We often hear it asked, Whether Periodical Criticism is, upon the whole, beneficial to the cause of literature? And this question is usually followed up by another, which is thought to settle the first, Whether Shakespeare could have written as he did, had he lived in the present day? We shall not attempt to answer either of these questions: But we will be bold to say, that we have at least one author at present, whose productions spring up free and numberless, in the very hotbed of criticism—a large and living refutation of the chilling and blighting effects of such a neighbourhood. ‘But would not the author of Waverley himself,’ resumes our tritical querist, ‘have written better, if he had not had the fear of the periodical press before his eyes?’ We answer, that he has no fear of the periodical press; and that we do not see how, in any circumstances, he could have written better than he does. ‘But a single exception does not disprove the rule.’ But he is not a single exception. Is there not Lord Byron? Are there not many more?—only that we are too near them to scan the loftiness of their pretensions, or to guess at their unknown duration. Genius carries on an unequal strife with Fame; nor will our bare word (if we durst presume to give it) make the balance even. Time alone can show who are the authors of mortal or immortal mould; and it is the height of wilful impertinence to anticipate its award, and assume, because certain living authors are new, that they never can become old.
Waving, however, any answer to these ingenious questions, we will content ourselves with announcing a truism on the subject, which, like many other truisms, is pregnant with deep thought,—viz. That periodical criticism is favourable—to periodical criticism. It contributes to its own improvement—and its cultivation proves not only that it suits the spirit of the times, but advances it. It certainly never flourished more than at present. It never struck its roots so deep, nor spread its branches so widely and luxuriantly. Is not the proposal of this very question a proof of its progressive refinement? And what, it may be asked, can be desired more than to have the perfection of one thing at any one time? If literature in our day has taken this decided turn into a critical channel, is it not a presumptive proof that it ought to do so? Most things find their own level; and so does the mind of man. If there is a preponderance of criticism at any one period, this can only be because there are subjects, and because it is the time for it. We complain that this is a Critical age; and that no great works of Genius appear, because so much is said and written about them; while we ought to reverse the argument, and say, that it is because so many works of genius have appeared, that they have left us little or nothing to do, but to think and talk about them—that if we did not do that, we should do nothing so good—and if we do this well, we cannot be said to do amiss!
It has been stated as a kind of anomaly in the history of the Fine Arts, that periods of the highest civilization are not usually distinguished by the greatest works of original genius. But, instead of a remote or doubtful deduction, this, if closely examined, will be found a self-evident proposition. Take the case, for example, of ancient Greece. The time of its greatest splendour, was when its first statues, pictures, temples, tragedies, had been produced, when they existed in the utmost profusion, and the taste for them had become habitual and universal. But the time of the greatest Genius was undoubtedly the time that produced them,—which was necessarily antecedent to the other: So that if we were to wait till the era of the most general refinement, for the production of the highest models of excellence, we should never arrive at them at all; since it is these very models themselves, that, by being generally studied, and diffused through social life, give birth to the last degrees of taste and civilization. When the edifice is raised and finished in all its parts, we have nothing to do but to admire it; and invention gives place to judicious applause, or, according to the temper of the observers, to petty cavils. While the niches are empty, every nerve is strained, every faculty is called into play, to supply them with the masterpieces of skill or fancy: when they are full, the mind reposes on what has been done, or amuses itself by comparing one excellence with another. Hence a masculine boldness and creative vigour is the character of one age, a fastidious and effeminate delicacy that of a succeeding one. This seems to be the order of nature: and why should we repine at it? Why insist on combining all sorts of advantages (even the most opposite) forcibly together; or refuse to cultivate those that we possess, because there are others that we think more highly of, but which are placed out of our reach? ‘We are nothing, if not critical.’ Be it so: but then let us be critical, or we shall be nothing.
The demand for works of original genius, the craving after them, the capacity for inventing them, naturally decay, when we have models of almost every species of excellence already produced to our hands. When this is the case, why call out for more? When art is a blank, then we want genius, enthusiasm, and industry to fill it up: when it is teeming with beauty and strength, then we want an eye to gaze at it, hands to point out its striking features, leisure to luxuriate in, and be enamoured of, its divine spirit. When we have Shakespeare, we do not want more Shakespeares: one Milton, one Pope or Dryden, is enough. Have we not plenty of Raphael’s, of Rubens’s, of Rembrandt’s pictures in the world? Terra plena nostri laboris, is almost literally true of them. Who has seen all the fine pictures, or read all the fine poetry, that already exists?—and yet till we have done this, what do we want with more? It is like leaving our own native country unexplored, to travel into foreign lands. Do we not neglect the standard works to hunt after mere novelty? This is not wisdom, but affectation or caprice. Learning becomes, by degrees, an undigested heap, without pleasure or use. We do not see the absolute necessity why another work should be written, or another picture painted, till those that we already have are becoming worm-eaten, or mouldering into decay. We can hardly expect a new harvest till the old crop is off the ground. If we insist on absolute originality in living writers or artists, we should begin by destroying the works of their predecessors. We want another Osmyn to burn and spare not—and then the work of extermination and the work of regeneration would go on kindly together. Are we to learn all that is already known, and, at the same time, to invent more? This would indeed be the ‘large discourse of reason looking before and after.’ Who is there that can boast of having read all the books that have been written, and that are worth reading? Who is there that can read all those with which the modern press teems, and which, did they not daily disappear and turn to dust, the world would not be able to contain them? Are we to blame for despatching the most worthless of these from time to time, or for abridging the process of getting at the marrow of others, and thus leaving the learned at leisure to contemplate the time-hallowed relics, as well as the ephemeral productions, of literature?
To instance in our own language only, is there not many a sterling old author that lies neglected on solitary, unexplored shelves, or tottering bookstalls, unknown to, or passed over by, the idle and the diligent, the republication of which would be the greatest service that could be performed by the modern man of letters? To master the Old English Dramatic Writers, the most esteemed novelists, the good old comedies and periodical works alone, would occupy the leisure of a life devoted to taste and study. If we look at the rise and progress, the maturity and decay, of each of these classes of excellence, we shall find that they were limited in duration, and successive. The deep rich tragic vein of Shakespeare, Webster, Ford, Deckar, Marlow, Beaumont and Fletcher, was discovered and worked out in the time of Elizabeth and the two first Stuarts. All that the heart of man could feel, all that the wit of man could express on the most striking and interesting occasions, had been exhausted by half a dozen great writers, who left little to their successors but pompous turgidity or smooth common-place,—the art of swelling trifles into importance, or taming rough boldness into insipidity. But Comedy rose as Tragedy fell; and, in the age of Charles II. and Queen Anne, Congreve, Wycherley and Vanburgh, were contemporary with Dryden, Lee and Rowe. Otway, it is true, belonged to the same period, a straggler from the veteran corps of tragic writers:—as, in a range of lofty mountains, we generally see one green hill thrown to a distance from the rest, and breaking the abrupt declivity into the level plain. But at each of the periods here spoken of, the Tragic or the Comic Muse was attended by a group of writers such as we can scarcely hope to see again, and such as we have no right to complain of seeing unrivalled, while they are themselves suffered to remain undisturbed in old collections and odd volumes. These probed the follies, as those unveiled the passions, of men: depicted jealousy, rage, ambition, love, madness, affectation, ignorance, conceit, in their most striking forms and picturesque contrasts: took possession of the strongholds, the ‘vantage points of vice or vanity: filled the Stage with the mask of living manners, or ‘the pomp of elder days:’ shook it with laughter, or drowned it with tears—poured out the wine of life, the living spirit of the drama, and left the lees to others. Little could afterwards be made of the subject, except by resorting to inferior branches of it, or to a second-hand imitation. No doubt, nature is exceedingly various; but the capital eminences, the choicest points of view, are limited; and when these have been once seized upon, we must either follow in the steps of others, or turn aside to humbler and less practicable subjects. When the highest places have been occupied, when the happiest strokes have been anticipated, the ambition of the poet flags: without the stimulus of novelty, the rapidity or eagerness of his blows ceases; and as soon as he can avail himself of common-place and conventional artifices, he shrinks from the task of original invention. Or, if he is bent on trying his native strength, and adding to the stock of what has been effected by others, it must be by striking into a new path, and cultivating some neglected plot of ground. So, the Periodical Essayists, Steele and Addison, succeeded to our great Comic Writers, and the Novelists, Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, to these; and each left works superior to any thing of the kind before, and unrivalled in their way by any thing since. Thus genius, like the sun, seems not to rise higher and higher, but from its first dawn to ascend to its meridian, and then decline; and art, like life, may be said to have its stated periods of infancy, manhood, and old age. Alas! the miracles of art stand often like proud monuments in the waste of time. The age of Leo the Tenth is like a rock rising out of the abyss,—with nothing before it, with nothing behind it! As art rose high then, so did it sink low afterwards: and the Vatican overlooks modern Italian art, stagnant, puny, steril, unwholesome, ague-struck, as Rome itself overlooks the marshes of the Campagna. What then? Does not the Vatican remain, the wonder of succeeding ages and surrounding nations? And when it yields (as yield it must) to time’s destructive rage, and its glories crumble into dust, a new Vatican will arise, and other Raphaels and Michael Angelos will breathe the inspiration of genius upon its walls! As fires kindled in the night send their light to a vast distance, so Taste, an emanation from Genius, lingers long after it; and when its mild radiance is extinguished, then comes night and barbarism. Modern art, which took its rise in Italy, was transplanted indeed elsewhere, and flourished in Holland, Spain, and Flanders—it never took root in France, nor has it yet done so in England—but the soil, where it first sprung up, became effete soon after, and has produced scarcely any thing worth naming since.
Not only are literature and art circumscribed by the limits of nature or the mind of man, but each age or nation has a standard of its own, which cannot be trespassed upon with impunity. Tragedy was at its height in France, when it was on the decline with us; but then it was in a totally different style of composition, which could never be successfully naturalized in this country. Popularity can only be insured by the sympathy of the audience with any given mode of representing nature. The English genius excludes sententious and sentimental declamations on the passions; and Shakespeare, were he alive, would be ‘cabin’d, cribbed, confined,’ to say the least, on that very stage where his plays still flourish, by the change of feeling and circumstances. He would not have scope for his fancy: the passion would often seem groundless and overwrought. To produce any thing new and striking at present, it is necessary to shift the scene altogether, to take new subjects, an entire new set of Dramatis Personæ,—to pitch the interest in the Heart of Mid-Lothian, or suspend it in air with the Children of the Mist. We see what Sir Walter Scott has done in this way, by turning up again to the day the rich accumulated mould of ancient manners and wild unexplored scenery of his native land; and we already see what some of his imitators have done. In a word, literature is confined not only within certain natural, but also within local and temporary limits, which necessarily have fewer available topics; and when these are exhausted, it becomes a caput mortuum, a shadow of itself. Nothing is easier, for instance, than to show how, from the alteration of manners, the brilliant dialogue of the older comedy has gradually disappeared from the stage. The style of our common conversation has undergone a total change from the personal and piquant to the critical and didactic; and, instead of aiming at elegant raillery or pointed repartee, the most polished circles now discuss general topics, or analyze abstruse problems. Wit, unless it is exercised on an indiscriminate subject, is considered as an impertinence in civil life: yet we complain that the stage is dull and prosaic.
Farther, the Fine Arts, by their spread, interfere with one another, and hinder the growth of originality. All the greatest things are done by the division of labour—by the intense concentration of a number of minds, each on a single and chosen object. But by the progress of cultivation, different arts and exercises stretch out their arms to impede, not to assist one another. Politics blend with poetry, painting with literature; fashion and elegance must be combined with learning and study: and thus the mind gets a smattering of every thing, and a mastery in none. The mixing of acquirements, like the mixing of liquors, is no doubt a bad thing, and muddles the brain; but in a certain stage of society, it is in some degree unavoidable. Rembrandt lived retired in his cell of gorgeous light and shade. Night and Day waited upon him by turns, or together: his eye gazed on the dazzling gloom, nor did he ask for any other object. He existed wholly in this part of his art, which he has stamped on his canvas with such vast and wondrous power. He was not distracted or diverted from his favourite study by other things, by penning a Sonnet, or reading the Morning’s Paper. Had he lived in our time, or in a state of manners like ours, he would have been a hundred other things, but not Rembrandt—a polite scholar, an imitator probably of the antique, a pleasing versifier, ‘a chemist, statesman, fiddler, and buffoon,’—every thing but what he was, the great master of light and shade! Michael Angelo, again, had diversity of genius enough, and grasped more arts than one with hallowed hands. Yet did he not use to say, that ‘Painting was jealous, and required the whole man to herself?’ How many modern accomplishments would it take to make a Michael Angelo? Yet perhaps the flutter of idle pretensions, the glitter of fashion, the cant of criticism, with the sense of his own deficiencies in frivolous pursuits, might have dismayed the dauntless Youth who, with a blow of his chisel, repaired the Meleager; who afterwards carved the Moses, painted the Prophets and Sybils, reared the dome of St. Peter’s, and fortified his native city against a foreign foe! The little might have turned aside, in his triple career of renown, him whom the great could not intimidate.
One effect of the endowment of Institutions for the Fine Arts is, to make the union of the accidents of fortune and fashion, that is, of the extrinsic and meretricious, indispensable to the artist. He is violently taken out of his own sphere, and thrust into one for which he is qualified neither by nature nor habit. He must be able to make speeches to assembled multitudes, to hold conversation with Princes. He climbs to the highest honours of his profession by arts which have nothing to do with it—by frivolous or servile means. He must have the ear of committees, the countenance of the great. He takes precedence as a matter of etiquette or costume. He rises, as he would at college or at court. The chair of a Royal Academy for the Fine Arts must be filled by a gentleman and scholar. So Sir Thomas Lawrence (absit invidia) is chosen President, not more because he is the best portrait-painter in existence, than because he is one of the finest gentlemen of the day. This is confounding the essential differences of things, and weakening the solid superstructure of art at its foundations.—A scholar was formerly another name for a sloven, an artist was known only by his works. Now, a professional man, who should come into the world, relying on his genius or learning for his success, without other advantages, would be looked upon as a pedant, a barbarian, or a poor creature. ‘Though he should have all knowledge, and could speak with the tongues of angels, yet, without affectation, he would be nothing.’ He who is not acquainted with the topic, who is not fashioned in the mode of the day, is no better than a brute. We will not have the arts and sciences ‘relegated to obscure cloisters and villages: no, we will have them to lift up their sparkling front in courts and palaces,’—in drawing-rooms and booksellers’ shops. ‘The toe of the scholar must tread so close on the heel of the courtier, that it galls his kibe.’
This is also a consequence of the approximation and amalgamation of different ranks and pretensions from the more general diffusion of knowledge. Each takes something of the colour, or borrows some of the advantages, of its neighbour. A reflected light is thrown on all parts of society. The polite affect literature: the literary affect to be polite. Such a state of things, no doubt, produces a great deal of mock-patronage and mock-gentility. What then? It cannot be prevented: and is it not better to make the most of this florid and composite style of manners, than to proscribe and stigmatize it altogether, or insist on going back to the simple Doric or pure Gothic—to barbaric wealth or cynical knowledge? ‘Take the good the Gods provide ye’—is our motto, and our advice. The impulse that sways the human mind cannot be created by a fiat of captious discontent: it floats on the tide of mighty Circumstance. By resisting this natural bias, and peevishly struggling against the stream, we shall only lose the favourable opportunities we possess, both for enjoyment and for use. It is not sufficient to say, ‘Let there be Shakespeares, and there were Shakespeares:’—but we have writers in great numbers, respectable in their way, and suited to the mediocrity of the age we live in: And, by cultivating sound principles of taste and criticism, we can still point out the beauties of the old authors, and improve the style of the new. There is a change in the world, and we must conform to it. Instead of striving to revive the spirit of old English literature, which is impossible, unless we could restore the same state of things, and push the world back two centuries in its course, let us add the last polish and fine finish to the modern Belles-Lettres. Instead of imitating the poets or prose writers of the age of Elizabeth, let us admire them at a distance. Let us remember, that there is a great gulf between them and us—the gulf of ever-rolling years. Let them be something sacred, and venerable to the imagination: But let us be contented to serve as priests at the shrine of ancient genius, and not attempt to mount the pedestal ourselves, or disturb the sanctuary with our unwarranted pretensions.
This is the course dictated no less by modesty than wisdom. Half the cant of criticism (on the other side of the question) is envy of the moderns, rather than admiration of the ancients. It is not that we really wish our contemporaries to rival their predecessors in grandeur, in force and depth; but that we wish them to fall short of themselves in elegance, in taste, in ingenuity, and facility. The exclusive outcry in favour of ancient models, is a diversion to the exercise of modern talents, and a misdirection to the age. If we cannot produce the great and lasting works of former times, we may at least improve our knowledge of the principles on which they were raised, and of the distinguishing characteristics of each. If we have nothing to show equal to some of these, let us make it up (to the best of our power) by a taste susceptible of the beauties of all. If we do not succeed in solid folio, let us excel in light duodecimo. If we are superficial, let us be brilliant. If we cannot be profound, let us at least be popular.