The rally: Copleston.
I should be half afraid that the interest which I feel in the next set of Prælections, those of Edward Copleston,—“the Provost,” as he anticipated Hawkins in being to Oxford men, even not of his own college of Oriel,—might be set down to that boulimia or morbid appetite for critical writings of which I have been accused, if I had not at hand a very potent compurgator. Keble, it is true, was a personal friend of Copleston’s. But he was not at all the man to let personal friendship, any more than personal enmity, bias his judgment; and he was admirably qualified to judge. Yet he says deliberately[[1109]] that the book “is by far the most distinct, and the richest in matter, of any which it has fallen to our lot to read on the subject.” I cannot myself go quite so far as that, and I doubt whether Keble himself would have gone so far when, twenty years later, he wrote his own exquisite Lectures; but I can go a long way towards it.
The future Provost and Bishop has, indeed, other critical proofs on which to rely,[[1110]]—the famous and excellent “Advice to a Young Reviewer,” which I fear is just as much needed, and just as little heeded, as it was a hundred years ago, the admirable smashing of the Edinburgh’s attack on Oxford, and other matters,—but the Prælections[[1111]] are the chief and principal thing. Keble insisted that they ought to be Englished, but I am not so sure. They form one of the severest critical treatises with which I am acquainted; and some of the features of this severity would, I think, appear positively uninviting in English dress, while they consistently and perfectly suit the toga and the sandal. But I must explain a little more fully in what this “severity” consists; for the word is ambiguous. I do not mean that Copleston rejects Pleasure as the end of Poetry; for, on the contrary, he writes Delectare boldly on his shield, and omits prodesse save as an indirect consequence. I do not mean that he is a very Draconic critic of particulars, though he can speak his mind trenchantly enough.[[1112]] Nor do I mean that he is a very abstract writer; for every page is strewn with concrete illustrations, very well selected, and, for the most part, un-hackneyed.
His severity is rather of the ascetic and “methodist” kind; he resembles nothing so much as a preceptist of the school of Hermogenes, who should have discarded triviality, and risen to very nearly the weight and substance of Aristotle. At the very beginning he makes a statute for himself, to cite no literature but Greek and Latin, and to use no language but these. And he never breaks either rule; for though, on rare occasions, he refers to English writers—Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Burke, Reynolds[[1113]]—it is a reference only to books, or poems, or passages, never a citation. And in the second place his method is throughout—constant as is his use of the actual poetic object-lesson—to proceed by general categories, not of poetic kinds (he shuns that ancient and now well-beaconed quicksand[[1114]]) but of qualities, constituents, means. His whole book, after a brief definition or apology for not defining, is distributed under four parts,—Of Imitation, Of the Emotions, Of Imagination (Phantasia), and Of Judgment,—though he never reached the fourth,[[1115]] owing to his tenure of the Chair coming to an end. After a pretty full discussion of the nature and subject of Imitation, he makes his link with his next subject by dwelling on the Imitatio morum, and so of the Passions themselves. In this part a very large share is given to the subject of Sententiæ—“sentiments,” as Keble translates it, though, as I have pointed out formerly,[[1116]] no single translation of the word is at all satisfactory. The section on Imagination is very interesting. Copleston is at a sort of middle stage between the restricted Addisonian and the wide Philostratean-Shakespearean-Coleridgean interpretation of the word. He expressly admits that other senses besides sight can supply the material of Phantasia; but his examples are mainly drawn from material which is furnished by the sight, and his inclusions of Allegory, Mythology, &c., with other things, sometimes smack of an insufficient discrimination between Imagination and Fancy. Indeed the fact that he is Præ-Coleridgean helps to give him his interest.
Keble mildly complains that Copleston does not make use of that doctrine of Association which he himself, writing so early, had perhaps adopted, not from Coleridge but direct from Hartley. We have, in our day, seen this doctrine worked to death and sent to the knacker’s in philosophy generally; but there is no doubt that it can never be neglected in poetry, being, perhaps, the most universal (though by no means the universal) means of approach to the sources of the poetic pleasure. It does not, however, seem to me that Copleston intended to mount so high, or go so far back: his aim was, I think, more rhetorical, according to a special fashion, than metacritical. But his mediate axioms are numerous and often very informing: and his illustrations, as has been said, abundant, really illustrative, and singularly recreative. He lays most Latin and many Greek poets under contribution; but some of his most effective examples are drawn from a poet whom he does not critically overvalue, but who has no doubt been, as a rule, critically undervalued, and for whom he himself evidently had a discriminating affection—that is to say, Claudian.
On the whole, the appearance of a book of this scope and scheme, at the very junction of the centuries and the ’isms, Classic and Romantic, is of singular interest. Until intelligent study of the Higher Rhetoric—reformed, adjusted, and extended—has been reintroduced, such another will not come. But such another might come with very great advantage, and would supply a very important tertium quid to the mere Æsthetics and to the sheer Impressionism between which Criticism has too often divided itself.
Conybeare.
There is almost as much significance in Copleston’s successor, though it is a significance of a different kind. For J. J. Conybeare was the first Professor of Poetry to bestow attention on Anglo-Saxon (Warton, even in his History, had not gone, with any knowledge, beyond Middle English), and so to complete the survey of all English Literature. Before his appointment he had held, as its first occupant, the chair of Anglo-Saxon itself; and while Professor of Poetry he was a country parson. He died suddenly and comparatively young, and his remarkable Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry[[1117]] were published after his death by his brother, who is actually responsible for a good part of its matter, so that the book is a composite one. It is thus mainly in its general significance—for Conybeare’s Prælections as Professor were not, so far as I know, published—that it is valuable for us. But the value thus given is unmistakable. Conybeare’s individual judgments and aperçus are always interesting, and often acute; but his real importance lies in the fact that he was almost the first—though Mitford, after Ellis, had attempted the thing as an outsider—to move back the focussing-point sufficiently to get all English Literature under view. Nothing could serve more effectually to break up the false standing-ground of the eighteenth century.