Importance of prosodic inquiry.
The truth is, that these inquirers both builded and pulled down better than they knew. Many persons besides Mitford have begun by thinking controversies about prosody dull and uninteresting, while only too few have allowed themselves to be converted as he did; nor is it common to the present day to find a really intelligent comprehension of the importance of the subject. On the contrary, a kind of petulant indignation is apt to be excited by any criticism of poetry which pursues these “mechanical” lines, as they are called, and the critic has sometimes even to endure the last indignity of being styled a “philologist” for his pains.
Yet nothing is more certain than that these inquiries into prosody were among the chief agencies in the revolution which came over English poetry at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the next. A sort of superstition of the decasyllable, hardened into a fanaticism of fixed pause, rigidly disyllabic feet and the rest, had grown upon our verse-writers. A large part of the infinite metrical wealth of English was hidden away and locked up under taboo. Inquiries into prosody broke this taboo inevitably; and something much more than mere metrical wealth was sure to be found, and was found, in the treasure-houses thus thrown open.
Sterne and the stop-watch.
One expected figure of a different kind may perhaps have been hitherto missed in this part of our gallery. Sterne’s well-known outburst as to criticism, in the twelfth chapter of the third book of Tristram Shandy, is far too famous a thing to be passed over with the mere allusion given to it in the last volume, or with another in this. Nay, it may be said at once, from its fame and from its forcible expression, to have had, and even in a sense still to have, no small place among the Dissolvents of Judgment by Rule. “Looking only at the stop-watch” is one of those admirable and consummate phrases which settle themselves once for all in the human memory, and not merely possess—as precisians complain, illegitimately—the force of an argument, but have a property of self-preservation and recurrence at the proper moment in which arguments proper are too often sadly lacking.
Further, it must be admitted that there are few better instances of the combined sprightliness and ingenuity of Sterne’s humour. “Befetiched with the bobs and trinkets of criticism” is in reality even happier than the “stop-watch,” and of an extraordinary propriety. Though he did “fetch it from the coast of Guinea,” nothing was ever less far-fetched or more home-driven. The “nothing of the colouring of Titian” is equally happy in its rebuke of the singular negativeness—the attention to what is not there, not to what is—of Neo-Classicism; while the outburst, again world-known, as to the “tormenting cant of criticism,” and the ingenious and thoroughly English application of this cant itself to the eulogy of the curse of Ernulphus, are all too delightful, and have been too effective for good, not to deserve the heartiest acknowledgment.
At the same time the Devil’s Advocate—who is always a critic, if a critic is not always an officer of the devil—-may, nay must, point out that Sterne’s main object in the passage is not strictly literary. It is assuredly from the sentimental point of view that he attacks the Neo-Classic “fetichism”; the “generous heart” is to “give up the reins of its imagination into the author’s hands,” to “be pleased he knows not why, and cares not wherefore.” To which Criticism, not merely of the Neo-Classic persuasion, can only cry, “Softly! Before the most generous of hearts gives up the reins of imagination (which, by the way, are not entirely under the heart’s control) to an author, he must show that he can manage them, he must take them, in short. And it is by no means superfluous—it is highly desirable, if not absolutely necessary—to know and care for the wherefore of your pleasing.” Nor, wide as was Sterne’s reading, and ingenious as are the uses which he makes of it, does it appear that he had any very great interest in literature as such—as being good, and not merely odd, or naughty, or out-of-the-way, or conducive to outpourings of heart. He might even, by a very ungenerous person, be described as by no means disinterested in his protests. For certainly his own style of writing had very little chance of being adjudged to keep time according to the classical stop-watch, of satisfying, with its angles and its dimensions, the requirements of the classical scale. So he is rather a “Hal o’ the Wynd” in the War of Critical Independence—he fights for his own hand, though he does yeoman’s service to the general cause.
[96]. One celebrated person, much associated with it in some ways, and referred to in passing above, will not appear here. Horace Walpole did, for such a carpet knight, real service in the general movement; but he was a literary critic pour rire only. His admiration of Mme. de Sévigné is not really much more to his credit than his sapient dictum (to Bentley, Feb. 23, 1755) that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is “forty times more nonsensical than the worst translation of an Italian opera-book.” “Notre Dame des Rochers” talked of subjects that interested him in a manner which he could understand: Shakespeare was neither “Gothic” nor modern. So he liked the one and despised the other—uncritically in both cases.