A writer, therefore, who tries to recall criticism to a sense of its responsibilities and true functions deserves all sympathy and encouragement. It is refreshing to turn from the sort of thing to which we have referred to such a work as Mr. Worsfold has given us. His design is "to present an account of the main principles of literary criticism," which he professes to trace from Plato to Matthew Arnold. Mr. Worsfold's thesis simply stated is that criticism—and he deals with criticism chiefly in its application to poetry—has passed successively through five stages. With the Greeks it concerned itself principally with form. "The first question it asked with them was not, as with us, What is the thought? but What is the form?" By Addison—for here Mr. Worsfold makes a prodigious leap over some twenty centuries—it was furnished with a new test, and it asked, How does a given poem affect the imagination? By Lessing a return was made to the formal criticism of the ancients, but he adopted also Addison's criterion, and added definiteness to it. Victor Cousin followed in 1818 with his lectures, entitled, Du Vrai, du Beau, et du Bien, and enlarged the boundaries of the science by a complete theory of beauty and art, developed mainly out of Plato. Lastly came Matthew Arnold, who extended the realm still further, by the addition of certain other important touchstones of poetic excellence. At the present time a gradual limitation of the scope of its rules, and a gradual extension of the scope of its principles, are the tendencies most discernible in criticism. "An enlightened criticism no longer aims at directing the artist by formulating rules which, if they were valid, would only tend to obliterate the distinction between the fine and the technical arts. It allows him to work by whatever methods he may choose, and it is content to estimate his merit not by reference to his method but by reference to his achievement, as measured by principles of universal validity."
All this is exceedingly ingenious, and has in it a measure of truth, but, like most generalisations on vast and complicated subjects, it is more plausible than sound. The stages in the progress of criticism are not so sharply defined as Mr. Worsfold would have us believe. If Greek criticism were represented only by Plato and the extant works of Aristotle, English by Addison and Matthew Arnold, German by Lessing, and French by Victor Cousin, what Mr. Worsfold postulates might, after a manner, pass muster. But by far the greater portion of Greek criticism has perished; it exists only in fragments, and to the most important and remarkable work on this subject which has come down to us from antiquity, the Treatise on the Sublime, Mr. Worsfold does not even refer. If he had done so, and had he considered what is scattered fragmentarily through the Greek writers, or may be gathered from the titles of treatises which are lost, he would have seen that much which he supposes to mark development in criticism has long been old. Innumerable passages in the minor Greek critics, in Plutarch and in the Scholia, especially if we add what is to be found in Roman writers, derived no doubt from Greek sources, amply warrant doubt whether, after all, it is not with criticism as it is, to use Goethe's expression, with wit, "Alles Gescheidte ist schon gedacht worden, man muss nur versuchen, es noch einmal zu denken." At all events, it is a great mistake to suppose that Greek criticism, in its application to poetry, is represented by Plato and Aristotle. It would be almost as absurd to go to Plato for typical Greek criticism on poetry as it would be to go to Henry More or the Puritan Divines for typical English criticism. He approached it only as such a philosopher would be likely to approach it. He regarded art and letters generally simply as means of educational discipline and culture, or as mere playthings, of which the best to be expected was harmless pleasure. He despised poetry not only as an appeal, and a perturbing appeal, to the senses and the passions, but as representing the shadows of shadows. It may be pronounced with confidence that, had he seriously applied himself to literary and artistic criticism, he would have been one of the subtlest and profoundest critics who ever lived, and would probably have anticipated, so far as principles are concerned, all that Mr. Worsfold attributes to Addison, to Lessing, and to Victor Cousin; but, like our own Ruskin, he was wilful and fanatical.
Still less is Greek criticism represented by Aristotle. It is in the highest degree misleading to generalize from such a work as the Poetics. It is not merely a fragment, but a fragment deformed by desperate corruption, hopeless interstices and contemptible interpolations. If it confines itself, or in the main confines itself, to formal criticism, it is simply because it was designed to deal with that particular department of criticism, not because its author supposed that the chief question which concerned criticism was form. Again, if by form Mr. Worsfold understands, as he appears to do, expression and structure, he very much misrepresents the Treatise. Aristotle's criterion of poetry is not its formal expression, for he distinctly declares that it is not metre which makes a poem, and even seems to maintain that a poem may be composed without metre. In Aristotle's definition and conception of poetry as the concrete expression of the universal, in his definition of the scope and functions of tragedy, and in innumerable occasional remarks we have the germs of much, and of very much, which Mr. Worsfold would attribute to the later developments of criticism.
Aristotle, it is true, derived his canons from an analysis of the masterpieces of Greek poetry, but it is doing him great injustice to say, that he would make all epics Homeric, and all plays Sophoclean, and most erroneous to assume that modern criticism commenced at this point. Aristotle distinctly questions whether tragedy had as yet perfected its proper types or not (Poet., IV. 11), and in discussing the proper length of tragedy he makes a remark which shows that such a plot as the plot of Hamlet or the plot of Lear would have been quite compatible with his canons.[38] The truth is that Mr. Worsfold has gone too far; he has confounded the various aspects of criticism with stages in its development. Aristotle dealt mainly with form, because it was his business to deal with form. Plato approached poetry from a particular point of view, because it was from that particular point of view that it concerned him.
Had Mr. Worsfold taken his stand in his review of ancient criticism on the treatise attributed to Longinus, he would have seen that what he so strangely attributes to Addison and later writers had long been anticipated. This remarkable work which, since its translation into French by Boileau in 1674, has had more influence on criticism both in England and on the Continent than any other work that could be named, would alone show how much we owe to the Greeks. It has analyzed and defined, for all time, the essential virtues and the essential vices of diction and style, and has traced them to their sources. It has furnished us with infallible criteria in judging rhetoric and poetry. Take its analysis of the "grand style," which is described comprehensively as μεγαλοφροσυνης απηχημα, "the echo of a great soul"; it has, the Treatise tells us, five characteristics—richness and grandeur of conception (το περι τας νοησεις ἁδρεπηβολον); vehement and inspired passion (το σφοδρον και ενθουσιαστικον παθος), the due formation of figures, which are twofold—first those of thought, and secondly those of expression (ἡ ποια των σχηματων πλασις δισσα δε που ταυτα, τα μεν νοησεως, θατερα δε λεξεως); noble diction (ἡ γενναια, φρασις); dignified and elevated composition (ἡ εν αξιωματι και διαρσει συνθεσις). Nothing could be more masterly than its detailed analysis of each of these qualities, and of the pseudo forms which they assume, as the result of stimulated enthusiasm. How admirable, too, is its test of the sublime in the seventh chapter; its criticism of Sappho, generalizing what constitutes the charm and power of lyric, in the tenth chapter; its analysis of the eloquence of Demosthenes, again generalizing the characteristics of oratory in perfection (chap. xvii.); its demonstration of the inferiority of correct mediocrity to the faulty irregularities of inspired genius; its admirable remarks about the relation of Art to Nature. Like the Poetics, it has come down to us in a very mutilated form, and has evidently been interpolated by some inferior hand, which no doubt accounts for the exasperating triviality of some of the sections. Here, as elsewhere, we have references to the many losses which Greek criticism has sustained, the author referring to treatises written by him on Xenophon, on Composition, and on the Passions.
It is impossible to give an adequate account of the evolution of criticism without a very careful survey of the chief contributors to criticism in each generation, and such a survey Mr. Worsfold has not attempted. To Latin criticism he never even refers. And yet it has had great influence on critical literature. The Romans, it is true, contributed scarcely anything new to criticism, except that which pertains to oratory. We know enough of Varro, with whom Roman criticism may be said to begin, to feel confident that he could have had no pretension to the finer qualities of the critic. Of the five treatises composed by him, only one, the περι χαρακτηρων, appears to have been purely critical, and it almost certainly drew largely on Greek sources. Horace derived the material of the Ars Poetica from a Greek writer, Neoptolemus of Parium. Much of Quinctilian's criticism is demonstrably a compilation from Greek writers. The best critic of poetry among the Romans is undoubtedly to be found in Petronius, occasional and scanty though his remarks are. But of prose literature Rome produced two really great critics—the one was Cicero, the other was Tacitus. The Brutus and the Dialogus de Oratoribus are masterpieces, equal to anything which has come down to us from the Greeks. One of the most important critical principles ever enunciated we owe to Cicero. He was the first to demonstrate that the test of excellence in oratory lay, in its appealing equally to the multitude and to the most fastidious of connoisseurs. The most consummate rhetorician which the world has ever seen, he was at the same time a consummate critic of his art. This department of criticism has, indeed, for nearly two thousand years, been practically his monopoly; it may be questioned whether anything can be added, so far as the technique of rhetoric is concerned, to what may be traced to his writings. The interest of the Dialogus de Oratoribus is largely historical, but never have the causes which inspire and nourish, or depress and starve, eloquence been more eloquently and brilliantly explained. Nor must it be forgotten that it was through the medium of the Latin critics that Greek criticism became influential on modern literature.
Mr. Worsfold has very properly drawn attention to the fine passage about poetry in the second book of Bacon's Advancement of Learning, but he says not a word about Sidney's remarkable treatise, one of the most charming contributions to the criticism of poetry which has ever been made, or about the admirable remarks in Ben Jonson's Discoveries. The interest of Elizabethan criticism, as represented by these works—and they are the only works on this subject of any value produced during the Elizabethan period—lies partly in its return to Aristotelian canons, and partly in the importance which, in accordance with the ancients, it attaches to the didactic element in poetry. This is expressed very eloquently in Ben Jonson's dedication of the Fox:—
"If men will impartially and not asquint look toward the offices and function of a poet, they will easily conclude to themselves the impossibility of a man's being the good poet without being first the good man,—he that is able to inform young men to all good discipline, inflame young men to all good virtues, keep old men in their best and supreme state, or, as they decline to childhood, recover them to their first state, that comes forth the interpreter and arbiter of nature, a teacher of things divine no less than human."
This was precisely Spenser's conception of one of the chief functions of poetry. Thus the Elizabethan critics, who were followed afterwards by Milton, if they did not formally discuss the relation of æsthetic to ethic, insisted on their essential connection in the higher forms of poetry. Even in the succeeding age, when poetry lost all its high seriousness and much of its moral dignity, criticism, if it did not always insist on the application of this test, still retained it. Dryden could write, "I am satisfied if verse cause delight, for delight is the chief, if not the only end, of poesy"; but in adding "instruction can be admitted but in the second place, for poesy only instructs as it delights," he half corrected his former statement, and, indeed, simply reverted to what Aristophanes, Ben Jonson, and Milton would have been the first to admit.
But to return to Mr. Worsfold. A very serious defect in his work is his omission of all notice of Boileau and Dryden, and of the critics contemporary with them in France and England. The consequence is, that much is attributed to Addison which belongs to them, and Addison's importance as a critic is much overrated. Again, of the many memorable contributions to this branch of literature in England, in France, in Italy, and in Germany, which were made between the appearance of the Abbé Dubos's Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture in 1719, and the lectures of Coleridge and Schlegel about 1812, all that is said is represented by what is said of Lessing. Though a long chapter is given to Matthew Arnold, Matthew Arnold's master, Sainte-Beuve, is, if we remember rightly, not so much as named.