though in itself the best thing in the whole poem, is unluckily placed, because this sensation of familiarity beneath novelty is constantly given by those very “conceits” which Pope is denouncing. On “Language” and “Numbers” he is too notoriously speaking to a particular brief. And as for his more general cautions throughout, they are excellent sense for the most part, but have very little more to do with criticism than with any other function of life. A banker or a fishmonger, an architect, artist, or plain man, will no doubt be the better for avoiding extremes, partisanship, singularity, fashion, mere jealousy (personal or other), ignorance, pedantry, vice. And if he turns critic he will find these avoidances still useful to him, but not more specially useful than in his former profession.
What then was the critical attitude which was expressed so brilliantly, and which gave Pope a prerogative influence over all the orthodox criticism of his own century in England and even elsewhere? and the critical attitude of his group. It can be sketched very fairly as being a sort of compromise between a supposed following of the ancients, and a real application, to literature in general and to poetry in particular, of the general taste and cast of thought of the time. The following of the Ancients—it has been often pointed out already—was, as the Articles of the Church of England have it, a “corrupt following”: those who said Aristotle meant now nobody more ancient than Boileau, now no one more ancient than Vida, scarcely ever any one more ancient than Horace. The classics as a whole were very little studied, at least by those who busied themselves most with modern literature; and it had entered into the heads of few that, after all, the standards of one literature might, or rather must, require very considerable alteration before they could apply to another.[[596]] But Greek and Roman literature presented a body of poetry and of most other kinds, considerable, admittedly excellent, and mostly composed under the influence of distinct and identical critical principles. Very few men had a complete knowledge of even a single modern literature; hardly a man in France knew Old French as a whole, hardly a man in England, except mere antiquaries, knew Old English even as a part. There was probably not a man in Europe till Gray (and Gray was still young at Pope’s death) who had any wide reading at once in classical literature and in the mediæval and modern literatures of different countries. Accordingly the principles of ancient criticism, not even in their purity fully adequate to modern works, and usually presented, not in their purity but in garbled and bastardised form, were all that they had to stand by.
This classical, or pseudo-classical, doctrine was further affected, in the case of literature generally, by the ethos of the time, and, in the case of poetry, by the curious delusion as to hard and fast syllabic prosody which has been noticed in connection with Bysshe. Classicism, in any pure sense, was certainly not to blame for this, for everybody with the slightest tinge of education knew that the chief Latin metre admitted the substitution of trisyllabic for dissyllabic feet in every place but one, and most knew that this substitution was even more widely permitted by Greek in a standard metre, approaching the English still nearer. But it had, as we have seen, been a gradually growing delusion, for a hundred and fifty years, in almost every kind of non-dramatic poetry.
As for the general tendency, the lines of that are clear—though the arbitrary extension and stiffening of them remain a little incomprehensible. Nature was to be the test; but an artificialised Nature, arranged according to the fashion of a town-haunting society—a Nature which submitted herself to a system of convention and generalisation. In so far as there was any real general principle it was that you were to be like everybody else—that singularity, except in doing the usual thing best, was to be carefully avoided. Pope, being a man of genius, could not help transcending this general conception constantly by his execution, not seldom by his thought, and sometimes in his critical precepts. But it remains the conception of his time and of himself.
The writers whom we have been discussing, since we parted with Dennis, have all been considerable men of letters, who in more or less degree busied themselves with criticism. Philosophical and Professional Critics. We must now pass to those who, without exactly deserving the former description, undertook the subject either, as part of those “philosophical” inquiries which, however loosely understood, were so eagerly and usefully pursued by the eighteenth century, or as direct matter of professional duty. The first division supplies Lord Kames in Scotland and “Hermes” Harris in England. Whether we are right in reserving Shaftesbury, Hume, Adam Smith, &c., from it, so as to deal with them from the Æsthetic side in the next volume, may be matter of opinion.
To the second belong Trapp, Blair, and Campbell. Trapp. Trapp need not detain us very long; but as first occupant of the first literary chair in England, and so the author of a volume of Prælections respectable in themselves, and starting a line of similar work which, to the present day, has contributed admirable critical documents, he cannot be omitted. He was the author of one of the wittiest epigrams[[597]] on record, but he did not allow himself much sparkle in his lectures.[[598]] Perhaps, indeed, he was right not to do so.
Hugh Blair, half a century later than Trapp, in 1759, started, like him, the teaching of modern literature in his own country. Blair. He had the advantage, as far as securing a popular audience goes, of lecturing in English, and he was undoubtedly a man of talent. The Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres,[[599]] which were delivered with great éclat for nearly a quarter of a century from the Chair of their subject, are very far, indeed, from being devoid of merit. They provide a very solid, if a somewhat mannered and artificial instruction, both by precept and example, in what may be called the “full-dress plain style” which was popular in the eighteenth century. They are as original as could be expected. The critical examination of Addison’s style, if somewhat meticulous, is mostly sound, and has, like Johnson’s criticisms of Dryden and Pope, the advantage of thorough sympathy, of freedom from the drawback—so common in such examinations—that author and critic are standing on different platforms, looking in different directions, speaking, one may almost say, in mutually incomprehensible tongues. The survey of Belles Lettres is, on its own scheme, ingenious and correct: there are everywhere evidences of love of Literature (as the lover understands her), of good education and reading, of sound sense. Blair is to be very particularly commended for accepting to the full the important truth that “Rhetoric” in modern times really means “Criticism”; and for doing all he can to destroy the notion, authorised too far by ancient critics, and encouraged by those of the Renaissance, that Tropes and Figures are not possibly useful classifications and names, but fill a real arsenal of weapons, a real cabinet of reagents, by the employment of which the practitioner can refute, or convince, or delight, as the case may be.
But with this, and with the further praise due to judicious borrowings from the ancients, the encomium must cease. The Lectures on Rhetoric. In Blair’s general critical view of literature the eighteenth-century blinkers are drawn as close as possible. From no writer, even in French, can more “awful examples” be extracted, not merely of perverse critical assumption, but of positive historical ignorance. Quite early in the second Lecture, and after some remarks (a little arbitrary, but not valueless) on delicacy and correctness in taste, we find, within a short distance of each other, the statements that “in the reign of Charles II. such writers as Suckling and Etheridge were held in esteem for dramatic composition,” and later, “If a man shall assert that Homer has no beauties whatever, that he holds him to be a dull and spiritless writer, and that he would as soon peruse any legend of old knight-errantry as the Iliad, then I exclaim that my antagonist is either void of all taste,” &c. Here, on the one hand, the lumping of Suckling and Etherege together, and the implied assumption that not merely Suckling, but Etherege, is a worthless dramatist, gives us one “light,” just as the similar implication that “an old legend of knight-errantry” is necessarily an example of dulness, spiritlessness, and absence of beauty, gives us another. That Blair lays down, even more peremptorily than Johnson, and as peremptorily as Bysshe, that the pause in an English line may fall after the 4th, 5th, 6th, or 7th syllable, and no other, is not surprising; and his observations on Shakespeare are too much in the usual “faults-saved-by-beauties” style to need quotation. But that he cites, with approval, a classification of the great literary periods of the world which excludes the Elizabethan Age altogether, is not to be omitted. It stamps the attitude.
These same qualities appear in the once famous but now little read Dissertation on Ossian.[[600]] The Dissertation on Ossian. That, in the sense of the word on which least stress is laid in these volumes, this “Critical Dissertation” is absolutely uncritical does not much matter. Blair does not even attempt to examine the evidence for and against the genuineness of the work he is discussing. He does not himself know Gaelic; friends (like Hector M’Intyre) have told him that they heard Gaelic songs very like Ossian sung in their youth; there are said to be manuscripts; that is enough for him. Even when he cites and compares parallel passages—the ghost-passage and that from the book of Job, Fingal’s “I have no son” and Othello—which derive their whole beauty from exact coincidence with the Bible or Shakespeare, he will allow no kind of suspicion to cross his mind. But this we might let pass. It is in the manner in which he seeks to explain the “amazing degree of regularity and art,” which he amazingly ascribes to Macpherson’s redaction, the “rapid and animated style,” the “strong colouring of imagination,” the “glowing sensibility of heart,” that the most surprising thing appears. His citations are as copious as his praises of them are hard to indorse. But his critical argument rests almost (not quite) wholly on showing that Fingal and Temora are worked out quite properly on Aristotelian principles by way of central action and episode, and that there are constant parallels to Homer, the only poet whom he will allow to be Ossian’s superior. In short, he simply applies to Ossian Addison’s procedure with Paradise Lost. The critical piquancy of this is double. For we know that Ossian was powerful—almost incredibly powerful—all over Europe in a sense quite opposite to Blair’s; and we suspect, if we do not know, that Mr James Macpherson was quite clever enough purposely to give it something of the turn which Blair discovers.
The charge which may justly be brought against Blair—that he is both too exclusively and too purblindly “belletristic”—cannot be extended to Henry Home, Lord Kames. Kames. Johnson, whom Kames disliked violently, and who returned the dislike with rather good-natured if slightly contemptuous patronage, dismissed the Elements of Criticism, 1761,[[601]] as “a pretty Essay, which deserves to be held in some estimation, though much of it is chimerical.”[[602]] The sting of this lies, as usual, in the fact that it is substantially true, though by no means all the truth. The Elements of Criticism is a pretty book, and an estimable one, and, what is more, one of very considerable originality. Its subtlety and ingenuity are often beyond Johnson’s own reach; it shows a really wide knowledge of literature, modern as well as ancient; and it is surprisingly, though not uniformly, free from the special “classical” purblindness of which Johnson and Blair are opposed, but in their different ways equal, examples. Yet a very great deal of it is “chimerical,” and, what is worse, a very great deal more is, whether chimerical or not in itself, irrelevant. It presents a philosophical treatise, vaguely and tentatively æsthetic rather than critical, yoked in the loosest possible manner to a bundle of quasi-professorial exercises in Lower and Higher Rhetoric. The second part might not improperly be termed “Critical Illustrations of Rhetoric.” The first could only be properly entitled “Literary Illustrations of Morals.”