His largest work, the History of the Renaissance in Italy, is actually one of great value in information, thought, and style; but its extreme redundance cannot be denied, and has indeed already necessitated a sort of boiling down into an abstract. Both in prose essays (which he wrote in great numbers, chiefly on Greek or Renaissance subjects) and in verse (where he was not so successful as in prose) Mr. Symonds was one of the most characteristic and copious members of the rather foolishly named "æsthetic" school of the last third of the century, the school which, originally deriving more or less from Mr. Ruskin, more and more rejected the ethical side of his teaching. But Mr. Symonds, who had been very much under the influence of Professor Jowett, had philosophical velleities, which have become more generally known than they once were through the interesting biography published after his death by Mr. Horatio Brown. But for the redundance above mentioned, which is all pervading with him both in thought and style, and which once suggested to a not unfriendly critic the remark that he should like "to squeeze him like a sponge," Symonds would probably or rather certainly occupy a much higher place than he has held or ever will hold. For his appreciation both of books and of nature was intense, and his faculty of description abundant. But the ventosa et enormis loquacitas of his style was everywhere, so that even selection would be hard put to it to present him really at his best.
William Minto, who was born in 1846 and died in 1893, Professor of Logic and English Literature at Aberdeen, showed fewer marks of the joint direction of "æsthetic" criticism to art and letters than these two, and had less distinct and original literary talent. He had his education mainly at Aberdeen itself, where he was born and died; but he made a short visit to Oxford. Subsequently taking to journalism, he became editor of the Examiner, and considerably raised the standard of literary criticism in that periodical, while after quitting it he wrote for some time on the Daily News. His appointment to the professorship enabled him to devote himself entirely to literature, and he produced some novels, the best of which was The Crack of Doom. He had much earlier executed two extremely creditable books, one on English Prose, and one on part of the History of English verse, the only drawbacks to which were a rather pedagogic and stiff arrangement; he was a frequent contributor to the Encyclopædia Britannica, and after his death some of his professorial Lectures on the Georgian era were published, but without his final revision. The strongest side of Minto's criticism lay in his combination of sufficiently sound and wide knowledge of the past with a distinct and rather unusual sympathy with the latest schools of literature as they rose. He was untainted by the florid style of his day, but wrote solidly and well. If it were necessary to look for defects in his work they would probably be found in a slight deficiency of comparative estimate, and in a tendency to look at things rather from the point of view of modern than from that of universal criticism. But this tendency was not in him, as it so often is, associated with ignorance or presumptuous judgment.
CHAPTER X
SCHOLARSHIP AND SCIENCE
The remarks which were made at the beginning of the chapter on Philosophy and Theology apply with increasing force to the present chapter; indeed, they need to be restated in a much more stringent and exclusive form. To give some history of English philosophy and theology in the nineteenth century, by noticing its literary expression, was possible, though it had to be done, so to speak, in shorthand. To do the same thing with science, or even with what is technically called scholarship, would be simply impossible. Much of their expression is hardly susceptible of literary form at all, hardly any ever receives such form, while the subdivision of the branches of physical science is now so great and their shadow so wide that no systematic sketch of them is to be thought of. It is only possible to mention a few distinguished writers, writers who would have been distinguished whatever their subject, but who happen to have devoted themselves, solely or mainly, to scientific writing, or to classical criticism and philology.
A curious independent study might be made of the literary gradations of classical scholarship. In the Middle Ages, though the complete ignorance of the classics, once imagined as prevailing, has been shown to be a figment, scarcely anybody could claim to be a scholar. During the Renaissance almost every man of letters had necessarily some tinge of scholarship, and some of the greatest in its earlier period, such as Erasmus, were scholars first of all. The growth of vernacular literature, the constant increase and subdivision of subjects, and the advance in minute study of the Greek and Latin languages, brought about an inevitable cleavage, and from the seventeenth century onwards scholarship became an independent profession or vocation. For some considerable time, however, it was the almost indispensable novitiate of a literary career, and the tradition that a scholar must be first applied to, for no matter what literary work, was still potent in the times of Salmasius, and cannot be said to have been discredited in those of Bentley, who would undoubtedly have been as formidable in purely political or general controversy as he was on Phalaris or on his own private interests. The eighteenth century, however, saw the divorce nearly completed, and by the period of our present volume it was an accomplished fact.
Even then, however, though for men of letters it was not customary to turn first to scholars, scholars had not ceased to be men of letters, and philology (or the mere study of language, as apart from literature) had not absorbed them.
During that part of our period which is still concerned with the last century, there were many excellent scholars in England, but perhaps only three—two of whom as scholars were of no great account—who make much figure in purely literary history. Jacob Bryant (1715-1804), an odd person of uncritical judgment but great learning, who belongs more to the last volume than to the present, devoted himself chiefly to mythology, a subject which had not yet attracted general interest, and which was treated by him and others in a somewhat unhistorical manner. Gilbert Wakefield (1756-1801) was one of the characteristic figures of the Revolutionary time. He was a Cambridge man, and took orders, but left the church, became a violent Jacobin, and went to prison for a seditious libel. He was one of those not very uncommon men who, personally amiable, become merely vixenish when they write: and his erudition was much more extensive than sound. But he edited several classical authors, not wholly without intelligence and scholarship, and his Silva Critica, a sort of variorum commentary from profane literature on the Bible, was the forerunner, at least in scheme, of a great deal of work which has been seen since.