In one way Eighteenth-Century criticism has a very notable advantage over Seventeenth and Sixteenth. In the earliest of the three, as we saw, criticism exists almost without a critic. Its authorities are either men of something less (to speak kindly) than the first rank as men of letters, or else they devote only a slight and passing attention to the subject. In the Seventeenth this is not quite so, for Dryden is a host in himself, and Boileau, to name nobody else, is no common man of letters.
But in the Eighteenth the case is far more altered. English and French, the two leading literatures of Europe, are copiously and intensely critical, if not entirely according to knowledge. Addison, Johnson, Pope, Voltaire, are all dictators of literature, whose fame and authority, in the case at least of the two last, go far beyond their own country—and they are all critics. In another country, though in a division, for reasons, not yet noticed, Goethe, who, if any one, is the representative man of letters in his own nation, is a critic. The second class of names—mentioned or to be mentioned—Vico, Shaftesbury, Lessing, Gray, Buffon, Diderot, and others, approaches very nearly, if it does not sometimes reach, the first rank. Moreover, criticism has enormously multiplied its appearances and opportunities of appearance: it has, in a manner, become popular. The critical Review—the periodical by means of which it is possible, and becomes easy, to give critical account of the literature, not merely of the past but of the present—becomes common. The critic as such is no longer regarded as a mere pedant; he at least attempts to take his place as a literary man of the world. If Italy and Spain fail—even allowing for the remarkable Italian critical group at the beginning of the century—to justify their old reputation, Germany, on the other hand, begins that career of critical hard labour to which she has apparently sentenced herself in perpetuity, and relieves it with more excursions into the fairer letters than of late. The French, though subject more severely than men of any other country to the idols of the time, continue to justify themselves both in the lighter and the severer critical work.
But the contribution of England is the most interesting of all. Our position at the time may be compared, with some advantage and no danger of straining, to that of Spain at a somewhat earlier period (see pp. 338-350). We do not indeed find, in any English critic after Dryden, formal expressions of such weight and pregnancy in the Romantic direction as those which the sharp-sightedness and patience of Señor Menéndez y Pelayo have extracted from the Spanish Preceptists. But the general tendency is even more comprehensive, if not yet catholic. In consequence, very mainly, of Dryden’s own magnificent championship of Shakespeare and Milton, it was, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, felt in England that these two at any rate had to be reckoned with; while Chaucer also had the same powerful recommendation, and Spenser had never lost the affection of the fit, though for a time they might be few. With these four to be somehow or other—by hook or by crook—taken into consideration, it was impossible for the worst harm to be done; and the peculiarities of English character, combined with the more vigorous condition of English creative literature, made the compromise work far better than that which had been in a manner entertained in Spain on the subject of Lope and Calderon. It might have been dangerous if Johnson had written the Lives at the age which was Pope’s when he wrote the Essay on Criticism; but this danger also the Fortune of England—kindest of Goddesses, and most abused in her kindness, yet justified of Fate!—averted.
We shall, it is to be hoped, be able to show in the next volume how these conditions of Classicism in the several countries affected the rise or resurrection of Romanticism. For the present we must confine ourselves to the way in which they affected Classicism itself.
For the purpose we need not repeat, or even recapitulate, what has been said of its fortunes in Germany, Italy, and Spain, save to say that in the first-named country it only appeared to disappear, while in the other two it suffered increasing decrepitude. England and France are much more important and interesting subjects of consideration and comparison.
In both, as we saw, Neo-classicism is undoubtedly the accepted orthodoxy of the time. If that draft confession of Faith, which has been sketched in a former page, had been laid before an assembly of the leading men of letters in both countries, many might have taken exception to its actual form; but as for its spirit, there is hardly a Frenchman who would have refused to accept it, while not many Englishmen would have done so. At the same time—until, towards the later years of the century, the “alarums and excursions” of the Romantic rising recalled the orthodox to strictness—a more searching examination would have revealed serious defections and latitudinarianisms. Pope was perhaps the most orthodox neo-classic, in criticism as in creation, of the greater men of letters of the time; but Pope was fond of Spenser. Addison had never thoroughly cleared his mind up about criticism; but many things in him point the Romantic way, and we know that some of the more orthodox thought him weak and doubtful. Voltaire, at one time, had considerable leanings towards both Shakespeare and Milton; and we have seen how Johnson, though he resisted and recovered himself, was at least once within appreciable distance of that precipice of “judging by the event,” over which, when a Classic once lets himself slip, he falls for ever and for ever through the Romantic void.
Of lesser men we need not speak much—reference to what has been said above of the escapades of Fontenelle and Marmontel, of Steele and Kames, is sufficient. But all these things were as the liberalities of a securely established orthodoxy, estated and endowed, dreading no disturbance, and able to be generous to others—even to indulge itself a little in licence and peccadillo. Everywhere but in England the vast majority of men, and even in England all but a very small minority, had no doubt about the general principles of the Neo-classic Creed. They still judged by Rules and Kinds; they still had the notion that you must generalise, always generalise; they still believed that, in some way or other, Homer and Virgil—especially Virgil—had exhausted the secrets of Epic, and almost of poetry; and, above all, they were entirely unprepared to extend patient and unbiassed judgment to something acknowledged, and acknowledging itself, to be new. On the contrary, they must still be vindicating even things which they liked, but which appeared to them to be novel, on the score of their being so very like the old—as we saw in the case of Blair and Ossian.
The Nemesis of this their Correctness, as far as creation is concerned, in prose to some extent, but still more in verse, has been described over and over again by a thousand critics and literary historians. The highest and most poetical poetry they could not write at all—except when they had, like Collins, and Smart, and Blake, a little not merely of furor poeticus, but of actual insanity in their constitution, or when they violated their own rules by transgressing into pure nature-poetry or into intense realism of anthropology. In their own chosen way they could at best achieve the really poetical rhetoric, but at the same time strictly rhetorical poetry, of Pope, and, in a lower range, of Akenside.[[744]] For prose they had the luck to discover, in the Novel, a Kind which, never having been to any great extent practised before, was a Kind practically without rules, and so could make or neglect its rules for itself. In another, not quite so new, their performance gave striking instance of their limitations. The Periodical Essay was a thing of almost infinite possibilities: but because it had happened at first to be written in a certain form by persons of genius, they turned practice into Kind and Rule once more, and for nearly the whole century—not merely in England—went on imitating the Spectator.
In Criticism itself the effects were not wholly different, though of course to some extent apparently dissimilar. We have seen how, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the necessary and ineluctable set of the critical current towards full and free “judging of authors” seems to have been resisted by a sort of unconscious recalcitrance on the part of critics; yet how they are drawn nearer and nearer to it, and, in Dryden’s case at any rate, achieve admirable results. By the eighteenth, in all countries, the tendency becomes irresistible. The interest in literature, the bent and occupations of men of letters great and small, the new institution of periodicals—all combine to strengthen it: and every kind of critical estimate, from the elaborate literary history to the brief review, begins to be written, and is written, ever more copiously.
This was what criticism wanted; and it could not but do good. Yet the results illustrated, as mere abstract treatises never could have done, the deficiencies of the common critical theory. The writers save themselves, as a rule, from the worst mistakes by simply ignoring that of which they are ignorant. But in regard to the things with which they do deal the inadequacy and the hamper of their theory are sufficiently apparent.