That catholicity which has been said to be his main critical virtue will be found (without any of the vice which has been hinted as sometimes accompanying it) in the very list of the authors selected from—Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Middleton, Dekker, and Webster, Milton, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats: while the less “imaginative” poets are by no means neglected, and in particular Leigh Hunt brings out, often as no one had ever done before, that sheer poetical quality of Dryden to which the critics of 1800-1830 had been as a rule unjust. But the comment (and one cannot say more) is usually worthy of the selection. The fullest division of all is that on Spenser—indeed Leigh Hunt’s appreciation of this at once exquisite and magnificent poet is one of the very best we have, and would be the best of all if it had been a little more sensitive to Spenser’s “bravest translunary things,” to the pervading exaltation and sublimation of thought and feeling which purifies the most luscious details, and unites the most straggling divagations in a higher unity. But, short of this, it would be difficult to have a better detailed eulogium, pièces en main, of the subject; nor does Hunt fail to make out something of a case against, at least, the exaggeration of Lessing’s attack on the ut pictura poesis view. But his limitations appear in his complete misunderstanding of Coleridge’s exact and profound observation that Spenser’s descriptions are “not in the true sense of the word picturesque, but composed of a wondrous series of images as in dreams.” What Coleridge meant, of course, is that sequence rather than strict “composition” is Spenser’s secret—that his pageants dissolve into one another. But in these finesses Hunt is seldom at his ease. So, again, he blasphemes one of the most beautiful lines of The Tempest—
“The fringed curtains of thine eye advance”—
as “elaborate nothingness, not to say nonsense” [how nothingness can in any case be sense he shall tell us], “pompous,” “declamatory,” and disapproved of by—Pope!
One really blushes for him. Could he possibly be unaware that when a person is about to look at anything, the natural gesture is to lower the head and thrust it a little forward, raising or depressing the eyelids at the same time? or be insensible to the exquisite profile image of Miranda with the long eyelashes projected against the air? And he was the author of A Criticism of Female Beauty! But if he sometimes misunderstands, he seldom misses good things such as (it is true Warton put him on this) the Medea passage of Gower.[[476]] Ben Jonson made him uncomfortable, which is again a pity; and on Beaumont and Fletcher he is at almost his very worst: but he is sounder than some greater ones on Ford and Massinger, and his great “catch” of De Flores deserves yet a third mention. He is at his very best and pleasantest, too, where most men fail—where they are even often very unpleasant—on his contemporaries, Coleridge, and Shelley, and Keats. When you have said such a thing as this[[477]] of Coleridge, “Of pure poetry, ... consisting of nothing but its essential self, ... he was the greatest master of his time,” you had better “stand down.” Your critical claim is made out: you may damage but can hardly increase it. Yet it is only in the severe court of critical history that one would wish to silence Hunt: for, in truth, nine-tenths of his criticism is admirable, and most admirably suited to instruct and encourage the average man. Impressionism and Rulelessness are almost as fairly justified of him, their child, as of any other that I can think of. They scarcely ever lead him wrong in liking; and he mentions what he dislikes so seldom that he has only occasional chances of being wrong there.
Hazlitt.
But the greatest of the “Cockney critics” (quelle Cocaigne!) has yet to come. There is “a company of warm young men,” as Dryden has it, who would doubtless disdain the inquiry whether Coleridge or Hazlitt is the greatest of English critics; and it is quite certain that this inquiry might be conducted in a sufficiently futile sense and manner. There are others, less disdainful, who might perhaps be staggered by the acknowledgment in limine that it is possible to answer the question either way—nay, for the same person to give both answers, and yet be “not unwelcome back again” as a reasonable disputant. I have myself in my time, I think, committed myself to both propositions; and I am not at all disposed to give up either—for reasons which it will be more proper to give at the end than at the beginning of an examination of Hazlitt himself. That he was a great critic there will probably now be little dispute, though Goethe is said not to have found much good in him; though persons of worship, including Mr Stevenson, have thought him greater as a miscellaneous essayist; and though you may read writings of considerable length upon him in which no attempt is made to bring out his critical character at all.
Method of dealing with him.
His critical deliverances are so numerous and so voluminous that the “brick of the house” process, which we have frequently found applicable, has in his case to be given up, or at least considerably modified—for it is too much the principle of the present History to be given up altogether. Fortunately there is no difficulty in the modification. Hazlitt is not, like Coleridge, remarkable for the discovery and enunciation of any one great critical principle, or for the emission (obiter or otherwise) of remarkable mediate dicta, or for marginalia on individual passages or lines, though sometimes he can do the last and sometimes also the second of these things. What he is remarkable for is his extraordinary fertility and felicity, as regards English literature, in judgments, more or less “grasped,” of individual authors, books, or pieces. As, by preference, he stops at the passage, and does not descend to the individual line or phrase, so, by preference also,[[478]] he stops at the individual example of the Kind, and does not ascend to the Kind itself, or at least is not usually very happy in his ascension. But within these limits (and they are wide enough), the fertility and the felicity of his criticism are things which strike one almost dumb with admiration; and this in spite of certain obvious and in their way extremely grave faults.