought not to be so. He admits also—nay, insists on—nature, variety, individuality. He will “connoisseur no man out of his senses,”[[510]] and refuses to be so connoisseured by any, while he will give good reasons for his own and others’ pleasure. These are the marks of the true and catholic criticism; and Dryden has them.
Let us pass from him directly to one who has them not. There are few English critics who require to be dealt with at once more carefully and more faithfully than does Thomas Rymer. Rymer. He has become a name, and to become a name is to be at least on the way to becoming a legend, if not a myth. Moreover, as his legend is (for good reasons) far from a favourable one, it has been made more legendary by those generous or wayward revolts against it which are not uncommon. It has even been held proper, for some time, to shake the head of deprecation over Macaulay’s “the worst critic that ever lived.” Moreover, Rymer is by no means very accessible—in his critical works, of course, for we speak not here of the Fœdera. Whether these were originally published in very small numbers; whether the common-sense of mankind rose against them and subjected them in unusual proportions to the “martyrdom of pies”; or whether (by one of Time’s humorous revenges) the copies have been absorbed into special collections relating to that altissimo poeta whom Rymer blasphemed, I cannot say. But it is certain that very good libraries often possess either none or only a part of them, and that on the rare occasions on which they appear in catalogues they are priced at about as many pounds as they are intrinsically worth farthings. I think I have seen notices of Rymer which evidently confused The Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) with A Short View of Tragedy (1693).[[511]] Besides these two, Rymer, independently of smaller things and reissues, had produced, earlier than the earlier, in 1674, a preface to his own translation of Rapin’s Reflections, which completes the trinity of his important criticism. No one of the three is long; in fact, The Tragedies of the Last Age is a very tiny book, which, short as it is, seems to have exhausted the author before he could carry out half his scheme.
A careful and comparative reading of all three has given me a settled, and I think a just, conception of Rymer as of a man of remarkable learning for his age and country, but intensely stupid to begin with, and Puck-led by the Zeitgeist into a charcoal-burner’s faith in “the rules.” The Preface to Rapin. In the Preface[[512]] he is less crabbed than in the two booklets; and, though he already uses the would-be humorous hail-fellow-well-met colloquialism characteristic of the lower Restoration style, and employed even by such a man of letters as L’Estrange and such scholars as Collier and Bentley, he does not push it to the same lengths of clumsy ass-play as later. He thinks that “poets would grow negligent if Critics had not a strict eye on their miscarriages,” yet he admits that this eye sometimes squints, and compares some critics to “Wasps that rather annoy the Bees than terrify the drones.” Then he skims the past, noticing Castelvetro, Malherbe, and others, but thinks that till lately “England was as free from Critics as from Wolves,” Ben Jonson having all the critical learning to himself. After praise of Aristotle and a short notice of his actual author, he then proceeds to consider the history of English poetry independently. As for Chaucer, “our language was not then capable of any heroic character,” nor indeed was the most polite wit of Europe “sufficient for a great design.” Spenser had “a large spirit, a sharp judgment, and a genius for Heroic poetry perhaps above any that ever wrote since Virgil,” but “wanted a true idea,” and was misled by Ariosto. “They who can love Ariosto will be ravished with Spenser, but men of juster thoughts,” &c. His stanza is “nowise proper for our language.”
Davenant and Cowley are criticised with politeness, but not very favourably; the faults of both, as well as their designs, were what Rymer was capable of understanding, and neither provokes him to any rudeness on the one hand or stupidity on the other, though there is an occasional ripple betraying an undercurrent of asperity. Then, after some more general remarks, he takes the accepted test of the Description of Night, and applies it with mixed commendation to Apollonius Rhodius, with rather independent criticism to Virgil, slightingly to Ariosto, and rather cavillingly to Tasso, with a good deal of censure to Marino, and with more to Chapelain, with about as much to Père Le Moyne, and then with very considerable praise to that passage of Dryden’s in the Conquest of Mexico to which Wordsworth was afterwards nearly as unjust as Rymer himself to far greater things.[[513]] And with this rather patronising “Well done our side!” he stops.
Had Rymer done nothing more than this in criticism it would indeed be absurd to call him our best critic, but it would be still more absurd to call him our worst. There is fair knowledge, there is fair common-sense judgment; the remarks on Chaucer are merely what might be expected, and on Spenser rather better than might be expected; the detailed censure is correct enough; and though there cannot be said to be any great appreciation of poetry, there is interest in it. Above all, if the piece stood alone, we should hardly think of detecting in it even a murmur of the pedantic snarl which is the one unpardonable sin of a critic.
In The Tragedies of the Last Age Rymer ruit in pejus. The Tragedies of the Last Age. He had in the interval received some praise, which is always bad for an ill-conditioned man and dangerous for a stupid one; he had conceived the idea of being bee as well as wasp; and he undertook to show Beaumont and Fletcher, Shakespeare and Jonson, their errors, though as matter of fact he lost his wind in belabouring the twins, and had to leave the others till he had taken fifteen years’ breath. He shows himself at once in a mood of facetious truculence and self-importance. He is not going to emulate “the Remarks and eternal triflings of French Grammaticasters.” But he is going to set the “quibble-catching” of his countrymen right, and to put an end to “the Stage-quacks and Empirics in poetry” who despise the rules. “Fancy leaps and frisks, and away she’s gone; while Reason rattles the chain, and follows after,” in which flight Rymer, as often, does not seem to perceive that he is not exactly giving Reason and himself the beau rôle. Then he sets to work on three plays of Beaumont and Fletcher. In Rollo there is nothing to move pity and terror, nothing to delight, nothing to instruct.[[514]] In A King and No King Panthea actually suggests kissing![[515]] Arbaces is so bad that he really made Rymer think of Cassius—a withering observation which foretells what the critic was going to say about Shakespeare, though on this occasion he was too exhausted to say it.
He said it fifteen years later with no uncertain voice. The one redeeming feature of the Short View is its remarkable, if not quite impeccable, learning. The Short View of Tragedy. Rymer really knows something about “Provencial” poetry, though he confuses it (and thereby made Dryden confuse it) with old French, and actually regards Philippe Mouskès—not even a Frenchman but a Fleming—as a “troubadour.” Still, his knowledge is to be praised, and his ignorance forgiven. Less forgivable, but still not fatal, are the singular want of method with which he flings the result of his learning, pell-mell with his own remarks, on the reader, and (in a yet further degree of culpability) the vulgar jeering of his style. But all this might still pass. His mistakes are much less, and his knowledge much greater, than those of any critic of his age. Others have lacked method; and Bentley was quite, Collier very nearly, as coarsely rude. On some general points, such as the utility of the chorus in keeping playwrights to the rules, he is not unintelligent. He is a great admirer of dumb-show, and thinks that many of the tragical scenes, not merely in Shakespeare, but in Jonson, would go better without words.
More than half the little book[[516]] is occupied with a display of his learning—first in some general remarks on the drama, and then in a history of it which is, with all its mistakes, better informed than anything of the kind earlier. And then Rymer falls on Othello. He grants it “a phantom of a fable.” But it is a very bad phantom. Ridiculous that Desdemona should love a blackamoor at all; more ridiculous that she should be attracted by his stories of adventure; most that Othello should be made a Venetian general—and so on throughout. But the characters are worse. Rymer simply cannot away with Iago; and this on grounds exquisitely characteristic, not merely of him but of the whole system, of which he is the reductio ad absurdum. It is not nearly so much Iago’s theriotes by which Rymer is shocked, as his violation of the type and the general law. “He would pass upon us a close, dissembling, false, insinuating rascal instead of an open-hearted, frank, plain-dealing soldier—a character constantly worn by them for some thousand years in the world.”[[517]] Again, “Philosophy tells us it is a principle in the nature of Man to be grateful.... Philosophy must be [the poet’s] guide,”[[518]] therefore Iago is a poetical impossibility. Rymer knows that historically all men are not grateful: but never mind. The Type! the Type! the Type![[519]] One need hardly go farther, but in going we cannot, in one sense, fare worse.[[520]] “Godlike Romans” (as Mr Dryden had already called them) are, in Julius Cæsar, “put in fools’ coats and made jack-puddings of,” which, says Tom justly, “is a sacriledge.” Brutus and Cassius “play a prize, a tryal of skill in huffing and swaggering like two drunken Hectors.” In Tragedy Shakespeare “appears quite out of his element; his brains are turned; he raves and rambles without any coherence, any spark of reason, or any rule to control him, and set bounds to his frenzy.” Nor does Ben fare much better. He indeed “knew to distinguish men and manners at another rate.” In Catiline “we find ourselves in Europe, we are no longer in the land of Savages,” sighs Rymer with relief. Still Ben, too, “gropes in the dark, and jumbles things together without head and tail;” he, though not “in the gang of the strolling fraternity,” like Shakespeare, “must lie a miserable heap of ruins for want of architecture;” he “sins against the clearest light and conviction” by “interlarding fiddle-faddle comedy and apocryphal matters.” And so forth.
That Rymer was utterly deaf to the poetry of Othello and of Julius Cæsar, that he thinks “the neighing of a horse or the howling of a mastiff possesses more meaning” than Shakespeare’s verse, merely demonstrates that he understood the language of the beasts and did not understand that of the man. The Rule of Tom the Second. It disqualifies him for his business, no doubt, hopelessly and of itself. But in the nature of the case we cannot quarrel with him for this Judgment of God; and, on his own theory, mere poetry is of so little consequence that it does not much matter. But where he is cast hopelessly on his own pleadings, where he shows himself (as he has been called) utterly stupid, is in his inability to understand the fable, the characters themselves. He cannot see that the very points which he blunderingly picks out are the adunata pithana of his own law-giver—the improbabilities or impossibilities made plausible by the poet’s art; and that the excess of this or that quality in Iago, in Desdemona, in Othello, is utterly lost in, or is unerringly adjusted to, their perfect humanity. He is not bound to feel “the pity of it”—which he quotes, much as the pig might grunt at the pearl. But he is bound, on Aristotelian, no less than on the most extreme Romantic, principles, to feel that universality which Dryden had ascribed a quarter of a century before, and for all time to come. Therefore, for once, though no Macaulayan, I venture to indorse my unimportant name on a dictum of Macaulay’s. I have read several critics—I trust this book may show sufficiently that this is no idle boast. I have known several bad critics from Fulgentius to the Abbé d’Aubignac, and from Zoilus to persons of our own day, whom it is unnecessary to mention. But I never came across a worse critic than Thomas Rymer.[[521]]
Between its King and its Helot, our Sparta of the last forty years of the seventeenth century does not offer many persons for exornation, with crown or with stripe, as the case may be. Sprat in the famous passage of his History of the Royal Society; Phillips and Winstanley and Langbaine in their attempts at literary history; Sir Thomas Pope Blount in his other attempt at a critical summary of literature; Collier in his moral chevauchées against the ethical corruption of the Drama,—these we may legitimately notice, but at no great length. Dennis, Gildon, and Bysshe will come better in the next Book; and it is hoped that no reader will be so insatiable as to demand the inclusion of Milbourn or of Hickeringill.