Of course the deficiencies of Eighteenth-century criticism are to be easily matched with other, and sometimes opposite, deficiencies in other times. It takes considerably more pains to get at something like a real appreciation of its subject, something more than a bare reference to schedule, than had been the case, either in ancient times or in the two centuries immediately preceding. It is very much better furnished with a critical theory (whether good or bad does not at the moment matter) than has usually been the case with Criticism from the early years of the nineteenth century to the early years of the twentieth. It is not even intentionally ignorant—its ignorance only proceeds from a mistaken estimate of things as worth or not worth knowing; and there is rarely to be found in it the bland assumption that “I like this,” or perhaps rather, “I choose to say I like this,” will settle everything, which has been not entirely unknown later. But it combines, in a fashion already perhaps sufficiently illustrated, the awkwardness of dogmatism and of compromise; and it is perhaps more exposed to those two terrible questions, “Why?” and “Why Not?” which are the Monkir and Nakir of all critics and all criticism, than the criticism of any other period. It is difficult to see how a critic such as Dennis could give any reasons for admiring Shakespeare at all, save ethical ones; and it is quite certain that a persistent Te sequar with the “Why Not?” will dispose of almost all the stock eighteenth-century objections both to Shakespeare and to all other suspected persons. In a certain way La Harpe had the advantage of all his predecessors, for he was at least consistent.
The theory not merely of the authades kallos, the “head-strong beauty,” but of the “monstrous beauty”—the beauty which is beautiful but has no business to be so, the miracle-working power which does work miracles, but is to be forbidden as magia nigra, because it does not work them according to the rules—may seem itself so monstrous as to be a patent reductio ad absurdum. In fact it acted as such. Yet the logic of it is undeniable. It had all along been the unspoken word, but the word that ought to have been spoken, and had to be spoken some day. Nor need we grudge the admission that it was in a certain sense better than the practice (which had been often resorted to before, and which has not seldom been resorted to since) of absolutely denying the beauty altogether, with the possible result of being, after a time, honestly unable to see it.
A certain number of points, affecting the criticism and the taste of the Eighteenth century in particular, remains to be noticed briefly before we pass to the consideration of the Neo-classic Dispensation generally.
In the first place, both could not fail to be influenced most powerfully by the constant growth of literature in volume; by the appearance, almost for the first time in large numbers, of the man of letters by profession; and, lastly, by certain changes in general education, and so in the quality of writers and readers. To say that the general reader first made his appearance about 1660, in what were to be thenceforward the two great literary countries of Europe, would be an exaggeration, but only an exaggeration, of the truth. He certainly increased and multiplied in both thenceforward; and, by an inevitable consequence, at once created the vocation of the writer and determined the cast and quality of the things written. Matters like the continued engouement of the French court and French society for literature, and the alternate exaltation and depression, the Secretaryships of State and the Grub Street kennels, for it in England, only concern us indirectly; but they do concern us. Prosperity and patronage enticed the literary man to work; poverty and contempt drove him to it, if only to hack-work. Influences came, too, from the subdivision of Kinds, the specialisation of study required, the reduction of mere erudition among those who were not specialists. I should suppose that, taking the average reading of those who had any reading at all, the late sixteenth century, with a great part of the seventeenth, was the most erudite time in the known history of the world. The level of general erudition has been constantly declining since, though with some fluctuations; and it was at a specially low level during the later eighteenth century. Although it is an auxiliary on whose aid Romantic criticism—or rather that catholic criticism which is neither Classic nor Romantic exclusively, but both and more than both—can by no means pride herself, there is little doubt that the increasing neglect of the classics did help to discredit the criticism which chiefly appealed to them; while the constantly growing attention to certain kinds of physical science could not but tell upon the purely literary estimate. The historical studies which were so great a characteristic of the later century could not, again, but be powerful unsettlers of the fixed point of view; the ever-growing popularity of the novel was constantly lifting into greater prominence a kind of which the ancients had practically taken no notice at all; the equally constant development of the newspaper was always adding writers, who knew little of ancient rules, on subjects of which the ancients had never thought. Even without the special literary influences which we may hope to consider in the next Book, the general trend of habit and event made for a change in criticism; and such a change was imperatively called for, at once by that reductio ad absurdum of neo-classic strictures, and by that illogical tolerance of certain great writers of the past, to which we have given the joint name and status of its Nemesis.[[745]]
II.
We now have before us the more important, but also the more difficult, task of summing up the achievements and the shortcomings of the whole period covered by this volume—the only period, be it remembered, in which Criticism was regarded from the point of view of a commonly accepted, if not very commonly understood, orthodoxy. This of itself is an advantage, which, though it has not recently counted for very much, will never be overlooked by true critics. Even if we drop the quod semper, the quod ubique, quod ab omnibus has a weight which leaves it wholly for the other side to show case and cause against. Orthodoxy may be really right—really orthodox; on that head it has at least an even chance against any of its opponents. Even if it is not, it has merits which they can rarely claim. It has no temptations for the clever fool, who is perhaps on the whole the most pestilent, intellectually, of human beings. It demands a certain amount of self-abnegation, which is always a good thing. It does not perhaps really offer any greater temptation to the merely stupid than does the cheap heterodoxy of other times. Above all, it directly tends to a certain intellectual calmness—to an absence of fuss, and worry, and pother, which is certainly not one of the least characteristics of the Judge. At all times the wise man would rather be orthodox than not; and at most times, though not quite at all, the wisest men have been orthodox, if only because they have recognised that every opinion has some amount of truth in it, and that this truth, plus the advantages of orthodoxy just mentioned, is greatest, and should prevail.
This will be recognised by all fair-minded persons as a handsome allowance in any case; it is surely a particularly handsome allowance when the arbiter happens not to be a partisan of the orthodoxy in question. And it is quite sincere. The present writer has emerged from the serious and consecutive examination of “classical” critics, necessary for the writing of this volume, with a distinctly higher opinion of them generally, with a higher opinion in most cases in particular, than he held previously on piecemeal and imperfect acquaintance. It is only in such a case as that of Boileau—where an almost consummate faculty of expression masks really small critical gifts, and where the worst faults of the critical character, personal rudeness and spite, are continually lurking behind what seem to be systematic judgments—that the result of the reading has gone the other way. At the same time, if we take the true reading of illud Syrianum, “Judex damnatur [capitis cum [in]nocens [culpatur vel minime],” then the case of the criticism with which we have been dealing becomes somewhat parlous. It is all the worse because its worsening is gradual and continuous. The sins of the earliest Renaissance criticism are sins chiefly of neglect, and are not as a rule aggravated by commission; while its merits are very great. We could have done nothing without it: at best we should have had to do for ourselves all that it has done for us. But the bad side of the matter betrays itself in the code-making of the seventeenth century; it is but imperfectly and unsatisfactorily disguised in the compromises of the earlier eighteenth; and it appears in all its deformity in the La Harpian recrudescence.
The fault of the whole is undoubtedly but an aggravation of what in Ancient Criticism could hardly be called with justice a fault at all, though it was even there a serious defect—the absence, that is to say, of a wide enough collection of instances from the past, and of an elastic and tolerant system of trial and admission for the present and future. We may now[[746]] use the word “fault” almost without qualification, proviso, or apology. The Greek could not, and the Roman until very late days could only to a most limited extent, exercise the proper sweep of observation and comparison; the man of the earlier Middle Ages was, from different causes, prevented from doing so to any effect. But the contemporaries of Lilius Giraldus who knew (or knew of) Chaucer and Wyatt—still more, in the next generation, those of Patrizzi who knew Ronsard and the Pléiade—could plead no such exemption or excuse. They had recovered the exacter knowledge of the remoter past which the Middle Ages lacked, the critical spirit which during the Middle Ages was asleep: and they had accumulated and were accumulating treasures, of completed mediæval work and of modern work constantly accruing, enough to give them every comparison, without exception, that they could have wanted. Their guilt was deepening daily as their opportunities increased.
For they neglected these opportunities, they “sinned” these mercies, almost without exception. If England in any way deserved the good fortune that fell to her at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, it was because she had never wholly denied either Chaucer or Spenser, either Shakespeare or Milton. But the just men who thus saved her were wofully few, and they were almost all of them followers of Naaman, who extorted a permission to bow in the house of Rimmon, rather than of the glorious Three Children, who would do obeisance to no graven image that any king set up. If Germany had the honour of leading the way—or very nearly leading the way—in the Critical Reformation, it was because, from the very beginning of her really modern literature, she had put faith in her Heldenbuch and her Bergreihen. But even this faith was rather hesitating for a long time, and it had no foothold in courtly, and curial, and academic places. The men who were the real pioneers in the revival or commencement of that universal study of literature which alone can lead to a universal criticism, were as a rule mere scholars and antiquaries, men like Oldys and Capell, La Monnoye and Sainte-Palaye, Sanchez and Sedano. Gray, the greatest man of letters by far who at least fumbled with the key of the enchanted garden, did but fumble with that key: and his successors Percy and Warton, who opened what they could, were not great men of letters at all. Abroad, and especially in France, their analogues, such as Marmontel, never got so far even as they did. In Spain it became fashionable to deny Lope if not Cervantes: in Italy Dante-worship was too often, if not in most cases, lip-worship only.
The spectacle of these centuries is almost infinitely interesting and surprising. I cannot, after having, with not a little pains, attained to some Pisgah-sight of it, exhaust my own wonder, especially in regard to the Eighteenth, or disentangle myself from that fatalism which I have already—with the result of some misunderstanding in the house of no un-friends—announced at the end of the First volume. We can understand the Sixteenth century, with its vernaculars hardly yet fully formed, with their greatest literature coming and to come, with an almost excusable distaste for the immediate past, and with the full eagerness—the honeymoon intoxication—of their intercourse with the classics upon them—we can understand this being excessive in admitting, in continuing, in caricaturing, the critical principles of the classics themselves. We can also, if not quite so fully, understand how the dwindling enthusiasms of the Seventeenth, with its still greater sense of “the petty done, the undone vast” in the matter of mere erudition, and its thick-coming concerns of party politics, material progress, physical science, rivalry of nations, and the like—we can understand its sinking, in mid-journey or thereabouts, to an “age of prose and sense,” where the prose was as certain as the sense was sometimes problematical. But the Eighteenth was beginning to be disengaged, to specialise, to take stock, to disuse the Chronicle and begin the History. How, we must ask ourselves, could men like Muratori and Gravina, like Addison and Johnson, like Fontenelle and Du Bos, rest even partly satisfied (for wholly, as we have seen, some of them at least were not) with literary sealed patterns which admittedly would not fit the greatest admitted literature of all their respective countries except France, and which presented, to the not insufficient self-sufficiency of Frenchmen, the proposition that, for hundreds of years, French men of letters had been barbarians, if not idiots?