[956]. London, 1852.
[957]. It is important to notice that he is not hostile, he is simply puzzled. The great method, which emerges first in Dryden, and which Sainte-Beuve perfected, of “shaking together” different literary examples, is still dark to him in practice, though, as has been said, he had a glimpse of its theory.
[958]. Foster’s interest in literature—real, but very strongly coloured and conditioned by his moral and religious preoccupations—may be easily appraised by reading his Essays on “A Man Writing his Own Memoirs” and “The Epithet Romantic” in Bohn’s Library.
[959]. Fox has the credit of “discovering” Browning, but there were personal reasons here. Much more, of course, were there such in A. H. Hallam’s essay on Tennyson—a rather overrated thing.
[960]. Rogers is even “mentioned in despatches”—that is, by Sainte-Beuve.
[961]. See his Early Essays in Bohn’s reprint. The criticism of certain romantic poets of the mid century would make an interesting excursus of the kind which I have indicated as (if it were possible) fit to be included in a fourth volume of this work. Horne’s New Spirit of the Age (1845), though exhibiting all the singular inadequacies, inequalities, and inorganicisms of the author of Orion, does not entirely deserve the severe contrast which Thackeray drew between it and its original as given by Hazlitt. Mrs Browning, who took some part in this, has left a substantive critical contribution in The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets, in which again the weaknesses of the writer in poetry are interestingly compensated by weaknesses in criticism, but in which again also, and much more, “the critic whom every poet must [or should] contain” sometimes asserts himself not unsuccessfully. W. C. Roscoe, whose verse is at least interesting, and has been thought something more, is critically not negligible. But perhaps the most interesting document which would have to be treated in such an excursus is Sydney Dobell’s Nature of Poetry, delivered as a lecture (it must have been something of a choke-pear for the audience) at Edinburgh in 1857. Here the author, though not nominatim, directly traverses Matthew Arnold’s doctrine in the great Preface (see next chapter), by maintaining that a perfect poem will be the exhibition of a perfect mind, and, we may suppose, a less perfect but still defensible poem the exhibition of a less perfect mind—which principle, no doubt, is, in any case, the sole possible justification of Festus and of Balder. Others (especially Sir Henry Taylor) might be added, but these will probably suffice.
CHAPTER III.
ENGLISH CRITICISM—1860-1900.
[MATTHEW ARNOLD: ONE OF THE GREATER CRITICS]—[HIS POSITION DEFINED EARLY]—[THE ‘PREFACE’ OF 1853]—[ANALYSIS OF IT, AND INTERIM SUMMARY OF ITS GIST]—[CONTRAST WITH DRYDEN]—[CHAIR]-[WORK AT OXFORD, AND CONTRIBUTIONS TO PERIODICALS]—[‘ON TRANSLATING HOMER’]—[“THE GRAND STYLE”]—[DISCUSSION OF IT]—[THE STUDY OF CELTIC LITERATURE]—[ITS ASSUMPTIONS]—[THE ‘ESSAYS’: THEIR CASE FOR CRITICISM]—[THEIR EXAMPLES THEREOF]—[THE LATEST WORK]—[THE INTRODUCTION TO WARD’S ‘ENGLISH POETS’]—[“CRITICISM OF LIFE”]—[POETIC SUBJECT OR POETIC MOMENT]—[ARNOLD’S ACCOMPLISHMENT AND POSITION AS A CRITIC]—[THE CARLYLIANS]—[KINGSLEY]—[FROUDE]—[MR RUSKIN]—[G. H. LEWES]—[HIS ‘PRINCIPLES OF SUCCESS IN LITERATURE’]—[HIS ‘INNER LIFE OF ART’]—[BAGEHOT]—[R. H. HUTTON]—[HIS EVASIONS OF LITERARY CRITICISM]—[PATER]—[HIS FRANK HEDONISM]—[HIS “POLYTECHNY” AND HIS STYLE]—[HIS FORMULATION OF THE NEW CRITICAL ATTITUDE]—[‘THE RENAISSANCE’]—[OBJECTIONS TO ITS PROCESS]—[IMPORTANCE OF ‘MARIUS THE EPICUREAN’]—[‘APPRECIATIONS’ AND THE “GUARDIAN” ESSAYS]—[UNIVERSALITY OF HIS METHOD]—[MR J. A. SYMONDS]—[THOMSON (“B. V.”)]—[WILLIAM MINTO]—[HIS BOOKS ON ENGLISH PROSE AND POETRY]—[H. D. TRAILL]—[HIS CRITICAL STRENGTH]—[ON STERNE AND COLERIDGE]—[ESSAYS ON FICTION]—[“THE FUTURE OF HUMOUR”]—[OTHERS: MANSEL, VENABLES, STEPHEN, LORD HOUGHTON, PATTISON, CHURCH, ETC.]—[PATMORE]—[MR EDMUND GURNEY]—[‘THE POWER OF SOUND’]—[‘TERTIUM QUID.’]
Matthew Arnold: one of the greater critics.