[531]. A Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage. London, 1698. The great popularity of the book caused it to be quickly reprinted: my copy, though of the first year, is the third edition. Collier’s rejoinder to his victims next year contains good things, but is of less importance. And it does not matter much to us whether he originally drew anything from the Prince de Conti’s pietist Traité Sur la Comédie (1667). The Ancients, and the Fathers, and the Puritans were in any case quite sufficient sources.
[532]. Essays upon Several Moral Subjects (3rd ed., 2 vols., London, 1698). Nor can one make out an entirely good case (though something may be done) for Collier in the matter of that description of Shakespeare, which Mr Browning has maliciously chosen, as a motto for Ferishtah’s Fancies, from the Historical Dictionary: “His genius was jocular, but, when disposed, he could be very serious.”
[533]. De Re Poetica, or Remarks upon Poetry, &c., 4to, London, 1694. It is even said to have first appeared in 1690.
[534]. Both Roscommon and Mulgrave were critics in their way, and the former’s Essay on Translated Verse is one of those numerous documents which would have been of the utmost service to us in the last volume, but which cannot receive detailed treatment in this.
[535]. The remark may with more proportion be made of Cœlius himself, a very worthy Humanist, whom Lilius Giraldus pronounces to be multifariam eruditus, parum tamen in pangendis versibus versatus.
[536]. The Athenian Mercury (1690-97) ran to twenty volumes. The Oracle, from which the late Mr Underhill made his interesting selection (London, n. d.), was issued in four. I have one (London, 1703), which calls itself an “Entire Collection,” as well as Athenian Sport (London, 1707), and The British Apollo, (3rd ed., London, 1718).
[537]. An exception may perhaps be made in favour of J. [Cornand] de La Croze’s Works of the Learned, which, translated wholly or mainly by its author from the French, began to appear monthly in August 1691, and was collected before long in a thin quarto volume. Its contents are real reviews in almost every point—down to some sharp remarks by the editor-reviewer on plagiarisms by the Athenian Mercury, and complaints of the absence of indices to lessen the labour of reviewing. The books reviewed are, as a rule, of no great interest; but the summaries of their contents are generally good, and the views advanced are at least sometimes made the subject of passably argumentative discussion.
INTERCHAPTER V.
In the present Interchapter we come to a sort of Omphalos of the whole projected History. Here and here only, up to the present day, do we find a Catholic Faith of criticism, not merely at last constituted, but practically accepted over the whole literary world. In ancient times, though it is not difficult to discern a creed of a not wholly dissimilar character, yet that creed was arrived at in roundabout fashion, and was never applied universally to poetry and prose as literature. In the Middle Ages there was no such creed at all. In the century which—or rather a certain aspect of it—will furnish us with the subject of the last Book of the present volume, the catholic faith still maintains, and even, as is the wont of such things, rather tightens, its hold as received orthodoxy; but there are grumblings, and threatenings, and upheavals on the one hand, and on the other the tendency to a dangerous latitudinarianism. In that which, with the permission of the fates, will, with the Dissidents of the Eighteenth, give the subject of the next volume, there is no parallel consensus even of a prevailing party. Take a dozen critics of any distinction, at different times and in different countries of the seventeenth century in Europe, and ask them to enunciate some general laws and principles of literary criticism. The results, if not slavishly identical, would be practically the same, putting aside particular and half unreal squabbles of Ancient and Modern and the like. Do the same at any time for the last hundred—certainly for the last seventy or eighty—years, and the result would be a Babel. If any two of the utterances did not betray direct contradiction, it would probably be because the speakers began at entirely different facets of the subject.
Whether this literary unanimity—which resembles the ecclesiastical unanimity, on the ruins of which it grew, not least in being a little unreal—was a good thing or a bad thing in itself, is one of those larger questions which we do not purpose to argue out here. The point for us is that it existed. It was compatible, as in the other case, with a good deal of minor difference: there might be literary Scotists and Thomists; there might even (as in the Ancient and Modern case) be a Great Schism of the most apparently important kind. But this was as a rule mere jangling; and the more serious of the Moderns generally tried to make out little more than that their favourites could claim as much, or more, of the graces which both esteemed, as the other people’s favourites possessed.