Between Addison and Pope, Steele, Atterbury, and Swift call for notice. Steele. Steele has little for us.[[587]] There are few things more curious than the almost entire abstinence from any expression, in the slightest degree really critical, to be found in the eulogy of Spenser, which he generously enough inserted in Sp. 540 to express “his passion for that charming author.” The numerous friends whom he has so justly won for himself may perhaps insist that there is criticism of the best in this very phrase; and that the rather rash encomium on the poet’s “old words” as being “all truly English” is balanced by the justice of the reference to his “exquisite numbers.” But the fact is that Steele had neither the knowledge, nor the patience, nor the coolness for critical work.
Atterbury gives rather more. He was himself a man of great intellectual power, a scholar, an eloquent and delicate writer, and possessed independent taste enough to admire Milton fervently at a time when Addison had not yet made it wholly orthodox to admire that poet at all, and when most Tories detested him. Atterbury. But his observations on Waller[[588]] are the very quintessence of pseudodoxy, as to that respectable person; and, by a curious combination, though Waller is a rhymer confirmed and complete, Atterbury joins with his admiration for him an antipathy to rhyme—“this jingling kind of poetry,” “this troublesome bondage, as Mr Milton well calls it.” As for this we need say little; the danger lay not there. But it lay in the direction of such remarks as that “English came into Waller’s hands like a rough diamond; he polished it first,” that, “for aught I know, he stands last as well as first in the list of refiners” [imagine the excellent Waller as be-all and end-all of English!], that “verse before Waller was downright prose tagged with rhyme,” &c., &c. Once more let our impatience of this talk not be ignorant—as is the impatience of those who nowadays cannot see music in Dryden, poetry in Pope, “cry” and clangour now and then even in persons like Langhorne and Mickle. He expressed an opinion; but in expressing it he showed this same ignorance from which we should abstain. Instead of pointing out that Waller introduced a different kind of music, he insisted that Waller substituted music for discord: instead of saying that he introduced a new fashion of cutting the diamond, he would have it that the diamond was merely rough before. This was the culpa, the maxima culpa of eighteenth-century criticism, and Atterbury illustrates and shares it.[[589]]
The critical work of Swift[[590]] is much more important, and though a good deal of it is inextricably mixed up with the work of Pope and of Arbuthnot, the lion’s claw is generally perceptible enough. Swift. The famous Tatler of September 28, 1710, on the conceptions of English style and writing, ought to hold place in every history and course of lectures on the subject, next to Sprat’s passage in the History of the Royal Society forty years before, as the manifesto of a fresh stage in English style-criticism; and it practically precedes everything that Addison, Steele, and Pope published on, or in connection with, the subject. But long before this, in the wonderful volume which first (1704) revealed his genius to the world, Swift had shown how critical the Gods had made him.
The Battle of the Books is one of the most eccentric documents in the whole History of our subject. The Battle of the Books. Directly, and on its face, it may be said to be of the first critical importance; because it shows how very little subject, intention, accuracy to fact, verisimilitude, and half-a-dozen other indispensables according to certain theories, have to do with the goodness of a book. The general characteristics of The Battle of the Books in all these named respects, and some of the unnamed ones, are deplorable. In a tedious and idle quarrel which, at least as it was actually debated, never need have been debated at all, Swift takes the side which, if not the intrinsically wrong one, is the wrong one as he takes it. To represent Bentley, or even Wotton, as enemies of the Ancients might seem preposterous, if it were not outdone by the preposterousness of selecting Temple as their champion. The details are often absurd—from that ranking of “Despréaux” side by side with Cowley as a Modern brigadier, which is probably a slip (perhaps for “Desportes”) of pen or press, to the spiteful injustices on Dryden. The idea of the piece was probably taken from Callières.[[591]] Its composition, from the rigid “Ancient” point of view, is sadly lax; and the two most brilliant episodes—the “Sweetness and Light” quarrel of the Spider and the Bee, and the “machine” of the Goddess of Criticism—have little or nothing to do with the action. But yet it is—and one knows it is—a masterpiece; and it is pretty certain from it that in certain kinds of destructive criticism, and even in certain kinds of what may be called destructive-constructive, the author will be able to accomplish almost anything that he is likely to try.
Though the Tale of the Tub is less ostensibly bookish, it shows even greater purely critical power: for the power of the Battle is mainly that of a consummate craftsman, who can accomplish by sheer craftsmanship whatsoever his hand findeth to do. The Tale of a Tub.In the Tale the crusade against bad writing and bad writers, which Swift carried on more or less for the whole of his middle and later years, and in which he enlisted Addison and Pope, Arbuthnot and Gay, is all but formally proclaimed, and is most vigorously waged with or without proclamation. In the “Dedication to Somers” the sword is being something more than loosened in the sheath; it flashes out in “The Bookseller to the Reader”; it is doing sanguinary work in the great “Epistle to Prince Posterity;” and it has only momentary rests in the “Preface” and the “Induction”: while there is hardly a section of the main text in which the quarters of Grub Street are not beaten up, and the Conclusion is even as the preludes and the main body.
A shrewd judge could hardly fail to perceive, from these famous twin-books, that a new genius of thoroughly critical character had arisen: but such a judge might well have doubted how far its exercise could be anything but negative. Minor works. His doubts, as we have already hinted, were to be justified. Indirectly, indeed, not merely in the Tatler paper above referred to and elsewhere, but by that almost uncanny influence which he seems to have exerted in so many ways on men only less than himself, Swift had very much to do with the rescuing of Style, by the hands of Addison and the rest, from the vulgarisation which it was undergoing at the close of the seventeenth century, not merely in common writers, not merely in the hands of an eccentric like L’Estrange, but in those of scholars like Collier and Bentley. But even this was a task of destruction rather than of positive construction, and he was always most at home in such tasks. The Meditation on a Broomstick and the Tritical Essay, though every good reviewer should know them by heart, and will have but too many opportunities of using his knowledge, are delivered with the backward, not the forward, speech of the critic; the Proposal for correcting the English Tongue, which falls in with the Tatler paper, aims at a sort of stationary state of language and literature alike, at proscriptions and ostracisings; the Letter to a Young Clergyman and the Essay on Modern Education, though both touch on literature, are exceedingly general in their precepts; and though all persons with a true English appreciation of shameless puns and utter nonsense must delight in The Antiquity of the English Tongue, it cannot be called serious criticism. There is more in the Advice to a Young Poet: but even here Swift is rather “running humours” on his subject than discussing it in the grave and chaste manner.
We shall therefore hardly be wrong if, after excepting the literary directions of the universal satiric douche in the Tale of a Tub, and the useful but somewhat rudimentary warnings of the Tatler paper, we see the most characteristic critical work of Swift in Martinus Scriblerus and the Peri Bathous, especially in the latter, which, though it be principally attributed to Arbuthnot and Pope, is as surely Swiftian in suggestion as if the Dean had written and published it alone. Often as it has been imitated, and largely as its methods have been drawn upon, it has never been surpassed as an Art of General and Particular “Slating”: and the sections on the Figures, with the immortal receipt for making an epic poem (the full beauty of which is lost on those who do not know how appallingly close it is to the approved prescriptions of the best neo-classic critics), cannot be too highly praised. But, once more, the critic is here at hangman’s work only: he allows himself neither to admire nor to love.
These principles, put in various ways by writers of more or less genius for half a century, found what seemed to more than two generations (always with a few dissidents) something like consummate expression in certain well-known utterances of Pope. Pope. As expression these utterances may still receive a very high degree of admiration: as anything else it is difficult to believe that any turn of fashion, unless it brings with it oblivion for large districts of noble literature, can restore them to much authority. Pope, though better read than he seems in his poems, was by no means a learned man; and it is now pretty generally admitted that his intellect was acute rather than powerful. The obstinate superficiality—the reduction of everything, even the most recondite problems of philosophy, even the most far-ranging questions of erudition, to a jury of “common-sense” persons, decorated with a little of the fashion of the town—which had set in, found in him an exponent as competent to give it exquisite expression as he was indisposed, and probably incompetent, to deepen or extend its scope. He attained early to nearly his full powers, and it does not much matter whether the Essay on Criticism was written at the age of twenty or at that of twenty-two. He could have improved it a little in form, but would hardly have altered it at all in matter, if he had written it thirty years later. The Imitation of the Epistle of Horace to Augustus, which was actually written about that time, is, though superior as verse, almost inferior as criticism, and more “out” in fact. The two together give a sufficient view of Pope as he wished to be taken critically. The Letters. But to be perfectly fair we must add the critical utterances in his Letters,[[592]] his Preface to Shakespeare, and (with caution of course) the remarks attributed to him by Spence. The Preface has received much praise; and has deserved some even from those who follow not Pope generally. It would be unfair to blame him for adopting the mixed “beauty and fault” system which had the patronage of great names in antiquity, and found hardly even questioners in his own time. And it is something that he recognises Shakespeare’s power over the passions, the individuality of his characters, his intuitive knowledge of the world and of nature. He is moderate and sensible on the relations of Shakespeare and Jonson; he has practically said all that is to be said, in an endless and tiresome controversy, by writing, The Shakespeare Preface. “To judge Shakespeare by Aristotle’s rules is like trying a man by the laws of one country who acted under those of another.” And for such utterances we may excuse, or at least pass over with little or no comment, the remarks that Shakespeare kept bad company, that he wrote to please the populace, that he resembles “an ancient majestic piece of Gothic architecture [so far, so good], where many of the details are childish, ill-placed, and unequal to its grandeur.” The littleness of this patchy, yea-nay criticism beside the great and everlasting appreciation of his master Dryden speaks for itself; it is only fair to remember that the very existence of Dryden’s for once really marmoreal inscription almost inevitably belittled and hampered Pope. He was obliged to be different; and internal as well as external influences made it certain that if he were different he would be less.
The Popiana of Spence[[593]] add more to our idea of Pope’s critical faculty, or at least of its exercises; in fact, it is possible to take a much better estimate of Pope’s “literature” from the Anecdotes than from the Works. Spence’s Anecdotes. Although the Boswellian spirit was, fortunately enough for posterity, very strong in the eighteenth century, there was no particular reason why Spence should toady Pope—especially as he published nothing to obtain pence or popularity from the toadying. That rather remarkable collection, or re-collection, of Italian-Latin poetry of the Renaissance,[[594]] of which not much notice has been taken by Pope’s biographers, would, of itself, show critical interest in a part, and no unnoteworthy part, of literature: and a few of the Spencean salvages bear directly upon this. He need not have been ashamed of his special liking for Politian’s Ambra: and he was right in thinking Bembo “stiff and unpoetical,” though hardly in joining Sadolet with him in this condemnation. We know perfectly well why he did not like Rabelais, for which Swift very properly scolded him: indeed, he tells us himself, twice over, that “there were so many things” in Master Francis, “in which he could not see any manner of meaning driven at,” that he could not read him with any patience. This is really more tale-telling than the constantly quoted passage about Walsh and correctness. For, after all, everybody aspires to be correct: only everybody has his own notions of what is correctness. It is not everybody—and, as we see, it was not the great Mr Pope—who could, or can, appreciate nonsense, and see how much more sensible than sense the best of it is. It would skill but little to go through his isolated judgments: but there are one or two which are eloquent.
Still, it is to the Essay and the Epistle that we must turn for his deliberate theory of criticism, announced in youth, indorsed and emphasised in age. The Essay on Criticism. And we meet at once with a difficulty. The possessor of such a theory ought, at least, to have something like a connected knowledge, at least a connected view, of literature as a whole, and to be able to square the two. All Pope seems to have done is to take the Arts of Horace, Vida, and Boileau, to adopt as many of their principles as he understood, and as would go into his sharp antithetic couplet, to drag their historical illustrations head and shoulders into his scheme without caring for the facts, and to fill in and embroider with criticisms, observations, and precepts, sometimes very shrewd, almost always perfectly expressed, but far too often arbitrary, conventional, and limited. He is most unfortunate of all in the historical part, where Boileau had been sufficiently unfortunate before him. The Frenchman’s observations on Villon and Ronsard had been ignorant enough, and forced enough: but Pope managed to go a little beyond them in the Essay, and a great distance further still in the Epistle. The history of the famous passage,