Yet there are curious drawbacks and limitations which explain why Jeffrey has not kept, and why he is perhaps not very likely to recover, his pride of place. Part of his idiosyncrasy was a very odd kind of pessimism, which one would rather have expected from a High Tory than from a “blue and yellow,” however symbolical these colours may be of fear. To Jeffrey—in the second decade of the new flourishing of English poetry, which had at least eighty good years to run; in the very year of the new birth of the novel; with Goethe still alive and Heine a boy in Germany; with the best men of the great French mid-nineteenth century already born—it seems that “the age of original genius is over.” Now, when a man has once made up his mind to this, he is not likely to be very tolerant of attempts on the age’s part to convince him that he is wrong. But even his judgments of the past exhibit a curious want of catholicity. The French vein, which is so strong in him, as well as the general eighteenth-century spirit, which is so much stronger, appears in a distinct tendency to set Latin above Greek. He commends the Greeks indeed for their wonderful “rationality and moderation in imaginative work,” suggesting, with a mixture of simplicity and shrewdness, that the reason of this is the absence of any models. Having no originals, they did not try to be better than these. His criticism of the two literatures is taken from a very odd angle—or rather from a maze and web of odd angles. “The fate of the Tarquins,” he says, “could never have been regarded at Rome as a worthy occasion either of pity or horror.” And he does not in the least seem to see—probably he would have indignantly denied—that in saying this he is denying the Romans any literary sense at all. In Aristophanes he has nothing to remark but his “extreme coarseness and vulgarity”; and “the immense difference between Thucydides and Tacitus” is adjusted to the advantage of the Roman. He actually seems to prefer Augustan to Greek poetry, and makes the astonishing remark that “there is nothing at all in the whole range of Greek literature like ... the fourth book of Virgil,” having apparently never so much as heard of Apollonius Rhodius.[[556]]

That of mediæval literature he says practically nothing is not surprising, but it must be taken into account: and his defence of English Literature against his author, though perfectly good against her, is necessarily rather limited by its actual purpose, and suggests somehow that other limitations would have appeared if it had been freed from this.

Its lesson.

In short, though we cannot support the conclusion further, the very word “limitation” suggests the name of Jeffrey, in the sphere of criticism. He seems to be constantly “pulled up” by some mysterious check-rein, turned back by some half-invisible obstacle. Sometimes—by no means quite always—we can concatenate the limiting causes,—deduce them from something known and anterior, but they are almost always present or impending. As Leigh Hunt is the most catholic of critics, so Jeffrey is almost the most sectarian: the very shibboleths of his sectarianism being arbitrarily combined, and to a great extent peculiar to himself.[[557]]

Hallam.

Let us conclude the chapter with a figure scarcely less representative of the anti-enthusiast school of critics, and much more agreeable than either Gifford or Jeffrey. To the English student of literary history and of literary criticism, Henry Hallam must always be a name clarum et venerabile; nor—as has been so often pointed out in these pages, and as unfortunately it seems still so often necessary[[558]] to point out—need disagreement with a great many of his own critical judgments and belief that—for those who merely swallow such judgments whole—he is not the safest of critical teachers, interfere with such due homage. His achievement. For Hallam was our first master in English of the true comparative-historical study of literature—the study without which, as one main result of this volume should be to show, all criticism is now unsatisfactory, and the special variety of criticism which has been cultivated for the last century most dangerously delusive. His Introduction to the Literature of Europe, with its sketch of mediæval and its fuller treatment of Renaissance and seventeenth-century Literature, is the earliest book of the kind in our language: it is not far from being, to this day, the best book of the kind in any.

Its merits