There is no explanation but Grandgousier’s, eked a little by the remembrance that—as we shall, it is to be hoped, see in the next volume—there was a searching of hearts, a moving of the waters, not very late, in fact very early, in the Eighteenth century itself. But, as we have seen already, the creed of the majority, the orthodoxy of the time, admitted no hint of this. It made a few concessions or extensions—till it found them obviously unsafe—in the direction of amiable but illogical compromise in particulars. It yielded up no jot of the general creed. It was still matter of breviary circa 1780, as it had begun to be circa 1580, that the Fable was the Poem (let us say that if Homer had written an argument of the Iliad, and had left off there, he would have done all that was actually necessary); that you must follow Nature by following the ancients; that you must not use epic verse in non-epic poetry, and so forth. In all countries, or almost all,—the extreme literary poverty and disarray of Germany here serving her in good stead,—these general assumptions, and the many others which have been noticed in the foregoing pages, had narrowed down to yet others of the particular kind—that the pause in an English verse must be absolutely within a syllable or two of the middle; that a French Alexandrine must not have the impudence to overflow into its neighbour; and the like. And the whole sums itself up all the more strikingly—because of the doubtful and argumentative tone of the passage—in that memorable decision of Johnson’s which has been discussed above, the decision justifying Rymer, justifying La Harpe, that we must not “judge by the event,”—that the presence of the fig is no proof of the nature of the fig-tree.
No very elaborate indications of the faults inseparable from this style of criticism can be necessary. That if carried out rigorously (as in some instances at least it was) it would simply have sterilised and petrified the literary production of the world, is of course obvious. That journey au fond de l’inconnu pour trouver du nouveau, which, with whatever success or failure it may meet, however dangerous it may be in some high functions and departments of Life and Thought, is the motive principle of Art, was barred by it at once. It was no question of “progress” in the very likely chimerical sense of improvement; there was to be not even any difference. “To-morrow” was not, according to the proverb, to be “a new day”: if the men of this school did not go as far as Musette and pronounce that Demain, c’est une fatuité du calendrier, they held that it was to be as yesterday, and much more also. It is equally obvious that this doctrine positively invited indulgence in some of the worst faults of criticism. The critic who nowadays compasses all the reference shelves of the British Museum in order to find one discrepancy with his author, and then triumphs over him, is mostly confined to dates and names, or to more or less transparent erections of personal opinion (or personal ignorance) into standards, which the fairly intelligent reader takes for what they are worth. A hundred and fifty years ago the child of Momus had much better cards in his hand. The “exact scales of Bossu” were not only infinitely complicated and elaborate, but people in general, however intelligent, were by no means inclined to find any fault with them or question their justice. He had a hundred chances, to one that he now has, of catching his author tripping under statute, and without any actual garbling or dishonesty.
But between the dangers on the great scale and the dangers on the small, which have been indicated in the last paragraph, there were many of intermediate kinds. Without absolute distrust of novelty or unfamiliarity as such on the one hand, and without a mere peddling tendency to pick holes on the other, a critic under this dispensation might, and almost must, find himself distracted, hampered, wellnigh mantrapped, in his critical investigations. A dreamlike network or chain of obsessions was upon him. To submit himself frankly to the effect of the work and judge it as he would a prospect or a picture,[[747]] a vintage or a face, was forbidden him. It was his duty, in the first place, if the author openly classed his work in any Kind, to decide whether it really belonged to this or to another; if the author had omitted that ceremony, to determine the classification sedulously for himself. Then he had to remember, or look up, the most celebrated ancient examples of the Kind, or those modern ones which had obtained the credit of being most like the ancients; and to decide whether the resemblance was sufficient in general. And then he had to descend—if descent be possible in this process of grovelling—to particulars, and see if they were “according to Cocker.” If everything were entirely en règle, he was at liberty to admire and enjoy, supposing that, after the preliminaries, he had any disposition towards admiration and enjoyment left in him.
This is not a caricature; it is absolutely exact according to the “regulation” theory: and as the examples quoted before will have shown, and as hundreds of others might be produced to show, it is by no means untrue to practice. A critic, great, or generous, or happily both, might transcend his brief, be better than his creed, as in that noble eulogy of Gray’s Elegy which makes up for much in Johnson’s Life of the poet. But these were works of supererogation; and it is not quite certain that the exercise of them was entirely orthodox. The “stop-watch” was orthodox: it was the very centre and pulse of the machine of neo-classic criticism.
I do not think that it is part of my duty as a Historian to support this view by any further argument. I have given the strongest possible, in a minute, and I believe faithful, exposition of the actual survey, the actual opinions, the actual processes and judgments of neo-classic critics. If it is necessary to say any more, let it be this only. The weakness of their position is sufficiently shown by the fact that it could not bear the light of a historical knowledge of literature. There was none such, so long as it lasted: and when that light shone, it fell. The coincidences may not be causative; but it is for others to show that they are not.
If, however, any one should conclude from these strictures that, in the view of the present writer, the critical work of these three centuries was only evil continually, he would make a very great mistake. Moreover, putting all personal views out of the question, it is certain that this could not be the case. In almost all arts and even sciences, but in Art even more than in Science, the task set before the human faculties is a gigantic “Rule of False,” as the older arithmetic books called it, in which, by following out certain hypotheses, and ascertaining how and to what extent you are led wrong by them, you at last discover the right way. The most grotesque error is thus a benefit to Humanity, which, indeed, sometimes shows itself conscious enough of the beneficial character to perform the experiment over and over again. And further, in all arts and in all sciences, but especially in the higher division of Art, the reward of these excursions is not confined to the somewhat negative advantage of discovering that man need go that way no more. Corollaries and episodes—wayside windfalls of the Muses—await, not so thinly spread, the adventurous and single-hearted practitioner of Allegory as of Alchemy, on the acrostic as on the astrolabe. And considering the secondary or parasitic character which so specially belongs to Criticism, it is inevitable, not merely that these “bonuses,” these “extras,” should be more abundant here than anywhere else, but that the regular profits of the ordinary work should be considerable. Unless the critic is utterly incompetent and bad—unless he is a very Rymer, I do not say a Dennis, much less a Boileau—his mere contact with a new work of art must result in something useful, in a critical datum and fact for the future. It is very unlikely—if he is a person of even rather more than average brains it is practically impossible—that the exact equation or conjunction of his temperament, and his equipment, and the character of the work, will ever recur. It is, ex hypothesi, quite certain that it can never have occurred before. That he judges under a certain system, even a wrong one, will not detract from the value of the result, save in quantity. There will still be the actual fact—acquired to the stock of critical data for the future—that a critical power, say A, applied under the restrictions of system m or n, to work B, has resulted in the judgment x. And this result, in its own line and sphere, is as much a “thing,” and a thing of interest, to the critical student of literature, as a new beetle to the man of science, or a new judgment of the House of Lords to the man of law. Nay, to such a student it has a higher interest still: it is in rank and line (mutatis mutandis again) with the work criticised, with a picture, with a sonata, as a thing of art itself.
And critics in these centuries, from these points of view and others, estated criticism more richly than it could have hoped to be endowed when the Humanists began once more to attack and defend Poetry, or when Daniello a little later set himself down to write the first treatise of criticism proper in a vernacular language. They attempted, and to the best of their power arranged, the more general questions of the Art, always with zeal, if not always with discretion; they did valuable, if also somewhat and sometimes mistaken, work in its intermediate regions; and slowly, grudgingly, but surely, they set themselves to the apparently humbler but really fruitful work of actual critical examination of literature, at first as it had been provided and already criticised long ago, at last as it was being provided by the flying day. Their own theories, right or wrong, they worked out with altogether admirable patience and thoroughness, applying them, too, with a faithfulness which must excite admiration, if it cannot command agreement. And, as we have taken all fair pains to show, they not unfrequently strayed and stumbled upon outside truths, leant over the border of their somewhat narrow world and pried into others, after a fashion which, when the due time came, was sure to start more adventurous discoverers on wider paths of exploration.
It would be superfluous to extend this already long volume with any list of selected specimens of individual achievement and excellence. I hope, indeed, that this book may attract or help attention to some critics—Capriano, Cinthio, Patrizzi, Ogier are a very few examples—who are at present very little known: and to others, unnecessary to specify, whose claims have, as it seems to me, been underrated or misunderstood. But I have included, I think, no one of all the hundreds appearing in this volume who is not profitable in some way, for example, or for correction, or for reproof—who has not done something, if it be only in the way of warning, to help the student of all time.
We may also advantageously compare this balance-sheet with the balance-sheets of Ancient Criticism as given before, and of Modern in an anticipated draft. As compared with the former, Neo-Classicism has the disadvantage that, with at least equal if not greater narrowness, it is almost entirely destitute of the same excuse for being narrow. The Greeks of the great age wrote with nothing but Greek literature before them; those of the decadence and the Romans with nothing but Greek literature and Roman, which was for the most part a pale copy of Greek. The men of the eighteenth century, had they chosen, could have compared, with the practice and the theory of these two literatures, not merely the vast, the interesting, and, as “correcting” classicism, the inestimable literature of the Middle Ages, but at least four substantive and important literatures of modern times, those of France, Italy, England, and Spain. They not only did not do this as a matter of fact, but they invariably in practice, and not seldom as a matter of express theory, flouted and scouted the bare idea of doing it. They persisted in applying a travesty of the system of Horace, itself travestied from Aristotle, to these totally different products. Sometimes this resulted in the bland absurdity of the Battle of the Books attitude, sometimes in the hardly less ludicrous compromise which, by stretching the faults-and-beauties doctrine to its farthest possible extent, allowed critics to make room, as it were by sufferance, for Shakespeare and Milton, for Dante and Cervantes. They could laugh heartily at a dinner in the style of the ancients, and their common-sense would at once have pronounced any one fit for Bedlam who attempted to journey from London to York bareheaded, clothed in a toga, and with sandals on foot; but in theory, and even partly in practice, they imposed the classical uniform on literature.
Still, they show, at least in some respects, better beside their modern successors than it is the fashion to think. We have opened the road which they barred, and permitted the exploration of the countries which they forbade; but it is rather a question whether we have profited as we should by this gain. It is still the very rarest thing to find a critic who, by equipment or even by inclination, is himself disposed to take a really catholic view of literature; and those who do endeavour to take such a view are constantly regarded with distrust by the general, and with a rather comic rancour by specialists. It follows that the modern critic is, taking each on his own scheme, very much less well prepared as a rule than the critic, not merely of the eighteenth century, as has been said above, but of our period generally, and very nearly as liable as that critic was to take hasty sweeping views in condemnation of whole provinces of his subject.