Mr Edmund Gurney.
There were, I think, few English writers of the last quarter of the nineteenth century who showed more of the true critical ethos than the late Mr Edmund Gurney. I did not know Mr Gurney myself, but most of my friends did; a situation in which there is special danger (when the friends are complimentary) of the fate of Aristides for the other person. But the good things which were told me of Mr Gurney I find to be very much more than confirmed by his books, though, of course, I also find plenty to disagree with. The earlier of them, The Power of Sound,[[1001]] is in the main musical; and I have generally found (though there are some capital exceptions) that critics of poetry, or of literature generally, who start from much musical knowledge, are profoundly unsatisfactory, inasmuch as they rarely appreciate the radical difference between musical music and poetical music. Even Mitford fails here. But Mr Gurney does not. He was the first, or one of the first, I think, in English to enunciate formally the great truth that “the setting includes a new substance”—meaning not merely the technical music-setting of the composer, but that “sound accompaniment” which, in all poetry more or less, and in English poetry of the nineteenth century especially, gives a bonus, adds a panache, to the meaning.
The Power of Sound.
He was right too, I have not the slightest doubt, in laying it down that “metrical rhythm is imposed upon, not latent in, speech”; and he went right, where too many scholars of high repute have gone wrong, in seeing that the much-decried English scansion-pronunciation of Latin almost certainly brings out to an English ear the effect on a Latin one, better than any conjectured attempt to mimic what might have been the Latin pronunciation itself. I was delighted to find that he, too, had fixed upon Tennyson’s “Fair is her cottage” (his is not quite my view, and perhaps we were both guided by a reported speech of Mr Spedding’s) as almost the ne plus ultra of “superadded” audible and visual effect combined. And he is well worth reading on certain “illusions” of Lessing’s.
Tertium Quid.
The literary part of The Power of Sound is, however, if not accidental, incidental mainly: not a few of the papers in the second volume of Tertium Quid[[1002]] deal with literature pure and simple. They are to some extent injured by the fact that many, if not most of them, are merely strokes, or parries, or ripostes, in particular duels or mêlées on dependences of the moment. And, as I have pointed out in reference to certain famous altercations of the past, these critical squabbles seem to me almost invariably to darken counsel—first, by leading the disputants away from the true points, and secondly, by inducing them to mix in their pleadings all sorts of flimsy, ephemeral, and worthless matter. Not the point, but what Jones or Brown has said about the point, becomes the object of the writer’s attention; he wants to score off Brown or Jones, not to score for the truth. So when Mr Gurney contended with the late Mr Hueffer—another literary-musical critic, who did not, as Mr Gurney did, escape the dangers of the double employ—when he contributed not so much a tertium as a quartum quid to the triangular duel of Mr Arnold, Mr Austin, Mr Swinburne about Byron—he did not always say what is still worth reading. And he makes one or two odd blunders, such as that the French are blind to Wordsworth, whereas Wordsworth’s influence on Sainte-Beuve, to name nobody else,[[1003]] was very great. But he is always sensible,[[1004]] and he always has that double soundness on the passionate side of poetry and on the peculiar appeal of its form, which is so rare and so distinctive of the good critic.
These qualities should, of course, appear in his essay on the “Appreciation of Poetry”;[[1005]] and they do. It is, however, perhaps well to note that, while quite sound on the point that there is a right as well as a wrong comparison, he, like others, hardly escapes the further danger of “confusing the confusion”—of taking what is really the right comparison for what is really the wrong. The comparison which disapproves one thing because it is unlike another is wrong, not the comparison which is used to bring out a fault, though the unlikeness is not assigned as the reason of the fault at all. But I am here slipping from history to doctrine on this particular point. I think Mr Gurney, right in the main, might have been still righter: but in general I am sure that he had admirable critical qualities, and I only wish he had chosen, or had been forced, to use them more fully and frequently.[[1006]]