literature, in drama,[[346]] in poetry, in prose, which differed extremely from anything in ancient letters. In examining these, with no help from Aristotle, or Longinus, or Horace, they could not but pursue the natural method of tracing or endeavouring to trace them to their origins, and in so doing they could not but become conscious, not merely of the history—so long interrupted by a mist like that of Mirza’s vision—of English or French or whatsoever literature itself, but also more dimly of the greater map of European literature, as it spread and branched from the breaking up of the Roman Empire onwards. And this study of Literary History was in the main, this study of Comparative Literary History was almost absolutely, again a new thing.
Nor were the actual critical results which, either expressly or incidentally, came from the exercitations of these critics of less importance. The turn of the tide may nowhere be seen so strongly as in Joseph Warton’s audacious question whether Pope, the god of the idolatry of the earlier part of the century in England, was a poet, or at least a great poet, at all; in Lessing’s proposition to call the great Corneille, just re-habilitated as he had been by Voltaire himself, Corneille the Monstrous. These things indeed were, like all revolutionary manifestos, extravagances, yet the extravagance was not only symptomatic but to a great extent healthy. It was probably impossible as a matter of tactics—it would certainly have been unnatural as a matter of history and human nature—to refrain from carrying the war into the enemies’ country, from laying siege to the enemies’ stronghold. And this was invited by the ignorant and insulting depreciation which had long been, and long continued to be, thrown upon one of the most charming and precious divisions of the literature and thought of the world.
But there were more sober fruits of the revolt. Hurd might
indeed have developed further that doctrine of Romantic as independent of Classical Unity, which is one of the most important discoveries or at least pronouncements of any time, which practically established a modus vivendi between all rational Neo-classic and all rational Romantic criticism, and which has never yet been worked out as it deserves. Percy’s Essay on Alliterative Metre, despite the comparative narrowness of its basis, is both acute and successful; and falls in interestingly with that more intelligent devotion to Prosody which has up to the present time given better results than any “metacritic,” and has plenty yet to give. Thomas Warton, though often a fanciful and sometimes an insufficiently equipped critic, was a critic both alert and sound. Diderot might with advantage have concentrated that “encyclopædic head” of his on fewer subjects, have been less anarchic, more subject to harmless convention. But there are few better examples in literature of the “strong young devil shut up in an iron box” and made to do work—as the Bulgarian peasant defined the locomotive to an English engineer who went to the Balkans after the war of 1878. We have not feared to speak of Lessing’s shortcomings, but though it is possible to speak indiscreetly and unadvisedly of his merits in kind and point, who shall overpraise them in degree? And the bent of almost all of them turned, and turned most beneficially, especially in the case of Warton, to History.
The necessary retrospect of the achievement of groups and countries can be given at no excessive length. The Germans had begun criticism later than any other of the great nations; and they had hardly passed the mere “rhetoric” stage of it when France was leading Europe in the later Neo-classic phase; when England was already, under the half-unknowing leadership of Dryden, sighting the modern conditions; and when Italy and Spain were passing into a sort of temporary dotage or trance on the subject. But during the seventeenth century the influence of England had been exchanged for that of France, and this latter, itself originally recommended by Opitz with a view to the exhibition of Pléiade medicine, had got this prescription changed, by a sort of legerdemain of Time the Conjurer, for the very different one of Correctness à la Boileau. Yet the doses of Ronsardism had had great effect already, and the strong romantic leaven in the Germans, their pupillary state, their philosophical leanings—above all, that restless, irresistible, unwearied craving for knowledge which characterised them—prevented them from abiding in the faith of Gottsched for any length of time. We have traced the gropings and tentatives, the successive stages of Bodmer and those about him, the arrested promise of J. E. Schlegel, that Marcellus of German criticism, and we saw how Enfin Lessing vint.
There can, for once, be no harm in attributing part at least of the deserved prominence of this critic in German criticism to the fact that he not only exhibited eminently the two great characteristics of his countrymen in the department,—unwearied industry in study and philosophic disposition of his results,—but combined with this exhibition merits which they much more rarely possess—an intimate though irregular appreciation, a great intellectual alacrity, and, above all, a really good and pleasant style. He did not, unfortunately, help to propagate these latter qualities so much as he helped to establish and corroborate the former: but with the limitations noted above, he did a great deal in almost all ways. The opinion which assigns to him, everywhere in literature more or less, but in criticism most of all, the principal share in that enormous dead-lift of German letters which marks the middle of the eighteenth century, and which, exceptis excipiendis, may be said to have made Goethe and Schiller possible, is unquestionably right. And though he did not quite live to see the time when Germany had begun to repay the enormous debts which, before his lifetime and during its earlier part, she had accumulated towards the rest of Europe, he almost saw this: and he had almost more to do than any other with the counter-accumulation of the necessary funds.
Yet he himself was, as we have seen, a debtor: and to the old creditor, France. The critical history, during this period, of France herself is the most curious of the three divisions which here suffice. In Germany, Neo-classicism, which had taken no deep root, was easily uprooted. In England, though various causes, and especially the immense influence of the “dead hand” of Addison and Pope, and the living one of Johnson, kept back the Romantic growth in a salutary fashion, that growth itself was as steady as it was slow. In the very year after Gray died, Coleridge was born: and the lives and work of these two men mark one unhasting, unresting line of Romantic progress. But in France (as the two parallel views given in the second chapter of the last book, and the fourth chapter of this, will have shown), although there is no real confusion, the strands are most puzzlingly twisted during the whole of this selfsame period, till those of the classical colour break and ravel away into almost nothing just before the close. This is due, no doubt, in part to the extreme strength of what we may call the Neo-classic establishment in France—to the fact that the strong places of literature are held by classical garrisons, who take good care to let no unorthodox recruit set foot in them if it can possibly be helped. But it is due also to that essential classicality which has been noticed, and fully acknowledged, in the French literary temper. It certainly exists: and it accounts not merely for the stubborn resistance, until its sudden débâcle, of Classicism itself, but also for the peculiarities of the various greater critics whom we have noticed.
Of the three greatest of these (for Madame de Staël cannot, I think, really make out her right to cut in) Joubert excels in aphoristic and perennial quality, somewhat (not wholly) independent of time, and Chateaubriand expresses more fully than any one the tendencies (even in him much chequered by others) which he was to live to see triumphant without being quite glad thereat. But Diderot is, in principle and motive force, however eccentrically working, if not in actual expressed example, the most considerable of the three, and perhaps the most considerable single figure included in this Book. For in him, as was said above, we first see as a pervading and guiding, if not explicitly asserted, principle that Impressionism which (though the word has been variously used[[347]]) is, in its simplest and most natural meaning, perhaps more
appropriate to “Modern” criticism than any other single term. As we have seen and put from many different sides, the general tendency of ancient and of Neo-classic critics was always to separate the work as much as possible from the worker, and (except as regarded oratory and partly drama) still more from the hearer and reader—this being done for the freedom of considering it, not so much in and by itself, as in relation to ideal and a priori schedules of its kind, quality, and appurtenant rules. There had been partial and half-conscious revolts or declensions from this in individuals, from Longinus to Castelvetro, and from Castelvetro to Fontenelle. But Diderot is almost the first person who habitually, naturally, as a matter of course, isolates the work with himself, considers it in its form and pressure as printed on him. And this is almost, or altogether, a new Covenant of Criticism.
The performance of England here was not so fruitful of great critical personalities—for her greatest, Johnson, was in intention, though by no means wholly in performance, on the other side. Nor, though the English Æsthetics were influential abroad as well as at home, can they be ranked very high. In the other chief branch, however, of that practical operation which has been noticed, the rediscovery and revaluation of the capital of the literature for critical purposes, England takes the most important position of all—less by the excellence of the workers (though this was not inconsiderable) than in consequence of the richness of their material. The French, except from the antiquarian side, were still neglecting, and even for the most part despising, their own old treasures, which were themselves scarcely so great as those of England: and the Germans, though not neglectful of what they had, had less, and dealt with it in a less thoroughly literary spirit. But Gray, Percy, Hurd, the Wartons (especially Thomas), and all the painful and meritorious editors from Theobald to Tyrwhitt, were engaged, independently in intention, but in fact systematically enough, not merely in clearing away rubbish and bringing treasures to light, but in combating the prejudices and doing away with the delusions and ignorances which had led to the neglect and contempt of those treasures themselves.