English literary criticism Part 3

Even Richardson--no less revolutionary, though in a different way, than Fielding--was only saved so as by fire; by the undying hatred which he shared with Johnson for his terrible rival. It was rather as moralist than as artist, rather for "the sentiment" than for the tragic force of his work, that Richardson seems to have won his way to Johnson's heart. [Footnote: See the pa.s.sage referred to in the preceding note.]

Is not the evidence conclusive? Is it a harsh judgment to say that no critic so narrow, so mechanical, so hostile to originality as Johnson has ever achieved the dictatorship of English letters?

The supremacy of Johnson would have been impossible, had not the way been smoothed for it by a long succession of critics like-minded with himself. Such a succession may be traced from Swift to Addison, from Addison to Pope, and--with marked reservations--from Pope to Goldsmith.

It would be unjust to charge all, or indeed any, of these with the narrowness of view betrayed in Johnson's verdicts on individual writers.

To arrive at this perfection of sourness was a work of time; and the nature of Addison and Goldsmith at least was too genial to allow of any approach to it. But, with all their difference of temperament, the method of the earlier critics is hardly to be distinguished from that of Johnson. There is the same orderliness of treatment--first the fable, then the characters, lastly the sentiment and the diction; the same persistency in applying general rules to a matter which, above all others, is a law to itself; the same invincible faith in "the indispensable laws of Aristotelian criticism". It is this that, in spite of its readiness to admire, makes Addison's criticism of _Paradise Lost_ so dreary a study; and this that, in an evil hour, prompted Goldsmith to treat the soliloquy of Hamlet as though it were a schoolboy's exercise in rhetoric and logic. [Footnote: Goldsmith, Essay xvi. The next essay contains a like attack on Mercutio's description of Queen Mab.]

And yet it is with Goldsmith that we come to the first dawn of better things. The carping strain and the stiffness of method, that we cannot overlook in him, were the note of his generation. The openness to new ideas, the sense of nature, the fruitful use of the historical method, are entirely his own. There had been nothing like them in our literature since Dryden. In criticism, as in creative work, Goldsmith marks the transition from the old order to the new.

Perhaps the clearest indication of this is to be found in his constant appeal to nature. In itself, as we have seen, this may mean much or little. "Nature" is a vague word; it was the battle-cry of Wordsworth, but it was also the battle-cry of Boileau. And, at first sight, it might seem to be used by Goldsmith in the narrower rather than in the wider sense. "It is the business of art", he writes, "to imitate nature, but not with a servile pencil; and to choose those att.i.tudes and dispositions only which are beautiful and engaging." [Footnote: Goldsmith, Essay xiii.] But a glance at the context will show that what Goldsmith had in mind was not "nature to advantage dressed", not nature with any adornments added by man; but nature stripped of all that to man has degrading a.s.sociations; nature, to adopt the words used by Wordsworth on a kindred subject, "purified from all lasting or rational causes of dislike or disgust". It may well be that Goldsmith gave undue weight to this reservation. It may well be that he did not throw himself on nature with the unwavering constancy of Wordsworth.

But, none the less, we have here--and we have it worked out in detail [Footnote: As to oratory, poetry, the drama, and acting, Ib., Essays iv., xii., xiii.; _The Bee_, no. ii.]--the germ of the principle which, in bolder hands, gave England the Lyrical Ballads and the Essays of Lamb.

In an essay not commonly reprinted, Goldsmith, laying his finger on the one weak spot in the genius of Gray, gives the poet the memorable advice--to "study the people". And throughout his own critical work, as in his novel, his comedies, and his poems, there is an abiding sense that, without this, there is no salvation for poetry. That in itself is enough to fix an impa.s.sable barrier between Goldsmith and the official criticism of his day.

The other main service rendered by Goldsmith was his return to the historical method. It is true that his knowledge is no more at first hand, and is set out with still less system than that of Dryden a century before. But it is also true that he has a far keener sense of the strength which art may draw from history than his great forerunner.

Dryden confines himself to the history of certain forms of art; Goldsmith includes the history of nations also in his view. With Dryden the past is little more than an antiquarian study; with Goldsmith it is a living fountain of inspiration for the present. The art of the past--the poetry, say, of Teutonic or Celtic antiquity--is to him an undying record of the days when man still walked hand in hand with nature. The history of the past is at once a storehouse of stirring themes ready to the hand of the artist, and the surest safeguard against both flatness and exaggeration in his work. [Footnote: See Essays xiii., xiv., xx.; _Present State of Polite Learning_, in particular, chap. xi.] It offers, moreover, the truest schooling of the heart, and insensibly "enlists the pa.s.sions on the side of humanity". "Poetry", Byron said, "is the feeling of a former world, and future"; [Footnote: Moore's _Life_, p. 483] and to the first half of the statement Goldsmith would have heartily subscribed. For the historical method in his hands is but another aspect of the counsel he gave to Gray: "Study the people". It is an antic.i.p.ation--vague, no doubt, but still unmistakable--of the spirit which, both in France and England, gave birth to the romantic movement a generation or two later.

That zeal for the literature of the past was in the air when Goldsmith wrote is proved by works so different as those of Gray and Percy, of Chatterton and MacPherson, of Mallet and Warton. [Footnote: Percy's Reliques were published in 1765; Chatterton's _Rowley Poems_ written in 1769; MacPherson's _Ossian_ (first instalment) in 1760; Mallet's _Northern Antiquities_ in 1755; and Warton's _History of English Poetry_--a book to the learning and importance of which scant justice has been done--from 1772 to 1778. To these should be added a work, whose fine scholarship and profound learning is now universally admitted, Tyrwhitt's _Chaucer_ (1775-78). It will be noticed that all these works fall within the s.p.a.ce of twenty years, 1755-1775] But it may be doubted whether any one of them, Gray excepted, saw the true bearing of the movement more clearly than Goldsmith, or did more to open fresh springs of thought and beauty for the poetry of the next age, if not of his own. It would be unpardonable to turn from the writers of the eighteenth century with no notice of a book which, seldom now read, is nevertheless perhaps the most solid piece of work that modern Europe had as yet to show in any branch of literary criticism. This is Burke's treatise _On the Sublime and the Beautiful_.

Few will now be prepared to accept the material basis which Burke finds for the ideas of the imagination. [Footnote: Burke traces our ideas of the sublime to the sense of physical pain; our ideas of the beautiful to that of physical pleasure; identifying the former with a contraction or tension, and the latter with a relaxation of the muscles. Against this theory two main objections may be urged: (1) As, on Burke's own showing, the objects of the imagination, at least as far as poetry is concerned, are, and must be, presented first to the _mind_, it is (in the strictest sense of the term) preposterous to attribute their power over us to a purely muscular operation (2) The argument, taken by itself, is barely relevant to the matter in hand. Even where a physical basis can be proved--as it can in the case of music, painting, and sculpture (and of poetry, so far as rhythm and harmony are an essential element of it) it is extravagant to maintain that the physiologist or the "psycho physicist" can explain the whole, or even the greater part, of what has to be explained Beyond the fraction of information that purely physical facts can give us, a vast field must be left to intellectual and imaginative a.s.sociation. And that is the province not of physiology but of psychology, and of what the Germans call _Aesthetik_ This province, however, is but seldom entered by Burke.

What, then, was it that drove Burke to a position so markedly at variance with the idealism of his later years? In all probability it was his rooted suspicion of reasoning as a deliberate and conscious process. Other writers of the century--Addison, for instance--had spoken as if men reasoned from certain abstract ideas (proportion, fitness, and the like) to individual instances of beauty, deciding a thing to have beauty or no, according as it squared or failed to square with the general notion This, as Burke points out, is more than questionable in itself, and it was certain to affront a man who, even thus early, had shown an almost morbid hatred of abstractions. In his later years, as is well known, he sought refuge from them in instinct, in "prejudice", in the unconscious working of the "permanent reason of man". In earlier days--he was still well under thirty--he found escape by the grosser aid of a materialist explanation (Burke's treatise was published in 1756 The _Laoc.o.o.n_ of Lessing, a work which may be compared with that of Burke and which was very probably suggested by it, appeared in 1766.)] But none can deny the skill with which he works out his theory, nor the easy mastery with which each part is fitted into its place. The speculative power of the book and the light it throws on the deeper springs of the imagination are alike memorable.

The first is not unworthy of the _Reflections_ or the _Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs_; the second shows that fruitful study of the Bible and the poets, English and cla.s.sical, to which his later writings and speeches bear witness on every page.

If the originality and depth of Burke's treatise is to be justly measured, it should be set side by side with those papers of Addison which Akenside expanded in his dismal _Pleasures of the Imagination_.

The performance of Addison, grateful though one must be to him for attempting it, is thin and lifeless. That of Burke is ma.s.sive and full of suggestion. At every turn it betrays the hand of the craftsman who works with his eye upon his tools. The speculative side of criticism has never been a popular study with Englishmen, and it is no accident that one of the few attempts to deal seriously with it should have been made at the only time when philosophy was a living power among us, and when the desire to get behind the outward shows of things was keener than it has ever been before or since. But for Burke's treatise, a wide gap would have been left both in the philosophy and the criticism of the eighteenth century; and it is to be wished that later times had done more to work the vein which he so skilfully explored. As it is, the writers both of France and Germany--above all, Hegel in his _Aesthetik_--have laboured with incomparably more effect than his own countrymen, Mr. Ruskin excepted, upon the foundations that he laid.

IV. Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_ was the last word of the school which the Restoration had enthroned; the final verdict of the supreme court which gave the law to English letters from the accession of Anne to the French Revolution. Save in the splenetic outbursts of Byron--and they are not to be taken too seriously--the indispensable laws of Aristotelian criticism fell silent at Johnson's death. A time of anarchy followed; anarchy _plus_ the policeman's truncheon of the _Edinburgh_ and the _Quarterly_. [Footnote: The first number of the _Edinburgh_ appeared in 1802; the _Quarterly_ was started in a counterblast in 1809.]

The ill-fame of these Reviews, as they were in their pride of youth, is now so great that doubts may sometimes suggest themselves whether it can possibly be deserved. No one who feels such doubts can do better than turn to the earlier numbers; he will be forced to the conclusion that, whatever their services as the journeymen of letters and of party politics, few critics could have been so incompetent to judge of genius as the men who enlisted under the standard of Jeffrey or of Gifford.

There is not, doubtless, in either Review the same iron wall of reasoned prejudice that has been noted in Johnson, but there is a plentiful lack of the clear vision and the openness to new impressions which are the first necessity of the critic. What Carlyle says of Jeffrey and the _Edinburgh_ may be taken as the substantial truth also about Gifford and the _Quarterly_, and it is the most pregnant judgment that has yet been pa.s.sed upon them.

"Jeffrey may be said to have begun the rash, reckless style of criticising everything in heaven and earth by appeal to Moliere's maid: 'Do _you_ like it?' '_Don't_ you like it?' a style which, in hands more and more inferior to that sound-hearted old lady and him, has since grown gradually to such immeasurable length among us; and he himself is one of the first that suffers by it. If praise and blame are to be perfected, not in the mouth of Moliere's maid only but in that of mischievous, precocious babes and sucklings, you will arrive at singular judgments by degrees." [Footnote: Carlyle, _Reminiscences_ n 63, 64 ]

Carlyle has much here to say of Jeffrey's "recklessness", his defiance of all rules, his appeal to the chance taste of the man in the crowd.

He has much also to say of his acuteness, and the unrivalled authority of his decrees. [Footnote: "Jeffrey was by no means the supreme in criticism or in anything else, but it is certain there has no critic appeared among us since who was worth naming beside him and his influence for good and for evil in literature and otherwise has been very great. Nothing in my time has so forwarded all this--the 'gradual uprise and rule in all things of roaring, million headed &c Demos'-- "as Jeffrey and his once famous _Edinburgh Review_'--Ib ] But he is discreetly silent on their severity and short-sightedness. [Footnote: "You know", Byron wrote in 1808 "the system of the Edinburgh gentlemen is universal attack. They praise none, and neither the public nor the author expects praise from them."--Moore's _Life_, p 67.]

Yet this is the unpardonable sin of both Reviews: that mediocrity was applauded, but that, whenever a man of genius came before them, the chances were ten to one that he would be held up to ridicule and contempt. The very first number of the _Edinburgh_ lays this down as an article of faith. Taking post on the recent appearance of _Thalaba_, the reviewer opens fire by a laboured parallel between poetry and religion. [Footnote: _Edinburgh Review_, No. 1, pp 63, &c ] With an alteration of names it might have been written by a member of the English Church Union, or of the Holy Inquisition.

"The standards of poetry have been fixed long ago by certain inspired writers, whose authority it is no longer lawful to call in question.

Many profess to be entirely devoted to poetry, who have no _good works_ to produce in support of their pretensions. The Catholic poetical Church too . . . has given birth to an infinite variety of heresies and errors, the followers of which have hated and persecuted each other as heartily as other bigots."

Then, turning to business, the writer proceeds to apply his creed to Southey and all his works, not forgetting the works also of his friends.

"The author belongs to a sect of poets that has established itself in this country within these ten or twelve years"--it would be hard to say for whose benefit in particular this date was taken--"and is looked upon as one of its chief champions and apostles". "The doctrines of this sect"--the Reviewer continues, with an eye upon the Alien Act--"are of German origin, or borrowed from the great apostle of Geneva".

Rousseau is then "named" for expulsion, together with a miscellaneous selection of his following: Schiller and Kotzebue (the next number includes Kant under the anathema), Quarles and Donne, Ambrose Phillips and Cowper--perhaps the most motley crew that was ever brought together for excommunication. It is not, however, till the end of the essay that the true root of bitterness between the critic and his victims is suffered fully to appear. "A splenetic and idle discontent with the existing inst.i.tutions of society seems to be at the bottom of all their serious and peculiar sentiments." In other words, the _Edinburgh_ takes up the work of the _Anti-Jacobin_; with no very good grace Jeffrey affects to sit in the seat of Canning and of Frere.

So much for the "principles" of the new venture; principles, it will be seen, which appear to rest rather upon a hatred of innovation in general than upon any reasoned code, such as that of Johnson or the "Aristotelian laws", in particular. On that point, it must be clearly realized, Carlyle was in the right. It is that which marks the essential difference of the Reviewers--we can hardly say their advance--as against Johnson.

We may now turn to watch the Reviewers, knife in hand, at the dissecting-table. For the twenty-five years that followed the foundation of the _Edinburgh_, England was more full of literary genius than it had been at any time since the age of Elizabeth. And it is not too much to say that during that period there was not one of the men, now accepted as among the chief glories of English literature, who did not fall under the lash of one, or both, of the Reviews. The leading cases will suffice.

And first, the famous attack--not altogether undeserved, it must be allowed--of the _Edinburgh_ upon Byron. "The poetry of this young lord belongs to the cla.s.s which neither G.o.ds nor men are said to permit", and so on for two or three pages of rather vulgar and heartless merriment at the young lord's expense. [Footnote: _Edinburgh Review_, xi. 285. It is uncommonly hard to find any trace of poetic power, even of the imitative kind, in the _Hours of Idleness_. It is significant that the best pieces are those in the heroic couplet; an indication--to be confirmed by _English Bards_--of Byron's leaning towards the past.]

The answer to the sneer, as all the world knows, was _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_. The author of the article had reason to be proud of his feat. Never before did pertness succeed in striking such unexpected fire from genius. And it is only fair to say that the Review took its beating like a gentleman. A few years later, and the _Edinburgh_ was among the warmest champions of the "English Bard".

[Footnote: See the article on _The Corsair_ and _Bride of Abydos_, Ib.

xxiii. 198. After speaking of the "beauty of his diction and versification, and the splendour of his description", the reviewer continues: "But it is to his pictures of the stronger pa.s.sions that he is indebted for the fulness of his fame. He has delineated with unequalled force and fidelity the workings of those deep and powerful emotions.... We would humbly suggest to him to do away with the reproach of the age by producing a tragic drama of the old English school of poetry and pathos." The _amende honorable_ with a vengeance. The review of _The Giaour_, Byron thought, was "so very mild and sentimental that it must be written by Jeffrey in _love_".--Moore's _Life_, p. 191.]

It was reserved for Southey, a pillar of the _Quarterly_, to rank him as the "Goliath" of the "Satanic school".

Let us now turn to the _Quarterly_ upon Keats. _Endymion_, in spite of the n.o.ble self-criticism of its preface, is denounced as "c.o.c.kney poetry" [Footnote: The phrase was also employed by _Blackwood_, vol.

iii. 519-524.]--a stupid and pointless vulgarism--and is branded as clothing "the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language".

The author is dismissed with the following amenities: "Being bitten by Leigh Hunt's insane criticism, he more than rivals the insanity of his poetry"; and we are half-surprised not to find him told, as he was by _Blackwood_, to "go back to the shop, Mr. John; back to the plasters, pills, and ointment-boxes". [Footnote: _Quarterly Review_, xix. 204.

See _Blackwood_, vol. iii. 524; where the Reviewer sneers at "the calm, settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy of _Endymion_".]

With this insolence it is satisfactory to contrast the verdict of the _Edinburgh_: "We have been exceedingly struck with the genius these poems--_Endymion_, _Lamia_, _Isabella_, _The Eve of St. Agnes_, &c.--display, and the spirit of poetry which breathes through all their extravagance. . . . They are at least as full of genius as absurdity."

Of _Hyperion_ the Reviewer says: "An original character and distinct individuality is bestowed upon the poet's mythological persons. . . .

We cannot advise its completion. For, though there are pa.s.sages of some force and grandeur, it is sufficiently obvious that the subject is too far removed from all the sources of human interest to be successfully treated by any modern author". [Footnote: Edinburgh Review, x.x.xiv. 203.] A blundering criticism, which, however, may be pardoned in virtue of the discernment, not to say the generosity, of the foregoing estimate.

It would have been well had the _Edinburgh_ always written in this vein. But Wordsworth was a sure stumbling-block to the sagacity of his critics, and he certainly never failed to call forth the insolence and flippancy of Jeffrey. Two articles upon him remain as monuments to the incompetence of the _Edinburgh_; the first prompted by the Poems of 1807, the second by the _Excursion_.

The former p.r.o.nounces sentence roundly at the very start: "Mr.

Wordsworth's diction has nowhere any pretence to elegance or dignity, and he has scarcely ever condescended to give the grace of correctness or dignity to his versification". From this sweeping condemnation four poems--_Brougham Castle_, and the sonnets on Venice, Milton, and Bonaparte--are generously excepted. But, as though astonished at his own moderation, the reviewer quickly proceeds to deal slaughter among the rest. Of the closing lines of _Resolution and Independence_ he writes: "We defy Mr. Wordsworth's bitterest enemy to produce anything at all parallel to this from any collection of English poetry, or even from the specimens of his friend, Mr. Southey". Of the stanzas to the sons of Burns, "never was anything more miserable". _Alice Fell_ is "trash"; _Yarrow Unvisited_, "tedious and affected". The lines from the _Ode to Duty_.

"Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong,"

are "utterly without meaning". The poem on the _Cuckoo_ is "absurd".

The _Ode on Immortality_ is "the most illegible and unintelligible part of the whole publication". "We venture to hope that there is now an end of this folly." [Footnote: _Edinburgh Review_, xi. 217, &c.]

But the hope is doomed to disappointment. The publication of the _Excursion_ a few years later finds the reviewer still equal to his task. "This will never do", he begins in a fury; "the case of Mr.

Wordsworth is now manifestly hopeless. We give him up as altogether incurable and beyond the power of criticism." The story of Margaret, indeed, though "it abounds, of course, with mawkish sentiment and details of preposterous minuteness, has considerable pathos". But the other pa.s.sage which one would have thought must have gone home to every heart--that which describes the communing of the wanderer with nature [Footnote: _Excursion_, book i.]--is singled out for ridicule; while the whole poem is judged to display "a puerile ambition of singularity, grafted on an unlucky predilection for truisms". [Footnote: _Edinburgh Review_, xxiv. I, &c. It is but just to add that in the remainder of the essay the Reviewer takes back--so far as such things can ever be taken back--a considerable part of his abuse.]

It would be idle to maintain that in some of these slashing verdicts-- criticisms they cannot be called--the reviewer does not fairly hit the mark. But these are chance strokes; and they are dealt, as the whole attack is conceived, in the worst style of the professional swash- buckler. Yet, low as is the deep they sound, a lower deep is opened by the _Quarterly_ in its article on Sh.e.l.ley; an article which bears unmistakable marks of having been written under the inspiration, if not by the hand, of Southey.

It is impossible to know anything about Southey without feeling that, both in character and in intellect, he had many of the qualities that go to make an enlightened critic. But his fine nature was warped by a strain of bigotry; and he had what, even in a man who otherwise gave conclusive proof of sincerity and whole-heartedness, must be set down as a strong touch of the Pharisee. After every allowance has been made, no feeling other than indignation is possible at the tone which he thought fit to adopt towards Sh.e.l.ley.

He opens the a.s.sault, and it is well that he does so, by an acknowledgment that the versification of the _Revolt of Islam_, the _corpus delicti_ at that moment under the scalpel, is "smooth and harmonious", and that the poem is "not without beautiful pa.s.sages, free from errors of taste". But the "voice of warning", as he himself would too generously have called it, is not long in making itself heard. "Mr. Sh.e.l.ley, with perfect deliberation and the steadiest perseverance, perverts all the gifts of his nature, and does all the injury, both public and private, which his faculties enable him to perpetrate. . . .He draws largely on the rich stores of another mountain poet, to whose religious mind it must be matter of perpetual sorrow to see the philosophy, which comes pure and holy from his pen, degraded and perverted by this miserable crew of atheists and pantheists."

So far, perhaps, the writer may claim not to have outstepped the traditional limits of theological hatred. For what follows there is not even that poor excuse. "If we might withdraw the veil of his private life and tell what we now know about him, it would be indeed a disgusting picture that we should exhibit, but it would be an unanswerable comment on our text. . .Mr. Sh.e.l.ley is too young, too ignorant, too inexperienced, and too vicious to undertake the task of reforming any world but the little world within his own breast."

[Footnote: Quarterly Review, xxi. 460, &c.] For the credit of both Reviews it must be said that it would be difficult to find another instance of so foul a blow as this: [Footnote: Except in the infamous insinuations, also a crime of the _Quarterly_,]

Non ragioniam di _lui_, ma guarda e pa.s.sa.

[Footnote: against the character of Currer Bell. See also the scurrilous attack on the character of Leigh Hunt in _Blackwood_, vol III 453]

Apart from their truculence, the early numbers of the _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly_ are memorable for two reasons in the history of English literature. They mark the downfall of the absolute standard a.s.sumed by Johnson and others to hold good in criticism. And they led the way, slowly indeed but surely, to the formation of a general interest in literature, which, sooner or later, could not but be fatal to their own haphazard dogmatism. By their very nature they were an appeal to the people; and, like other appeals of the kind, they ended in a revolution.

Of the men who fixed the lines on which this revolution was to run, four stand out taller from the shoulders upwards than their fellows.

These are Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and Carlyle. The critical work of all four belongs to the first thirty years or so of the present century; [Footnote: Some of the dates are as follows Lamb's _Specimens of English Dramatic Poets_ was published in 1808, his _Essays of Elia_ began to appear in the _London Magazine_, 1820, Coleridge's first Course of Lectures (on English poets) was delivered in 1808, his second Course, in 1811-12, his _Biographia Literana_ in 1817 Hazlitt's _Characters of Shakespeare's Plays_ was published in 1817, his _Lectures on the English Poets_ in 1818, and on _The English Comic Writers_ in 1819 Carlyle's Essays began to appear (in the _Edinburgh_ and other Reviews) in 1827, that on Diderot--the last notable essay of a literary cast--in 1833 Hazlitt died in 1830, Coleridge and Lamb in 1834 By that time Carlyle had turned to history and kindred subjects] and of the four it is probable that Carlyle, by nature certainly the least critical, had the greatest influence in changing the current of critical ideas.

s.p.a.ce forbids any attempt to treat their work in detail. All that can be done is to indicate what were the shortcomings of English criticism as it came into their hands, and how far and in what manner they modified its methods and its aims.

Till the beginning of the present century, criticism in England had remained a very simple thing. When judgment had once been pa.s.sed, for good or evil, on an individual work or an individual writer, the critic was apt to suppose that nothing further could reasonably be expected of him. The comparative method, foreshadowed but only foreshadowed by Dryden, had not been carried perceptibly further by Dryden's successors.

The historical method was still more clearly in its infancy. The connection between the two, the unity of purpose which alone gives significance to either, was hardly as yet suspected.