CHAPTER VI.

THE STUDY OF LITERATURE.

BEARINGS OF THE CHAPTER—ENGLAND—THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE—OF SPENSER— CHAUCER—ELIZABETHAN MINORS—MIDDLE AND OLD ENGLISH—INFLUENCE OF ENGLISH ABROAD—THE STUDY OF FRENCH AT HOME AND ABROAD—OF ITALIAN— ESPECIALLY DANTE—OF SPANISH—ESPECIALLY CERVANTES—OF GERMAN.

[Sidenote: _Bearings of the chapter._]

Both in the last volume and in the present Book, repeated notice has been taken of the importance, as it seems to the present writer, of the widened and catholicised study of literature during the earlier eighteenth century. Not a few of the persons who have had places of more or less honour in the foregoing chapters—the twin Swiss schoolmasters, Lessing and the Germans almost without exception, almost all the English precursors, and some, though fewer, in other countries—have owed part of their position here to their share in this literary “Voyage round the World.” Some further exposition and criticism of the way in which the exploration itself worked may be looked for in the following Interchapter. Here we may give a little space to some such explorers who, though scarcely worthy of a place among critics proper, did good work in this direction, and to the main lines and subjects on and in regard to which the explorations were conducted.

[Sidenote: _England._]

The most interesting and directly important of the great literary countries in regard to this matter is undoubtedly England. Curiosity in Germany was much more widespread and much more industrious;[326] but in the first place the notable German explorers have already had their turn, and in the second, the width too often with them turned to indiscriminateness, and the industry to an intelligent hodman’s work. France, by providing such pioneers as Sainte-Palaye, and by starting the great _Histoire Littéraire_, contributed inestimably to the stimulation and equipment of foreign students; but it was some time before this work reacted directly on her own literature. We have spoken of Spain, where for a time the adherents of the older literature were, like their ancestors in the Asturias, but a handful driven to bay, instead of as in other countries an insurrectionary multitude gaining more and more ground; and the traditional Dante-and-Petrarch worship of Italy did at this time little real good. Both directly and indirectly—at home and, chiefly in the Shakespeare direction, abroad—England here deserves the chief place.

Her exercises on the subject may be advantageously considered under certain subject-headings: Shakespeare himself, Spenser, Chaucer, minor writers between the Renaissance and the Restoration, Middle English, and Anglo-Saxon. It is not necessary here to bestow special attention on Milton-study,[327] despite its immense influence both at home and abroad, because it was continuous. From Dryden to the present day, Milton has always been with the guests at any feast of English literature, sometimes, it is true, as a sort of skeleton, but much more often as one whom all delight more or less intelligently to honour.

[Sidenote: _The study of Shakespeare._]

It is not mere fancy which has discerned a certain turning-point of importance to literature, in the fact that between the Fourth Folio and the first critical or quasi-critical edition (Rowe’s) there intervened (1685-1709) not quite a full quarter of a century. The successive editions of Rowe himself, Pope, Theobald, Hanmer, Warburton, and Johnson not merely have a certain critical interest in themselves, not merely illustrate the progress of criticism in a useful manner, but bring before us, as nothing else could do, the way in which Shakespeare himself was kept before the minds of the three generations of the eighteenth century.[328]

[Sidenote: _Of Spenser._]

Spenser’s fortunes in this way coincided with Shakespeare’s to a degree which cannot be quite accidental. The third folio of the _Faerie Queene_ appeared in 1679, and the first critical edition—that of Hughes—in 1715. But the study-stage—not the theatrical, considering a list of adapters which runs from Ravenscroft through Shadwell up to Dryden—had spared Shakespeare the attentions of the Person of Quality.[329] Before Hughes he had received those of Prior, a person of quality[330] much greater; but Prior had spoilt the stanza, and had travestied the diction almost worse than he did in the case of the _Nut-Browne Maid_. He would not really count in this story at all if his real services in other respects did not show that it was a case of “time and the hour,” and if his remarks in the Preface to _Solomon_ did not show, very remarkably, a genuine admiration of Spenser himself, and a strong dissatisfaction with the end-stopped couplet. And so of Hughes’ edition: yet perhaps the import of the saying may escape careless readers. At first one wonders why a man like Prior should have taken the trouble even to spoil the Spenserian stanza; why an editor like Hughes should have taken the much greater trouble to edit a voluminous poet whose most ordinary words he had to explain, whose stanza he also thought “defective,” and whose general composition he denounced as “monstrous” and so forth; why all the imitators[331] should have imitated what most of them at any rate seem to have regarded as chiefly parodiable. Yet one soon perceives that _mens agitat molem_, that the lump was leavened, that, as in one case at any rate (Shenstone’s), is known to be the fact, “those who came to scoff remained to pray.” They were dying of thirst, though they did not know how near the fountain was; and though they at first mistook that fountain and even profaned it, the healing virtues conquered them at last.

[Sidenote: _Chaucer._]

The same coincidence does not fail wholly even with Chaucer, of whom an edition, little altered from Speght’s, appeared in 1687, while the very ill-inspired but still intentionally critical attempt of Urry came out in 1721, Dryden’s wonderful modernisings again coming between. But Chaucer was to wait for Tyrwhitt, more than fifty years later (1775) before he met any full scholarly recognition, and this was natural enough. There had been no real change in English prosody since Spenser, any more than since Shakespeare: and the archaism of the former was after all an archaism not less deliberate, though much better guided by genius, than that of any of his eighteenth-century imitators. To the appreciation of Chaucer’s prosody one simple but, till turned, almost insuperable obstacle existed in the valued final _e_, while his language, his subjects, and his thought were separated from modern readers by the great gulf of the Renaissance,—a gulf indeed not difficult to bridge after a fashion, but then unbridged.

[Sidenote: _Elizabethan minors._]

Invaluable as the study of Shakespeare was in itself, its value was not limited to this direct gain. Partly to illustrate him and partly from a natural extension, his fellow-dramatists were resorted to,—indeed Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher had never lost hold of the acting stage. A few of the greatest, Marlowe especially, were somewhat long in coming to their own; but with others it was different, and the publication of Dodsley’s _Old Plays_, at so early a date as 1744, shows with what force the tide was setting in this direction. Reference was made in the last volume to the very remarkable _Muses’ Library_ which Oldys began even earlier, though he did not find encouragement enough to go on with it,[332] and the more famous adventure of the _Reliques_ was followed up in the latter part of the century by divers explorations of the treasures of the past, notably that of the short-lived Headley.[335]

[Sidenote: _Middle and Old English._]

Nay, about the close of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth it looked as if early Middle English and Anglo-Saxon themselves might come in for a share of attention, as a result of the labours of such men as Hearne and Hickes. But the Jacobite antiquary was interested mainly in the historical side of literature, and Hickes, Wanley, and the rest were a little before their time, though that time itself was sure to come. And before it came the all but certain forgeries of Macpherson, the certain forgeries of Chatterton, the sham ballads with which, after Percy’s example, Evans and others loaded their productions of the true, all worked (bad as some of the latter might be) for good in the direction of exciting and whetting the literary appetite for things not according to the Gospel of Neo-Classicism.

[Sidenote: _Influence of English abroad._]

The study of English literature abroad was somewhat limited in range, but it had an almost incalculable effect. That German criticism would have been made anyhow is certain enough; but in actual fact it would be impossible to find any actual influences in its making more powerful than the influence of Milton upon the Zürichers, and the influence of Shakespeare upon Lessing, and all men of letters after him. These two great (if not exactly twin) brethren, from the date of their introduction by that strongest of ushers Voltaire, exercised, as we have seen, in France an influence constantly (at any rate in the case of Shakespeare) increasing, though rejected again and again with horror and contumely by those who seemed to be pillars. Of older English writers few except Bacon and Locke had much influence abroad—and what they exercised was not literary. But the writers of the eighteenth century were extremely powerful. Callières very nearly lived to see the time when France herself, forgetting all about the trinity of _nations polies_, respectfully read, and even sedulously imitated, the people to whom he had thoughtfully given permission to write in Latin in order that they might have some literary chance. Nor was this a mere passing _engouement_: nor was it limited to the great Queen Anne men, Addison, Pope, and Swift, who were themselves (at least the first two) in many ways germane to French taste, and had borrowed much from France. Thomson, an innovator and sower of revolution in his own country, was warmly welcomed in France: about Richardson the whole Continent went mad. Sterne excited the strongest interest both in France and Germany. The odd French taste for the lugubrious sententiousness of Young was rather later, and so was the well-known and slightly ludicrous adoration of _Ossian_. But throughout the century, until the French Revolution, English literature was not merely the subject of respectful study and imitation in Germany but of quite lively interest in France, of an interest almost startling when it is contrasted with the supercilious blindness (for a man who cannot use his eyes may use his eyebrows) of the age of Boileau.[336]

[Sidenote: _The study of French at home and abroad._]

For the moment—and the fact connects itself sharply and decisively with the delay of their critical reconstruction—the French busied themselves less, at least in appearance, with the exhumation and investigation of their own literature. Nowhere was more solid work really done; nowhere were the foundations of mediæval study, in particular, laid once for all with such admirable thoroughness. But for a long time the workers cast their bread upon the waters: and the waters in turn cast it mostly upon alien shores. The mighty industry of Ducange—in method and quality as well as time of the seventeenth century, in effect scarcely to bear full fruit till the nineteenth—had been entirely included within the seventeenth itself. That of Sainte-Palaye, which has been alluded to, dates from the third quarter of the eighteenth. The magnificent _Histoire Littéraire de La France_, not finished yet, but unresting as unhasting, was begun as early as 1733; of the Frères Parfait we have also spoken; Barbazan’s invaluable collection of the _Fabliaux_ appeared in 1756. But, except it may be here and there on a man of genius like Fontenelle, those publications had no general literary effect. How little they had may perhaps best be gauged by the fact that the travestied and rococo _Corps d’Extraits de Romans_ of the Comte de Tressan, published long after all of them, _had_ such an effect, and did rather more harm than good. Still, the two giants of the French Renaissance, earlier and later, Rabelais and Montaigne, always kept a hold, and did for France something, though less, of the good which the great quartette—Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton—did for England. Ronsard, as we have seen, kept, in the worst of times, the respect and the appreciation of men so different in date and character as Fénelon and Marmontel: while, if the celebrated “worship of Lubricity” had something to do with the resuscitation of others by Prosper Marchand, &c., let this be counted for righteousness even to the slippery goddess who has so little!

With the eternal exception of Germany, French literature during this time was not much studied abroad in its older divisions, and had not much assistance to offer, in the direction of which we are now speaking, in its more modern. When a man like Sterne touched the former, it was probably for the reasons so handsomely palliated in the last sentence of the last paragraph: and few others touched it at all. The influence of the modern literature of France, exaggerated as it may have been, had yet been considerable enough to deprive it of all value as an _alterative_ save in the cases of exceptional and outlying writers like La Fontaine and Fontenelle, and to some extant Marivaux, the last of whom had himself already derived much from England, if he was to give much back to her.[337] In other parts of Europe this influence was no doubt still very great: it conditioned, as we have seen, the powerful action of Lessing, both in the way of attraction and in that of repulsion. But of the persons who attracted and inspired Lessing, Diderot, however unlike Bentham, had something of the Benthamic fate of requiring transportation and transformation before he could be really operative; and the gospel of Marmontel was altogether too inconsistent and transitional to be very effective. Rousseau, of course, to mention him yet once more, is epoch-making enough in himself. But Rousseau is, on the purely literary side, rather an immense propelling force than an origin: and it is not to be forgotten, though it often has been, that the _Confessions_ and the _Rêveries_, the most important of his works as literature, did not appear till after his death. As for _La Nouvelle Héloïse_, it is a question whether it is nearly so much a literary origin as _Manon Lescaut_, its elder by a generation.

[Sidenote: _Of Italian._]

The effect of Italian literature in Italy was, it has been said, not at the time great; the contrast between the study of Shakespeare at this time in England and the study of Dante in Italy has, I have no doubt, defrayed the expense of many a literary-historical comparison.[338] But Italian—though it had lost something of the prerogative importance which it had once, and justly, and for a long time held—retained a great, and, as regards the products of its best time, a wholly salutary, influence over the rest of Europe. That rather treacherous turning of French critics on their Italian masters, which Hurd so acutely noticed, had, like other things evil, its soul of goodness in it. Ariosto, and Tasso, and Petrarch, though not Dante, had entered so thoroughly into the _corpus_ of European literature that they could not be driven out by any scoffs of Boileau or scorns of Voltaire. And when people began to examine them for themselves there was, with the different set of tide and wind which we have seen throughout this book, a very good chance, almost a certainty, of a healthy voyage back. There was all the more chance of this that the strong Renaissance admixture in the authors of the _Orlando_ and the _Gerusalemme_, the at least not strongly mediæval character of Petrarch, made them more suitable for eighteenth-century consumption than the pure milk of the mediæval word. The argument which Hurd himself put about Spenser and Milton—“_These_ were no barbarians; _these_ were men of real learning, of polished and statesman-like society; and _they_ liked romance”—was applicable with even greater force to the Captain of the Garfagnana and the friend of Leo X., to the familiar (if also victim) of princes and princesses at Ferrara, and the Laureate elect of Rome.

[Sidenote: _Especially Dante._]

There can indeed be no doubt that throughout the eighteenth century it was from these two poets that men drew most of their ideas of Romance itself. Dryden, on the eve of that century, betrays the fact in his own case by his designation of our own Guenevere under her Italian name of Ginevra. Scott, at its close and far beyond it, wide as was his knowledge of the true and real mediæval romance itself, is still haunted by the Italians. While as for Petrarch (to put out of question the fact that he is of all time, if not of the highest of all time), he means the sonnet; and the sonnet is anti-classical from centre to circumference. Even if Dante was somewhat neglected, the fact of Gray’s attraction to Nicholls at their first meeting, because he found that the young man read that Florentine, is evidence for exception as well as for rule. At any rate, a man who studied Italian, whether he were Englishman or Frenchman, German or from Mesopotamy, might always, and must certainly not seldom, be brought into contact with the _Commedia_. And when that contact is established in a fitting soul, “A drear and dying sound, Affrights the Flamens” of Neo-classicism “at their service quaint.” You read no more in Boileau that day, nor any day thereafter by preference and as a disciple.

[Sidenote: _Of Spanish._]

So also in Spain the home study of the home literature—though as above noted its results were not by any means nugatory—was far inferior to the effect of the study of that literature abroad. The general and half-blind impulse towards collection and reproduction, however, was especially important,—hardly even in England, putting the works of the very greatest out of the question, did anything appear more precious than the _Poesias Anteriores_: and Spain had, in three different divisions and directions, inestimable and inexhaustible treasures for the foreign student, especially for the foreign student who felt the gall and the cramp of the classical strait-waistcoat and wished to cast it off. The first of these in order of time was the ballad matter provided by the _Cancioneros_. The second was the Spanish drama, and the reflections which it had drawn from native poets and critics. The third was the work of Cervantes and the picaresque novel.

The first of these were valuable not only as all the ballads of Europe were valuable, not merely because of the diametrical opposition of their tone and spirit to that of the “classical” poetry, but because of their remarkable _differentia_ as ballads themselves. In the first place, they[339] are the only _Southern_ ballads available,—for Italy, though not infertile in folk-song, does not appear to have had any ballads proper, and those of Modern Greece are of very doubtful earliness, and were not known till long afterwards. In the second place, the part-Oriental part-African admixture, which makes _cosas de España_ so interesting and so powerful, appears in them to the full. And, lastly, there is a certain _largeur_ about them—a national quality, whether excited by conflict with Charlemagne or by conflict with the Moors, which is lacking in all other ballads known at least to the present writer. Even the split between North and South Britain is a case of mere family misunderstanding, compared with the secular stand of the great Peninsula, at bay against Christian invaders from the North and Paynim foes in the household. And it is not unnoteworthy that, with the exception of _Chevy Chase_, not one of the very best of ballads in English is inspired by the quarrel of Englishman and Scot.

The influence of the Spanish drama and of the more or less conscious fight waged in Spain itself over its principles had also, especially in Germany, great play, and should have had greater. It reached a climax no doubt in the somewhat capricious and ill-informed, the certainly intemperate, will-worship of the Schlegels, which we have not yet discussed: but as we have seen, Lessing was aware of it, and there is no doubt that it had great effect on at least the “Sturmers-and-Drangers.” It ought, we say, probably to have had much more influence than it actually exercised; but with the decay of Spanish political power the study of the Spanish language had been steadily going out in Europe, never, as yet, to revive. The valuable and interesting Spanish critical discussions on the subject were almost unknown; and the theatre itself was never thoroughly studied, till the investigations of Schack, a German, and Ticknor, an American, in the middle of the nineteenth century. Yet it is not necessary to spend many words on showing the immense germinal and alterative power which this study had, and in particular the value which it possessed as seconding the influence of the English drama, with just sufficient difference to make the seconding a real reinforcement, and not a mere repetition of attack by the same troops. The obsession of the sealed pattern, the illusion of the undeviating rule, might in a Frenchman (for strongest instance) survive the reading, or at least the hearing, of the “barbarian” Shakespeare: but it must have been seriously shaken by such writers of a “polished” nation as Tirso, and Lope, and Calderon, not to speak of minors like Alarcon and Rojas.

[Sidenote: _Especially Cervantes._]

Yet there can be no doubt that the greatest debt owed by the eighteenth century, at least, to Spanish goes to the credit of one great man in the main, and of a compartment of literature to which that great man, though transcending it, belonged, in the second—in other words, to Cervantes and the Spanish novel. The “picaresque” variety of this novel had early affected both France and England: and it had virtue enough in it to affect successive generations, directly or indirectly, from that of Scarron and Head, through that of Le Sage, down to that of Smollett. Abundance of things may be said against the picaresque style: but of one credit nobody can possibly deprive it—that it was the first kind in Europe to combine the ordinary life of the _fabliau_ (and in part the _novela_) with the length, the variety, the quasi-epic conformation and powers of the Romance. And while all the best of this quality appeared in _Don Quixote_ itself, that mighty book left out almost all the bad and weak concomitants, and added merit and powers of which the _Lazarillos de Tormes_ and the _Marcos de Obregon_ had not a vestige. As we have seen, Cervantes was something of a Neo-classic himself in critical principles, and something (though not so much as has been thought) of an enemy of Romance in purpose. But his performance was fatal to his teaching in more ways than one or two: while he certainly gave Fielding the idea of the modern novel even as a matter of theory and schedule.

[Sidenote: _Of German._]

If we say less here of Germany it is not because there is less to say, but because, in the first place, much of it has been and much more will be said, elsewhere; and because, in the second, we should have to give an abstract of the German literary history of the century. It was not till very late—till almost the eve of the nineteenth—that German literature had much effect abroad, or indeed that there was much German literature to have any effect. But quite early the Germans began to study their own older writers; and early and late they, as we have seen, simply flung themselves on the literature of other countries. It is indeed open to any one to contend that from the first (some century and a half ago) to the present day they overdosed themselves with this as with other studies,—that, taking to it before Germany had really acquired a continuous and important literary idiosyncrasy of its own, they have always lacked the _pou sto_, and have wasted their labour in consequence. But this is another and for us an irrelevant question. That they form no exception to the rule illustrated in this chapter, and that they not only took the medicine in huge doses themselves, but prepared it and handed it on to others, as if they wished to be the literary apothecaries of Europe, this is undeniable.[340]

INTERCHAPTER VII.

It becomes somewhat more difficult to twist and twine the threads of our Interchapters as we come to the complexity and diversity of modern times; but, in the same proportion, each web or yarn becomes more important as link and guide-rope of the whole History.

The present period—or stage, for it has more logical than chronological unity—may seem at first sight extremely confused; composed as it is of constituents separated from their countrymen, their contemporaries, and in some cases even their fellow-workers, whom we have dealt with formerly. But these constituents have in reality the greatest of all unities, a unity (whether conscious or unconscious does not matter a jot) of _purpose_.

“One port, methought, alike they sought, One purpose hold where’er they fare.”

The port was the Fair Haven of Romanticism, and the purpose was to distinguish “that which is established because it is right, from that which is right because it is established,” as Johnson himself formulates it. And now, of course, the horse-leeches of definition will ask me to define Romanticism, and now, also, I shall do nothing of the sort, and borrow from the unimpeachable authority of M. Brunetière[341] my reason for not doing it. What most of the personages of this book sought or helped (sometimes without at all seeking) to establish is Romanticism, and Romanticism is what they sought or helped to establish.

In negative and by contrast, as usual, there is, however, no difficulty in arriving at a sort of jury-definition, which is perhaps a good deal better to work to port with than the aspiring but rather untrustworthy mast-poles of “Renascence of Wonder” and the like. We have indeed seen, throughout the last volume, that the curse and the mischief of Neo-classicism lay in the tyranny of the Definition itself. You had no sooner satisfied yourself that Poetry was such and such a thing, that it consisted of such and such narrowly delimited Kinds, that its stamped instruments and sealed patterns were this and that, than you proceeded to apply these propositions inquisitorially, excommunicating or executing delinquents and nonconformists. The principal uniformity amid the wide diversities of the new criticism was that, without any direct concert, without any formulated anti-creed, they all tended to remove the bolts and the bars, to antiquate the stipulations, to make the great question of criticism not “What have you proposed to do, and how have you proposed to do it?” but “What is this that you have _done_? and is it good?” But they never, in any instance, formulated the abolition of restrictions, as, for instance, we shall find Hugo doing in the Preface to the _Orientales_. They had almost invariably some special mediate or immediate object in view—in Hurd’s case to get rid of the disqualification of the “Gothic,” in Lessing’s to get rid of the domination of French. Even Diderot’s Impressionism—the most important and pregnant phenomenon of the whole—is a matter of practice, not of theory, of infinite local explorations, not of a Pisgah-sight. The whole tendency, as we have indicated in the sub-title of the book, is rather to dissolve what exists than to put anything definite in its place.

The survey of their actual accomplishment,[342] therefore, may be best executed, for the purpose of corresponding with and continuing those formerly given, by first considering more generally the main new critical engines—Æsthetic inquiry and the Study of Literature—which have formed in detail the subjects of the last two chapters; then by summarising, as usual, the most significant performances of national groups and individuals; and, lastly, by indicating, as best may be done, the point to which the stage has brought us.

The advantages and importance of the wider and more abstract æsthetic inquiry in reconstituting or reorganising criticism should be pretty obvious. The worst fault of the later Neo-classicism, in its corruption, was that it tended to become wholly _irrational_—a mere reference to classification; that even its appeal to Nature, and to Reason herself, had got utterly out of _rapport_ with real nature, with true reason. Now the construction of a general theory of the Sublime and Beautiful— however partial or however chimerical the inquiry into the appeals of different arts and different divisions of the same art—could not but tend—however indirectly, however much in some cases against the very will of the inquiry—to unsettle, and sometimes to shatter, the conventional hypotheses and theories. “Why?” and “Why not?” must force themselves constantly on such an inquirer; and, as has been said more than once or twice, “Why?” and “Why not?” are battering-rams, predestined, automatic, irresistible, to conventional judgments of all sorts. It was, indeed, not impossible for a person sufficiently stupid, or sufficiently ingenious, to construct an æsthetic which, somehow or other, should fit in with the accepted ideas.[343] But what stupid people do does not count for much in the long-run, despite the proverbial invincibility of stupidity for the time. And the ingenious person, unless his perverseness were truly diabolical, must sometimes hit upon truth which would explode all his convention.

At the same time Æsthetics have proved, and might by an observer of sufficient detachment have from the first been seen to be likely to prove, a very dangerous auxiliary

to Criticism, if not even a Stork for a Log. In the first place, there was the danger—present in fact from the first, impending from before the very first—of fresh arbitrary rules being set up in the place of the old ones,—of the old infinitely mischievous question, “Does the poet please _as he ought to please_?” being juggled into the place of the simple “Does he please?” No form of abstract inquiry can escape this danger: and that is why, save in matter of the pure intellect, abstract inquiries should always be suspected. Form your theory and conduct your observations of the æsthetic sense, of “the Beautiful,” of the mediate axioms of this or that literary kind, as carefully, as impartially, with as wide a range and view, as you may—these perilous generalisations and abstractions will always bring you sooner or later into contact and conflict with the royal irresponsibility, or (as some may hold it) the anarchic individualism of the human senses, and tastes, and artistic powers. You will hamper your feet with a network of axioms and definitions; you will burden your back with a whole Italian-image-man’s rack-full of types. It is somewhat improbable that you will be a Lessing: yet even a Lessing loses himself in inquiries as to what “_a_ jealous woman’s” revenge will be, what “_an_ ambitious woman’s revenge will be.” Shakespeare (for that Shakespeare had very much to do with the whole portraiture of Margaret, from the first gracious and playful scene with Suffolk to the sombre and splendid triumph over Elizabeth Woodville, I at least have no doubt) has shown us in Margaret of Anjou the revenge and the other passions of a woman who is at once ambitious, jealous, the victim perhaps not of actually adulterous but certainly of rather extra-conjugal love, yet loyal to her husband’s position if not to himself, a tigress to her enemies and to her young alike, a rival in varying circumstance, an almost dispassionate sibyl reflecting and foretelling the woes of her rivals. You can no more disentangle all these threads, and get the passion of this type and the passion of that separate, than Psyche could have done her task without the ants. Yet, early and crude as is the work, it is all right, it is all there. And Æsthetics are not the ants.

A much more dangerous result of addiction to the æsthetic side of criticism, mainly or exclusively, is that you get by degrees away from the literary matter altogether, and resign yourself to the separation with all the philosophy of Marryat’s captain, when he gave orders first that he should be called when the last ship of his convoy was out of sight behind, and then when the first hove in sight again. I remember once hearing a lecture, and a very interesting one, on Hegel’s idea of tragedy as illustrated in Shakespeare, delivered by a most admirable scholar, then professor in one great University, and now professor in one than which there is no greater. It was very ingenious, very stimulating; but I remember thinking at the close of it that it might have been delivered just as well if we were in such an infinite state of misery as to have not a line of an actual tragedy of Shakespeare, but only abstracts and arguments, as with some of the ancients. In the attraction to the æsthetic, the moral, the dramaturgic side and the like, an absolute break of contact with the literary may come about. We have seen that this is the case even with Lessing, and it is constantly the case with German critics and with their English followers. The “word,” the “expression,” sinks out of the plane of the critic’s purview. His Æsthetics become Anæsthetics, and benumb his literary senses and sensibilities.

Recurrence to one example of this may suffice. When I see Lessing called “the King of Criticism” I always think, great as is my opinion of him, of that judgment of _Soliman the Second_. Here is a thing which, on its own lines and specification, is, and is practically allowed by the critic to be, a masterpiece. But he will not accept those lines. It is a satiric criticism of life, of the actual nature, morals, _mœurs, mores, ethe_, of men; he wants it to be a didactic exhortation to what those morals ought (according to him) to be. He does not find Soliman’s butterfly veerings from the sentiment of Elvire to the mere courtesanship of Delia, and from this latter to the grisettish or soubrettish minxery of Roxelane, attractive or excusable. He does not like this minxishness; there are even signs that he has a private antipathy towards the _petit nez retroussé_ which plays so great a part in the story. His criticism is in consequence not a criticism at all; it is a mere explosion of unreasoning dislike—at best one of “nervous impression,” as Flaubert said to Sainte-Beuve. And if, by a juggle of words, it be retorted that Lessing is a dogmatic not an æsthetic critic, this retort will fall blunted from the simple rectification that he is a dogmatist of æsthetics and an æsthetician in dogma.

The benefits, therefore, of the rise of Æsthetics as a special study were far from unmixed, though the influence of that rise was very great. It is otherwise with the Study of Literature, to which we have also given a short and summary chapter above. Here it was all but impossible that extension of consideration—from modern and classical to mediæval, from certain arbitrarily preferred modern languages to others—should fail to do good. Prejudice, the bane of Criticism, received, in the mere and necessary progress of this study, a notice to quit. This notice took various forms and was exhibited and attended to in various ways. England, France, and Germany exhibited these differences with a difference itself very interesting. But they can be reduced to a few heads with very little difficulty.

The first of these is the attempt to judge the work presented, not according to abstract rules, derived or supposed to be derived from ancient critical authority, nor according to its agreement or disagreement with the famous work of the past. To some extent this revolutionary proceeding was forced upon our students by the very nature of the case—it was one of the inevitable benefits of the extension of study, and especially of the return to mediæval literature. To attempt to justify that literature, as Addison, with more or less seriousness, had done, by showing that its methods were after all not so very different from those of Homer, or even Virgil, was in some cases flatly impossible, in most extremely difficult; while in almost all it carried with it a distinct suspicion of burlesque. There was no need of any _dislike_ of the classics; but it must have been and it was felt that mediæval and later literature must be handled _differently_.[344] And so—insensibly no doubt

at first—there came into Criticism the sovereign and epoch-making recognition of the “leaden rule”—of the fact that literature comes first and criticism after—that criticism must adjust itself to literature, and not _vice versa_. Very likely not one of the men we are here discussing would have accepted this doctrine _simpliciter_:[345] indeed it is the rarest thing to find it accepted even a century and a half after their time, except in eccentric and extravagant forms. But it lay at the root of all their practice.

Further, that practice, deprived of the crutches and go-carts of rule and precedent, was perforce obliged to follow the natural path and play of the feelings and faculties—to ask itself first, “Do I like this?” then, “How do I like it?” then, “What qualities are there in it which make me like it?” Again, these questions may not have formulated themselves quite clearly to any of our group. Again, it would be hard to name many critics since who have at once fearlessly and faithfully kept them before their eyes. But, again also, these were the questions which, however blindly and stumblingly, they followed as their guiding stars, and these have been the real questions of criticism ever since.

Postponing the discussion of the relationship of this new criticism to the old, we may turn to another point of its _differentia_. This is that students of mediæval literature especially were—again perforce and whether they would or no—driven to make excursions into the region of Literary History, and, what is more, of Comparative Literary History. They found themselves face to face with forms—the ballad and the romance being the chief of them—which were either not represented at all or represented very scantily and obscurely in classical literature, while they had been entirely and almost pointedly neglected by classical criticism. They could not but see that, both in mediæval literature proper and in modern, there were other forms and subvarieties of

literature, in drama,[346] in poetry, in prose, which differed extremely from anything in ancient letters. In examining these, with no help from Aristotle, or Longinus, or Horace, they could not but pursue the natural method of tracing or endeavouring to trace them to their origins, and in so doing they could not but become conscious, not merely of the history— so long interrupted by a mist like that of Mirza’s vision—of English or French or whatsoever literature itself, but also more dimly of the greater map of European literature, as it spread and branched from the breaking up of the Roman Empire onwards. And this study of Literary History was in the main, this study of Comparative Literary History was almost absolutely, again a new thing.

Nor were the actual critical results which, either expressly or incidentally, came from the exercitations of these critics of less importance. The turn of the tide may nowhere be seen so strongly as in Joseph Warton’s audacious question whether Pope, the god of the idolatry of the earlier part of the century in England, was a poet, or at least a great poet, at all; in Lessing’s proposition to call the great Corneille, just re-habilitated as he had been by Voltaire himself, Corneille the Monstrous. These things indeed were, like all revolutionary manifestos, extravagances, yet the extravagance was not only symptomatic but to a great extent healthy. It was probably impossible as a matter of tactics—it would certainly have been unnatural as a matter of history and human nature—to refrain from carrying the war into the enemies’ country, from laying siege to the enemies’ stronghold. And this was invited by the ignorant and insulting depreciation which had long been, and long continued to be, thrown upon one of the most charming and precious divisions of the literature and thought of the world.

But there were more sober fruits of the revolt. Hurd might

indeed have developed further that doctrine of Romantic as independent of Classical Unity, which is one of the most important discoveries or at least pronouncements of any time, which practically established a _modus vivendi_ between all rational Neo-classic and all rational Romantic criticism, and which has never yet been worked out as it deserves. Percy’s _Essay on Alliterative Metre_, despite the comparative narrowness of its basis, is both acute and successful; and falls in interestingly with that more intelligent devotion to Prosody which has up to the present time given better results than any “metacritic,” and has plenty yet to give. Thomas Warton, though often a fanciful and sometimes an insufficiently equipped critic, was a critic both alert and sound. Diderot might with advantage have concentrated that “encyclopædic head” of his on fewer subjects, have been less anarchic, more subject to harmless convention. But there are few better examples in literature of the “strong young devil shut up in an iron box” and made to do work—as the Bulgarian peasant defined the locomotive to an English engineer who went to the Balkans after the war of 1878. We have not feared to speak of Lessing’s shortcomings, but though it is possible to speak indiscreetly and unadvisedly of his merits in kind and point, who shall overpraise them in degree? And the bent of almost all of them turned, and turned most beneficially, especially in the case of Warton, to History.

The necessary retrospect of the achievement of groups and countries can be given at no excessive length. The Germans had begun criticism later than any other of the great nations; and they had hardly passed the mere “rhetoric” stage of it when France was leading Europe in the later Neo-classic phase; when England was already, under the half-unknowing leadership of Dryden, sighting the modern conditions; and when Italy and Spain were passing into a sort of temporary dotage or trance on the subject. But during the seventeenth century the influence of England had been exchanged for that of France, and this latter, itself originally recommended by Opitz with a view to the exhibition of Pléiade medicine, had got this prescription changed, by a sort of legerdemain of Time the Conjurer, for the very different one of Correctness _à la_ Boileau. Yet the doses of Ronsardism had had great effect already, and the strong romantic leaven in the Germans, their pupillary state, their philosophical leanings—above all, that restless, irresistible, unwearied craving for knowledge which characterised them—prevented them from abiding in the faith of Gottsched for any length of time. We have traced the gropings and tentatives, the successive stages of Bodmer and those about him, the arrested promise of J. E. Schlegel, that Marcellus of German criticism, and we saw how _Enfin Lessing vint_.

There can, for once, be no harm in attributing part at least of the deserved prominence of this critic in German criticism to the fact that he not only exhibited eminently the two great characteristics of his countrymen in the department,—unwearied industry in study and philosophic disposition of his results,—but combined with this exhibition merits which they much more rarely possess—an intimate though irregular appreciation, a great intellectual alacrity, and, above all, a really good and pleasant style. He did not, unfortunately, help to propagate these latter qualities so much as he helped to establish and corroborate the former: but with the limitations noted above, he did a great deal in almost all ways. The opinion which assigns to him, everywhere in literature more or less, but in criticism most of all, the principal share in that enormous dead-lift of German letters which marks the middle of the eighteenth century, and which, _exceptis excipiendis_, may be said to have made Goethe and Schiller possible, is unquestionably right. And though he did not quite live to see the time when Germany had begun to repay the enormous debts which, before his lifetime and during its earlier part, she had accumulated towards the rest of Europe, he almost saw this: and he had almost more to do than any other with the counter-accumulation of the necessary funds.

Yet he himself was, as we have seen, a debtor: and to the old creditor, France. The critical history, during this period, of France herself is the most curious of the three divisions which here suffice. In Germany, Neo-classicism, which had taken no deep root, was easily uprooted. In England, though various causes, and especially the immense influence of the “dead hand” of Addison and Pope, and the living one of Johnson, kept back the Romantic growth in a salutary fashion, that growth itself was as steady as it was slow. In the very year after Gray died, Coleridge was born: and the lives and work of these two men mark one unhasting, unresting line of Romantic progress. But in France (as the two parallel views given in the second chapter of the last book, and the fourth chapter of this, will have shown), although there is no real confusion, the strands are most puzzlingly twisted during the whole of this selfsame period, till those of the classical colour break and ravel away into almost nothing just before the close. This is due, no doubt, in part to the extreme strength of what we may call the Neo-classic _establishment_ in France—to the fact that the strong places of literature are held by classical garrisons, who take good care to let no unorthodox recruit set foot in them if it can possibly be helped. But it is due also to that essential classicality which has been noticed, and fully acknowledged, in the French literary temper. It certainly exists: and it accounts not merely for the stubborn resistance, until its sudden _débâcle_, of Classicism itself, but also for the peculiarities of the various greater critics whom we have noticed.

Of the three greatest of these (for Madame de Staël cannot, I think, really make out her right to cut in) Joubert excels in aphoristic and perennial quality, somewhat (not wholly) independent of time, and Chateaubriand expresses more fully than any one the tendencies (even in him much chequered by others) which he was to live to see triumphant without being quite glad thereat. But Diderot is, in principle and motive force, however eccentrically working, if not in actual expressed example, the most considerable of the three, and perhaps the most considerable single figure included in this Book. For in him, as was said above, we first see as a pervading and guiding, if not explicitly asserted, principle that Impressionism which (though the word has been variously used[347]) is, in its simplest and most natural meaning, perhaps more

appropriate to “Modern” criticism than any other single term. As we have seen and put from many different sides, the general tendency of ancient and of Neo-classic critics was always to separate the work as much as possible from the worker, and (except as regarded oratory and partly drama) still more from the hearer and reader—this being done for the freedom of considering it, not so much in and by itself, as in relation to ideal and _a priori_ schedules of its kind, quality, and appurtenant rules. There had been partial and half-conscious revolts or declensions from this in individuals, from Longinus to Castelvetro, and from Castelvetro to Fontenelle. But Diderot is almost the first person who habitually, naturally, as a matter of course, isolates the work _with himself_, considers it in its form and pressure as printed on _him_. And this is almost, or altogether, a new Covenant of Criticism.

The performance of England here was not so fruitful of great critical personalities—for her greatest, Johnson, was in intention, though by no means wholly in performance, on the other side. Nor, though the English Æsthetics were influential abroad as well as at home, can they be ranked very high. In the other chief branch, however, of that practical operation which has been noticed, the rediscovery and revaluation of the capital of the literature for critical purposes, England takes the most important position of all—less by the excellence of the workers (though this was not inconsiderable) than in consequence of the richness of their material. The French, except from the antiquarian side, were still neglecting, and even for the most part despising, their own old treasures, which were themselves scarcely so great as those of England: and the Germans, though not neglectful of what they had, had less, and dealt with it in a less thoroughly literary spirit. But Gray, Percy, Hurd, the Wartons (especially Thomas), and all the painful and meritorious editors from Theobald to Tyrwhitt, were engaged, independently in intention, but in fact systematically enough, not merely in clearing away rubbish and bringing treasures to light, but in combating the prejudices and doing away with the delusions and ignorances which had led to the neglect and contempt of those treasures themselves.

Even those other nations which directly contributed little or nothing[348] to criticism during the time, contributed, as we have seen, something also under this head by examination of their own literatures, and something more by their adoption and following of English, or of French, or (towards the end) of German also. Towards any wide comparative study of literature, indeed, this period made but a far-off approach: that could not come till later, though it is the glory of Germany, in the second division of the time, with which we shall deal presently, to have begun the attack itself, and made it something more. But the study of the individual literature at different periods has very much the same kind of widening and altering power as the study of different literatures, and this at least was vigorously pursued.

For after all it is History which is at the root of the critical—as of almost every other—matter. To judge you must know,—must know not merely the so-called best that has been thought and done and written (for how are you to know the best till you know the rest?), but to know all, or something of all, that has been written, and done, and thought by the undulating and diverse animal called Man. His undulation and his diversity will play you tricks still, know you never so widely; but the margin of error will be narrower, the more widely you know. The most perfect critical work that we have—that of Aristotle and that of Longinus—is due in its goodness to the thoroughness of the writers’ knowledge of what was open to them, in its occasional badness and lack of perfection to the fact that everything was not open to them to know. “The goodness of _our_ goodness when we’re good” is due to our knowing a little more, and the more frequent badness of our badness when we are bad to our not taking the trouble to know it thoroughly.

BOOK VIII

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM

“_To the young I would remark that it is always unwise to judge of anything by its defects; the first attempt ought to be to discover its excellences._”—COLERIDGE.

“_Il ne savait pas de quoi étaient faites les_ limites de l’art.”— VICTOR HUGO.

“_Savoir bien lire un livre en le jugeant chemin faisant, et sans cesser de le goûter, c’est presque tout l’art du critique._”— SAINTE-BEUVE.