This “Tennyson” essay is one of a hundred pages, though not very large ones: but the only other piece of length which has been preserved, a paper on “Wordsworth” not much shorter than the “Tennyson,” is, as was perhaps natural, seeing that it was published immediately after the poet’s death, mainly biographical, and so uninteresting: while the remaining contents of the volume are short reviews. The “Wordsworth” starts, however, with reasoned estimates of Byron, Scott, and Shelley, as foils to Wordsworth: and to these, remembering their time,[[947]] the very middle of the century, we turn with interest. The “Byron” and the “Scott” reward us but moderately: they are in the main “what he ought to have said,”—competent, well-balanced, true enough as far as they go, but showing no very individual grip. The Shelley, a better test, is far more satisfactory in the result. It is quite clear that Brimley sympathised neither with Shelley’s religious views, nor with his politics, nor with his morals. He may be thought to be even positively unjust in saying that Shelley’s “mind was ill-trained, and not well furnished with facts,” for intellectually few poets have been better off in this respect. Yet, in spite of all this, he says, “with one exception a more glorious poet has not been given to the English nation,” which once more shows how very much sounder he was on the subject of poetry than Arnold, and how little beginnings, and middles, and ends, with all their trumpery, really mattered to him. Among the shorter pieces, the attempts at abstract, or partly abstract, treatment in “Poetry and Criticism” and “The Angel in the House” (only part of which latter is actually devoted to its amiable but rather wool-gathering title-subject) are not conspicuously successful; they are, in fact, trial-essays, by a comparative novice, in an art the secrets of which had been almost lost for nearly a generation. But the attempt in “Poetry and Criticism” to gather up, squeeze out, and give form to the Coleridgean vaguenesses (for that is very much what it comes to), has promise and germ. As for the smaller reviews, Mr Brimley had the good fortune to deal as a reviewer with Carlyle, Thackeray, and Dickens, as well as Bulwer and Kingsley, not to mention such different subjects as the Noctes Ambrosianæ and the Philosophie Positive: and the merit of coming out, with hardly a stain upon his character, from any one of these (in some cases very high) trials. We may think that he does not always go fully right; but he never goes utterly wrong. And when we think what sorrowful chances have awaited the collision of great books at their first appearance even with by no means little critics, the praise is not small.

His intrinsic and chronological importance.

Yet a sufficient study of the “Tennyson” essay should have quite prepared the expert reader for these minor successes. Brimley, as we have said, was only partially favoured by time, place, and circumstance, even putting health out of the question. He was heavily handicapped in that respect: and he had no time to work out his critical deliverance fully, and to justify it by abundant critical performance. But he has the root of the matter in him: and it throws out the flower of the matter in that refusal to be “frightened out of the enjoyment of fine poetry by epithets.” When a man has once shown himself ausus contemnere vana in this way, when he has the initial taste which Brimley everywhere shows, and the institution of learning which he did not lack, it will go hard but he is a good critic in posse already, and harder if he is not a good one in such actuality as is allowed him. And this was well seen of George Brimley.

“Gyas and Cloanthus.”

It is one of the penalties, late but heavy, of an attempt to take a kingdom (even one not of Heaven) by storm for the first time, that you have to “refuse” or “mask” not a few of its apparently strong places—and if their strength be more than apparent, the adventurer will not be conqueror. There are in English, as in other nineteenth-century literatures, many persons who addressed themselves more or less seriously to criticism, who obtained more or less name as critics, with whose works every well-read person is more or less acquainted, yet who must be so refused or masked at the writer’s peril of the reader’s disappointment or disapproval. Many of them seemed to be pillars of the early and middle nineteenth-century reviews; from some of them, no doubt, some institution in criticism has been received by readers of all the three generations which have passed since the appearance of the earliest. Milman, Croker, Hayward. It may seem intolerable outrecuidance to put Milman and Croker and Hayward, Sydney Smith and Senior and Helps, with others not even named, as it were “in the fourpenny box” of our stall. Yet it is unavoidable, and the stall-keeper must dare it, not merely—not even mainly—because he has no room to give them better display. Milman was at least thought by Byron a formidable enough critic to have the apocryphal crime of “killing John Keats” assigned to him by hypothesis: and his merits (not of the bravo kind) are no doubt much greater than the bad critics who, after Macaulay, depreciate his style, and the maladroit eulogists of his free thought, who would make him a sort of nineteenth-century Conyers Middleton, appear to think. But he has no critical credential, known to the present writer, that would give him substantive place here.[[948]] Croker was neither such a bad man nor such a bad writer as Macaulay would have had him to be: but he was almost as much more of a bravo than Milman as he was less of a scholar. Senior, before he became a glorified earwig, or, if this seem disrespectful, the father of all such as interview, was a sound, if not very gifted, reviewer, but little more: Hayward, a much cleverer and, above all, much more worldly wise Isaac Disraeli, who made the most of being “in society” (see Thackeray), talked better than he wrote, but still wrote well, especially by the aid of l’esprit des autres. Sydney Smith, Senior, Helps. Of Sydney Smith earlier, and Sir Arthur Helps later, the fairest thing to say in our present context is, that neither held himself out as a literary critic at all. Sydney could give admirable accounts of books: but he nowhere shows, or pretends to, the slightest sense of literature. Helps, starting[[949]] a discussion on Fiction,—the very most interesting and most promising of all literary subjects for a man of his time—a subject which was just equipped with material enough at hand, and not yet too much, neither novel to the point of danger nor stale to the point of desperation,—“keeps to the obvious,” as one of his own characters acknowledges, in a fashion almost excusing the intrinsically silly reaction from obviousness, which distinguished the last quarter of the century, and is now getting obviously stale itself. The influence of works of fiction is unbounded. The Duke of Marlborough took his history from Shakespeare. Fiction is good as creating sympathy. It is bad as leading us into dreamland. Real life is more real than fiction. Writers of fiction have great responsibility. In shorter formula, “We love our Novel with an N because it is Nice; we hate it because it is sometimes Naughty; we take it to the Osteria[[950]] of the Obvious, and treat it with an Olio of Obligingness and Objurgation.” But Helps, in this very passage, tells us that he prefers life to literature, and no one can be a good critic who, when he criticises, does that: though he may be a very bad one, and yet make the other preference.

Elwin, Lancaster, Hannay.

We must still extend this numerus a little in order to do that justice—unjust at the best—which is possible here, and which is yet not quite so futile and inadequate as some still more unjust judgments would have it. For the object of this History is to revive and keep before the eye of the reader the names, the critical position, and, if only by touches, the critical personality, of as many of those who have done good service to criticism in the past as may be possible. A little less wilfulness and exclusiveness of personal taste, or rather less opportunity of indulging it, would probably have made of Whitwell Elwin—who survived till the earlier portion of this book was published, but did his critical work long ago—a really great critic. Even as it is, his Remains[[951]] contain some of the best critical essays, not absolutely supreme, to be found among the enormous stores of the nineteenth century, especially on the most English Englishmen of letters during the eighteenth, such as Fielding and Johnson. A short life, avocations of business, and perhaps the absence of the pressure of professional literary occupation, prevented the work of Henry Lancaster[[952]] from being much more than a specimen: but his famous essay on Thackeray showed (and not alone) what he could do. On the other hand, the not always mischievous, though too often galling, yoke of the profession was not wanting to James Hannay. His literary work was directed into too many paths, some of them too much strewn with the thorns and beset with the briars of journalism. But there are very few books of the kind which unite a certain “popularity” in no invidious sense, and an adaptation for the general reader, with sound and keen criticism, as does his far too little known Course of English Literature;[[953]] while many of his scattered and all but lost essays show admirable insight.