Of course this excellent Scots lawyer and ingenious “Scotch metaphysician” had strong precedents to urge for making a muddle of Moral Philosophy and Literary Criticism. The Elements of Criticism. It has been pointed out that Aristotle himself is not a little exposed to the same imputation. But Kames embroils matters to an extent never surpassed, except by those, to be found in every day, who are incapable of taking the literary point of view at all, and who simply treat literature as something expressing agreement or disagreement with their moral, political, religious, or other views. He seems himself to have had, at least once, a slight qualm. “A treatise of ethics is not my province: I carry my view no farther than to the elements of criticism, in order to show that the fine arts are a subject of reasoning as well as of taste.”[[603]] If this was his rule he certainly gives himself the most liberal indulgence in applying it. His First Chapter is devoted to “Perceptions and Ideas in a Train”; the second (an immensely long one, containing a good third of the first volume) to “Emotions and Passions”; while the whole of the rest till the end of the seventeenth chapter is really occupied by the same class of subject. Kames excels in that constantly ingenious, and often acute, dissection of human nature which was the pride and pleasure of his century and his country, but which is a little apt to pay itself with clever generalisations as if they were veræ causæ. In one place we find a distribution of all the pleasures of the senses into pain of want, desire, and satisfaction. In another[[604]] the philosopher solemnly informs us, “I love my daughter less after she is married, and my mother less after a second marriage; the marriage of my son or my father diminishes not my affection so remarkably.” An almost burlesque illustration of the procedure of the school is given in the dictum,[[605]] “Where the course of nature is joined with Elevation the effect must be delightful; and hence the singular beauty of smoke ascending in a calm morning.” When one remembers this, and comes later[[606]] to the admirable remark, “Thus, to account for an effect of which there is no doubt, any cause, however foolish, is made welcome,” it is impossible not to say “Thou sayest it”; as also in another case, where he lays it down that “Were corporeal pleasures dignified over and above [i.e., beside the natural propensity which incites us to them] with a place in a high class, they would infallibly disturb the balance of the mind by outweighing the social affections. This is a satisfactory final cause for refusing to these pleasures any degree of dignity.”[[607]] I am tempted to quote Kames’s philosophy of the use of tobacco[[608]] also, but the stuff and method of his first volume must be sufficiently intelligible already.
The second, much more to the purpose, is considerably less interesting. A very long chapter deals with Beauty of Language with respect to Sound, Signification, Resemblance between Sound and Signification, and Metre. It is abundantly stocked with well-chosen examples from a wide range of literature, and full of remarks, generally ingenious and sometimes both new and bold, as where at the outset Kames has the audacity to contradict Aristotle, by implication at least, and lay it down that “of all the fine arts, painting and sculpture only are in their nature imitative.”[[609]] But it is not free from the influence of the idols of its time. Of such, in one kind, may be cited the attribution to Milton of “many careless lines”;[[610]] for if there is one thing certain in the risky and speculative range of literary dogmatism, it is that Milton never wrote a “careless” line in his life. If his lines are ever bad (and perhaps they are sometimes), they are bad deliberately and of malice. In another and more serious kind may be ranged the predominating determination to confuse the sensual with the intellectual side of poetry. This, of course, is Kames’s root-idea; but that it is a root of evil may be shown sufficiently by the following passage in his discussion of the pause—in relation to which subject he is as wrong as nearly all his contemporaries. He is talking of a pause between adjective and substantive.[[611]] What occurs to him is that “a quality cannot exist independent of a subject, nor are they separable even in imagination, because they make part of the same idea, and for that reason, with respect to melody as well as to sense, it must be disagreeable to bestow upon the adjective a sort of independent existence by interjecting a pause between it and its substantive.” His examples are no doubt vitiated by the obsession of the obligatory “middle” pause, which makes him imagine one between adjective and substantive in
“The rest, his many-coloured robe concealed,”
where the only real pause, poetic as well as grammatical, is at “rest.” But his principle is clear, and it is as clearly a wrong principle. It ignores the great fact glanced at above, that the pleasure of poetry is double—intellectual and sensual—and that the two parts are in a manner independent of each other. And in the second place, even on its own theory, it credits the mere intellect with too sluggish faculties. In the first line which Kames suggests as “harsh and unpleasant” for this reason,
“Of thousand bright inhabitants of air,”
the pause at “bright” is so slight a one that some might deny its existence. But if it be held necessary, can we refuse to the subtilitas intellectus the power of halting, for the second of a second, to conceive the joint idea of number and brightness, before it moves further to enrich this by the notion of “inhabitants of air”? The mere and literal Lockist may do so; but no other will. The Figures enjoy a space which, without being surprised at it, one grudges; and the Unities are handled rather oddly, while a digression of some fifty pages on Gardening and Architecture speaks for itself. The conclusion on the Standard of Taste is singularly inconclusive; and an interesting appendix on “terms defined and explained” presents the singularity that not, I think, one of the terms so dealt with has anything specially to do with literature or art at all.
Nevertheless, though it is easy to be smart upon Kames, and not very difficult to expose serious inadequacies and errors both in the general scheme and the particular execution, the Elements of Criticism is a book of very great interest and importance, and worthy of much more attention than it has for a long time past received. To begin with, his presentation, at the very outset of his book, of Criticism as “the most agreeable of all amusements”[[612]] was one of those apparently new and pleasant shocks to the general which are, in reality, only the expression of an idea for some time germinating and maturing in the public mind. Even Addison, even Pope, while praising and preaching Criticism, had half-flouted and half-apologised for it. Swift, a great critic on his own day, had flouted it almost or altogether in others. The general idea of the critic had been at worst of a malignant, at best of a harmless, pedant. Kames presented him as something quite different,—as a man no doubt of learning, but also of position and of the world, “amusing,” as well as exercising himself, and bringing the fashionable philosophy to the support of his amusement.
But he did more than this. His appreciation of Shakespeare is, taking it together (and his references to the subject are numerous and important), the best of his age. His citations show a remarkable relish for the Shakespearian humour, and though he cannot clear his mind entirely from the “blemish-and-beauty” cant, which is ingrained in the Classical theory, and which, as we saw, infected even such a critic as Longinus, he is far freer from it than either Johnson or Blair. In his chapter on the Unities he comes very near to Hurd[[613]] (to whom, as the Elements of Criticism preceded the Letters on Chivalry in time, he may have given a hint) in recognising the true Romantic Unity of Action which admits plurality so far as the different interests work together, or contrast advantageously. He has a most lucid and sensible exposure of the difference between the conditions of the Greek theatre and ours. In short, he would stand very high if he were not possessed with the pseudological mania which makes him calmly and gravely write[[614]]—“Though a cube is more agreeable in itself than a parallelopipedon,[[615]] yet a large parallelopipedon set on its smaller base is by its elevation more agreeable, and hence the beauty of a Gothic tower.” But this amabilis insania is in itself more amiable than insane. He wants to admit the Gothic tower, and that is the principal thing. Magdalen, and Merton, and Mechlin may well, in consideration of his slighting in their favour the more intrinsic charms of a cube, afford to let a smile flicker round their venerable skylines at his methodical insistence on justifying admiration of them by calling them large parallelopipeda set on their smaller ends. And the cube can console herself with his admission of her superior intrinsic loveliness.
The faults of Blair and of Kames are both, for the most part, absent, while much more than the merit of either, in method and closeness to the aim, is present, in the very remarkable Philosophy of Rhetoric[[616]] which Dr George Campbell began, and, to some extent, composed, as early as 1750; though he did not finish and publish it till nearly thirty years later (1777). Campbell. It may indeed be admitted that this piecemeal composition is not without its effect on the book, which contains some digressions (especially one on Wit, Humour, and Ridicule, and another on the cause of the pleasure received from the exhibition of painful objects) more excrescent than properly episodic. It is, moreover, somewhat weighted by the author’s strictly professional and educational design, in retaining as much of the mere business part of the ancient Rhetoric as would or might be useful to future preachers, advocates, or members of Parliament. Campbell, too, is a less “elegant” writer than Blair; and his acuteness has a less vivacious play than that of Kames. But here concessions are exhausted; and the book, however much we may disagree with occasional expressions in it, remains the most important treatise on the New Rhetoric that the eighteenth century produced. Indeed, strange as it may seem, Whately’s, its principal formal successor in the nineteenth, is distinctly retrograde in comparison.
The New Rhetoric—the Art of Criticism—this is what Campbell really attempts. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. He is rather chary of acknowledging his own position, and, in fact, save in his title, seldom employs the term Rhetoric, no doubt partly from that unlucky contempt of scholastic appellations which shows itself in his well-known attack on Logic. But his definition of “Eloquence”—the term which he employs as a preferred synonym of Rhetoric itself—is very important, and practically novel. The word “Eloquence, in its greatest latitude, denotes that art or talent by which the discourse is adapted to its end.” Now this, though he modestly shelters it under Quintilian’s scientia bene dicendi and dicere secundum virtutem orationis, asserting also its exact correspondence with Cicero’s description of the best orator as he who dicendo animos delectat audientium et docet et permovet, is manifestly far more extensive than the latter of these, and much less vague than the former. In fact Rhetoric, new dubbed as Eloquence, becomes the Art of Literature, or in other words Criticism.