Essays on Fiction.

The title-paper of the collected Essays, “The New Fiction,” connects itself with several other pieces in the volume, “The Political Novel,” “Samuel Richardson,” “The Novel of Manners,” and, to some extent, “The Future of Humour.” Mr Traill was a particularly good critic of the most characteristic product of the nineteenth century: I doubt whether we have had a better. In poetry he seemed to me to sin a little, in one direction (just as, I know, I seemed to him to sin in the other), by insisting, too much in the antique fashion, on a general unity and purpose. He shows this, I think, here in the paper on “Matthew Arnold,” who, indeed, himself could hardly have objected, for they were theoretically much at one on the point. But as to prose fiction he had no illusions, and his criticism of it is consummate. We have not a few instances of onslaughts upon corrupt developments of the art by critics great and small; but I do not think I know one to equal Mr Traill’s demolition of the “grime-novel” of to-day or yesterday. “The Future of Humour.” His highest achievement, however, in a single piece, is undoubtedly “The Future of Humour,” which transcends mere reviewing, transcends the mere causerie, and unites the merits of both with those of the best kind of abstract critical discussion. One may say of it, without hesitation, Ça restera; it may be lost in the mass, now and then, but whenever a good critic comes across it he will restore it to its place. It is about a day, but not of or for it: it moves, and has its being, as do all masterpieces of art, small and great, sub specie æternitatis. If it were not so idle, one could only sigh at thinking how many a leading article, how much journey-work in biography, one would give for Traill to be alive again, and to write such criticism as this.

Others: Mansel, Venables, Stephen, Lord Houghton, Pattison, Church, &c.

Others, great and small, we must once more sweep into the numerus named, or unnamed. Mr Traill himself—for they were both of St John’s—may be said to have directly inherited the mantle of Dean Mansel in respect of critical wit and sense, though the Dean had only occasionally devoted these qualities, together with his great philosophical powers, and his admirable style, to pure literary criticism.[[995]] Of the immense critical exercise of Mr George Venables, a little lacking in flexibility, sympathy, and unction, but excellently sound and strong, no salvage, I think, has ever been published: and though a good deal is available from his yoke-fellow, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen,[[996]] this latter’s tastes—as his father’s had done before, though in a different direction—led him away from the purer literary criticism. Of three other persons, eminent in their several ways, more substantive notice may perhaps have been expected by many, and will certainly be demanded by some. But Lord Houghton’s Monographs,[[997]] admirably written and extremely interesting to read, hardly present a sufficiently individual kind, or a sufficiently considerable bulk of matter, for a separate paragraph. Mr Mark Pattison’s dealings with Milton and with Pope, as well as with the great seventeenth-century scholars, may seem more, and more imperatively, to knock for admission. As far as scholarship, in almost every sense of the word, is concerned, no critic can surpass him; but scholarship, though all but indispensable as the critic’s canvass, needs much working upon, and over, to give the finished result. And Pattison’s incurable reticence and recalcitrance—the temperament which requires the French words rêche and revêche, if not even rogue, to label it—were rebel to the suppleness and morigeration which are required from all but mere scholastic critics. The happier stars or complexion of his near contemporary, Dean Church, enabled him to do some admirable critical work on Dante, on Spenser, and on not a few others, which will be found in the English Men of Letters, in Mr Ward’s Poets, in his own Collected Essays, and in separate books. Dr Church combined, with an excellent style, much scholarship and a judgment as sane as it was mild, nor did he allow the natural drift of his mind towards ethical and religious, rather than purely literary, considerations to draw him too much away from the latter.

Patmore.

Mr Coventry Patmore has been extolled to the skies by a coterie. But to the cool outsider his criticism, like his poetry, has somewhat too much the character of “diamondiferous rubbish,”—a phrase which, when applied to the poetry itself, did not, I am told, displease him. For though, in Principle in Art[[998]] and Religio Poetæ[[999]] there may be a few things rich and rare, there is a very large surplusage of the other constituents of the mixture. The short articles of the first volume consist almost wholly of it, and might have been left in the columns of the Daily Paper in which they appeared with a great deal of advantage.[[1000]] Indeed those on Keats, Shelley, Blake, and Rossetti, which unfortunately follow each other, make a four-in-hand good only for the knacker. Mr Patmore, when he wrote them, was too old to take the benefit of no-clergy, to be allowed the use of undergraduate paradox. And as, unfortunately, he was a craftsfellow, and a craftsfellow not very popular or highly valued with most people, his denigration is all the more awkward. A man who says that The Burden of Nineveh “might have been written by Southey” (and I do not undervalue Southey), must have an insensible spot somewhere in his critical body. A man who says that Blake’s poetry, “with the exception of four or five pieces and a gleam here and there,” is mere drivel, must be suffering from critical hemiplegia. There are better things in the other volume, and its worst faults are excesses of praise, always less disgusting, though not always less uncritical, than those of blame. But I am not here giving a full examination to Mr Patmore’s criticism, I am only indicating why I do not here examine it, as I am perfectly ready to do at any moment in a proper place.