Not much need be said of the critical production—arrested, like the poetical, by causes unhappy but well known—of James Thomson “the Second,” hardly “the Less,” but most emphatically “the Other.” It ought to have been good: and sometimes (especially under the unexpected and soothing shadow of Cope’s Tobacco Plant) was so.[[988]] Thomson had much of the love, and some of the knowledge, required; his intellect (when allowed to be so) was clear and strong; he was, in more ways than one, of the type of those poets who have made some of the best critics, despite the alleged prodigiousness of the metamorphosis. But the good seed was choked by many tares of monstrous and fatal growth. The least of these should have been (but perhaps was not) the necessity of working for a living, and not the necessity, but the provoked and accepted doom, of working for it mostly in obscure and unprofitable, not to say disreputable, places, imposed upon a temperament radically nervous, “impotent,” in the Latin sense, and unresigned to facts. That temperament itself was a more dangerous obstacle: and the recalcitrance to religion which it was allowed to induce was one more dangerous still. There are no doubt many instances where rigid orthodoxy has proved baneful, even destructive, to a man’s critical powers, or at any rate to his catholic exertion of them: but there are also many in which it has interfered little, if at all. On the other hand, I can hardly think of a case in which religious, and of very few in which political, heterodoxy has not made its partisans more or less hopelessly uncritical on those with whom they disagree. Nor could the peculiar character of Thomson’s education and profession fail to react unfavourably on his criticism. It is hard to get rid of some ill effects of schoolmastering in any case; it must be nearly impossible, in the case of a proud and rather “ill-conditioned” man, who has not enjoyed either full liberal education or gentle breeding, and who is between the upper and nether millstone, as Thomson seems to have been, or at least felt himself, while he was a military schoolmaster. All these irons entered into a critical soul which might have been a fair one and brave: and we see the scars of them, and the cramp of them, too often.[[989]]
William Minto.
A journalist for one-half of his working life, and a professor—partly—of literature for the other, William Minto executed in both capacities a good deal of literary work: but his most noteworthy contribution[[990]] to our subject consisted in the two remarkable manuals of English literary history which, as quite a young man, he drew up.[[991]] To say that these manuals were at the time of their publication by far the best on the subject would be to say little: for there were hardly any good ones. Their praise can be more of a cheerfully positive, and less of a “rascally, comparative” character. They were both, but especially the Poets from Chaucer to Shirley, full of study, insight, originality, and grasp—where the author chose to indulge his genius. His books on English Prose and Poetry. Their defects were defects which it requires genius indeed, or at least a very considerable share of audacity, to keep out of manuals of the kind. There is, perhaps, too much biography and too much mere abstract of contents—a thing which will never serve the student in lieu of reading, which will sometimes disastrously suggest to him that he need not read, and which must always curtail the space available for really useful guidance and critical illumination to him when he does. In the Prose there is something else. The book is constructed as a sort of enlarged praxis on a special pedagogic theory of style-teaching, that of the late Professor Bain: and is elaborately scheduled for the illustration of Qualities and Elements of Style, of Kinds of Composition. There is no need to discuss how far the schedule itself is faulty or free from fault; it is unavoidable that rigid adjustment to it—or to any such—shall bring back those faults of the old Rhetoric on which we commented in vol. i., with others more faulty than themselves. For classical literature was very largely, if not wholly, constructed according to such schemes, and might be analysed with an eye on them: English literature had other inceptions and other issues. That Minto’s excellent critical qualities do not disappear altogether behind the lattice-work of schedule-reference speaks not a little for them.
H. D. Traill.
Few writers have lost more by the practice of anonymous journalism than the late Mr Traill. He engaged in it, and in periodical writing generally, from a period dating back almost to the time of his leaving Oxford,[[992]] and he had to do with it, I believe, till his death, the extraordinary quality of his work recommending him to any and every editor who knew his business. It was impossible, in reading any proof of his, be it on matters political, literary, or miscellaneous, not to think of Thackeray’s phrase about George Warrington’s articles, as to “the sense, the satire, and the scholarship” which characterised them. In the rather wide knowledge, which circumstances happened to give me, of writers for the press during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, I never knew his equal for combination of the three. His critical strength. For a great many years, however, chance, or choice, or demand, directed him chiefly to the most important, as it is thought, and the most paying, but the most exhausting and, as far as permanent results go, the most utterly thankless and evanescent division of journalism—political leader-writing, with actual attendance at “the House” during the Session. And this curtailed both his literary press-work and his opportunities of literary book-work. He did, however, a great deal of the former: and the labours of the much-abused but sometimes useful literary resurrection-men, who dig contributions out of their newspaper graves, could hardly be better bestowed than upon him. Fortunately, however, the literary side of his criticism—he was a critic of letters and life alike, born and bred, in prose and in verse, by temper and training, in heart and brain—remains in part of The New Lucian, in the admirable monographs on Sterne and Coleridge,[[993]] and in the collection of Essays[[994]] issued but a year or two before his death.
On Sterne and Coleridge.
In the three last-named volumes especially, his qualities as a critic are patent to any one with eyes. The two monographs are models of competence and grasp, but they are almost greater models of the combination of vigour and sanity. Both subjects are of the kind which used to tempt to cant, and which now tempts to paradox. To the first sin Mr Traill had no temptation—whatever fault might have been found with him, neither Pecksniffery nor Podsnappery was in the faintest degree his failing. But he might have been thought likely to be tempted, as some very clever men in our day have been, by the desire to fly in the face of the Philistine, and to flout the Family Man. There is no trace of any such beguilement—the moral currency is as little tampered with as it could have been by Johnson or by Southey, while there is no trace of the limitations of the one or of the slight Pharisaism of the other. And yet the literary judgment is entirely unaffected by this moral rectitude: the two do not trespass on each other’s provinces by so much as a hair’s-breadth.