The attitude of the Latter-day Pamphlets.
And then things get worse. That invocation of the Devil in the Latter-day Pamphlets,[[938]] “to fly away with the poor Fine Arts,” is indeed put off on “one of our most distinguished public men.” But Carlyle avows sympathy with it. He even progresses from it to the Platonic view that “Fiction” at all “is not quite a permissible thing”—is “sparingly permissible” at any rate. “Homer” was meant for “history”:[[939]] the arts were not “sent into the world to fib and dance.” As for Literature more particularly, “if it continue to be the haven of expatriated spiritualisms,” well: but “if it dwindle, as is probable, into mere merry-andrewism, windy twaddle, and feats of spiritual legerdemain,” there “will be no hope for it.” Its “regiment” is “extremely miscellaneous,” “more a canaille than a regiment,” and so forth. The “brave young British man” is adjured to be “rather shy of Literature than otherwise, for the present,”—a counsel which, it is well known, Mr Carlyle repeated in his Edinburgh Rectorial address sixteen years later. Nor did he ever alter the point of view which he had now taken up, either in book, or minor published work, or Letters, or autobiographic jottings, or those Ana which still flit on the mouths of men concerning his later years.
The conclusion of this matter.
A man who speaks thus, and thinks thus, has perforce renounced the development of any skill that he may once have had in the analysis of the strands of the tight-rope, or the component drugs of the Cup of Abominations. Still less can he be expected to expatiate, with the true critic’s delight, on the elegance with which the dancer pirouettes over vacancy, or on the iridescent richness of the wine of Circe, as it moveth itself in the chalice. I do not know that—great critic, really, as he had been earlier and always might have been—the loss of his services in this function is much to be regretted. For he did other things which assuredly most merely literary critics could not have done: and not a few good workmen stepped forward, in the last thirty years of his life, to do the work which he thus left undone, not without some flouting and scorning of it. But, once more, the fact is the fact: and his estrangement from the task, like that of Macaulay, undoubtedly had something to do with the general critical poverty of the period of English literature, which was the most fertile and vigorous in the literary life of both.
Thackeray.
Another of the very greatest gods of mid-nineteenth century literature in England displays the slightly anti-critical turn of his time still more curiously. It is one of the oddest and most interesting of the many differences between the two great masters of English prose fiction in the mid-nineteenth century that, while there is hardly any critical view of literature in Dickens, Thackeray is full of such views.[[940]] He himself practised criticism early and late; and despite the characteristic and perhaps very slightly affected depreciation of the business of “reading books and giving judgment on them,” which appears in Pendennis and other places, it is quite clear that he pursued that business for love as well as for money. Moreover, from first to last,—from his early and long uncollected “High-Jinkish” exploits in Fraser to the Roundabout Papers,—he produced critical work from which an anthology of the very finest critical quality, and by no means small in bulk, might be extracted with little pains and no little pleasure. His one critical weakness If he “attains not unto the first three,” it is I think only from the effect of the reaction or ebb that we note in this chapter, and from a certain deficiency in that catholic sureness which a critic of the highest kind can hardly lack. Nobody is obliged to like everything good; probably no one can like everything good. But, in case of disliking, the critic must be able either to give reasons (like those of Longinus in regard to the Odyssey) relatively, if not positively, satisfactory: or he must frankly admit that his objections are based upon something extra-literary, and that therefore, in strictness, he has no literary judgment to give.
Now Thackeray does not do this. He was not, perhaps, very good at giving reasons at all: and he was specially affected by that confusion of literary and extra-literary considerations from which all times suffer, but from which his own time and party—the moderate Liberals of the mid-nineteenth century in England—suffered more than any time or party known to us. Practically we have his confession, in the famous and dramatically paradoxical sentence on Swift, that, though he is the greatest of the Humourist company, “I say we should hoot him.” The literary critic who has “got salvation” knows that he must never do this—that whatever his dislike for the man—Milton, Racine, Swift, Pope, Rousseau, Byron, Wordsworth (I purposely mix up dislikes which are with those which are not mine)—he must not allow them to colour his judgment of the writer. Gulliver may be a terrible, humiliating, heart-crushing indictment, but nothing can prevent it from being a glorious book: and so on. Now Thackeray, by virtue of that quality of his, different sides of which have been—with equal lack of wisdom perhaps—labelled “cynicism” and “sentimentality,” was wont to be very “peccant in this kind,” and it, with some, though less, purely political or religious prejudice, and a little caprice, undoubtedly flawed his criticism.