The famous Suggestion Scene in Othello has, in Rymer's view, no point but 'the mops, the mows, the grimace, the grins, the gesticulation.' On Desdemona's
O good Iago,
What shall I do to win my lord again?
he remarks that no woman bred out of a pig-stye would talk so meanly. Speaking of Portia he says, 'she is scarce one remove from a natural, she is own cousin-german, of one piece, the very same impertinent flesh and blood with Desdemona.' And Rymer's general verdict of Othello—which he considers the best of Shakespeare's tragedies—is thus summed up:
There is in this play some burlesque, some humour and ramble of comical wit, some show and some mimicry to divert the spectators: but the tragical part is plainly none other than a bloody farce, without salt or savour.
In the eighteenth century Lord Lansdowne, writing on 'Unnatural Flights in Poetry,' could refuse to go into the question of Shakespeare's soliloquies, as being assured that 'not one in all his works could be excused by reason or nature.' The same tone was still later kept up by Voltaire, who calls Shakespeare a writer of monstrous farces called tragedies; says that nature had blended in him all that is most great and elevating with all the basest qualities that belong to barbarousness without genius; and finally proceeds to call his poetry the fruit of the imagination of an intoxicated savage.2. The Shakespearean Drama held inadmissible, yet attractive.—Meanwhile a second wave of opinion had arisen, not conceiving a doubt as to the total inadmissibility of the Shakespearean Drama, yet feeling its attraction. This is perhaps most exactly illustrated in the forgotten critic Edwards, who ruled that 'poor Shakespeare'—the expression his own—must be excluded from the number of good tragedians, yet 'as Homer from the Republic of Plato, with marks of distinction and veneration.' But before this the more celebrated dramatists of the Restoration had shown the double feeling in the way they reconstructed Shakespeare's plays, and turned them into 'correct' dramas. Thus Otway made the mediæval Capulets and Montagus presentable by giving them a classical dress as followers of Marius and Sulla; and even Dryden joined in a polite version of The Tempest, with an original touch for symmetry's sake in the addition to the heroine Miranda, a maid who had never seen a man, of a suitable hero, a man who had never seen a maid.3. The Shakespearean Drama admitted with excuses.—Against loud abuse and patronising reconstruction the silent power of Shakespeare's works made itself more and more felt, and we reach a third stage when the Shakespearean Drama is accepted as it stands, but with excuses. Excuse is made for the poet's age, in which the English nation was supposed to be struggling to emerge from barbarism. Heywood's apology for uniting light and serious matter is allowed, that 'they who write to all must strive to please all.' Pope points out that Shakespeare was dependent for his subsistence on pleasing the taste of tradesmen and mechanics; and that his 'wrong choice of subjects' and 'wrong conduct of incidents,' his 'false thoughts and forced expressions' are the result of his being forced to please the lowest of the people and keep the worst of company. Similarly Theobald considers that he schemed his plots and characters from romances simply for want of classical information.4. The Shakespearean Drama not felt to need defence as a whole, but praised and blamed in its parts.—With the last name we pass to yet another school, with whom Shakespeare's work as a whole is not felt to need defence, and the old spirit survives only in their distribution of praise and blame amongst its different parts. Theobald opens his preface with the comparison of the Shakespearean Drama to a splendid pile of buildings, with 'some parts finished up to hit the taste of a connoisseur, others more negligently put together to strike the fancy of a common beholder.' Pope—who reflects the most various schools of criticism, often on successive pages—illustrates this stage in his remark that Shakespeare has excellences that have elevated him above all others, and almost as many defects; 'as he has certainly written better so he has perhaps written worse than any other.' Dr. Johnson sets out by describing Shakespeare as 'having begun to assume the dignity of an ancient'—the highest commendation in his eyes. But he goes on to point out the inferiority of Shakespeare's Tragedy to his Comedy, the former the outcome of skill rather than instinct, with little felicity and always leaving something wanting; how he seems without moral purpose, letting his precepts and axioms drop casually from him, dismissing his personages without further care, and leaving the examples to operate by chance; how his plots are so loosely formed that they might easily be improved, his set speeches cold and weak, his incidents imperfectly told in many words which might be more plainly described in few. Then in the progress of his commentary, he irritates the reader, as Hallam points out, by the magisterial manner in which he dismisses each play like a schoolboy's exercise. 5. Finally criticism comes round entirely to Shakespeare.—At last comes a revolution in criticism and a new order of things arises: with Lessing to lead the way in Germany and Coleridge in England, a school of critics appear who are in complete harmony with their author, who question him only to learn the secrets of his art. The new spirit has not even yet leavened the whole of the literary world; but such names as Goethe, Tieck, Schlegel, Victor Hugo, Ulrici, Gervinus suggest how many great reputations have been made, and reputations already great have been carried into a new sphere of greatness, by the interpretation and unfolding of Shakespeare's greatness: not one critic has in recent years risen to eminence by attacking Shakespeare.
Other examples.
And the Shakespearean Drama is only the most illustrious example of authors triumphing over the criticism that attempted to judge them. It is difficult for a modern reader to believe that even Rymer could refer to Milton.the Paradise Lost as 'what some are pleased to call a poem'; or that Dr. Johnson could assert of the minor poems of Milton that they exhibit 'peculiarity as distinguished from excellence,' 'if they differ from others they differ for the worse.' He says of Comus that it is 'inelegantly splendid and tediously instructive'; and of Lycidas, that its diction is harsh, its rhymes uncertain, its numbers unpleasing, that 'in this poem there is no nature for there is no truth, there is no art for there is nothing new,' that it is 'easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting,'—after which he goes through the different parts of the poem to show what Milton should have done in each. Hallam has pointed out how utterly impotent Dr. Johnson has been to fix the public taste in the case of these poems; yet even Hallam could think the verse of the poet who wrote Paradise Lost sufficiently described by the verdict, 'sometimes wanting in grace and almost always in ease.' Shakespeare's Sonnets.In the light of modern taste it is astonishing indeed to find Steevens, with his devotion of a lifetime to Shakespeare, yet omitting the Sonnets from the edition of 1793, 'because the strongest Act of Parliament that could be framed would not compel readers into their service.' Spenser.It is equally astonishing to find Dryden speaking of Spenser's 'ill choice of stanza,' and saying of the Faerie Queene that if completed it might have been more of a piece, but it could not be perfect, because its model was not true: an example followed up in the next century by a 'person of quality,' who translated a book of the Faerie Queene out of its 'obsolete language and manner of verse' into heroic couplets. Gray.I pass over the crowd of illustrations, such as the fate of Gray at the hands of Dr. Johnson, Keats.of Keats at the hands of monthly and quarterly reviewers, Waverley Novels.or of the various Waverley Novels capriciously selected by different critics as examples of literary suicide. But we have not yet had time to forget how Jeffrey—one of the greatest names in criticism—set in motion the whole machinery of reviewing in order to put down Wordsworth. Wordsworth.Wordsworth's most elaborate poem he describes as a 'tissue of moral and devotional ravings,' a 'hubbub of strained raptures and fantastical sublimities': his 'effusions on ... the physiognomy of external nature' he characterises as 'eminently fantastic, obscure, and affected.' Then, to find a climax, he compares different species of Wordsworth's poetry to the various stages of intoxication: his Odes are 'glorious delirium' and 'incoherent rapture,' his Lyrical Ballads a 'vein of pretty deliration,' his White Doe is 'low and maudlin imbecility.' Not a whit the less has the influence of Wordsworth deepened and solidified; and if all are not yet prepared to accept him as the apostle of a new religion, yet he has tacitly secured his place in the inner circle of English poets. In fine, the work of modern criticism is seriously blocked by the perpetual necessity of revising and reversing what this same Jeffrey calls the 'impartial and irreversible sentences' of criticism in the past. And as a set-off in the opposite scale only one considerable achievement is to be noted: Robert Montgomery.that journalism afforded a medium for Macaulay to quench the light of Robert Montgomery, which, on Macaulay's own showing, journalism had puffed into a flame.
Defeat of criticism in the great literary questions.
It is the same with the great literary questions that have from time to time arisen, the pitched battles of criticism: as Goldsmith says, there never has been an unbeaten path trodden by the poet that the critic has not endeavoured to recall him by calling his attempt an innovation. Blank verse.Criticism set its face steadily from the first against blank verse in English poetry. The interlocutors in Dryden's Essay on the Drama agree that it is vain to strive against the stream of the people's inclination, won over as they have been by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher; but, as they go on to discuss the rights of the matter, the most remarkable thing to a modern reader is that the defence of blank verse is made to rest only on the colloquial character of dramatic poetry, and neither party seems to conceive the possibility of non-dramatic poetry other than in rhyme. Before Dryden's Essay on Satire the Paradise Lost had made its appearance; but so impossible an idea is literary novelty to the 'father of English criticism' that Dryden in this Essay refuses to believe Milton's own account of the matter, saying that, whatever reasons Milton may allege for departing from rhyme, 'his own particular reason is plainly this, that rhyme was not his talent, he has neither the ease of doing it nor the graces of it.' To one so steeped in French fashions as Rymer, poetry that lacks rhyme seems to lack everything; many of Shakespeare's scenes might, he says, do better without words at all, or at most the words set off the action like the drone of a bagpipe. Voltaire estimates blank verse at about the same rate, and having to translate some of Shakespeare's for purposes of exact comparison, he remarks that blank verse costs nothing but the trouble of dictating, that it is not more difficult to write than a letter. Dr. Johnson finds a theoretic argument in the unmusical character of English poetry to prove the impossibility of its ever adapting itself to the conditions of blank verse, and is confident enough to prophesy: 'poetry may subsist without rhyme, but English poetry will not often please.' Even Byron is found only one degree more tolerant than Dryden: he has the grace to except Milton from his dictum that no one ever wrote blank verse who could rhyme. Thus critical taste, critical theory, and critical prophecy were unanimous against blank verse as an English measure: for all that it has become the leading medium of English poetry, and a doubter of to-day would be more likely to doubt the permanence of English rhyme than of English blank verse. The 'three unities':As to the famous 'three unities,' not only the principles themselves, but even the refutation of them has now become obsolete. Yet this stickling for the unities has been merely the chief amongst many examples of the proneness the critical mind has exhibited towards limiting literary appreciation and production by single standards of taste. and limitations by still narrower classical standards.The same tone of mind that contended for the classical unities had in an earlier generation contended for the classical languages as the sole vehicle of literary expression, and the modern languages of Europe had to assert their rights by hard fighting. In Latin literature itself a more successful attempt has been made to limit taste by the writers of a single period, the Augustan age, and so construct a list of Latin poets which omits Lucretius. And for a short period of the Renaissance movement the limitation was carried further to a single one of the Augustan writers, and 'Ciceronianism' struggled hard against the freedom of style it chose to nickname 'Apuleianism,' till it fell itself before the laughter of Erasmus. Criticism failing to distinguish the permanent and transitory.It would seem almost to be a radical law of the critical temperament that admiration for the past paralyses faith in the future; while criticism proves totally unable to distinguish between what has been essential in the greatness of its idols and what has been as purely accidental as, to use Scott's illustration, the shape of the drinking-glass is to the flavour of the wine it contains. And if criticism has thus failed in distinguishing what is permanent in past literature, it has proved equally mistaken in what it has assumed to be accidental and transitory. Early commentators on Shakespeare, whatever scruples they may have had upon other points, had no misgivings in condemning the irregularities of his English and correcting his grammar. This was described as obsolete by Dryden half a century after the poet's death; while it is delicious to hear Steevens, in the Advertisement to his edition of 1766, mentioning that 'some have been of opinion that even a particular syntax prevailed in the time of Shakespeare'—a novel suggestion he promptly rejects. If the two could have lived each a century later, Dryden would have found Malone laying down that Shakespeare had been the great purifyer and refiner of our language, and Steevens would have seen Shakespeare's grammar studied with the same minuteness and reduced to the same regular form as the grammar of his commentators and readers; while one of the most distinguished of our modern grammarians, instituting a comparison between Elizabethan and nineteenth century English, fancies the representative of the old-fashioned tongue characterising current speech in the words of Sebastian: