Milman.

A curious but perhaps not surprising thing about Milman’s Professorship is that it aroused the ire of an undergraduate poet of the rarest though of the most eccentric type—namely, Beddoes. If Milman really did “denounce” Death’s Jest-Book,[[1118]] it is a pity that his lectures were (so far as I know) never printed, or at least collected, for there might have been more such things of the fatally interesting kind which establishes the rule that Professors should not deal, in their lectures, with contemporary literature. It was certainly unlucky for a man to begin by objecting in one official capacity to Death’s Jest-Book, and to end by objecting in another to Stevens’s Wellington Monument. And that Milman had generally the character of a harsh and donnish critic is obvious, from Byron’s well-known suggestion of him as a possible candidate for the authorship of the Quarterly article on Keats, though the rhyme of “kill man” may have had something to do with this. If he wrote much literary criticism we have little of it in the volume of Essays which his son published, after his death, in 1870. Even on Erasmus—surely a tempting subject—he manages to be as little literary as is possible, and rather less than one might have thought to be; and his much better-known Histories are not more so.

Keble.

Ignorance may sneer, but Knowledge will not even smile, at the dictum that not the least critical genius that ever adorned the Oxford Chair was possessed by John Keble. There is some faint excuse for Ignorance. The actual Prælections[[1119]] of the author of The Christian Year, being Latin, are not read: his chief English critical works,[[1120]] though collected not so very long ago, were collected too late to catch that flood-tide, in their own sense, which is unfortunately, as a rule, needed to land critical works out of reach of the ordinary ebb. Moreover, there is no question but Keble requires “allowance”; and the allowance which he requires is too often of the kind least freely granted in the present day. If we have anywhere (I hope we have) a man as holy as Keble, and as learned, and as acute, he will hardly express the horror at Scott’s occasional use of strong language which Keble expresses.[[1121]] Our historic sense, and our illegitimate advantage of perspective, have at least taught us that to quarrel with Scott again, for not being “Catholic” enough, is almost to quarrel with Moses for not having actually led the children of Israel into Palestine. And no man, as honest as Keble was, would now echo that other accusation against the great magician (whom, remember, Keble almost adored, and of whom he thought far more highly as a poet than many good men do now) of tolerating intemperance; though some might feign it to suit a popular cant.

But in all these respects it is perfectly easy for those who have once schooled themselves to this apparently but not really difficult matter, to make the necessary allowance.[[1122]] And then, even in the English critical Essays—the “Scott,” the “Sacred Poetry,” the “Unpublished Letters of Warburton,” and the “Copleston”—verus incessu patet criticus.

The Occasional [English] Papers.

His general attitude to poetic criticism (he meddled little with any other) is extremely interesting. His classical training impelled him towards the “subject” theory, and the fact that his two great idols in modern English poetry were Scott and Wordsworth was not likely to hold him back. He has even drifted towards a weir, pretty clearly, one would think, marked “Danger!” by asking whether readers do not feel the attraction of Scott’s novels to be as great as, and practically identical with, that of his poems. But no “classic” could possibly have framed the definition of poetry which he puts at the outset[[1123]] of the Scott Essay as “The indirect expression in words, most appropriately in metrical words, of some overpowering emotion, or ruling taste, or feeling, the direct indulgence whereof is somehow repressed.” Everybody will see what this owes to Wordsworth; everybody should see how it is glossed and amplified—in a non-Wordsworthian or an extra-Wordsworthian sense. We meet the pure critical Keble again, in his enthusiastic adoption of Copleston’s preference for “Delight” (putting Instruction politely in the pocket) as the poetic criterion.[[1124]] And his defence of Sacred Poetry, however interested it may seem to be, coming from him, is one of the capital essays of English criticism. He makes mince-meat of Johnson, and he takes by anticipation a good deal of the brilliancy out of his brilliant successor, Mr Arnold, on this subject. The passage, short but substantial,[[1125]] on Spenser in this is one of the very best to be found on that critic of critics (as by an easily intelligible play he might be said to be) as well as poet of poets. Spenser always finds out a bad critic—he tries good ones at their highest.