The advantages and importance of the wider and more abstract æsthetic inquiry in reconstituting or reorganising criticism should be pretty obvious. The worst fault of the later Neo-classicism, in its corruption, was that it tended to become wholly irrational—a mere reference to classification; that even its appeal to Nature, and to Reason herself, had got utterly out of rapport with real nature, with true reason. Now the construction of a general theory of the Sublime and Beautiful—however partial or however chimerical the inquiry into the appeals of different arts and different divisions of the same art—could not but tend—however indirectly, however much in some cases against the very will of the inquiry—to unsettle, and sometimes to shatter, the conventional hypotheses and theories. “Why?” and “Why not?” must force themselves constantly on such an inquirer; and, as has been said more than once or twice, “Why?” and “Why not?” are battering-rams, predestined, automatic, irresistible, to conventional judgments of all sorts. It was, indeed, not impossible for a person sufficiently stupid, or sufficiently ingenious, to construct an æsthetic which, somehow or other, should fit in with the accepted ideas.[[343]] But what stupid people do does not count for much in the long-run, despite the proverbial invincibility of stupidity for the time. And the ingenious person, unless his perverseness were truly diabolical, must sometimes hit upon truth which would explode all his convention.
At the same time Æsthetics have proved, and might by an observer of sufficient detachment have from the first been seen to be likely to prove, a very dangerous auxiliary
to Criticism, if not even a Stork for a Log. In the first place, there was the danger—present in fact from the first, impending from before the very first—of fresh arbitrary rules being set up in the place of the old ones,—of the old infinitely mischievous question, “Does the poet please as he ought to please?” being juggled into the place of the simple “Does he please?” No form of abstract inquiry can escape this danger: and that is why, save in matter of the pure intellect, abstract inquiries should always be suspected. Form your theory and conduct your observations of the æsthetic sense, of “the Beautiful,” of the mediate axioms of this or that literary kind, as carefully, as impartially, with as wide a range and view, as you may—these perilous generalisations and abstractions will always bring you sooner or later into contact and conflict with the royal irresponsibility, or (as some may hold it) the anarchic individualism of the human senses, and tastes, and artistic powers. You will hamper your feet with a network of axioms and definitions; you will burden your back with a whole Italian-image-man’s rack-full of types. It is somewhat improbable that you will be a Lessing: yet even a Lessing loses himself in inquiries as to what “a jealous woman’s” revenge will be, what “an ambitious woman’s revenge will be.” Shakespeare (for that Shakespeare had very much to do with the whole portraiture of Margaret, from the first gracious and playful scene with Suffolk to the sombre and splendid triumph over Elizabeth Woodville, I at least have no doubt) has shown us in Margaret of Anjou the revenge and the other passions of a woman who is at once ambitious, jealous, the victim perhaps not of actually adulterous but certainly of rather extra-conjugal love, yet loyal to her husband’s position if not to himself, a tigress to her enemies and to her young alike, a rival in varying circumstance, an almost dispassionate sibyl reflecting and foretelling the woes of her rivals. You can no more disentangle all these threads, and get the passion of this type and the passion of that separate, than Psyche could have done her task without the ants. Yet, early and crude as is the work, it is all right, it is all there. And Æsthetics are not the ants.
A much more dangerous result of addiction to the æsthetic side of criticism, mainly or exclusively, is that you get by degrees away from the literary matter altogether, and resign yourself to the separation with all the philosophy of Marryat’s captain, when he gave orders first that he should be called when the last ship of his convoy was out of sight behind, and then when the first hove in sight again. I remember once hearing a lecture, and a very interesting one, on Hegel’s idea of tragedy as illustrated in Shakespeare, delivered by a most admirable scholar, then professor in one great University, and now professor in one than which there is no greater. It was very ingenious, very stimulating; but I remember thinking at the close of it that it might have been delivered just as well if we were in such an infinite state of misery as to have not a line of an actual tragedy of Shakespeare, but only abstracts and arguments, as with some of the ancients. In the attraction to the æsthetic, the moral, the dramaturgic side and the like, an absolute break of contact with the literary may come about. We have seen that this is the case even with Lessing, and it is constantly the case with German critics and with their English followers. The “word,” the “expression,” sinks out of the plane of the critic’s purview. His Æsthetics become Anæsthetics, and benumb his literary senses and sensibilities.
Recurrence to one example of this may suffice. When I see Lessing called “the King of Criticism” I always think, great as is my opinion of him, of that judgment of Soliman the Second. Here is a thing which, on its own lines and specification, is, and is practically allowed by the critic to be, a masterpiece. But he will not accept those lines. It is a satiric criticism of life, of the actual nature, morals, mœurs, mores, ethe, of men; he wants it to be a didactic exhortation to what those morals ought (according to him) to be. He does not find Soliman’s butterfly veerings from the sentiment of Elvire to the mere courtesanship of Delia, and from this latter to the grisettish or soubrettish minxery of Roxelane, attractive or excusable. He does not like this minxishness; there are even signs that he has a private antipathy towards the petit nez retroussé which plays so great a part in the story. His criticism is in consequence not a criticism at all; it is a mere explosion of unreasoning dislike—at best one of “nervous impression,” as Flaubert said to Sainte-Beuve. And if, by a juggle of words, it be retorted that Lessing is a dogmatic not an æsthetic critic, this retort will fall blunted from the simple rectification that he is a dogmatist of æsthetics and an æsthetician in dogma.
The benefits, therefore, of the rise of Æsthetics as a special study were far from unmixed, though the influence of that rise was very great. It is otherwise with the Study of Literature, to which we have also given a short and summary chapter above. Here it was all but impossible that extension of consideration—from modern and classical to mediæval, from certain arbitrarily preferred modern languages to others—should fail to do good. Prejudice, the bane of Criticism, received, in the mere and necessary progress of this study, a notice to quit. This notice took various forms and was exhibited and attended to in various ways. England, France, and Germany exhibited these differences with a difference itself very interesting. But they can be reduced to a few heads with very little difficulty.
The first of these is the attempt to judge the work presented, not according to abstract rules, derived or supposed to be derived from ancient critical authority, nor according to its agreement or disagreement with the famous work of the past. To some extent this revolutionary proceeding was forced upon our students by the very nature of the case—it was one of the inevitable benefits of the extension of study, and especially of the return to mediæval literature. To attempt to justify that literature, as Addison, with more or less seriousness, had done, by showing that its methods were after all not so very different from those of Homer, or even Virgil, was in some cases flatly impossible, in most extremely difficult; while in almost all it carried with it a distinct suspicion of burlesque. There was no need of any dislike of the classics; but it must have been and it was felt that mediæval and later literature must be handled differently.[[344]] And so—insensibly no doubt
at first—there came into Criticism the sovereign and epoch-making recognition of the “leaden rule”—of the fact that literature comes first and criticism after—that criticism must adjust itself to literature, and not vice versa. Very likely not one of the men we are here discussing would have accepted this doctrine simpliciter:[[345]] indeed it is the rarest thing to find it accepted even a century and a half after their time, except in eccentric and extravagant forms. But it lay at the root of all their practice.
Further, that practice, deprived of the crutches and go-carts of rule and precedent, was perforce obliged to follow the natural path and play of the feelings and faculties—to ask itself first, “Do I like this?” then, “How do I like it?” then, “What qualities are there in it which make me like it?” Again, these questions may not have formulated themselves quite clearly to any of our group. Again, it would be hard to name many critics since who have at once fearlessly and faithfully kept them before their eyes. But, again also, these were the questions which, however blindly and stumblingly, they followed as their guiding stars, and these have been the real questions of criticism ever since.
Postponing the discussion of the relationship of this new criticism to the old, we may turn to another point of its differentia. This is that students of mediæval literature especially were—again perforce and whether they would or no—driven to make excursions into the region of Literary History, and, what is more, of Comparative Literary History. They found themselves face to face with forms—the ballad and the romance being the chief of them—which were either not represented at all or represented very scantily and obscurely in classical literature, while they had been entirely and almost pointedly neglected by classical criticism. They could not but see that, both in mediæval literature proper and in modern, there were other forms and subvarieties of