Dallas.
To one remarkable critic, however, who, though a younger man than Mr Arnold, is on the whole of a Præ-Arnoldian type, and to whom justice, I think, has not usually been done, a little larger space must be given. I must admit that, having been disgusted at the time of the appearance of The Gay Science[[954]] by what I then thought its extremely silly, and now think its by no means judicious, title, I never read it until quite recently, and then found (of course) that Mr Dallas had said several of my things before me, though usually with a difference.[[955]] But I have not the least inclination to say Pereat: on the contrary, I should like to revive him. The Poetics. Fourteen years earlier than the date of his principal book, as a young man fresh from the influence of the Hamiltonian philosophy, and also, I think, imbued with not a little of Ruskinism, he had written a volume of Poetics,[[956]] which, though it does not come to very much, is a remarkable book, and a very remarkable one, it we consider its date—a year before Mr Arnold’s Preface, and when Brimley and others were only waking up by fits, and starts, and relapses, to the necessity of a new criticism. Not that Dallas is on the right track: but he is on a track very different from that of most English critics since Coleridge. He revives, in an odd way,—odd, at least, till we remember the Philistinism of the First Exhibition period,—the Apologetic for Poetry; he establishes, rather in the old scholastic manner, the distinction between Poetry the principle and Poesy the embodiment: he talks about the “Law of Activity,” the “Law of Harmony,” and the like.
The Gay Science.
There is, for the time, not a little promise in this: and there is much more, as well as some, if not quite enough, performance, in the later book. The Gay Science (an adaptation, of course, of the Provençal name for Poetry itself) was originally intended to be in four volumes: but the reception of the two first was not such as to encourage the author—who had by this time engaged in journalism, and become a regular writer for The Times—to finish it. I cannot agree with the author of the article in the D. N. B., that the cause of its ill-success was its “abstruseness”: for really there is nothing difficult about it. On the contrary, it is, I should say, rather too much in the style of the leading article—facile, but a little “woolly.” Its faults seem to lie partly in this, but more in the two facts that, in the first place, the author “embraces more than he can grasp”; and that, in the second, he has not kept pace with the revival of criticism, though he had in a manner anticipated it. He knows a good deal; and he not only sees the necessity of comparative criticism, but has a very shrewd notion of the difference between the true and the false Comparisons. Acuteness in perception and neatness in phrase appear pretty constantly: and he certainly makes good preparation for steering himself right, by deciding that Renaissance criticism is too verbal (he evidently did not know the whole of it, but is right so far); German too idealist; Modern generally too much lacking in system. Yet, when he comes to make his own start, he “but yaws neither.” He is uncomfortable with Mr Arnold (who, by this time, had published not merely the Preface but the Essays in Criticism), and finds fault with him, more often wrongly than rightly. Especially he shows himself quite at a loss to comprehend Sainte-Beuve, whom he, like some later persons, hardly thinks a critic at all.[[957]] He gets boldly into the “psychological coach,” and books himself, as resolutely as any German, for the City of Abstraction. “The theory of imitation,” we are told, “is now utterly exploded”—a remarkable instance of saying nearly the right thing in quite the wrong way. We travel arm-in-arm with “Imagination” and “The Hidden Soul” (which seems to be something like Unconscious Cerebration); we hear even more than from Mr Arnold about the “Play of Thought”; we have chapters on chapters about Pleasure—not the specially poetic pleasure, but pleasure in general. In short, we are here in the presence, not so much of what we have called “metacritic” as of something that might almost better be called “procritic”—altogether in the vestibule of critical inquiries proper. Of course it is fair to remember the two unwritten or unpublished volumes. But I venture very much to doubt, from a perusal of both his published works, whether Dallas would have ever thoroughly “collected” his method, or have directed it to that actual criticism of actual literature, of which, however (as of most things), there are fragments and essays in his work. The disturbing influences which, as we have seen, acted on so many of his contemporaries or immediate seniors acted differently on him, but they acted: and his literary “ideation” was, I think, too diffuse to make head completely against them. Yet he had real critical talent: and it is a pity that it has not had more adequate recognition.
Others: J. S. Mill.
But it is time to leave this part of the subject, only casting back among the elders, because each of these has “become a name,”—to John Foster,[[958]] and W.J. Fox,[[959]] Henry Rogers,[[960]] and the first Sir James Stephen, not even naming others of perhaps hardly less fame. And let us salute the man among these elders who, at first sight and frankly, could pronounce The Lady of Shalott, “except that the versification is less exquisite [it was much improved later], entitled to a place by the side of The Ancient Mariner and Christabel,” who doubted whether “poetic imagery ever conveyed a more intense conception of a place and its inmate than in Mariana,” and who justified his right to pronounce on individual poems by the two very remarkable articles on “What is Poetry?” and “The Two Kinds of Poetry.” One remembers, with amused ruth, Charles Lamb’s friend and his “What a pity that these fine ingenuous youths should grow up to be mere members of Parliament?” as one thinks of the Juvenilia and the Senilia of John Stuart Mill.[[961]]