The very large body[[1049]] of individual judgments on literature, ancient and modern, with which he supports these, and from which, in part no doubt, he drew them, is, on the whole though not wholly, a little inferior. But we can see the reason for this inferiority where it exists, and even then it does not make him worthless. He has somewhat imperfect sympathies. On Shakespeare’s Sonnets[[1050]] he is not much better than Hallam; his single judgment on Heine,[[1051]] though studiously moderate, might almost be called studiously inadequate: and in talking of Friedrich Schlegel he cannot forget the author of Lucinde, or that when they once met at Naples, the future mystic and Neo-Catholic ate too much, drank too much, and talked too greasily. This, considering that he himself can admire The Custom of the Country, seems a little hard.
A critic of limitations: but a critic.
Grillparzer is, in fact, one of those critics in exploring whose region one gets to be familiar with certain danger-signals which are not always signals of danger only. As a practised playwright he speaks with special interest on Shakespeare, and he has given us judgments on other dramatists, which have not less. His appreciation, by no means indiscriminate, of Beaumont and Fletcher[[1052]] is specially noteworthy, and he has a whole volume on the Spanish Drama. I do not know whether any of our modern Byron-worshippers are acquainted with his estimate[[1053]] of their idol, whom he fully accepts as “the second greatest English poet,” but of whom he gives an idea quite different from the average Continental one. As a dramatist once more, and a man with dramatic ideas, he is extremely hard on Lessing;[[1054]] but I do not know an admiring critic of Goethe who is much better[[1055]] on that difficult person. We know that he will not appreciate Walther von der Vogelweide, though he has no strong anti-mediæval prejudice as such; and he does not.[[1056]] Finally, let me give, as remarkable, his coupling of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and A. W. Schlegel’s Lectures on Drama as “two of the most mischievous books of modern times for an inexperienced understanding.” I am not satisfied with his calling Tieck a “chattering noodle” (“Fasler”), but at any rate he calls Gervinus “absurd.” He returns again and again to the charge against this latter egregious person, who is still quoted by the compilers of Shakespeare Hand-books and the writers of examination papers. If I had any need of pardoning (which I have not, since I understand them) his remarks on Walther, on the Sonnets, and on Heine, I would do it at once for the exclamation, “Du lieber Himmel!” which he, a German, makes on Gervinus’s most famous boast that “the English have left it to us Germans to do full justice to their Shakespeare,” and for his explosion at the methods by which “bis aufs Blut wird alles erklärt.”[[1057]]
In short, I strongly recommend Grillparzer, about whom I have seen very little in English, to study at the hands of those Englishmen who take an interest in criticism. A very considerable man of letters himself, he seems to have never, in the course of his long life, lost interest in the work of others. He had some natural limitations, and they appear to have been further tightened by his playwrightship and by the influence of Joseph Schreyvogel, a sort of Austrian Nisard, of whom I do not know much.[[1058]] But the quotations and account which I have given will, I think, show that he had no small root of the critical matter in him, and that in more than one or two instances he enunciated and observed critical truths which are not exactly the stereotyped headings of the critical copybook.
It is not necessary here, after what has been said repeatedly before, to enter into any apology for not discussing the abstract Æsthetic of the German nineteenth century. Even Hegel, though he is tempting, must be omitted; for, as an authority of unsuspected competence[[1059]] observes with some naïveté on this very point, “it is undoubtedly difficult to get a net result out of Hegel,” and it is with net results that we are concerned. But a disciple of his may be usefully discussed with reference to the more general sides of the matter.
Carrière: his Æsthetik.
The Æsthetik[[1060]] of Moritz Carrière is a sort of object-lesson on its subject. The praises which have been bestowed on its style are quite justified: there is no German book of the kind known to me that is pleasanter to read. Its learning and its arrangement are all that can be desired. And yet, as one reads it, the old reflections on The Elements of Criticism arise (with a difference of course) once more. The impressions produced are rather those of a long course of elegant sermons, with æsthetic substituted for theology, than of anything else. Here you may read that women are smaller than men; that “as the noses of children are small and stumpy, a retroussé nose in the adult indicates want of development, though with elegant culture [of the feature or the person?] it may be naïve and roguish”; that dilettanti are always plagiarists. The conclusion of the second volume, to the extent of nearly two hundred pages, is devoted to Poetry, and is very good reading. Sometimes whole pages are neatly woven of agreeable poetical citations, or of dicta from more or less important persons,—“Schiller says,” “Goethe observes,” and so on. We learn further how Music “presents the idea as the principle and measure of the movement of life, and connects the beauty of that which is to come with that of what is”—like, say, a dinner-bell when one is talking to an agreeable person in a pretty drawing-room. Observe that Herr Carrière is neither quack nor twaddler; he does really feel the beauties about which he is talking. Such a passage as that at the foot of p. 457, vol. ii., and the top of the next, on Homer’s method of bringing scenes and figures before us, is real criticism of a valuable kind,—not more, it is true, than a corollary of Lessing’s propositions, but worth adding to them, for all that. I know hardly anything more shrewdly and amusingly adjusted, as a sort of æstheticised “Rhetoric” of the Hermogenean type, than the remarks and illustrations about Figures, from that of the orator who said, “Let us burn our ships and launch out boldly into the open sea,” onwards. The attempts to connect different metres with distinctive mental effects, or with separate classes of subject, are again most ingenious. His defence of the rhymes of the Nibelungenlied against the characteristic criticism of Gervinus is admirable. In fact, the book is almost everywhere, as Mr Weller would say, “wery pretty.”
Only—as we have so often been constrained to add in dealing with critics, from the Greek Rhetoricians downwards—how much better employed would this erudition, this taste, this ingenious adjustment of exposition to example, have been upon individual and complete poems, books, writers! These pieces, these selected examples, are after all only branches torn from the living trunk, mutilated things, wanting their context almost always to give them full beauty and their own beauty. But this is not the worst: for at least on the doctrine of the Poetic Moment they will sometimes give that moment. But they are produced, not to give it but to exemplify a presumed classification and analysis of the manner of its giving. They have to yield a formula: and insensibly, inevitably, the heresy will grow upon the reader, that the formula will yield them. It is as if some diabolical physiologist took Helen from the arms of Paris or of Faustus, extracted her eyes, or tore off her hair, or drew ounces of the half-divine blood from her veins, dissected and analysed them, and said, “Gentlemen, this dissection reconstituted, this analysis ‘made up,’ will give you what is required to make you immortal.” But, alas! it will not. And the fact is, that no explanation of the manner in which the literary delight is produced is ever general or true of any but the individual instance. That delight is never the same twice running: these stars always have some, it may be infinitesimal, but discernible and individualising, glory. Yet Herr Carrière is a craftsmanlike and entertaining demonstrator of the Undemonstrable.