The Age of Tennyson

by Hugh Walker

CRITICISM, SCHOLARSHIP, AND MISCELLANEOUS PROSE.

It was a maxim of Matthew Arnold’s that the main effort of the mind of Europe in our time was a critical one. By this he meant something more than merely literary criticism; but he certainly included that. All will agree with him that one of the characteristics of recent times is the desire to understand the meaning and the historical order of the forms of literature. The great development of journalism has done much to foster critical work; for a critical view of individual men or of isolated works can be conveniently expressed within the compass permitted by the periodical form of publication. The quality of this periodical criticism is uneven. Much of it is worthless, but the fact that the best critics of the present century—Lamb, Carlyle, Macaulay, Lockhart, Ruskin and Matthew Arnold—have all written for periodicals, is proof sufficient that the best as well as the worst is to be found there.

One of the features of this journalistic criticism is its anonymity, and this doubtless encouraged the ferocity characteristic of the early school of the Edinburgh, the Quarterly and Blackwood. But the evil seems to have worked its own cure. It would be rash to assert that there is not incompetence and unfairness still; but at least the bludgeon school of criticism has passed away. The cause is twofold: the fixing of an ethical standard, and the discovery, which Matthew Arnold did much both by precept and example to spread, that the rapier is the more deadly weapon. The critics of the early periodicals had no tradition to guide them, and, like settlers in a new country, they ran riot.

A good deal of uncertainty necessarily attaches to anonymous writing, and all that is possible here is to notice shortly a few of the more eminent names, avoiding any minute discussion. Some, like Carlyle, Macaulay and Lockhart, have been mentioned elsewhere. It was however under their influence, and under the gradually growing influence of Lamb, Coleridge and Hazlitt, that the criticism of this period grew up. There has also to be taken into account the spread of German thought, which gave to criticism greater breath and a firmer foundation in principle, and conduced likewise to a more careful and patient scholarship. The Germans have not only themselves done a great work in Shakespearian criticism, but they have induced the English to do the same. Still, an exclusive following of the Germans would have led to mischief, and fortunately for English criticism this tendency has been corrected by the opposite influence of the French school. Thanks largely to Matthew Arnold, and to the charm of Ste. Beuve, whom he helped to make known in England, the lucidity, good form and sanity of French criticism have had their effect as well as the laborious learning and sometimes rash theorising of the Germans.

John Payne Collier
(1789-1883).

Shakespearian criticism might almost be said to be in its infancy when the period opened. The highest reputation was speedily acquired by John Payne Collier, whose History of English Dramatic Poetry (1831) was a really valuable contribution to the study of the drama. A later work of Collier’s however brought dishonour on his name, and threw doubt upon all his conclusions unless they could be proved from other authorities. His Notes and Emendations to the Plays of Shakespeare (1853) professed to give all the ‘essential’ readings of the Perkins Folio; but when the mystery which for a time hung over this folio was penetrated, it proved that the emendations in question were forgeries. Unfortunately these ‘emendations’ do not stand alone. Nearly all through Collier’s work is tainted with falsehood. He attempted to vitiate the old ballads as well as Shakespeare, and perhaps even now his evil influence in retarding the progress of sound scholarship is not wholly annulled.Mrs. Anna Jameson
(1794-1860). Mrs. Anna Jameson was a better writer than Collier, and she enjoys an unclouded reputation. Her Characteristics of Shakespeare’s Women (1832) still holds its ground as a fine example of the critical analysis of character. She wrote other books afterwards—Sacred and Legendary Art, Legends of the Monastic Orders, and Legends of the Madonna—but none so good as her Shakespearian criticisms.J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps
(1820-1889). J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps did great service to the study of English literature in general, especially by his elucidation of the life of Shakespeare; and Alexander Dyce deserves mention for one of the most useful editions of Shakespeare’s works. The palm for learning and research must however be assigned to the great Cambridge Shakespeare, published between 1863 and 1866, under the editorship of W. G. Clark and W. Aldis Wright. Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke likewise deserve to be remembered. The Concordance of the latter was until lately the standard work of its class, and must always remain an honourable monument of patience and thoroughness.

Sir Arthur Helps
(1813-1875).

In the sphere of general criticism, a man of great reputation in the middle of the century was Sir Arthur Helps, author of Friends in Council, a collection of social and critical dialogues and essays, published between 1847 and 1859. Many of these essays are essentially commonplace, and the book is so long drawn out that it would be intolerable, but for occasional vivid and forcible passages and epigrammatic expressions. Such, for example, are the imaginary picture of the woman taken in adultery, and the description of a great cathedral, with a thin congregation lost in a little corner of it, a bad sermon and a dull service: ‘We look about, thinking when piety filled every corner, and feel that the cathedral is too big for the religion, which is a dried-up thing that rattles in that empty space.’

There remain two writers, John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold, who are as distinctly leaders of criticism in the middle and later portions of the period, as Carlyle and Macaulay were at the opening of it.

John Ruskin
(1819-1900).