Their doctrine.
At the very opening of the Letters, Hurd meets the current chatter about “monkish barbarism,” “old wives’ tales,” and the rest, full tilt. “The greatest geniuses,” he says, “of our own and foreign countries, such as Ariosto and Tasso in Italy, and Spenser and Milton in England, were seduced by these barbarities of their forefathers; were even charmed by the Gothic Romances. Was this caprice and absurdity in them? Or may there not be something in the Gothic Romance peculiarly suited to the views of a genius, and to the ends of poetry? And may not the philosophic moderns have gone too far in their perpetual contempt and ridicule of it?” There is no mistake possible about this; and if the author afterwards digresses not a little in his “Chivalry” discussions—if he even falls into the Addisonian track, which he elsewhere condemns, of comparing classical and romantic methods, as a kind of apology for the latter, one ought, perhaps, to admit that it was desirable, perhaps necessary, in his day to do so. But when he returns to his real subject, the uncompromisingness and the originality of his views are equally evident, and they gain not a little by being compared with Warton, whose Observations on the Faërie Queene had already appeared. After arguing, not without much truth, that both Shakespeare and Milton are greater when they “use Gothic manners” than when they employ classical, he comes[[140]] to Spenser himself, and undertakes to “criticise the Faërie Queene under the idea not of a classical, but of a Gothic composition.” He shows that he knows what he is about by subjoining that, “if you judge Gothic architecture by Grecian rules, you find nothing but deformity, but when you examine it by its own the result is quite different.” A few pages later[[141]] he lays the axe even more directly to the root of the tree. “The objection to Spenser’s method arises from your classic ideas of Unity, which have no place here.” There is unity in the Faërie Queene, but it is the unity not of action, but of design.[[142]] Hurd even reprobates the additional unities which Spenser communicates by the ubiquity of Prince Arthur, and by his allegory. (He may be thought wrong here, but this does not matter.) Then he proceeds to compare Spenser with Tasso, who tries to introduce classic unity, and gives the Englishman much the higher place; and then again he unmasks the whole of his batteries on the French critics. He points out, most cleverly, that they, after using Tasso to depreciate Ariosto, turned on Tasso himself; and, having dealt dexterous slaps in the face to Davenant, Rymer, and Shaftesbury, he has a very happy passage[[143]] on Boileau’s clinquant du Tasse, and the way in which everybody, even Addison, dutifully proceeded to think that Tasso was clinquant, and nothing else. Next he takes the offensive-defensive for “the golden dreams of Ariosto, the celestial visions of Tasso” themselves, champions “the fairy way,” and convicts Voltaire out of the mouth of Addison, to whom he had appealed. And then, warming as he goes on, he pours his broadsides into the very galère capitaine of the pirate fleet, the maxim “of following Nature.” “The source of bad criticism, as universally of bad philosophy, is the abuse of terms.”[[144]] A poet, no doubt, must follow “Nature”; but it is the nature of the poetical world, not of that of science and experience. Further, there is not only confusion general, but confusion particular. You must follow the ordinary nature in satire, in epigram, in didactics, not in other kinds. Incredulus odi has been absurdly misunderstood.[[145]] The “divine dream”[[146]] is among the noblest of the poet’s prerogatives. “The Henriade,” for want of it, “will in a short time be no more read than Gondibert.”[[147]] And he winds up a very intelligent account of Chaucer’s satire on Romance in Sir Thopas by a still more intelligent argument, that it was only the abuse of Romance that Chaucer satirised, and by an at least plausible criticism of the advent of Good Sense,
“Stooping with disenchanted wings to earth.”
“What,” he concludes, “we have gotten is, you will say, a great deal of good sense; what we have lost is a world of fine fabling, the illusion of which is so grateful to the charmed spirit that, in spite of philosophy and fashion, ‘Fairy’ Spenser still ranks highest among the poets; I mean, with all those who are either come of that house, or have any kindness for it.”
And now I should like to ask whether it is just or fair to say that the work of the man who wrote this thirty-three years before Lyrical Ballads is “vapid and perverted,” that it is “empirical, dull, and preposterous,” and, at the best, “not very useful as criticism”?
His real importance.
On the contrary, I should say that it was not only useful as criticism, but that it was at the moment, and for the men, the unum necessarium therein. Why the Time-Spirit chose Hurd[[148]] for his mouthpiece in this instance I know no more than those who have used this harsh language of him; this Spirit, like others, has a singular fashion of blowing where he lists. But, at any rate, he does not blow hot and cold here. Scraps and orts of Hurd’s doctrine may of course be found earlier—in Dryden, in Fontenelle, in Addison, even in Pope; but, though somebody else may know an original for the whole or the bulk of it, I, at least, do not. The three propositions—that Goths and Greeks are to be judged by their own laws and not by each other’s; that there are several unities, and that “unity of Action” is not the only one that affects and justifies even the fable; and that “follow Nature” is meaningless if not limited, and pestilent heresy as limited by the prevailing criticism of the day—these three abide. They may be more necessary and sovereign at one time than at another, but in themselves they are for all time, and they were for Hurd’s more than for almost any other of which Time itself leaves record.