[94]. P. 23.
[95]. By an accident not worth dilating upon I was unable to incorporate the results of careful reading of König and Conti in the text. The former’s treatise on Taste is very respectable for its time, and must then have been quite stimulating; but it belongs to the obsolete box of our matter. Taste, excellent in the palmy times of Greek literature, declined later, was revived by the Romans, lost in the Middle Ages, recovered at the Renaissance, lost again and recovered by the French, and so on. He is much cumbered (as some other excellent persons have been) about the origin of the word Taste—deprives the Spaniards of the honour of inventing it, and very properly finds its origin in Græco-Roman times. It must be natural, but can be improved by acquirement. It is more immediate than judgment. It extends to quite trivial things—snuff, wine, foppery in dress, sensual pleasures, &c.
Conti’s work, in the edition quoted, has the great drawback of being presented almost wholly, as far as the critical part of it is concerned, in abstracts made from MS. by the editor. It consists, besides Letters to the Doge Marco Foscarini, to Maffei, to Muratori, &c., of Treatises on “Imitation,” “Poetic Fantasy,” and the like and of animadversions on classical and Italian Poetry, on Fracastoro, on Gravina, and others. It does not come to very much.
CHAPTER III.
THE ENGLISH PRECURSORS.
[THE FIRST GROUP]—[MEDIÆVAL REACTION]—[GRAY]—[PECULIARITY OF HIS CRITICAL POSITION]—[THE LETTERS]—[THE ‘OBSERVATIONS’ ON ARISTOPHANES AND PLATO]—[THE ‘METRUM’]—[THE LYDGATE NOTES]—[SHENSTONE]—[PERCY]—[THE WARTONS]—[JOSEPH’S ‘ESSAY ON POPE’]—[THE ‘ADVENTURER’ ESSAYS]—[THOMAS WARTON ON SPENSER]—[HIS ‘HISTORY OF ENGLISH POETRY’]—[HURD: HIS COMMENTARY ON ADDISON]—[THE HORACE]—[THE DISSERTATIONS]—[OTHER WORKS]—[THE 'LETTERS ON CHIVALRY AND ROMANCE’]—[THEIR DOCTRINE]—[HIS REAL IMPORTANCE]—[ALLEGED IMPERFECTIONS OF THE GROUP]—[STUDIES IN PROSODY]—[JOHN MASON: HIS ‘POWER OF NUMBERS’ IN PROSE AND POETRY]—[MITFORD: HIS ‘HARMONY OF LANGUAGE’]—[IMPORTANCE OF PROSODIC INQUIRY]—[STERNE AND THE STOP-WATCH].
We have already, in the last volume, seen that in England, about the middle of the eighteenth century, the tables of criticism turned, and that a company of critics, not large, not as a rule very great men of letters, began slowly, tentatively, with a great deal of rawness, and blindness, and even backsliding, to grope for a catholic and free theory of literature, and especially of poetry. We are now to examine this group[[96]] more narrowly. With the not quite certainly to be allowed exception of Gray, no one of them could pretend to the first rank in the literature of the time; and most of them (Hurd and Percy were the chief exceptions) did not live to see, even at the extreme verge of life, the advent of the champions who were to carry their principles into practice. But they were the harbingers of the dawn, little as in some cases (perhaps in all) they comprehended the light that faintly and fitfully illuminated them beforehand.
The first group.
Three of the writers of this class whom it is necessary to name here have been alluded to already; the others were Shenstone and the Wartons. As so often happens in similar cases, it is exceedingly difficult to assign exact priority, for mere dates of publication are always misleading; and in this case, from their close juxtaposition, they almost of themselves give the warning that they are not to be trusted. How early, in his indolent industry at Cambridge, Gray had come to a Pisgah-sight of the true course of English poetry; Shenstone, in pottering and maundering at the Leasowes, to glimpses of the same; Percy and Shenstone again to their design, afterwards executed by Percy alone, of publishing the Reliques; the Wartons to their revolutionary views of Pope on the one side and Spenser on the other; Hurd to his curious mixture of true and false aperçus;—it is really impossible to say. The last-named, judging all his work together, may seem the least likely, early as some of that work is, to have struck out a distinctly original way for himself; but all, no doubt, were really driven, nolentes volentes, conscious or unconscious, by the Time-Spirit.