Something, it has been said, will inevitably emerge from these utterances on a tolerably intelligent consideration. Hallam has abundant erudition, much judicial quality, a shrewdness which generally guides him more or less right in points of fact; sense; fairness; freedom from caprice—even (except as regards the Middle Ages, and especially mediæval Latin and its ancestors back to the late Silver Age) a certain power of regarding literature impartially. But he has, as is so often done (he alludes to the fact himself somewhere), spoken his own doom in words which he applies (with remarkable injustice as it happens) to Fontenelle. He has “cool good sense, and an incapacity, by natural privation, of feeling the highest excellence in works of taste.”
and the value left by it.
In short, “The Act of God”: and for such acts it is as unreasonable as it is indecent to blame their victims. But at the same time we may carry our forbearance to natural privations too far by accepting blind men as guides in precipitous countries, or using as a bloodhound a dog who has no scent. And therefore it is impossible to assign to Hallam a high place as a critic. He may be—he is—useful even in this respect as a check and a reminder of the views which once were taken by men of wide information, excellent discipline, literary disposition, and (where it was not seared or paralysed) positive taste; but he will not soon recover any other value. Even thus he is to a critic that always critically estimable thing a point de repère, and in the kindred but not identical function of literary historian, the praise which was given to him at the opening of this notice may be maintained in spite of, and not inconsistently with, anything that has been said meanwhile.[[564]]
Nay, more, Specialism has made such inroads upon us—has bondaged the land to such hordes of robber-barons—that we may not soon expect again, and may even regard with a tender desiderium, the width, the justice, the far-reaching and self-sufficing survey and sovereignty of Hallam.
[349]. It is widely[widely] usual in editions of Wordsworth to print these together and consecutively. They are so short, and accessible in so many different shapes that it seems superfluous to give page-references to any particular edition. The Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns (1816) (which Mr Rhys has included in the Literary Pamphlets noticed elsewhere) is less purely literary, but has important passages, especially that on Tam o’ Shanter.
[350]. I have had to insert “almost” since this chapter was first written, as a salute to my friend Professor Raleigh. The regular Wordsworthian is, of course, not an “impartial observer” at all. And I have generally found that the best of such observers, even if they do not agree with me, are disposed to admit that W. W. said more than he meant, and even to some extent what he did not mean.
[351]. That on the death of West.
[352]. I have used, and refer to, the Bohn edition of Coleridge’s Prose Works.
[353]. 1800-1817.