CHAPTER V.

ÆSTHETICS AND THEIR INFLUENCE.

THE PRESENT CHAPTER ITSELF A KIND OF EXCURSUS—A PARABASIS ON “PHILOSOPHICAL” CRITICISM-MODERN ÆSTHETICS: THEIR FOUNT IN DESCARTES AND ITS BRANCHES-IN GERMANY: NEGATIVE AS WELL AS POSITIVE INDUCEMENTS-BAUMGARTEN-‘DE NONNULLIS AD POEMA PERTINENTIBUS’-AND ITS DEFINITION OF POETRY-THE ‘ALETHEOPHILUS’-THE ‘ÆSTHETICA’-SULZER-EBERHARD-FRANCE: THE PÈRE ANDRÉ, HIS ‘ESSAI SUR LE BEAU’-ITALY: VICO-HIS LITERARY PLACES-THE ’DE STUDIORUM RATIONE’-THE ’DE CONSTANTIA JURISPRUDENTIS’-THE FIRST ‘SCIENZA NUOVA’-THE SECOND-RATIONALE OF ALL THIS-A VERY GREAT MAN AND THINKER, BUT IN PURE CRITICISM AN INFLUENCE MALIGN OR NULL-ENGLAND-SHAFTESBURY-HUME-EXAMPLES OF HIS CRITICAL OPINIONS-HIS INCONSISTENCY-BURKE ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL-THE SCOTTISH ÆSTHETIC-EMPIRICS: ALISON-THE ‘ESSAY ON TASTE’-ITS CONFUSIONS-AND ARBITRARY ABSURDITIES-AN INTERIM CONCLUSION ON THE ÆSTHETIC MATTER.

[Sidenote: _The present chapter itself a kind of excursus._]

It was announced at the very opening of this History that it would not deal, except incidentally and under _force majeure_, with those vaguer problems of general Criticism or metacriticism which, during the last two centuries, have taken the general name of Æsthetics. [Sidenote: _A parabasis on “philosophical” criticism._] But some of my critics have not been content with this announcement, and it is perhaps permissible in this place to notice certain exceptions which have been taken to the absence of—or rather to the pretty definite abstention from— “philosophical” discussions and speculations in this book. For while in Italy I have been pronounced _digiuno di filosofia_, the huntsmen have been up in America against my “confusion of thought” and my writing about Criticism without defining what criticism is.

As for the first point, I may perhaps be allowed to say that “divine Philosophy” has been by no means such a stranger or stepmother to me as some of my critics seem to suppose. I have duly sojourned in her courts, and have found them the reverse of unamiable: I have eaten of her bread and found it both palatable and nourishing. But it is Philosophy herself who teaches us, by the mouth of not her least but, as some have thought, her greatest exponent, not to shift or mix the Kinds. And, to my possibly heretical judgment, the “kind” of Criticism seems one into which such “general ideas” as my critics desiderate can only be introduced by a most doubtful and perilous naturalisation. I suppose it would be generally granted that no “philosophical” critics stand higher than Plato and Coleridge: Aristotle himself has, in comparison with them, but contented himself with middle axioms and empirical observation. And the result of this is that—again to my possibly heretical thinking—Plato has actually left us nothing in pure criticism but an often mischievous theory: while Coleridge is just so much the more barren in true criticism as he expatiates further in the regions of sheer “philosophy.”

Nor should I, if I chose to take up the quarrel, in the least lack other arms or armour of offence and defence, sufficiently proofmarked by Philosophy herself. I hold that the province of Philosophy is occupied by matters of the pure intellect: and that literary criticism is busied with matters which, though not in the loosest meaning, are matters of sense. I do not know—and I do not believe that any one knows, however much he may juggle with terms—why certain words arranged in certain order stir one like the face of the sea, or like the face of a girl, while other arrangements leave one absolutely indifferent or excite boredom or dislike. I know that we may generalise a little; may “push our ignorance a little farther back”; may discover some accordances of sound, some rhythmical adjustments, some cunning and more or less constant appeals to eye and ear which, as we coolly say, “explain” emotion and attraction to some extent. But _why_ these general things delight man he knows no more than, in his more unsophisticated stage, why their individual cases and instances do so. I do not think that my own doctrine of the Poetic (or the literary) Moment—of the instant and mirific “kiss of the spouse”—is so utterly “unphilosophical”: but I do know that that doctrine, if it does not exactly laugh to scorn theories of æsthetic, makes them merely facultative indulgences. And just as physiology, and biology, and all the ’ologies that ever were ’ologied, leave you utterly uninformed as to the real reason of the rapture of the physical kiss, so I think that æsthetics do not teach the reason of the amorous peace of the Poetic Moment.

But I began this book with no intention of writing a treatise on _Momentary_ (or _Monochronous_) _Apolaustics_, and except that it might have seemed discourteous to offer no explanation of (I can hardly call this any apology for) a feature, or the lack of one, which has disturbed well-willing readers, I should have preferred to keep such questions out altogether. Nor can I see that there is any “confusion of thought,” any contradiction, or even any want of “architectonic” in the plan which I have actually pursued. A man may surely write a _History of England_ without including in it an abstract treatise on politics, and describe an interesting country without philosophising on the architecture of its buildings, the family story of its tribes, or the chemical constitution of its natural products. I set before myself and my readers at the outset the promise of a simple survey of the actual critical opinions, actually expressed, in “judging of authors,” by the actual critics of recorded literature. To the survey of these I have added another of the chief reasons which they alleged for their tastes when they alleged any: and when, as naturally happens, these opinions and tastes, and the attempted explanations of them, appeared in groups or schools, I have adapted my survey, by means of the Interchapters of the book, to the summary consideration of these also. I have not thought it incumbent on me either to express, or to refrain from expressing, agreement or disagreement with their views: but where (as in the case of the Subject theory, of Boileau’s Good-Sense-worship and other things) it seemed to me that certain views and theories could be actually demolished by argument, I have endeavoured to show how. Where it is a simple question of taste, my own _Haupt-theorie_ forbids my attempting anything of the sort.

I am, I confess, unable to see that either Logic or Architectonic is outraged by this preannounced and methodical limitation of proceeding. I have given, or attempted to give, my “Atlas” of the actual facts with what accuracy and clearness I could. The complement of Theory I do not pretend to supply, and I cannot see that anybody has a right to demand it. Whoso wants to take it let him make it: my facts ought to help him in the making, and if they do not, he and not the facts must bear the blame. This book has attempted to provide, in an orderly arrangement, and, as far as might be in the space, exhaustively, what has called itself and has been called Criticism (certain varieties being, for reasons given, excluded or less fully treated) from the beginnings of Greek literature, as we have them, to the present day. Of these provisions I think I may say—without prejudice to any further use of them that any one may choose to make—_his utere mecum_: and I will just add that had anybody offered me the same provision thirty years ago, I should have been profoundly thankful, and have been spared many a weary hour of gleaning here and groping there.

I shall even be so very bold as to say that what I have actually done, or attempted to do, seems to me in the true sense both _philosophoteron_ and _spoudaioteron_ than what my censors would have liked me to do. Any tolerably clever undergraduate, reading for Greats, could sketch (in after-life amusing himself, and perhaps impressing others, by accumulating arguments in support, or in destruction, of his undergraduate hypothesis) explanations of the distaste of the ancients for “appreciative” criticism, of the critical silence of the Middle Ages, of the French and English attitude of sixteenth-seventeenth century criticism and sixteenth-seventeenth century creation, of the time of bondage to Good Sense, of the avatars and phases of Taste. I would undertake myself to make a complete set in a Long Vacation, with arguments _pro_ and _con_ in the “best and most orgilous” manner. But I should not believe one of them, and I should mutter _O vix sancta simplicitas!_ if anybody were taken in by them. In what I have given there is no possibility of taking in, and no need to believe or disbelieve. Here are the simple facts, disengaged by a certain amount of hard labour from their more or less accessible sources and quarries, and ranged, whether ill or well, yet at any rate with some system, and in such a fashion that they must be reasonably easy to master. I may not be an architect, but think I may claim to be a tolerable quarryman and a purveyor of the stone in fairly convenient arrangement, workably rough-hewed. And your most gifted architect will find himself put to it to make his Beauvais or his Batalha, his Salisbury or his Strasburg, from stone unquarried or unshaped to his hand. I have, in short, endeavoured to give a tolerably complete collection of facts which have never been collected before. If my facts are inconvenient to any philosophy, so much the worse for it: if they are convenient, let it take them and welcome.

At any rate—with what results of success or failure, of advantage or disadvantage to the work, the reader, not the writer, must judge,—my initial undertaking of abstinence has, I think, been fairly discharged. The point, however, at which we have arrived is one of those where the _force majeure_ makes itself felt. In the Book where we aim at exhibiting the process of change which is so noticeable as between the general criticism of the eighteenth and the general criticism of the nineteenth centuries, and at examining to some extent the causes of that change, we could not possibly omit an influence so powerful for good or for evil as that of the constitution—as a regular branch of philosophy— of inquiries into the principles of Beauty, into the æsthetic sense, into the psychological aspects of the appeal of art generally. We shall still deal in the most economical and temperate fashion with these matters: but we cannot here abstain from them entirely. Indeed it might be open to anybody to urge that large passages occurring elsewhere in this volume, and even to some extent in the last, properly belong to the present chapter—that Lessing, Diderot, Du Bos are strayed sheep of this fold. But one remarkable person in France, another in Italy, and two still more remarkable groups in Germany and England, will find better place here than anywhere for something like individual notice: and others must be at least the subject of reference and glance.

[Sidenote: _Modern Æsthetics: their fount in Descartes and its branches._]

With the minor differences which, occurring in all matters of opinion, nowhere multiply so fast and subdivide themselves so minutely as in questions of philosophy, there has been of late a general agreement to trace the germ of the modern division of Æsthetics to Descartes.[257] To discuss this at any length would be quite improper here: but no one who has the least acquaintance with the Cartesian philosophy can fail to see how naturally—nay, how inevitably—both the general principle of that philosophy in its reduction and rallying of everything to conditions of abstract idea and thought, and its particular insistence on clearness of definition and the like in Method, should lead to a reconsideration and further exploration of the idea of Beauty, literary and other. There is also no doubt that, in the next generation or generations, the developments of Cartesianism and the revolts against it might, nay, must, affect powerfully these applications of abstract thought to the remoter principles of literature. We have seen that Locke in England, Philistine as he himself was in regard to letters, and especially to poetry, had a very strong influence upon Addison,—an influence which he continued to exercise, both through Addison and independently, almost throughout the English eighteenth century. There is no doubt that in France the Père André, whom we shall mention presently, was a direct descendant of Descartes through Malebranche. In Italy the singular and solitary figure of Vico, though it exercised at first no influence, has been claimed as having a new and powerful influence to exercise in this direction as in others. And it is not disputable that Descartes begat Leibnitz or that Leibnitz begat Wolff, to whose philosophical system almost all competent judgment agrees in tracing the direct origin of German æsthetic, in Breitinger, in Baumgarten, and the rest.

[Sidenote: _In Germany: negative as well as positive inducements._]

It is, I think, Herr von Antoniewicz, the very learned and able editor of J. E. Schlegel, who accounts[258] for the strong abstract and æsthetic tendency of German eighteenth-century criticism, both then and since, by the fact that the originators of it had nothing to look back upon, nothing to “tie themselves on to,” and that they therefore struck out into the deep, _ripæ ulterioris amore_, as we may say, to tag his saying. This is ingenious, and it becomes more illuminative when we compare the facts with the corresponding facts in English criticism. We, too, though we had in Dryden and Jonson a good deal more than the Germans had, possessed little critical starting-point. But we had, what the Germans had not, abundance of really great writers upon whom to fix practical and real critical examinations. It is half pathetic and half ludicrous to see the efforts that Bodmer and Gottsched and their contemporaries make to provide themselves with subjects of the kind out of people like Besser and Neukirch and Amthor, like Lohenstein and Hofmanswaldau, even like the excellent Opitz: and we cannot wonder that they, or at least others, dropped off these unsucculent subjects into the pure inane. But the fairer Callipolis of English criticism could feed and grow fat on Chaucer, and Spenser, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Dryden always, and by degrees on all the recovered wealth of older English literature. The Germans had nothing (save Luther and a few more not of the absolutely first class or even a very high second) but that mediæval literature and those ballads which naturally they did not reach at once. And even these, much good as they did them, had not the inestimable _alterative_ value of older as compared with newer English literature.

[Sidenote: _Baumgarten._]

On the other hand, they had, as we have said, an unconquerable desire and a dogged determination to learn and to improve themselves: the very poverty of their own literature drove them to compare and abstract others; and they possessed, in the Wolffian philosophy, a strong and serviceable instrument of method. Breitinger, with whom we have dealt sufficiently in his general critical aspect, may perhaps have the credit of the first distinct and extensive attempt to busy himself with the theory of art and letters: to Baumgarten is always attributed that of having put the name “Æsthetic” into currency, and of having got the thing—if it may be called a thing—into formal and regular shape. He used the word in a thesis, _De Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus_,[259] as early as 1735, about midway between the time when the Zürich men turned their attention seriously to poetry and imagination in the abstract, and the issue of their main body of work in 1740-41. But it was not till fifteen years later, at the exact middle of the century, that he began to publish his _Æsthetica_,[260] redacted from lectures delivered in the interval.

[Sidenote: De Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus,]

The thesis itself is to the expert a sufficient announcement of the new departure, which of course is only an old one re-fashioned. Baumgarten takes us right back to the most abstract criticism of the Italian Renaissance—the “idea of a poem,” the skeleton of poetic thought, method, expression, strung together by a new science of the sense of beauty. A poem is _oratio sensitiva perfecta_. What is poetical is that which contributes to this perfection.

[Sidenote: _and its definition of poetry_.]

The most fatal, and I am sure the most unintentionally fatal, criticism of Baumgarten, and incidentally of the entire division of critical or quasi-critical literature to which his work belongs, is contained in a remark of Herr Braitmaier’s (ii. 9) that part of the thesis “is written with very little understanding of poetry.” The question is whether the whole is not—whether this and other things like it might not have been said by a man who could not distinguish between Tupper and Tennyson, between Hugo and Delille. Look at this _oratio sensitiva perfecta_—which sent the good Herder into ecstasies as a new poetic spell, germ, and what not. Like other abstract definitions, including that of Coleridge himself, to which we shall come later, it omits or misses the _differentia_ of Poetry altogether. It lets in the prose-poetry or the prose-better-than-poetry heretics by a wide and unclosable door:[261] it excludes the very quality which some of those who love poetry most love in it. What is “perfection” but the attainment, in the highest degree, of that which is elsewhere attained in degrees high, less high, low, or lowest? There are therefore _orationes sensitivæ_ which have the qualities of poetry but are not poetry. This is hard to admit. Poetry should be itself: not a “bestment” of something else.

[Sidenote: _The_ Aletheophilus.]

In the _Aletheophilus_, which followed (1741), Baumgarten expanded and, at the same time, condescended a little. A poem is now a “lively” oration instead of “sensitive” words, and so lively that it demands metrical expression. Herein he seems to his severer critics to have derogated. “Liveliness,” they say, was in _sensitiva_, only better: “metre” was in _perfecta_ by implication. One can only say that _we_ prefer to take it explicitly. And Baumgarten, like all other theorists with hardly an exception, grudges the admission of metre after all. He calculates that it gives only a very small proportion of the charm of poetry. True, the admission of it at all—with the further prescription of “thoughts that burn,” “brilliant order,” “regular,” that is to say, pure, neatly adjusted, adequate, and charming “expression,” does something to dress up the bare skeleton of the _perfecta sensitiva oratio_. But it does more to show what a bodiless skeleton it is. [Sidenote: _The_ Æsthetica.] The _Æsthetica_ itself,[262] which had been preceded by a sort of pilot-engine in the shape of a redaction of Baumgarten’s professorial lectures by his pupil, G. F. Meier,[263] expands, after a rather Vossian pattern, the principles of the two earlier books, dwelling much on “perfection,” on the innate disposition of the soul towards beautiful thoughts, and the like. He is perhaps most justly thanked for his insistence on _sensitiva_—on the sensual as well as intellectual appeal of poetry. But his illustration from actual ancient poetry is not rich: and that from modern almost non-existent.[264]

To Baumgarten we have given some place as to a pioneer even in a branch of criticism which we do not intend to pursue. His followers, Sulzer and Eberhard, must have less room, and Moses Mendelssohn, between them, is elsewhere treated.

[Sidenote: _Sulzer._]

The well-known _Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste_[265] of Sulzer, to which the often quoted _Zusätze_ of Blankenberg belong as supplement, is in reality a painful compound of Dictionary and Bibliography, wherein you go from _Copiren_ to _Corinthische Ordnung_, and from _Menuet_ to _Metalepsis_. Such things, invaluable for their time, are almost necessarily thrown into the wallet at his back by Time himself. But they serve as a text for a repetition of the sober truth that the immense reputation and the really solid achievement of Germany since have been not a little due to the provision of them by her eighteenth-century writers. Mere knowledge will not do everything: and it is peculiarly liable to degenerate into a simple rag-bag and marine-store accumulation of things that are _not_ knowledge. But the average man can do very little without it; he can sometimes do quite surprising things with it. And while the less than average man is without it mainly negligible, it would be wofully easy to provide examples in which persons, certainly or possibly much above the average in ability, have made shipwreck by neglecting it.

[Sidenote: _Eberhard._]

The _Handbuch der Æsthetik_[266] of Eberhard may deserve a line here, because, though beginning in the orthodox æsthetic manner with general Principles of Beauty, it works them down to specific Rhetoric and Poetry with rather more condescension, and a great deal more ingenuity, than usual.

[Sidenote: _France: the Père André_, his Essai sur le Beau.]

To pass to France, the _Essai sur le Beau_ of the Père André[267] is almost a famous book, and undoubtedly exercised a great deal of influence over the time; nor must we deny that that influence had literary effects. But even a not hasty reader might be excused—if he came across the book having never previously heard of it—for saying that its connection with Literature is almost non-existent. The very word does not occur in the Index, which is rather fuller than in most French books of the time: and though “Eloquence” and “Poetry” do, the remarks in reference to them are of the most meagre character. There must be Unity: and the poet must please the imagination (Addison had at least taught them to use the word) as well as the intellect. Even “pleasure” is to be used with jealous care as a criterion of Beauty—the love of this is to be “disinterested.” But beyond these vague, as one might have thought barren, and in the last case theoretical generalities, André has next to nothing for the student of Literary Criticism, who may make what he can of the table of the Beautiful, as—

Arbitrary, Moral, National, Spiritual, Essential, Musical, Sensible, Visible.

And it is well if this student has the grace to refrain from amplifying this table after the pattern and in the spirit of the twenty-eighth chapter of the Third Book of Rabelais.

[Sidenote: _Italy: Vico._]

In Italy, the illustrious author[268] of the _Scienza Nuova_[269] had, before Baumgarten, before even Breitinger, and long before André, turned the powers of his profound and original thought to the question of _sapienza poetica_. He lays at least as much stress as Baumgarten himself upon the _sensitiva_: discerns natural and diametrical opposition between Metaphysics and Poetry; but still admits a Science, “new” in this as in other respects, of Poetry, or at least a _logica poetica_ which compares curiously with Breitinger’s “Logic of Imagination” and other things. There does not appear to be any suspicion or any likelihood of indebtedness: it is only one of the innumerable instances of things being “in the air” and of the birds of the air carrying them to different places and persons. With him, poetry, like everything else, is an item or factor in human _history_, though, following his strong metaphysical turn, he deals largely with the relations to soul and sense, &c.

[Sidenote: _His literary places._]

In arranging, according to our usual fashion, the actual deliverances of Vico as actually presented, we find them in four successive places presenting as many stages of his thought—the _De Studiorum Ratione_ (1708), the _Constantia Jurisprudentis_ (1721), the first _Scienza_ (1725), and the second (1730).

[Sidenote: _The_ De Studiorum Ratione.]

The first named is early, and it presents the author’s thought in a somewhat embryonic condition, but as true to the future development as an embryo ought to be. Its importance for us consists first in the starting[270] from Bacon, which of itself will give us something of an inkling of Vico’s attitude to literature, though the Italian fortunately discarded whatever was contemptuous or hostile in the Englishman’s position. More important still is the erection[271] of a “Nova Critica” which is opposed and preferred to “Topica” in relation to literature itself. “Critica est ars veræ orationis; Topica [here evidently used in one of the full senses of ‘Rhetoric’] autem copiosæ.”[272] And most, the paragraph[273] on Poetry itself, where Vico, deserting Bacon, proclaims it not a _vinum dæmonum_ but a “gift of the Most Highest,” declares the great characteristic of the Poet to be Imagination, but (true to his own line) insists on Truth being still most necessary to him. That the new Physic will be very convenient to Poetry by supplying it with fresh and accurate images may raise a smile: but after all it has not proved quite vain.

[Sidenote: _The_ De Constantia Jurisprudentis.]

_De Constantia Jurisprudentis_ may seem a surprising title; but Vico was thoroughly of the opinion of a later jurist, Mr Counsellor Paulus Pleydell, about the necessity of “history and literature” to his profession, and the sub-title _De Constantia Philologiæ_ takes away even the titular shock. Philology is here no mere charwoman, with the charwoman’s too frequent habit of doing even the mean work she does badly; but a mighty goddess of knowledge, presiding over not merely the history of words but the history of things. History was Vico’s real darling: and that view of poetry as the earliest attainable history, which, true enough in a way, was to lead him into heresy afterwards, distinctly appears here. It is only at the twelfth chapter of this section[274] that he comes to talk “De Linguæ Heroicæ sive de Poeseos Origine,” and handles his subject very much as we should expect from his text, that “Poetry is the first language of men.” Still, he goes into a good deal of detail, and his description[275] of the iamb as the “middleman” (_tradux_) between heroic verse and prose, though not likely to be historically correct, has a certain truth logically. And he appends to this, in a very long note, a discussion of Homer himself, which is not yet polytheist.

[Sidenote: _The first_ Scienza Nuova.]

These earlier treatises take away almost all oddity from the appearance in the first _Scienza_ of an entire Book,[276] the Third, occupied with New Principles of Poetry. Hotch-potch as this book may seem—ranging as it does from theogony to chronology, and from both to heraldry and the science of medals, from elaborate discussions of “fables” generally to a discovery of the Laws of War and Peace in poetry itself, from the greatness of Homer to the truth of the Christian Religion,—all these apparent oddities are waxed if not welded together by Vico’s general idea of the Poet as the earliest and truest historian, philosopher, and authority for the New Science of Humanity. Indeed he often reminds us of Shelley in the _Defence of Poetry_, and I daresay Shelley really knew him.[277]

[Sidenote: _The Second._]

It is not, however, till the second _Scienza_ that these sketches and studies take the form of an elaborate treatise, _Della Sapienza Poetica_, filling one whole book on the general subject, and another, _Della Discoverta del Vero Omero_, no less than three hundred pages.[278] Here Vico becomes more than ever “Thorough.” After preliminaries on science generally, on poetical science, and on the Deluge, we have a Metaphysic of Poetry, a Logic of Poetry, an Ethic, Economic, Politic, Physic (specified down as Cosmography, Astronomy, Chronology, and Geography)—all of Poetry!

In these bold speculations many striking and really critical sayings occur. That it is the first principle of poetry to give life, and its own life, to everything[279] nobody need deny; nor that poetry is at once “impossible and credible,”[280] a near coasting of the Coleridgean Land of Promise, the explorer starting of course, as Coleridge did, from the Aristotelian doctrine of the “plausible impossible” and the absurdity rendered imperceptible by poetic speech. That “too much reflection hurts poetry”[281] is less unmixedly true, though most certainly not unmixedly false.

[Sidenote: _Rationale of all this._]

All this is extremely interesting, but with an interest so different from that of purely literary criticism that I can quite understand how a man like Signor Croce, taking his start from it, ostracises purely literary criticism itself. Of this last indeed[282] there is little or nothing in Vico. He does not conduct—I am not aware of any one who ever _has_ conducted—the argument for Homeric disintegration on literary grounds: his occasional comparisons of Dante with Homer are equally unliterary. I have not yet found a place where he deals with any author in a purely literary spirit. The zeal of his New Science of Humanity has eaten him up. A poem is a historical document, a poet is not merely an early historian but an early theologian, philosopher, jurist, moralist, panto-pragmatist, _panepistemon_, _panhistor_. Very like; but for most of these purposes a Tupper would be quite as valuable as a Tennyson, and we see that a cloud of unsubstantial Homerids were quite as valuable to Vico as the One Poet of Helen and Nausicaa, of Achilles and Odysseus.

[Sidenote: _A very great man and thinker, but in pure Criticism an influence malign or null._]

For us, therefore, the main importance of Vico, though undoubtedly great, is of a dubious not to say a sinister character. It establishes him in a position by no means dissimilar to that of Plato,—a position of enormous influence, epoch-making and original, which influence has chiefly spent itself in ways outside of, or counter to, that which we are pursuing. If Vico had contented himself with developing, in the direction of literature, the theory of cyclical progression which he in common with other great thinkers held, and if he had had literary knowledge enough to apply it, the results might have been wholly good. But it does not appear that he had this knowledge, and, whether he had it or not, he used what he had in very different lines. I think that Professor Flint has established beyond all doubt Vico’s claim to the anticipation of the so-called “Wolfian” method with Homer.[283] But, as I have explained from the very outset, this so-called criticism also is not the species of criticism with which we here busy ourselves at all: and its methods are entirely separate and partly hostile. Yet there is no question about the importance which this so-called criticism has assumed in the last two centuries, and in this, as in other matters, Vico is an origin.

So is he, I think, likewise in the extension of literary criticism by including in it investigations into psychology, not merely individual but national, into manners, religion, and what not. This extension, continued by the Germans of the later eighteenth century and immensely popularised and developed during the nineteenth, of course now seems to some the orthodox and only legitimate process of the kind. To me, as my readers by this time must be well aware, it does not seem so. I therefore deplore the exercise of Vico’s genius in this direction, and I do not purpose to admit its results into these pages more than I can help. But once more I recognise his greatness, if in some respects as that of a great heresiarch. And it would be really “unphilosophical” to leave him without pointing out, what has not, so far as I know, been pointed out before, how noteworthy he is as exemplifying the corruption of a thing accompanying quite early stages of its growth. We have throughout maintained that the Historical method is the salvation of Criticism, and in this very period we are witnessing its late application to that purpose. Vico is the very apostle, nay, more, the prophet, of the Historical method itself. Yet here, as elsewhere, the postern to Hell is hard by the gateway of the Celestial City.

[Sidenote: _England._]

We may give a somewhat full account of some English writers whose criticism trembles on the verge of æsthetic or oversteps it, partly on the general principles announced in the preface to the last volume, partly because some of them at least do touch actual criticism rather more nearly than, say, Baumgarten and Vico; but also because, in the great _prepollence_ of English literature during the eighteenth century, some of them likewise—notably Shaftesbury and Burke—exercised a very considerable influence upon foreign countries. As for Hume, he is a particularly interesting example of a man pushing freedom of thought to the utmost limit in certain directions, but apparently content to dwell in the most hide-bound orthodoxy of his time as to others.[284]

[Sidenote: _Shaftesbury._]

There are few writers of whom more different opinions have been held, in regard to their philosophical and literary value, than is the case with Shaftesbury. His criticism has been less discussed, except from the purely philosophical or at any rate the technically æsthetic side; but difference is scarcely less certain here when discussion does take place. It is difficult to put the dependence of that difference in an uncontentious and non-question-begging manner, because it concerns a fundamental antinomy of the fashion in which this curious author strikes opposite temperaments. To some, every utterance of his seems to carry with it in an undertone something of this sort: “I am not merely a Person of Quality, and a very fine gentleman, but also, look you, a philosopher of the greatest depth, though of the most elegant exterior, and a writer of consummate originality and _agudeza_. If you are sensible people you will pay me the utmost respect; but alas! there are so many vulgar and insensible people about, that very likely you will not.” Now this kind of “air” abundantly fascinates some readers, and intrigues others; while, to yet others again, it seems the affectation, most probably of a charlatan, certainly of an intellectual coxcomb, and they are offended accordingly. It is probably unjust (though there is weighty authority for it) to regard Shaftesbury as a charlatan; but he will hardly, except by the fascination aforesaid or by some illegitimate partisanship of religious or philosophical view, escape the charge of being a coxcomb; and his coxcombry appears nowhere more than in his dealings with criticism.[285] From the strictest point of view of our own definition of the art, he would have very little right to entrance here at all, and would have to be pretty unceremoniously treated if he were allowed to take his trial. His concrete critical utterances—his actual appreciations—are almost Rymerical; with a modish superciliousness substituted for pedantic scurrility. “The British Muses,” quoth my lord, in his _Advice to an Author_,[286] “may well lie abject and obscure, especially being as yet in their mere infant state. They have scarce hitherto arrived to anything of stateliness or person,” and he continues in the usual style with “wretched pun and quibble,” “false sublime,” “Gothick mode of poetry,” “horrid discord of jingling rhyme,” &c. He speaks of “that noble satirist Boileau” as “raised from the plain model of the ancients.” Neither family affection, nor even family pride, could have induced him to speak as he speaks of Dryden,[287] if he had had any real literary taste. His sneers at Universities,[288] at “pedantick learning,” at “the mean fellowship of bearded boys,” deprive him of the one saving grace which Neo-classicism could generally claim. “Had I been a Spanish Cervantes, and with success equal to that comick author had destroyed the reigning taste of Gothick or Moorish Chivalry, I could afterwards contentedly have seen my burlesque itself despised and set aside.”[289] Perhaps there is not a more unhappily selected single epithet in the whole range of criticism than “the _cold_ Lucretius.”[290]

On the other hand, both in the more speciously literary parts of his desultory discourses _de quodam Ashleio_, and outside of them, he has frequent remarks on the Kinds;[291] he is quite copious on Correctness;[292] and there can be no doubt that he deserves his place in this chapter by the fashion in which he endeavours to utilise his favourite _pulchrum_ and _honestum_ in reference to Criticism, of which he is a declared and (as far as his inveterate affectation and mannerism will let him) an ingenious defender. The main _locus_ for this is the Third Miscellany, and its central, or rather culminating, passage[293] occurs in the second chapter thereof. The Beautiful is the principle of Literature as well as of Virtue; the sense whereby it is apprehended is Good Taste; the manner of attaining this taste is by a gradual rejection of the excessive, the extravagant, the vulgar.[294] A vague enough gospel, and not over well justified by the fruits of actual appreciation quoted above;[295] but not perhaps much vaguer, or possessing less justification, than most metacritic.

[Sidenote: _Hume._]

The position of Hume in regard to literary criticism has an interest which would be almost peculiar if it were not for something of a parallel in Voltaire. If the literary opinions of the author of the _Enquiry into Human Nature_ stood alone they would be almost negligible; and if he had worked them into an elaborate treatise, like that of his clansman Kames, this would probably, if remembered at all, be remembered as a kind of “awful example.” In their context and from their author, however, we cannot quite “regard and pass” Hume’s critical observations as their intrinsic merit may seem to suggest that we should do: nay, in that context and from that author, they constitute a really valuable document in more than one relation.

[Sidenote: _Examples of his critical opinions._]

It cannot be said that Hume does not invite notice as a critic; on the contrary, his title of “_Essays: Moral, Political,_[296] and Literary” seems positively to challenge it. Yet his actual literary utterances are rather few, and would be almost unimportant but for the considerations just put. He tells us criticism is difficult;[297] he applies[297] (as Johnson did somewhat differently) Fontenelle’s remark about “telling the hours”; he illustrates from Holland the difference of excellence in commerce and in literature.[298] He condemns—beforehand, and with the vigour and acuteness which we should expect from him—the idea of attempting to account for the existence of a particular poet at a particular time and in a particular place.[299] He is shocked at the vanity, at the rudeness, and at the loose language of the ancients.[300] He approaches, as Tassoni[301] and Perrault[302] had approached, one of the grand _cruces_ of the whole matter by making his Sceptic urge that “_beauty_ and worth are merely of a relative nature, and consist of an agreeable sentiment produced by an object on a particular mind”;[303] but he makes no detailed use or application whatever of this as regards literature. His Essay on _Simplicity and Refinement in Writing_[304] is psychology rather than criticism, and he uses his terms in a rather curious manner. At least, I myself find it difficult to draw up any definitions of these qualities which will make Pope the _ne plus ultra_ of justifiable Refinement, and Lucretius that of Simplicity; Virgil and Racine the examples of the happy mean in both; Corneille and Congreve excessive in Refinement, and Sophocles and Terence excessive in Simplicity.[305] The whole is, however, a good rationalising of the “classical” principle; and is especially interesting as noticing, with slight reproof, a tendency to too great “affectation and conceit” both in France and England—faults for which _we_ certainly should not indict the mid-eighteenth century. The Essay _On Tragedy_ is more purely psychological still. And though _On the Standard of Taste_ is less open to this objection, one cannot but see that it is Human Nature, and not Humane Letters, in which Hume is really interesting himself. The vulgar censure on the reference to Bunyan[306] is probably excessive; for it is at least not improbable that Hume had never read a line of _The Pilgrim’s Progress_, and was merely using the tinker’s name as a kind of type-counter. But this very acceptance of a conventional judgment— acceptance constantly repeated throughout the Essay—is almost startling in context with the _alleszermalmend_ tendency of some of its principles. A critic who says[307] that “It is evident that none of the rules of composition are fixed by reasonings _a priori_,” is in fact saying “Take away that bauble!” in regard to Neo-classicism altogether; and though in the very same page Hume repeats the orthodox cavils at Ariosto, while admitting his charm on the next, having thus set up the idol again, he proceeds once more to lop it of hands and feet and tumble it off its throne by saying that “if things are found to please, they cannot be faults; let the pleasure which they produce be ever so unexpected and unaccountable.” The most dishevelled of Romantics, in the reddest of waistcoats, could say no more.

In his remarks upon the qualifications and functions of the critic, Hume’s anthropological and psychological mastery is evident enough: but it is at least equally evident that his actual taste in literature was in no sense spontaneous, original, or energetic. In comparing him, say, with Johnson it is not a little amusing to find his much greater acquiescence in the conventional and traditional judgments. Indeed, towards the end of his Essay[308] Hume anticipates a later expression[309] of a perennial attitude of mind by declaring, “However I may excuse the poet on account of the manners of his age, I never can relish the composition,” and by complaining of the want of “humanity and decency so conspicuous” even sometimes in Homer and the Greek tragedies. That David, of all persons, should fail to realise—he did _not_ fail to perceive—that the humanity of Homer _was_ human and the decency of Sophocles _was_ decent, is indeed surprising.

[Sidenote: _His inconsistency._]

Such things might at first sight not quite dispose one to regret that, as he himself remarks,[310] “the critics who have had some tincture of philosophy” have been “few,” for certainly those who have had more tincture of philosophy than Hume himself have been far fewer. But, as is usually the case,[311] it is not the fault of philosophy at all. For some reason, natural disposition, or want of disposition, or even that necessity of clinging to _some_ convention which has been remarked in Voltaire himself, evidently made Hume a mere “church-going bell”—pulled by the established vergers, and summoning the faithful to orthodox worship—in most of his literary utterances. Yet, as we have seen, he could not help turning quite a different tune at times, though he himself hardly knew it.

[Sidenote: _Burke on the Sublime and Beautiful._]

At the close of Burke’s _Essay_[312] he expressly declines “to consider poetry as it regards the Sublime and Beautiful more at large”; but this “more” refers to the fact that his Fifth Part had been given to the Power of Words in exciting ideas of the kind. Most of what he says on this head is Lockian discussion of simple and compound, abstract and concrete, &c., and of the connection of words with images, as illustrated by the cases—so interesting in one instance to the English, and in the other to the whole, eighteenth century—of Blacklock the blind poet, and Saunderson the blind mathematician. There is, however, a not unacute contention[313] against the small critics of that and other times, that the exact analytical composition necessary in a picture is not necessary in a poetic image. But one may doubt whether this notion was not connected in his own mind with the heresy of the “streaks of the tulip.”[314] It serves him, however, as a safeguard against the mere “imitation” theory: and it brings (or helps to bring) him very near to a just appreciation of the marvellous power of words as words. His remarks on the grandeur of the phrase “the Angel of the Lord” are as the shadow of a great rock in the weary glare of the _Aufklärung_, and so are those which follow on Milton’s “universe of Death.” Nor is it a trifling thing that he should have discovered the fact that “very polished languages are generally deficient in Strength.”

In the earlier part there are interesting touches, such as that of “_degrading_” the style of the _Æneid_ into that of _The Pilgrim’s Progress_, which, curiously enough, occurs actually in a defence of a taste for romances of chivalry[315] and of the sea-coast of Bohemia. Part I. sect. xv., on the effects of tragedy, is almost purely ethical. In the parts—the best of the book—which deal directly with the title subjects (Parts II. and III.), an excellent demonstration[316] is made of the utter absurdity of that scheme of physical proportion which we formerly laughed at:[317] but the application, which might seem so tempting, to similar arbitrariness in judging of literature, is not made. Still more remarkable is the scantiness of the section on “The Beautiful in Sounds”[318] which should have brought the writer to our proper subject. Yet we can hardly regret that he says so little of it when we read that astonishing passage[319] in which the great Mr Burke has “observed” the affections of the body by Love, and has come to the conclusion that “the head reclines something on one side; the eyelids are more closed than usual, and the eyes roll gently with an inclination towards the object; the mouth is a little opened and the breath drawn slowly with now and then a low sigh; the whole body is composed, and the hands fall idly to the sides”—a sketch which I have always wished to have seen carried into line by the ingenious pencil of Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe.[320] A companion portrait of the human frame under the influence of poetic afflatus, in writer or in reader, would indeed have been funny, but scarcely profitable. In fact, the most that can be said for Burke, as for the generality of these æsthetic writers, is that the speculations recommended and encouraged could not but break up the mere ice of Neo-classic rule-judgment. They almost always go directly to the effect, the result, the event, the pleasure, the trouble, the thrill. That way perhaps lies the possibility of new error: but that way certainly lies also the escape from old.

[Sidenote: _The Scottish æsthetic-empirics: Alison._]

The trinitarian succession of Scottish æsthetic-empirics—Gerard, Alison, Jeffrey—could not with propriety be omitted here, but the same propriety would be violated if great space were given to them. They connect with, or at least touch, Burke and Smith on the one hand, Kames on the other: but they are, if rather more literary than the first two, very much less so than the third. All, in degrees modified perhaps chiefly by the natural tendency to “improve upon” predecessors, are associationists: and all display (though in somewhat decreasing measure as a result of the time-spirit) that sometimes amusing but in the end rather tedious tendency to substitute for actual reasoning long chains of only plausibly connected propositions, varied by more or less ingenious substitutions of definition and equivalence, which is characteristic of the eighteenth century. Gerard, the earliest, is the least important:[321] and such notice of Jeffrey as is necessary will come best in connection with his other critical work. Alison, as the central and most important of the three, and as representing a prevailing party for a considerable time, may have some substantive notice here.

[Sidenote: _The_ Essay on Taste.]

The _Essay on Taste_, which was originally published in 1790, and which was sped on its way by Jeffrey’s Review (the original form of the reviewer’s own essay) in 1811, had reached its sixth edition in 1825, and was still an authority, though it must by that time have begun to seem not a little old-fashioned, to readers of Coleridge and Hazlitt. It is rather unfortunately “dated” by its style, which—even at its original date something of a survival—is of the old “elegant” but distinctly artificial type of Blair: and, as has been hinted already, it abuses that eighteenth-century weakness for substituting a “combined and permuted” paraphrase of the proposition for an argument in favour of the fact. There is a very fair amount of force in its associationist considerations, though, as with all the devotees of the Association principle down to Mill, the turning round of the key is too often taken as equivalent to the opening of the lock. But its main faults, in more special connection with our subject, are two. [Sidenote: _Its confusions_] The first is a constant confusion of Beauty or Sublimity with Interest. Alison exhausts himself in proving that the associations of youth, affection, &c., &c., cause _love_ of the object—a truth no doubt too often neglected by the Neo-classic tribe, but accepted and expressed by men of intelligence, from the Lucretian _usus concinnat_ down to Maginn’s excellent “Don’t let any fool tell you that you will get tired of your wife; you are much more likely to get quite unreasonably fond of her.” But love and admiration, though closely connected, are not the same thing, and love and interest are still farther apart. Another confusion of Alison’s, very germane indeed to our subject, is that he constantly mixes up the beauty of a thing with the beauty of the description of it.

The most interesting point, however, about Alison is his halting between two opinions as to certain Neo-classic idols. His individual criticisms of literature are constantly vitiated by faults of the old arbitrariness, especially as to what is “low.” There is an astonishing lack of critical imagination in his objections to two Virgilian lines—

“Adde tot egregias urbes, operumque laborem . . . . . . . . Septemque una sibi muro circumdedit arces”—

as “cold,” “prosaic,” “tame,” “vulgar,” and “spiritless.” As if the image of the busy town after the country beauty were not the most poetic of contrasts in the first: and as if the City of the Seven Hills did not justly fire every Roman mind![322]

[Sidenote: _and arbitrary absurdities._]

These, however, might be due to “the act of God,” to sheer want of the quality on which the essay is written. A large part of the second volume exhibits the perils of that Castle Dangerous, the “half-way house,” unmistakably and inexcusably. Alison is dealing with the interesting but ticklish subject of human beauty, and, like Burke, is justly sarcastic on the “four noses from chin to breast,” “arm and a half from this to that” style of measurement. But he is himself still an abject victim of the type-theory. Beauty must suit the type; and its characteristics must have a fixed qualitative value—blue eyes being expressive of softness, dark complexions of melancholy, and so on. But here he is comparatively sober.[323] Later he indulges in the following: “The form of the Grecian nose is said to be originally beautiful, ... and in many cases it is undoubtedly so. Apply, however, this beautiful form to the countenance of the Warrior, the Bandit, the Martyr, or to any which is meant to express deep or powerful passion, and the most vulgar spectator would be sensible of dissatisfaction, if not of disgust.” Let us at least be thankful that Alison has freed us from being “the most vulgar spectator.” Why the Warrior, why the Martyr, why the deep and powerful man, should not have a Grecian nose I fail to conceive: but the incompatibility of a Bandit and a straight profile lands me in profounder abysses of perplexity. The artillery and the blue horse must yield their pride of place: the reason in that instance is, if not exquisite, instantly discernible. But nothing in all Neo-classic arbitrariness from Scaliger to La Harpe seems to me to excel or equal the Censure of the Bandit with the Grecian Nose as a monstrous Bandit, a disgustful object, hateful not merely to the elect but to the very vulgar.[324]

[Sidenote: _An interim conclusion on the æsthetic matter._]

Let us hear the conclusion of this whole æsthetic matter. Any man of rather more than ordinary intelligence—perhaps any man of ordinary intelligence merely—who has been properly educated from his youth up (as all men who show even a promise of ordinary intelligence should have been) in ancient and modern philosophy, who knows his Plato, his Aristotle, and his neo-Platonists, his Scholastics, his moderns from Bacon and Hobbes and Descartes downwards, can, if he has the will and the opportunity, compose a theory of æsthetics. That is to say, he can, out of the natural appetite towards poetry and literary delight which exists in all but the lowest and most unhappy souls, and out of that knowledge of concrete examples thereof which exists more or less in all, excogitate general principles and hypotheses, and connect them with immediate and particular examples, to such an extent as the Upper Powers permit or the Lower Powers prompt. If he has at the same time—a happy case of which the most eminent example up to the present time is Coleridge—a concurrent impulse towards actual “literary criticism,” towards the actual judgment of the actual concrete examples themselves, this theory _may_ more or less help him, need at any rate do him no great harm. _Mais celà n’est pas nécessaire_, as was said of another matter; and there are cases, many of them in fact, where the attention to such things has done harm.

For after all, once more Beyle, as he not seldom did, reached the _flammantia mœnia mundi_ when he said, in the character of his “Tourist” _eidolon_, “En fait de beau chaque homme a sa demi-aune.” Truth is not what each man troweth: but beauty is to each man what to him seems beautiful. You may better the seeming:—the fact is at the bottom of all that is valuable in the endlessly not-valuable chatter about education generally, and it excuses, to a certain extent, the regularity of Classicism, the selfish “culture” of the Goethean ideal, the extravagances of the ultra-Romantics. But yet

“A God, a God, the severance ruled,”

and you cannot bridge the gulfs that a God has set by any philosophastering theory.[325]

Yet although all this is, according to my opinion at least, absolutely true; although literary criticism has not much more to do with æsthetics than architecture has to do with physics and geology—than the art of the wine-taster or the tea-taster has to do with the study of the papillæ of the tongue and the theory of the nervous system generally, or with the botany of the vine and the geology of the vineyard; although, finally, as we have seen and shall see, the most painful and earnest attention to the science of the beautiful appears to be compatible with an almost total indifference to concrete judgment and enjoyment of the beautiful itself, and even with egregious misjudgment and failure to enjoy,—yet we cannot extrude this other _scienza nuova_ altogether, if only because of the almost inextricable entanglement of its results with those of criticism proper. And it is more specially to be dealt with in this particular place because, beyond all question, the direction of study to these abstract inquiries did contribute to the freeing of criticism from the shackles in which it had lain so long. Any new way of attention to any subject is likely to lead to the detection of errors in the old: and as the errors of Neo-classicism were peculiarly arbitrary and irrational, the “high _priori_ way” did certainly give an opportunity of discovering them from its superior height—the most superfluous groping among preliminaries and foundations gave a chance of unearthing the roots of falsehood. As in the old comparison Saul found a kingdom when he sought for his father’s asses, so it was at least possible for a man, while he was considering whether poetry is an _oratio sensitiva perfecta_, or whether there is a separate Logic of Phantasy, to have his eyes suddenly opened to the fact that Milton was not merely a fanatic and fantastic, with a tendency to the disgusting, and that Shakespeare was something more than an “abominable” mountebank.