CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY AND RETROSPECTIVE.

SCOPE OF THE VOLUME—THE TERM MODERN—THE ORIGINS—NEED OF CAUTION HERE— CASE OF BUTLER ON RYMER, DENHAM—AND BENLOWES—OF ADDISON AND OTHERS— OF LA BRUYÈRE AND “TOUT EST DIT”—OF FÉNELON AND GRAVINA—OF DRYDEN AND FONTENELLE—THE MORE EXCELLENT WAY.

[Sidenote: _Scope of the volume._]

The present volume takes the work of no more than one century, the nineteenth, as a whole; but, according to our plan, casts back to the eighteenth, and even earlier, in order to deal with those dissidents or pioneers who then laid the foundation of the chief critical performances of the nineteenth itself.

[Sidenote: _The term Modern._]

For this work—foundation and superstructure—there is no more convenient and suitable appellation than “Modern,” used neither in the complimentary and rather question-begging sense which has recently been attached to it,[2] nor in the more slighting one of Shakespeare, but with a merely accurate and chronological connotation. Some would call this criticism “Romantic”; but that term, in addition to a certain vagueness, has the drawbacks both of question-begging and of provocation. There is no other that has the slightest claim to enter into competition, though we may have in passing to refer to such pretenders as “Æsthetic,” “Dogmatic,” “Scientific,” and what not.

The term “Modern” has, moreover,—so long as it is dissociated from any such futile belittling of “Ancient” as was implied in its use during the Quarrel,—the great advantage of keeping a secondary, but very convenient and in no way objectionable, opposition to “Ancient” itself. We have seen that, with much intelligent and judicious, there was more unintelligent and corrupt, following of the ancients during the period which we surveyed in the last volume: and that there was a still more dangerous and hurtful tendency to disfranchise modern literature as an equal source with ancient for the discovery of critical truths. Now, if there is a point wholly to be counted for righteousness, to at least the better part of the criticism which has prevailed for the last hundred years, and was a militant force for at least fifty years earlier, it is this taking into consideration of “Modern” literature, not to the exclusion of “Ancient,” but on even terms with it. It is no doubt much easier to say _nullo discrimine habebo_[3] than to carry it out, especially as a man grows older. But it is the cardinal principle of “Modern” criticism that the most modern of works is to be judged, not by adjustment to anything else, but on its own merits—that the critic must always behave as if the book he takes from its wrapper might be a new _Hamlet_ or a new _Waverley_,—or something as good as either, but more absolutely novel in kind than even _Waverley_,—however shrewdly he may suspect that it is very unlikely to be any such thing.

[Sidenote: _The origins._]

The actual investigation of the last volume brought us down to (and in La Harpe’s case a little beyond) the close of the eighteenth century itself, and showed us the final stages of the Neo-Classic dynasty, which still, in all European countries except Germany, reigned, and even appeared to govern; but which, not merely in Germany but to some extent also in England, was on the point of having the sceptre wrenched out of its hands. We had traced this critical system from its construction or reconstruction by the Italians of the sixteenth century onwards; we saw its merits and its defects. And we saw likewise that, in the usual general, gradual, incalculable way, opposition to it, conscious or unconscious, began to grow up at different times and in different places. This opposition was a plant of early but slow and fitful growth in England, rather later but more vigorous and rapid in Germany; while in the Southern countries it hardly grew at all, and in France was cruelly attacked and kept down, if not exactly extirpated, by the weeding-hook of authority.

[Sidenote: _Need of caution here._]

But it does not follow that we can put the finger on this and that person as having “begun” the new movement. Such an opinion is always tempting to not too judicious inquirers, and there has been no lack of books on _Le Romantisme des Classiques_ and the like. The fact, of course, simply is that everything human exists essentially or potentially in the men of every time; and that you may not only find books in the running brooks but (what appears at first more contradictory) dry stones in them: while, on the other hand, founts of water habitually gush from the midst of the driest rock. Indagation of the kind is always treacherous, and has to be conducted with a great deal of circumspection.

[Sidenote: _Case of Butler on Rymer, Denham,_]

It would be difficult to find an author who illustrates this danger and treachery better than Butler, whom some may have been surprised not to find in the last volume. The author of _Hudibras_ was born not long after Milton, and nearly twenty years before Dryden, who outlived him by the same space. His great poem did not give much room for critical utterances in literature; but the _Genuine Remains_[4] are full of it in separate places, both verse and prose. Take these singly, and you may make Butler out to be, not merely a critic, but half a dozen critics. In perhaps the best known of his minor pieces, the _Repartees between Cat and Puss_, he satirises “Heroic” Plays, and is therefore clearly for “the last age,” as also in the savage and admirable “On Critics who Judge Modern Plays precisely by the Rules of the Ancients,” which has been reasonably, or certainly, thought to be directed against Rymer’s blasphemy of Beaumont and Fletcher, published two years before Butler’s death. The satirist’s references and illustrations (as in that to “the laws of good King Howel’s days”) are sometimes too Caroline to be quotable; but the force and sweep of his protest is simply glorious. The _Panegyric on Sir John Denham_ is chiefly personal; but if Butler had been convinced that _Cooper’s Hill_ was the _ne plus ultra_ of English poetry he could hardly have written it: and though the main victim of “To a Bad Poet” has not been identified,[5] the lines—

“For so the rhyme be at the verse’s end, No matter whither all the rest does tend”—

could scarcely have been written except against the new poetry. The “Pindaric Ode on Modern Critics” is chiefly directed against the general critical vice of snarling, and the passages on critics and poets in the _Miscellaneous Thoughts_ follow suit. But if we had only the verse _Remains_ we should be to some extent justified in taking Butler, if not for a precursor of the new Romanticism, at any rate for a rather strenuous defender of the old.

[Sidenote: _and Benlowes._]

But turn to the _Characters_. Most of these that deal with literature are in the general vein which the average seventeenth-century character-writer took from Theophrastus, though few put so much salt of personal wit into this as Butler. In “A Small Poet” the earlier pages might be aimed at almost anybody from Dryden himself (whom Butler, it is said, did not love) down to Flecknoe. But there is only one name mentioned in the piece; and that name, which is made the object of a furious and direct attack, lightened by some of the brightest flashes of Butler’s audacious and acrid humour, is the name of Edward Benlowes.[6] Now, that Benlowes is a person _taillable et corvéable à merci et à miséricorde_ by any critical oppressor, nobody who has read him can deny. He is as extravagant as Crashaw without so much poetry, and as Cleveland without so much cleverness. But he is a poet, and a “metaphysical” poet (as Butler was himself in another way), and an example, though a rather awful example, of that “poetic fury” which makes Elizabethan poetry. Yet Butler is more savage with him than with Denham.

The fact is that Butler’s criticism is merely the occasional determination of a man of active genius and satiric temper to matters literary. Absurdities strike him from whatever school they come; and he lashes them unmercifully whensoever and whencesoever they present themselves. But he has no general creed: he speaks merely to his brief as public prosecutor of the ridiculous, and also as a staunch John Bull. If he had been writing at the time when his _Remains_ were first actually published, it is exceedingly probable that he would have “horsed” Gray as pitilessly as he horses Benlowes; if he had been writing sixty years later still, that he would have been as “savage and Tartarly” to Keats and Shelley, or seventy years later, to Tennyson, as the _Quarterly_ itself. This is not criticism: and we must look later and more carefully before we discern any real revolution in literary taste.

[Sidenote: _Of Addison and others._]

It is even very unsafe to attempt to discover much definite and intentional precursorship in Addison, who was born sixty years after Butler. There is no need to repeat what has been said of what seems to me misconception as to his use of the word Imagination: nor is this the point which is principally aimed at here. But the more we examine Addison’s critical utterances, whether we agree with Hurd or not that they are “shallow,” we shall, I think, be forced to conclude that any depth they may have has nothing to do with Romanticism. Addison likes Milton, no doubt, because he is a sensible man and a good critic, as a general reason. But when we come to investigate special ones we shall find that he likes him rather because he himself is a Whig, a pupil of Dryden, and a religious man—nay, perhaps even because he really does think that Milton carries out the classical idea of Epic—than because of Milton’s mystery, his “romantic vague,” his splendour of diction and verse and imagery. So, too, the admiration of _Chevy Chase_ is partly a whim or a joke, partly determined by the fact that at that time the Whigs were the “Jingoes,” and that _Chevy Chase_ is very pugnacious and very patriotic. Nowhere, from the articles on True and False Wit to the Imagination papers, do we find any real sense of unrest or dissatisfaction with the accepted theory of poetry. There is actually more in Prior, with all his profanation of the _Nut-browne Maid_ and his distortions of the Spenserian stanza.

[Sidenote: _Of La Bruyère and_ “Tout est dit.”]

So if we look backward a little, and a little southward, we shall, despite the praise which we were able to accord to some critical dicta of La Bruyère, find very little reason to regard that admirable master of Addison himself as a “Romantic before Romanticism.” He is a sensible man with a fairly catholic taste: but that is all. Nay, his principle of _Tout est dit_, though not quite irresistibly in practice, almost certainly leads to the conclusion that the oldest writers are likely to be the best, and to the habit of extending to new writers, or to the mass of precedent writing, a rather lukewarm welcome and a distinctly prejudiced criticism. In a certain sense, no doubt, all _has_ been said long ago—in gist, in matter, in subject. But then in literature, and especially in poetry, there is so much which is beside the gist, that is superadded to the matter, that does _not_ depend upon the subject! The thoughts suggested by birth and death, by dawn and sunset, by a blush and a smile, by the red wine when it moveth itself aright in the glass, and the green sea stretching from the white cliff-foot, and the “huge and thoughtful night,” will always be at bottom and in essence the same. But he must be a blind person who does not see that at any moment any poet who _can_ may give them an entirely new form and cast and presentation. In this sense—and it is the sense of the best “modern” criticism—“tout est _à dire_.”

[Sidenote: _Of Fénelon and Gravina._]

We may seem to have got into an _impasse_: nor will such excellent persons as Fénelon, and to go to yet another country, Gravina,[7] help us out of it. Fénelon indeed had, as we saw, some striking resipiscences, some individual pronouncements which, if they were as unaccompanied by others as they are disconnected from them, would be very promising indeed. But this very company that they do _not_ keep disestates them unluckily: and you cannot doubt, as you read _Télémaque_, that if the world had had to depend upon its author for leadership in the migration from the critical House of Bondage, it would never have got over the Red Sea, if it had even started on the journey. Gravina, to that general perspicacity and equity which distinguishes all these doubtful cases, added an unusually early and thorough appreciation of _Greek_, and the advantage, peculiar to an Italian, of having an actual classical period of modern literature extending over four entire centuries: of all which he made good use. But it is at least very difficult to discover, either in his original work or in the general trend of his critical utterances, any dissatisfaction with the prevailing direction of criticism in his time, or any determination to take a wider outlook.

[Sidenote: _Of Dryden and Fontenelle._]

Indeed, putting aside Dryden (whose method led straight to the Promised Land, and whose utterances show that he occasionally saw it afar off) as one who came too early to feel any very conscious desire of setting out on the pilgrimage of discovery, Fontenelle is perhaps the very earliest critic of distinction who shows a decided restlessness. And he, as we have sufficiently set forth, has too much of the critical Puck about him to be a safe guide for the wayfaring man. In fact, “Lord! what fools these mortals be!” is an exclamation which is always hovering on the door of his lips, and sometimes all but escapes it.

[Sidenote: _The more excellent way._]

But this history must have been told to very little purpose if readers still expect sharp and decided turns, assignable to definite hours and particular men, in the evolutions of criticism. Rather has it been one of our special lessons—it would be uncritical to say our special objects—to prove that these things are not to be expected. It is a part of the Neo-Classic error itself to assume some definite goal of critical perfection towards which all things tend, and which, when you have attained it, permits you to take no further trouble except of imitation and repetition. Just as you never know what new literary form the human genius may take, and can therefore never lay down any absolute and final schedule of literary kinds, and of literary perfection within these kinds, so you can never shape the set of the prevalent taste, and you can never do much more than give the boat the full benefit of the current by dexterous rowing and steering. Indeed, as we have seen, the taste in criticism and the taste in creation unite, or diverge, or set dead against each other in a manner quite incalculable, and only interpretable as making somehow for the greater glory of Literature. Somewhere about the time to which we have harked back—the meeting of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or a little later, or much later, as the genius of different countries and persons would have it—a veering of the wind, an eddy of the current, _did_ take place. And it is of this that we have to give account in the present Book—of the consequences of it that we have to give an account in the present volume.