Macaulay.
Another great name is added, by Macaulay, to the long and pleasant list of our examples how “Phibbus car” has, in unexpected and puzzling but always interesting ways, “made or marred the” not always “foolish Fates” of critics and criticism. When we first meet him as a critic of scarcely four-and-twenty, in the articles contributed to Knight’s Quarterly, we may feel inclined to say that nobody whom we have yet met (except perhaps Southey) can have had at that age a wider range of reading, and nobody at all an apparently keener relish for it. His exceptional competence in some ways. He is, what Southey was not, a competent scholar in the classics; he knows later (if unfortunately not quite earlier) English literature extraordinarily well; he has, what was once common with us, but was in his days getting rare, and has since grown rarer, a pretty thorough knowledge of Italian, and he is certainly not ignorant of French (though perhaps at no time did he thoroughly relish its literature), while he is later to add Spanish and German. But he does not only know, he loves. There is already much personal rhetoric and mannerism especially in the peroration of his review of Mitford’s Greece, where he reproaches that Tory historian with his neglect of Greek literature. But it is quite evidently sincere. He has shown similar enthusiasm, combined in a manner not banal, in his earlier article on Dante, and he shows wonderful and prophetic knowledge of at least parts of literature in his paper on the Athenian Orators, as well as in the later article on History belonging to his more recognised literary period. The early articles. From a candidate of this kind, but just qualified to be a deacon of the Church in years, we may surely expect a deacon in the craft of criticism before very long, particularly when he happens to possess a ready-made style of extraordinarily, and not merely, popular qualities. There are some who would say that this expectation was fully realised: I am afraid I cannot quite agree with them, and it is my business here to show why.
His drawbacks.
We have said that, even in these early exercitations, Macaulay’s characteristics appear strongly: and among not the least strongly appearing are some from which, unless a man disengages himself, he shall very hardly become a really great literary critic. The first of these is the well-known and not seriously to be denied tendency, not merely to “cocksureness,” but to a sweeping indulgence in superlatives, a “knock-me-down-these-knaves” gesticulation, which is the very negation of the critical attitude. Even the sound, the genuine, the well-deserved literary preferences above referred to lose not a little by this tone of swaggering sententiousness in their expression; and they lose a great deal more by the simultaneous appearance of the hopelessly uncritical habit of making the whites more dazzling by splashing the deepest black alongside of them. The very eulogy of Dante as a whole seems to Macaulay incomplete without an elaborate pendant of depreciation of Petrarch, while “Tasso, Marino, Guarini, and Metastasio” are swept into a dust-bin of common disdain, and we are told that the Secchia Rapita, “the best poem of its kind in some respects,” is “painfully diffuse and languid,” qualities which one might have thought destructive of any “bestness.”
The practical choking of the good seed.
It is of less importance—because the fault is so common as to be almost universal—that the “Mitford” displays very strong political prejudice, which certainly affects, as it should not do, the literary judgment. Mitford may have been an irregular and capricious writer, but the worst vices of the worst Rymer-and-Dennis criticism appear in the description of him as “bad.” His style could not possibly be so described by a fair critic who did not set out with the major premiss that whatever is unusual is bad. And not only here, but even in the purely literary essays, even at their most enthusiastically literary pitch, we may, I think, without any unfairness, perceive an undertone, an undercurrent, of preference for the not purely literary sides of the matter—for literature as it bears on history, politics, manners, man, instead of for literature in itself and for itself.
With the transference from Knight’s to the Edinburgh, which was political and partisan-political, or nothing, these seeds of evil grew and nourished, and to some extent choked the others. The “Milton,” the “Machiavelli,” the early and, for a long time, uncollected “Dryden,” serve as very hot-beds for them. All three are, as the French would say, jonchés with superlatives, arranged side by side in contrast like that of a zebra. The “Dryden”—a very tempting subject for this kind of work—is not the worst critically; indeed it is perhaps the best. It is, at any rate, far the most really literary, and it may not be unfair to think that this had something to do with the fact that Macaulay did not include it in the collected Essays.