The fact is that Butler’s criticism is merely the occasional determination of a man of active genius and satiric temper to matters literary. Absurdities strike him from whatever school they come; and he lashes them unmercifully whensoever and whencesoever they present themselves. But he has no general creed: he speaks merely to his brief as public prosecutor of the ridiculous, and also as a staunch John Bull. If he had been writing at the time when his Remains were first actually published, it is exceedingly probable that he would have “horsed” Gray as pitilessly as he horses Benlowes; if he had been writing sixty years later still, that he would have been as “savage and Tartarly” to Keats and Shelley, or seventy years later, to Tennyson, as the Quarterly itself. This is not criticism: and we must look later and more carefully before we discern any real revolution in literary taste.
Of Addison and others.
It is even very unsafe to attempt to discover much definite and intentional precursorship in Addison, who was born sixty years after Butler. There is no need to repeat what has been said of what seems to me misconception as to his use of the word Imagination: nor is this the point which is principally aimed at here. But the more we examine Addison’s critical utterances, whether we agree with Hurd or not that they are “shallow,” we shall, I think, be forced to conclude that any depth they may have has nothing to do with Romanticism. Addison likes Milton, no doubt, because he is a sensible man and a good critic, as a general reason. But when we come to investigate special ones we shall find that he likes him rather because he himself is a Whig, a pupil of Dryden, and a religious man—nay, perhaps even because he really does think that Milton carries out the classical idea of Epic—than because of Milton’s mystery, his “romantic vague,” his splendour of diction and verse and imagery. So, too, the admiration of Chevy Chase is partly a whim or a joke, partly determined by the fact that at that time the Whigs were the “Jingoes,” and that Chevy Chase is very pugnacious and very patriotic. Nowhere, from the articles on True and False Wit to the Imagination papers, do we find any real sense of unrest or dissatisfaction with the accepted theory of poetry. There is actually more in Prior, with all his profanation of the Nut-browne Maid and his distortions of the Spenserian stanza.
Of La Bruyère and “Tout est dit.”
So if we look backward a little, and a little southward, we shall, despite the praise which we were able to accord to some critical dicta of La Bruyère, find very little reason to regard that admirable master of Addison himself as a “Romantic before Romanticism.” He is a sensible man with a fairly catholic taste: but that is all. Nay, his principle of Tout est dit, though not quite irresistibly in practice, almost certainly leads to the conclusion that the oldest writers are likely to be the best, and to the habit of extending to new writers, or to the mass of precedent writing, a rather lukewarm welcome and a distinctly prejudiced criticism. In a certain sense, no doubt, all has been said long ago—in gist, in matter, in subject. But then in literature, and especially in poetry, there is so much which is beside the gist, that is superadded to the matter, that does not depend upon the subject! The thoughts suggested by birth and death, by dawn and sunset, by a blush and a smile, by the red wine when it moveth itself aright in the glass, and the green sea stretching from the white cliff-foot, and the “huge and thoughtful night,” will always be at bottom and in essence the same. But he must be a blind person who does not see that at any moment any poet who can may give them an entirely new form and cast and presentation. In this sense—and it is the sense of the best “modern” criticism—“tout est à dire.”
Of Fénelon and Gravina.
We may seem to have got into an impasse: nor will such excellent persons as Fénelon, and to go to yet another country, Gravina,[[7]] help us out of it. Fénelon indeed had, as we saw, some striking resipiscences, some individual pronouncements which, if they were as unaccompanied by others as they are disconnected from them, would be very promising indeed. But this very company that they do not keep disestates them unluckily: and you cannot doubt, as you read Télémaque, that if the world had had to depend upon its author for leadership in the migration from the critical House of Bondage, it would never have got over the Red Sea, if it had even started on the journey. Gravina, to that general perspicacity and equity which distinguishes all these doubtful cases, added an unusually early and thorough appreciation of Greek, and the advantage, peculiar to an Italian, of having an actual classical period of modern literature extending over four entire centuries: of all which he made good use. But it is at least very difficult to discover, either in his original work or in the general trend of his critical utterances, any dissatisfaction with the prevailing direction of criticism in his time, or any determination to take a wider outlook.