The criticism of a critic just cited, the late Mr R. H. Hutton, affords opportunity for at least a glance at one of the most important general points connected with our subject—the general distaste for pure criticism, and the sort of relief which l’homme sensuel moyen seems to feel when the bitter cup is allayed and sweetened by sentimental, or political, or religious, or philosophical, or anthropological, or pantopragmatic adulteration. Mr Hutton’s criticism was, it is believed, by far the most popular of his day; the very respectable newspaper which he directed was once eulogised as “telling you what you ought to read, you know ”—a phrase which might have awakened in a new Wordsworth thoughts too deep for tears or even for laughter.
His evasions of literary criticism.
The commentary on it is supplied by the two volumes of Mr Hutton’s selected and collected Essays.[[980]] These constantly deal with things and persons of the highest importance in literature; but they abstain with a sort of Pythagorean asceticism from the literary side of them. In his repeated dealings with Carlyle, it is always as a man, as a teacher, as a philosopher, as a politician, as a moralist, that he handles that sage—never directly, or at most rapidly and incidentally, as a writer. On Emerson he is a little more literary, but not much: and on him also he slips away as usual. Even with Poe, whom one might have thought literary or nothing, he contrives to elude us, till his judgment on the Poems suggests that inability to judge literature caused his refusal. Dickens, Amiel, Mr Arnold himself—the most widely differing persons and subjects—fail to tempt him into the literary open; and it is a curious text for the sermon for which we have here no room that he most nearly approaches the actual literary criticism of verse, not on Tennyson, not on “Poetry and Pessimism,” not on Mr Shairp’s Aspects of Poetry, but on Lord Houghton. He goes to the ant and is happy: with deans, and bishops, and archbishops, and cardinals he is ready to play their own game. But if Literature, as literature, makes any advances to him, he leaves his garment in her hands and flees for his life.
Pater.
To assert too positively that Mr Walter Pater was the most important English critic of the last generation of the nineteenth century—that he stands to that generation in a relation resembling those of Coleridge to the first, and Arnold to the latter part of the second—would no doubt cause grumbles. The Kingdom of Criticism has been of old compared to that of Poland, and perhaps there is no closer point of resemblance than the way in which critics, like Polacks, cling to the Nie pozwalam, to the liberum veto. So, respecting this jus Poloniæ let us say that those are fair reasons for advancing Mr Pater to such a position, while admitting that he is somewhat less than either of his forerunners.
His frank Hedonism.
His minority consists certainly not in faculty of expression, wherein he is the superior of both, nor in fineness of appreciation, in which he is at least the equal of either: but rather in a certain eclectic and composite character, a want of definite four-square originality, which has been remarkably and increasingly characteristic of the century itself. In one point, indeed, he is almost entitled to the highest place, but his claim here rests rather on a frank avowal and formulation of what everybody had always more or less admitted, or by denying had admitted the acceptance of it by mankind at large—to wit, the pleasure-giving quality of literature. Even he, however, resolute Hedonist as he was, falters sometimes in this respect—is afraid of the plain doctrine that the test of goodness in literature is simply and solely the spurt of the match when soul of writer touches reader’s soul, the light and the warmth that follow.