We may, however, be justly asked, in this place or in that, to face that view of German criticism which Carlyle was the first to put in England by a famous (and indeed very admirable) “State of German Literature,”[[811]] and which, with some modifications, was maintained and enforced later by Mr Arnold, who did not like Carlyle. The eulogium is well known, and it is a magnificent one. The Germans are [1827] distinctly and considerably in advance of other nations in Criticism. They have “raised it to a higher power,” in fact: though he does not, I think, use the phrase. They neither, in the old way, discuss diction, figures, logical value, &c., nor, as is usual with the best of our own critics at present, discover and debate the particular nature of the poet from his poetry: but, subordinating these two, attack the essence and peculiar life of the poetry itself. “How did Shakespeare organise his dramas?” they ask. “What unmixed reality is bodied forth in them?” &c. Then, too, how do they proceed? Not by gorgeous mystic phraseology[[812]] and vague declamation? No: by “rigorous scientific inquiry,” of which much is said, the illustration and the enforcement at once being drawn from Schiller on “Æsthetic Education,” and Fichte on the “Nature of the Scholar.”[[813]]
This abstract is designedly cut short, not out of unfairness, but because the original is known to many and accessible easily to all. It is a high encomium: and even the contents of this book will show that it is, beyond controversy, in part at least a deserved one. From Lessing onwards there can be no question of the intent of the Germans to bring about a complete critical Reformation: nor can it be denied that, after a time, and to no small extent in consequence of their efforts, something like a complete critical Reformation was brought about. But whether there is not an indispensable nexus wanting somewhere—whether the general improvement of actual criticism in Germany and elsewhere, though not perhaps more in Germany than elsewhere, is a consequence of the endeavour to consider the essence of Poetry and frame theories of it—that is the question. It would be fatuous to say that I have shown, but I have at least endeavoured to show, some cause against the affirmative answer. In particular, I should like to re-invite the reader’s attention to that aporia which has been stated earlier—whether the famous criticism of Hamlet in Wilhelm Meister (to which Carlyle, of course, appeals here) might not have been written without any knowledge of the original, of its language, and of its form—in short, on a German prose translation of Shakespeare? If anybody is bold enough to say “Yes: and so much the better,” well and good. But in that case his idea of the essence of poetry and mine are so different that I must necessarily seem a Completed Bungler to him, and that he must necessarily seem to me (let us say) a Person to be Sincerely Commiserated.
In actual “judging of authors” I have endeavoured to collect some facts showing that the Germans did not attain to any remarkable proficiency[[814]] by the application of their new systems of Æsthetic—in regard to which, by the way, no two authorities agreed among them, and of which, as a whole, some great authorities among them used language not much more respectful than my own. And so, far from this “scientific” criticism having any effect in the production of great poetry or of great literature, it is a notorious fact that since Heine—who was a hopeless rebel to the whole system—Germany has produced no great poet, and very few great men of pure letters. While other countries, besides producing in their unscientific way critics at least not less great (I should of course myself say, much greater) than Germany’s own, have maintained the production of creative literature for the best part of a century—for all but the whole of it.
And I have also endeavoured—if only by such hints and glances and instances as are allowable on the plan of this book—to show why the Germans seem to me to have failed, if not exactly where they seemed to Carlyle to have succeeded, yet in the same neighbourhood—how they have generally either flown too high or grubbed too low, and so have failed to gather the flowers and garner the fruit of the field of literature. Very likely these opinions are quite unjust, but at any rate they are not founded on ignorance; and he who holds them is perfectly ready to fight for them at any time with the due arms and in the proper lists.
If, more shortly and in slightly altered form, I may once more put my objection to German criticism, I can, as it happens, do so by simply inserting a “not” in a German boast on this very subject. Professor Schelling, of the University of Pennsylvania, in the Alumni-Register[[815]] of that Institution, quotes these remarkable words from Professor Lemcke of Marburg: “Let us for once lay aside our proverbial modesty and openly declare that it is not the affinity of race, nor the indications in his poetry of a German spirit, which have brought us so close to Shakespeare, but it is that God-given power, vouchsafed to us Germans before all other nations, by the grace of which we are enabled to recognise true genius, of whatever nation, better than other nations, ofttimes better than its own, and better to enjoy and appreciate its gifts.” Far be it from me to anticipate the obvious comments of different kinds upon this utterance of Germanism in cuerpo, and with the encumbrances of modesty laid aside. I shall only observe that it is precisely this “God-given power” of recognition or appreciation which German criticism seems to me to lack. It has the best intentions; it takes the most enormous trouble; it accumulates the most extensive and sometimes not the least valuable material and plant for appreciation. But, except in the case of its very greatest exponents, it does not seem to me often to appreciate.
But—French, or German, or English, with whatever diversity of immediate aim, exact starting-point, felicity of method, and perfection of result—all the dominant and representative criticism of this time tends in the direction and obeys the impulse of some form or other of that general creed which we have endeavoured to sketch earlier in this Interchapter, and so contributes to the general progress (straight or circular, who shall say?) of which this Book is the history. And when, rather, as usual, by the influence of creative than of critical literature, and by that of Scott and Byron above all, the same purpose was inspired in yet other countries, the results were again the same. The dislike of Rule; the almost instinctive falling back upon mediæval literature as an alterative from classical and (recent) modern; the blending of the Arts; the cultivation of colour- and sound-variety in poetry; the variegation and rhythmical elaboration of prose,—in all these ways, by all these agencies, literary Criticism as well as literary practice was reconstructed. And the end is not even yet.
Some more general remarks on the sub-period must be postponed to the several parts of the Conclusion. But there is one phenomenon which, first appearing towards the end of the last volume, and much more noticeable in the last Book, now becomes what the Germans call hervorragend, persistently and almost aggressively prominent. And on this we must say something.
[[816]]To enter into all the questions connected with the Periodical here, would be obviously impossible. That it has multiplied criticism itself is a truism; that it has necessarily multiplied bad criticism is maintainable; the question is whether it has actually multiplied good. I think it has. It is very difficult to conceive of any other system under which a man like Sainte-Beuve—not of means, and not well adapted to any profession—could have given his life practically to the service of our Muse as he actually did. It is difficult to imagine any other which would have equally well suited a man like Mr Arnold, with abundant, and fairly harassing, avocations on the one hand, and with apparently no great inclination to write elaborate books on the other. Many officials, professional men, persons “avocated” (in the real sense) from criticism by this or that vocation, have been enabled by the system to give us things sometimes precious, and probably in most times not likely to have been given at all under the book-and-pamphlet dispensation. Above all, perhaps, the excuse of the surplusage which beset the regular treatise has disappeared, while the blind (or too well-seeing) editor, with his abhorred shears, is apt to lop excrescences off if they attempt to appear.[[817]] Although there certainly has been more bad criticism written in the nineteenth century than in any previous one,—probably more than in all previous centuries put together,—it is quite certain that no other period can show so much that is good. And the change which has resulted in it was needed. The early Bibliothecæ of the late seventeenth century wanted pliancy, variety, combination of industrial power: the later Reviews were far too apt to be mere booksellers’ instruments, while their wretched pay kept many of the best hands from them, and kept those who were driven to them in undue dependence. And further, the increasing supply of actual literature required more criticism than could easily be had under the old system of few periodicals, eked out by independent treatises and pamphlets.
These are not unimportant considerations, but they lie a little outside of—or only touch—the question of the altered quality and increased or decreased goodness of criticism as a whole and in itself. And when we come to discuss this, the question assumes rather a different aspect. The better pay, the increased repute, the greater independence, might be thought likely to attract, and did attract, a better class of writers to the work: but whether this better class was always better fitted for the particular task itself one may sometimes doubt. And there can be no doubt at all that the same attractions must necessarily tempt, and that the increased demand must almost force, a very much larger supply of inferior talent to the said task. Again, this increased demand, if not for critics, for somebody who would undertake to criticise (which is not quite the same thing), coincided with a gradual removal of the not very severe requisitions of competence which had up to this time been imposed upon the aspirant. The Mr Bludyer of the eighteenth century was at least supposed to know his Aristotle and his Longinus, his Horace and his Quintilian, his Boileau and his Le Bossu, his Dryden and his Addison. In the majority of cases he did know them—after a fashion—though he constantly misinterpreted the best of them and put his faith chiefly in the worst. But the Mr Bludyer of the nineteenth has not been supposed to know anything at all of the history and theory of his art. Now, when you at once set up a Liberty Hall, and dispense good things therein freely to all comers, your Liberty Hall is too likely before long to become a Temple of Misrule.
As the older arrangements went to make the critic’s trade not merely homely and slighted, but cramped by too many, too strict, and too little comprehended rules and formulas, so the new tended rather to make it a paradise of the ignoramus with a touch of impudence. It has never perhaps been quite sufficiently comprehended, by what may be called the laity, that though, in a sense, Blake was perfectly right in saying that every man is a judge of art who is not connoisseured out of his senses, yet it does not quite follow that every man, without training and without reading, is qualified to deliver judgment, from the actual bench, on so complicated and treacherous a work of art as a book. You can take in at least great part of the beauty of a picture at the first glance; and, no matter what the subject may be, many of the details, with all the colour and some of the drawing and composition, require neither previous education nor prolonged and attentive study, though study and attention will no doubt greatly improve the comprehension and enjoyment of them. In the case of a book it is very different. The most rapid and industrious reader[[818]] will require some minutes—it may even be some hours—to put himself in a position to deliver any trustworthy judgment on it at all: and he must be an exceedingly well-informed one who is at home with every subject treated in every volume that he has to review. You have to find out what it is that the author has endeavoured to do, and then—the most impossible of tasks to some critics, it would seem—to consider whether he has done it, and not whether he has or has not done something else which you wanted him to do. You have to guard against prejudices innumerable, subtle, Hydra-headed,—prejudices personal and political, prejudices social and religious, prejudices of style and of temperament, prejudices arising from school, university, country, almost every conceivable predicament of man. You must be able first to grasp, then to take off a total impression, then to produce that impression in a form suitable to the conveyance of it to the public. One would not perhaps be quite prepared to assert that every one of the hundreds and thousands who have, under the new dispensation, undertaken the office of a critic, has been divinely endowed with these gifts before undertaking that office, or that all of them, even if they took the trouble to acquire what may be acquired, were likely to succeed. There remains, of course, the comfortable doctrine that “practice makes perfect”: or, as one of the most agreeable and acute of modern political satirists, himself an admirable critic, has ironically put it—