CHAPTER I.

WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE: THEIR COMPANIONS AND ADVERSARIES.

WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE—THE FORMER’S PREFACES—THAT TO ‘LYRICAL BALLADS,’ 1800—ITS HISTORY—THE ARGUMENT AGAINST POETIC DICTION, AND EVEN AGAINST METRE—THE APPENDIX: POETIC DICTION AGAIN—THE MINOR CRITICAL PAPERS—COLERIDGE’S EXAMINATION OF WORDSWORTH’S VIEWS—HIS CRITICAL QUALIFICATIONS—UNUSUAL INTEGRITY OF HIS CRITIQUE—ANALYSIS OF IT—THE “SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF”—ATTITUDE TO METRE—EXCURSUS ON SHAKESPEARE’S ‘POEMS’—CHALLENGES WORDSWORTH ON “REAL” AND “RUSTIC” LIFE—“PROSE” DICTION AND METRE AGAIN—CONDEMNATION IN FORM OF WORDSWORTH’S THEORY—THE ‘ARGUMENTUM AD GULIELMUM’—THE STUDY OF HIS POETRY—HIGH MERITS OF THE EXAMINATION—WORDSWORTH A REBEL TO LONGINUS AND DANTE—THE ‘PREFACE’ COMPARED MORE SPECIALLY WITH THE ‘DE VULGARI,’ AND DANTE’S PRACTICE WITH WORDSWORTH’S—THE COMPARISON FATAL TO WORDSWORTH AS A CRITIC—OTHER CRITICAL PLACES IN COLERIDGE— THE REST OF THE ‘BIOGRAPHIA’—‘THE FRIEND’—‘AIDS TO REFLECTION,’ ETC.—THE ‘LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE,’ ETC.—THEIR CHAOTIC CHARACTER AND PRECIOUSNESS—SOME NOTEWORTHY THINGS IN THEM: GENERAL AND PARTICULAR— COLERIDGE ON OTHER DRAMATISTS—THE ‘TABLE TALK’—THE ‘MISCELLANIES’— THE LECTURE ‘ON STYLE’—THE ‘ANIMA POETÆ’—THE ‘LETTERS’—THE COLERIDGEAN POSITION AND QUALITY—HE INTRODUCES ONCE FOR ALL THE CRITERION OF IMAGINATION, REALISING AND DISREALISING—THE “COMPANIONS”—SOUTHEY—GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS CRITICISM— REVIEWS—‘THE DOCTOR’—ALTOGETHER SOMEWHAT “IMPAR SIBI”—LAMB—HIS “OCCULTISM” AND ALLEGED INCONSTANCY—THE EARLY ‘LETTERS’—THE ‘SPECIMENS’—THE GARRICK PLAY NOTES—MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS—‘ELLA’—THE LATER ‘LETTERS’—UNIQUENESS OF LAMB’S CRITICAL STYLE AND THOUGHT— LEIGH HUNT: HIS SOMEWHAT INFERIOR POSITION—REASONS FOR IT—HIS ATTITUDE TO DANTE—EXAMPLES FROM ‘IMAGINATION AND FANCY’—HAZLITT— METHODOF DEALING WITH HIM—HIS SURFACE AND OCCASIONAL FAULTS: IMPERFECT KNOWLEDGE AND METHOD—EXTRA-LITERARY PREJUDICE—HIS RADICAL AND USUAL EXCELLENCE—‘THE ENGLISH POETS’—THE ‘COMIC WRITERS’—‘THE AGE OF ELIZABETH’—‘CHARACTERS OF SHAKESPEARE’—‘THE PLAIN SPEAKER’— ‘THE ROUND TABLE,’ ETC.—‘THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE’—‘SKETCHES AND ESSAYS’—‘WINTERSLOW’—HAZLITT’S CRITICAL VIRTUE, IN SET PIECES, AND UNIVERSALLY—BLAKE—HIS CRITICAL POSITION AND DICTA—THE “NOTES ON REYNOLDS” AND WORDSWORTH—COMMANDING POSITION OF THESE—SIR WALTER SCOTT COMMONLY UNDERVALUED AS A CRITIC—INJUSTICE OF THIS—CAMPBELL: HIS ‘LECTURES ON POETRY’—HIS ‘SPECIMENS’—SHELLEY: HIS ‘DEFENCE OF POETRY’—LANDOR—HIS LACK OF JUDICIAL QUALITY—IN REGULAR CRITICISM—THE CONVERSATIONS—‘LOCULUS AUREOLUS’—BUT AGAIN DISAPPOINTING—THE REVIVAL OF THE POPE QUARRELS—BOWLES—BYRON—THE ‘LETTER TO MURRAY,’ ETC.— OTHERS: ISAAC DISRAELI—SIR EGERTON BRYDGES—‘THE RETROSPECTIVE REVIEW’—THE ‘BAVIAD’ AND ‘ANTI-JACOBIN,’ WITH WOLCOT AND MATHIAS—THE INFLUENCE OF THE NEW ‘REVIEWS,’ ETC.—JEFFREY—HIS LOSS OF PLACE AND ITS CAUSE—HIS INCONSISTENCY—HIS CRITICISM ON MADAME DE STAËL—ITS LESSON—HALLAM—HIS ACHIEVEMENT—ITS MERITS AND DEFECTS—IN GENERAL DISTRIBUTION AND TREATMENT—IN SOME PARTICULAR INSTANCES—HIS CENTRAL WEAKNESS, AND THE VALUE LEFT BY IT.

[Sidenote: _Wordsworth and Coleridge._]

There are many differences, real and imaginary, partial and general, parallel and cross, between ancient, and mediæval, and modern poetry; but there is one, very striking, of a kind which specially differentiates ancient and mediæval (except Dante) from modern. In the former class of poets the “critic whom every poet must contain” was almost entirely silent, or conveyed his criticism through his verse only. It would have been of the very first interest to have an Essay from the hand of Euripides justifying his decadent and sentimental fashion of drama, or from that of Lucretius on the theory and practice of didactic verse: but the lips of neither were unsealed in this direction. Dante, on the other hand, as we have seen, was prepared and ready to put the rationale of his own verse, his own beliefs about poetry, into prose: so at the Renaissance were the poets of Italy and France; so was Dryden, so was Pope.

In no instance, however, save perhaps that of the Pléiade and Du Bellay’s _Défense et Illustration_, did a protagonist of the new poetry take the field in prose so early and so aggressively as did Wordsworth in his Preface to the second edition of _Lyrical Ballads_. In none, without exception, was such an attack so searchingly criticised and so powerfully seconded, with corrections of its mistakes, as in the case of the well-known chapters of the _Biographia Literaria_ in which Coleridge examined Wordsworth’s examination. These, it is true, came later in time, but when the campaign, whereof the first sword had been drawn in the _Lyrical Ballads_, and the first horn blown in the Preface of their second edition, though far gone was not finished, when the final blows, by the hands of Keats and Shelley, had still to be struck.

[Sidenote: _The former’s Prefaces._]

The _Preface_, with the little group of other prefaces and observations which supplements it,[349] provides a bundle of documents unequalled in interest except by the _De Vulgari Eloquio_ in the special class, while, as it happens, it goes directly against the tenor of that precious booklet. Wordsworth, there can be no doubt, had been deeply annoyed by the neglect or the contemptuous reception of the _Lyrical Ballads_, to which hardly any one had done justice except the future Archdeacon Wrangham, while his own poems in simple language had offended even more than _The Ancient Mariner_ had puzzled. To some extent I do not question that—his part of the scheme being to make the familiar poetical, just as it was Coleridge’s to make the unfamiliar acceptable, the uncommon common—the refusal of “poetic diction” which he here advances and defends was a _vera causa_, a true actuating motive. But there is also, I think, no doubt that, as so often happens, resentment, and a dogged determination to “spite the fools,” made him here represent the principle as much more deliberately carried out than it actually was. And the same doggedness was no doubt at the root of his repetition of this principle in all his subsequent prose observations, though, as has been clear from the first to almost all impartial observers,[350] he never, from _Tintern Abbey_ onwards, achieves his highest poetry, and very rarely achieves high poetry at all, without putting that principle in his pocket.

[Sidenote: _That to_ Lyrical Ballads, 1800.]

That the actual preface begins with a declaration that he was rather more than satisfied with the reception of his poems, and that the appearance of a systematic defence is set down to “request of friends,” is of course not in the least surprising, and will only confirm any student of human nature in the certainty that pique was really at the bottom of the matter. As a matter of fact, there is no more typical example of an aggressive-defensive _plaidoyer_ in the whole history of literature.

[Sidenote: _Its history._]

It begins with sufficient boldness and originality (indeed “W. W.” was never deficient in either) with admission that “by writing in verse, an author is supposed to make a formal engagement that he will gratify certain habits of association,” and merely urging that these habits have varied remarkably. The principle here is sound enough; it is in effect the same which we have traced in previous “romantic” criticism from Shenstone onwards; but the historical illustrations are unfortunate. They are “the age of Catullus, Terence, and Lucretius” contrasted with that of Statius and Claudian, and “the age of Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher” with that of Donne and Cowley or Dryden and Pope. The _nisus_ of the school towards the historic argument, and, at the same time, its imperfect education in literary history, could hardly be better illustrated. For, not to quibble about the linking of Statius and Claudian, the age of Catullus and Lucretius was most certainly _not_ the age of Terence; and the English pairs are still more luckless. Donne _and_ Cowley, Shakespeare _and_ Beaumont and Fletcher, are bad enough in themselves: but the postponement of Donne to the twin dramatists, when he was the elder of Fletcher probably by six or seven years, of Beaumont by ten or twelve, is rather sad. However, it is not on history that Wordsworth bases his attack.

[Sidenote: _The argument against poetic diction, and even against metre._]

His object, he tells us, was to choose incidents and illustrations from common life; to relate and describe them, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men; and at the same time to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect—a long but much less forcible appendix examining why the life so chosen was not merely “ordinary,” but “rustic and humble.” The kernel of his next paragraph is the famous statement that all good poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and then, after a little divagation, he sets to work to show how such a style as he was using was adapted to be the channel of such an overflow. He utterly refuses Personification: he “has taken as much pains to avoid what is called Poetic Diction as is ordinarily taken to produce it”; he “has at all times endeavoured to look steadily at the subject with little falsehood of description”; and he has not only denied himself false poetic diction, but many expressions in themselves proper and beautiful, which have been foolishly repeated by bad poets till they became disgusting. A selected sonnet from Gray[351] is then rather captiously attacked for the sake of showing (what certainly few will admit) that, in its only part of value, the language differs in no respect from that of prose: whence the heretic goes farther and, first asserting that there is _no_ essential difference between the language of Prose and that of Poetry, proceeds in a note to object to the opposition of Poetry and Prose at all, and to the regarding of the former as synonymous with metrical composition. Then he asks what a poet _is_: and answers himself at great length, dwelling on the poet’s philosophical mission, but admitting that it is his business to give pleasure. He anticipates the objection, “Why, then, do you not write in Prose?” with the rather weak retort, “Why should I not add the charm of metrical language to what I have to say?” A little later comes the other famous definition of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity,” with a long and exceedingly unsuccessful attempt to vindicate some work of his own from the charge of being ludicrous. And the Preface ends with two candid but singularly damaging admissions, that there _is_ a pleasure confessedly produced by metrical compositions very different from his own, and that, in order entirely to enjoy the poetry which he is undertaking, it would be necessary to give up much of what is ordinarily enjoyed.

[Sidenote: _The appendix: Poetic Diction again._]

There is an appendix specially devoted to “Poetic Diction” in which Wordsworth develops his objection to this. His argument is curious, and from his own point of view rather risky. Early poets wrote from passion, yet naturally, and so used figurative language: later ones, without feeling passion, imitated them in the use of Figures, and so a purely artificial diction was formed. So also metre was early added, and came to be regarded as a symbol or promise of poetic diction itself. To which of course it is only necessary to register the almost fatal demurrer, “Why, if the early poets used figurative language different from ordinary, may not later ones do so? or do you mean that Greek shoemakers of Homer’s time said _koruthaiolos_ and _dolichoskion_?” Again, “How about this curious early ‘superadding’ of metre? Where is your evidence? and supposing you could produce any, what have you to say to the further query, ‘If the metre was superadded, what could have been the reason, except that some superaddition was felt to be wanted?’”

[Sidenote: _The Minor Critical Papers._]

It is proof of the rather prejudiced frame of mind in which Wordsworth wrote that, in some subsequent criticisms of particulars, he objects to Cowper’s “church-going bell” as “a strange abuse”—from which we must suppose that he himself never talked of a “dining-room,” for it is certain that the room no more dines than the bell goes to church. The later papers on “Poetry as a Study,” and “Poetry as Observation and Description,” are also full of interesting matter, though here, as before, their literary history leaves much to desire, and though they are full of examples of the characteristic stubbornness with which Wordsworth clings to his theory. The most remarkable example probably of this stubbornness is the astonishing note to the letter on the last-named subject (addressed to Sir George Beaumont), in which, after attributing to the poet Observation, Sensibility, Reflection, Information, Invention, and Judgment, he adds, with a glance at his enemy, Metre—“As sensibility to harmony of numbers _and the power of producing it_ are _invariably_ attendants on the faculties above specified, nothing has been said upon those requisites.” Perhaps there is no more colossal _petitio principii_, and at the same time no more sublime ignoring of facts, to be found in all literature, than that “invariably.”

[Sidenote: _Coleridge’s examination of Wordsworth’s views._]

Interesting, however, as the Preface and its satellites are in themselves, they are far more interesting as the occasion of the much longer examination of the main document which forms the centre, and as criticism the most valuable part, of the _Biographia Literaria_[352] of Coleridge, Wordsworth’s fellow-worker in these same _Lyrical Ballads_. That Wordsworth was himself not wholly pleased with this criticism of his criticism, we know: and it would have been strange if he had been— nay, if a much less arrogant and egotistical spirit than his had taken it quite kindly. But Coleridge was on this occasion entirely within his right. The examination, though in some parts unsparing enough, was conducted throughout in the most courteous, indeed in the most eulogistic, tone; the critic, especially after the lapse of so many years,[353] could not be denied the right of pointing out the limits of his agreement with a manifesto which, referring as it did to joint work of his and another’s, might excusably be supposed to represent his conclusions as well as those of his fellow-worker.

As to his competence for the task, there could even then be little, and can now be no, dispute. Wordsworth himself, though he has left some valuable critical dicta, had by no means all, or even very many, of the qualifications of a critic. His intellect, save at his rare moments of highest poetical inspiration, was rather strong than fine or subtle; and it could not, even at those moments, be described as in any degree flexible or wide-ranging. He carried into literature the temperament of the narrowest theological partisan; and would rather that a man were not poetically saved at all, than that he were saved while not following “W. W.’s” own way. His reading, moreover, was far from wide, and his intense self-centredness made him indifferent about extending it: while he judged everything that he did read with reference to himself and his own poetry.

[Sidenote: _His critical qualifications._]

In all these respects, except poetical intensity, Coleridge was his exact opposite. But for a certain uncertainty, a sort of Will-o'-the-Wispishness which displays itself in some of his individual critical estimates—and for the too well-known inability to carry out his designs, which is not perhaps identical, or even closely connected, with this uncertainty,—he might be called, he may perhaps even in spite of them be called, one of the very greatest critics of the world. He had read immensely, and much of his reading had been in the philosophy of æsthetics, more in pure literature itself. The play of his intellect— when opium and natural tendency to digression did not drive it devious and muddle it—was marvellously subtle, flexible, and fine. He could take positions not his own with remarkable alacrity; was nothing if not logical, and few things more than historical-literary. Further, such egotisms as came into play in this particular quarrel all made for righteousness in his case, while they were snares to Wordsworth. It may be ungracious, but is not unfair, to say that Wordsworth’s contempt for poetic diction, and his belittling of metre, arose very mainly from the fact that, in his case, intense meaning was absolutely required to save his diction from stiffness on the one hand and triviality on the other, while he had no very special metrical gifts. Coleridge, though he certainly had no lack of meaning, and could also write simply enough when he chose, was a metrist[354] such as we have not more than five or six even in English poetry, and could colour and harmonise language in such a way that, at his best, not Shakespeare himself is his superior, and hardly any one else his equal. The old, the true, sense of _Cui bono?_ comes in here victoriously. It was certainly to Wordsworth’s interest that diction and metre should be relegated to a low place. Coleridge, though he had personal reasons for taking their part, could do well without them, and was not obliged to be their champion.

[Sidenote: _Unusual integrity of his critique._]

However all this may be, there is no doubt about the importance of the discussion of Wordsworth’s literary theories, in chaps. xiv. to xxii. of the _Biographia_. Some have held that Coleridge could not write a book; more have laid it down that he never did write one. Certainly the title is to be allowed to the _Biographia_ as a whole only by the most elastic allowance, while large parts of it are at best episodes, and at worst sheer divagations. But, if books were not sacred things, it would be possible, and of no inconsiderable advantage, to sub-title this part of the book _A Critical Enquiry into the Principles which guided the Lyrical Ballads, and Mr Wordsworth’s Account of Them_, to print this alone as substantive text,[355] and to arrange all the rest as notes and appendices.

[Sidenote: _Analysis of it._]

The examination begins with an interesting, and (whether Epimethean or not) quite probable and very illuminative account of the actual plan of the _Ballads_, and the principle on which the shares were allotted. He and his friend, he tells us, had, during their neighbourly intercourse in Somerset, often talked of the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. And he illustrates this finely, by instancing the sudden charm which accidents of light and shade, of moonlight or sunset, communicate to familiar objects.

[Sidenote: _The “suspension of disbelief.”_]

The _Ballads_ were to illustrate both kinds: and the poets were to divide the parts generally on the principle of Coleridge endeavouring to make the unfamiliar credible,[356] and Wordsworth the familiar charming. And with a charity which, I fear, the _Preface_ will not bear, he proceeds to represent its contentions as applying _only_ to the practical poetical attempt which Wordsworth, in accordance with the plan, was on this occasion making. He admits however, that Wordsworth’s expressions are at any rate sometimes equivocal, and indicates his own standpoint pretty early and pretty decisively by calling the phrase “language of real life” _unfortunate_. And then he proceeds to state his own view with very frequent glances—and more than glances—at his companion’s.

[Sidenote: _Attitude to metre._]

From the first, however, it is obvious that on one of the two cardinal points—the necessity or non-necessity of metre in poetry—he is, though hardly to be called in two minds, for some reason or other reluctant to speak out his one mind. The revival of this old heresy among such men as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, is the more to be wondered at, in that their predecessors of the eighteenth century had by no means pronounced on the other side in theory, and that therefore they themselves had no excuse of reaction. No one who, at however many removes, followed or professed to follow the authority of Aristotle, could deny that the subject, not the form, made poetry and poems. But just as the tyranny of a certain poetic diction led Wordsworth and others to strike at all poetic diction, so the tyranny of certain metres seems to have induced them to question the necessity of metre in general. At any rate Coleridge’s language, though not his real drift, is hesitating and sometimes almost self-contradictory. He will on the same page grant that “all compositions to which this charm of metre is superadded, whatever their contents, may be called poems,” and yet lay down that a poem is “that species of composition which is opposed to works of science by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth,” and (after adding to this a limitation, doubtless intended to take in metre, but nebulous enough to justify Peacock himself,[357]) will once more clear off his own mist by saying that if any one “chooses to call every composition a poem which is rhyme or measure or both, I must leave his opinion uncontroverted.”

That he himself saw the muddle is beyond doubt, and the opposite page contains a curious series of _aporiæ_ which show the difficulty of applying his own definition.[358] The first (_i.e._, fourteenth) chapter ends with a soft shower of words, rhetorically pleasing rather than logically cogent, about the poet “bringing the whole soul of man into activity”; “fusing the faculties, each into each, by the synthetic and magical power of imagination,” reconciling differences and opposites. “Finally, good sense is the body of poetic genius, fancy its drapery, emotion its life, and imagination the soul.” In the fifteenth and sixteenth the author turns with evident relief from the definition of the perhaps indefinable to an illustration of it by discussing _Venus and Adonis_. Here, though it would be pleasant, it would be truancy to follow him.

This study, however, is by no means otiose. It leads him to make a comparison between the poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that of “the present age,” a comparison of which not the least notable point is a reference to the _De Vulgari Eloquio_.[359] [Sidenote: _Excursus on Shakespeare’s_ Poems.] Coleridge seems only to have known it in the Italian translation; but it is much that he should have known it at all: and though he does not try to bring out its diametrical opposition to Wordsworth, that opposition must have been, consciously or unconsciously, in his mind. And then he comes back to Wordsworth himself.

[Sidenote: _Challenges Wordsworth on “real” and “rustic” life._]

He now (chap. xvii.) strikes into a line less complimentary and more corrective than his earlier remarks. It is true, he says, that much of modern poetic style is false, and that some of the pleasure given by it is false likewise. It is true, further, that W. W. has done good by his sticklings for simplicity. But Coleridge cannot follow him in asserting that “the proper diction for poetry in general consists altogether in language taken from the mouths of men in real life.” And he proceeds to show, by arguments so obvious and so convincing that it is unnecessary to recapitulate them, that a doctrine of this kind is neither adequate nor accurate—that Wordsworth’s own poems do not bear it out, and (pushing farther) that poetry must be “_dis_realised” (he does not use the word) as much as possible. He proceeds, cautiously and politely, but very decidedly, to set the puerilities and anilities[360] of _The Idiot Boy_ and _The Thorn_ in a clear light, which must have been extremely disagreeable to their arrogant author; and goes on to pull W. W.'s arguments, as well as his examples, to shreds and thrums. If you eliminate, he says (and most truly), a rustic’s poverty of thought and his “provincialism and grossness,” you get nothing different from “the language of any other man of common-sense,” so that he will not help you in the least; his speech does not in any degree represent the result of special and direct communing with nature. Nay, “real” in the phrase “real life” is itself a wholly treacherous and equivocal adjective. Nor will you do any good by adding “in a state of excitement.”

[Sidenote: _“Prose” diction and metre again._]

In the next chapter, the eighteenth, Coleridge carries the fray farther still into the enemy’s country, hitting the blot that though W. W.'s _words_ may be quite ordinary, their arrangement is not. And after wheeling about in this way, he comes at last to the main attack, which he has so often feinted, on Wordsworth’s astounding dictum that “there neither is nor can be any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.” After clearing his friend (and patient) from an insinuation of paradox, he becomes a little “metaphysical”— perhaps because he cannot help it, perhaps to give himself courage for the subsequent accusation of “sophistry” which he ventures to bring. Of course, he says, there are phrases which, beautiful in poetry, are quite inappropriate in prose. The question is, “Are there no others which, proper in prose, would be out of place in metrical poetry and _vice versa_?” And he has no doubt about answering this question in the affirmative, urging the origin of metre (for which, as we saw, Wordsworth did not attempt to account), and its effects of use and pleasure. He will not admit the appeal to nursery rhymes; and he confesses (a confession which must have given W. W. dire offence) that he should have liked _Alice Fell_ and the others much better in prose.

On the whole, Coleridge still shows too great timidity. He is obviously and incomprehensibly afraid of acknowledging pleasure in the metre itself. But—in this differing more signally from Wordsworth than from Wordsworth’s uncompromising opponents—he says, “I write in metre, _because_ I am about to use a language different from that of prose.” And, though on grounds lower than the highest, he finally plucks up courage to declare that “Metre is the proper form of poetry: and poetry [is] imperfect and defective without metre.” ’Twill serve, especially when he brings up in support, triarian fashion, “the instinct of seeking unity by harmonious adjustment,” and “the practice of the best poets of all countries and of all ages.”

[Sidenote: _Condemnation in form of Wordsworth’s theory._]

It is perhaps an anti-climax, though a very Coleridgean one, when he proceeds to criticise (very justly) Wordsworth’s criticism of Gray, and some passages both of his own and others: but we can have no quarrel with him when he ends the chapter, too verbosely indeed, but unanswerably, with the following conclusion of the whole matter: “When a poem, or part of a poem, shall be adduced, which is evidently vicious in the figures and contexture of its style, yet for the condemnation of which no reason can be assigned, except that it differs from the style in which men actually converse,—then and not till then can I hold this theory to be either plausible or practicable, or capable of furnishing either such guidance, or precaution, that might not, more easily and more safely, as well as more naturally, have been deduced in the author’s own mind from considerations of grammar, logic, and the truth and nature of things, confirmed by the authority of works whose fame is not of one country and of one age.”

[Sidenote: _The_ Argumentum ad Gulielmum.]

He has now (chaps. xix., xx.) argued himself into more confidence than he had shown earlier, and seems disposed to retract his concession that W. W.'s limitations were _not_ intended to apply to all poetry. He sees, indeed, from the criticism on Gray, and from Wordsworth’s references to Milton, that this concession was excessive, but still he thinks the general notion too monstrous for Wordsworth to have held. And he swerves, once more, to point out the especial beauty of beautiful diction and beautiful metre _added_ to fine or just thought, and introduces interesting but rather superfluous examples of this from all manner of poets down to Wordsworth himself. These last lead him to the very just conclusion, “Were there excluded from Mr W.'s poetic compositions all that a literal adherence to the theory of his Preface would exclude, two-thirds at least of the marked beauties of his poetry must be erased.”[361] Which indeed is once more a conclusion of the whole matter.[362]

[Sidenote: _The study of his poetry._]

After an odd, a distinctly amusing, but despite its title a, for our purpose, somewhat irrelevant, excursus on “the present mode of conducting critical journals,”[363] Coleridge concludes with a pretty long[364] and a very interesting examination of Wordsworth’s poetry. He brings out his defects, his extraordinary declension from the felicitous to the undistinguished, his matter-of-factness of various kinds (this part includes a merciless though most polite censure of _The Excursion_), his undue preference for dramatic [perhaps we should say dialogic] form, his prolixity, and his introduction of thoughts and images too great as well as too low for the subject. The excellences are high purity and appropriateness of language; weight and sanity of thoughts and sentiments; strength; originality and _curiosa felicitas_ in single lines and paragraphs; truth of nature in imagery; meditative pathos; and, lastly, imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word.

[Sidenote: _High merits of the examination._]

In fact this chapter, which forms in itself an essay of the major scale, is one of the patterns, in English, of a critical study of poetry. None, I think, had previously exhibited the new criticism so thoroughly, and very few, if any, have surpassed or equalled it since, although it may be a little injured on the one hand by its limitation to a particular text, and by the restrictions which the personal relations of the critic with his author imposed on Coleridge; on the other, by his own tendencies to digression, verbosity, and intrusion of philosophical “heads of Charles I.” In fact, there is no other critical document known to me which attacks the chief and principal things of poetry proper— poetic language and poetic numbers—in so satisfactory a manner, despite the economy which Coleridge displays on the latter head. Some of the ancient and most of the Renaissance discussions shoot too far and too high, and though the arrows may catch fire and give a brilliant and striking illumination, they hit no visible mark. The discussions of Lessing in the _Laocoön_ concern an interesting but after all quite subordinate point of the relation of poetry to other arts; nearly all of those in the _Dramaturgie_ deal with a part of literature only, and with one which is not, in absolute necessity or theory, a part of literature at all. But here we have the very _differentia_ of poetry, handled as in the Περὶ Ὕψους or the _De Vulgari_ itself, but handled in a more full, generally applicable, and philosophically based manner than Dante’s prose admitted of, and in a wider range than is allowed by the special purpose of Longinus.

[Sidenote: _Wordsworth a rebel to Longinus and Dante._]

With both these great lights of criticism Coleridge agrees almost as thoroughly as Wordsworth disagrees with them: and it is proper here to fulfil the promise which was made[365] of a consideration of Wordsworth’s work in reference to Dante specially, but with extension to Longinus as well.

The collision of Wordsworth with Longinus appears in the very title of the famous little treatise. Fight as we may about the exact meaning of ὕψος, it must be evident, to poets and pedlars alike, that it never can apply to the “ordinary language of real life”; struggle as Wordsworthians may, they never can establish a _concordat_ between the doctrine of the _Preface_ and the doctrine of the “beautiful word.” But as Longinus was not specifically writing of Poetry, and as in reference to Poetry he was writing from his own point of view only, on a special function or aspect of Poetry and Rhetoric alike, he does not meet the Apostle of the Ordinary full tilt and weapon to weapon. I have said that I do not know whether, when Wordsworth wrote the _Preface_, he knew the _De Vulgari_ or not. If Coleridge had known it at the time, he probably would have imparted his knowledge in the celebrated Nether Stowey talks: but his own reference, itself not suggestive of a very thorough appreciation, is twenty years later. And as Wordsworth was a perfectly fearless person, and had not a vestige of an idea that any created thing had authority sufficient to overcrow W. W., he would pretty certainly have rebuked this Florentine, and withstood him to his face, if he had known his utterances.

[Sidenote: _The_ Preface _compared more specially with the_ De Vulgari,]

But, on the other hand, Dante himself might almost have been writing with the _Preface_ before him (except that had he done so Wordsworth would probably have been at least in Purgatory), considering the directness, the almost rude lie-circumstantial of the antidote. “Take the ordinary language, especially of rustic men,” says Wordsworth. “Avoid rustic [“silvan”] language altogether,” says Dante, “and even of ‘urban’ words let only the noblest remain in your sieve.” “If you have Invention, Judgment, and half a dozen other things,” every one of which has been possessed in more or less perfection by most of the great writers of the world whether in prose or poetry, “metrical expertness will follow as a matter of course,” says Wordsworth. “You must, after painfully selecting the noblest words and arranging them in the noblest style, further arrange them in the best line that experience and genius combined can give you, and yet further build these lines into the artfullest structure that art has devised,” says Dante. “Poetry is spontaneous utterance,” says he of Cockermouth. “Poetry, and the language proper for it, is a regular ‘panther-quest,’ an elaborate and painful toil,” says the Florentine.

[Sidenote: _and Dante’s practice_]

And their practice is no less opposed than their theory; or rather the relation of the two, to theory and practice taken together, is the most astonishing contrast to be found in Poetry. Dante never falsifies his theory for a moment. You cannot find a line, in _Commedia_ or _Vita Nuova_ or anywhere else, where the “panther-quest” of word, and phrase, and line-formation, and stanza-grouping is not evident; you will be put to it to find one where this quest is not consummately successful. And, in following word and phrase and form, Dante never forgets or starves his meaning. He may be sometimes obscure, but never because there is no meaning to discern through the gloom. He may be sometimes technical; but the technicality is never otherwise than the separable garb of a “strange and high” thought and intention. Matter and form with him admit no divorce: their marriage is not the marriage of two independent entities, but the marriage of soul and body. He has no need of the alternation of emotion and tranquillity, of the paroxysm succeeded by the notebook (or interrupted by it and succeeded by the fair copy), because his emotion and his tranquillity are identical, because the tide of his poetry is the tide “too full for sound or foam,” at least for splash or spoondrift. He is methodical down to the counting of syllables in poetic words: and yet who has more poetic madness than he?

[Sidenote: _with Wordsworth’s._]

The difference in Wordsworth is almost startling; it looks as if it had been “done on purpose.” He does obey his theory, does accept the language of ordinary life.[366] But when he does so, as (almost) everybody admits, he is too often not poetical at all—never in touch with the highest poetry.[367] And (which is extremely remarkable and has not, I think, been remarked by Coleridge or by many other critics) even in these poems he has not the full courage of his opinions. In no single instance does he venture on the experiment of discarding the merely “superadded charm” of metre, of which he has such a low opinion. He never in one single instance relies on the sheer power of “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” on the impetus of “emotion recollected in tranquillity,” _without_ metre. In the form of poetry, which he affects to despise, he is even as these publicans.

These are two sufficiently striking points; but they are not so striking as the third. Wordsworth _is_ a great poet; he _has_ moments of all but the sublimest—for this argument we need certainly not grudge to say of the sublimest—poetry. He can bathe us in the light of setting suns, and introduce us even to that which never was on sea and land;[368] he can give us the full contact, the full ecstasy, the very “kiss of the spouse.” But in no single instance, again, does he achieve these moments, except—as Coleridge has pointed out to some extent, and as can be pointed out without shirking or blenching at one “place” of poetry—at the price of utterly forgetting his theory, of flinging it to the tides and the winds, of plunging and exulting in poetic diction and poetic arrangement.

[Sidenote: _The comparison fatal to Wordsworth as a critic._]

So we can only save Wordsworth the poet—in which salvage there is fortunately not the slightest difficulty—at the expense of Wordsworth the critic. Even in these curious documents of critical suicide there are excellent critical utterances _obiter_, and some even of the propositions in the very argument itself are separately, if not in their context, justifiable. He might, if he could have controlled himself, have made a very valuable exposure, not merely of false poetic diction, but of that extremely and monotonously _mannerised_ poetic diction which, though not always bad in its inception and to a certain extent, becomes so by misusage and overusage. He might have developed his polemic against the personification of Gray and others with real advantage. He might have arranged a conspectus of the sins of eighteenth-century poetic diction, which would have been a most valuable pendant to Johnson’s array of the extravagances of the Metaphysicals. He might—if he had carried out and corrected that theory of his of the necessity of antecedent “powerful feelings” in the poet—have produced a “Paradox of the Poet” which would have been as true as Diderot’s on the Actor, and have had far greater value. But he did none of these things; and what he did do is itself not even a paradox—it is a paralogism.

[Sidenote: _Other critical places in Coleridge._]

How much better Coleridge comes out of this affair has already been partly said. But these concluding chapters[369] of the _Biographia_, though certainly his capital critical achievement, are very far from being his only one. Indeed, next to his poetical, his critical work is Coleridge’s greatest: and with all his everlasting faults of incompleteness, digression, cumbrousness of style,[370] and what not, it gives him a position inferior to no critic, ancient or modern, English or foreign. But it is scattered all over his books, and it would not be ill done if some one would extract it from the mass and set it together. In surveying such examples of it as are here most important, we shall take the convenient Bohn edition of Coleridge’s Prose, following the contents of its volumes, but supplementing them to no small extent with the very interesting and only recently printed notes which Mr Ernest Coleridge published as _Anima Poetæ_, and with a glance at the _Letters_.

[Sidenote: _The rest of the_ Biographia.]

Coleridge himself, at the very beginning of the _Biographia_, has indicated the discussion of the question of Poetic Diction as the main point which he had in view; but, with all its gaps and all its lapses, the whole book is among the few which constitute the very Bible of Criticism. The opening, with its famous description of the author’s education in the art under the merciless and yet so merciful ferule of Boyer or Bowyer; the reference to Bowles—so little important in himself and on Arnoldian principles, so infinitely important to “_them_,” and so to history and to us, the “us” of every subsequent time; the personal digressions on himself and on Wordsworth and on Southey—are among “the topmost towers of Ilion,” the best illustrations of that “English fashion of criticism” of which, as has been said, Dryden laid the foundations nearly a century and a half earlier by uniting theory with elaborate, and plentiful, and apparently indiscriminate, examples from practice.

[Sidenote: The Friend.]

One seldom feels inclined to be more angry[371] with Coleridge’s habit of “Prommy pas Payy”[372] than in reference to that introduction to the _Ancient Mariner_—dealing with the supernatural, and with the difference between Imagination and Fancy—to which he coolly refers the reader as if it existed,[373] just before the actual examination of Wordsworth’s theories in the _Biographia_, and after the long digressions, Hartleian, biographical proper, and what not, which fill the second division of the book. But that one does well to be angry is not quite so certain. The discussion would probably have been the reverse of methodical, and it is very far from unlikely that everything good in it is actually cast up here, or there, on the “Rich Strand” of his actual work. To return to that work,[374] there is little criticism in the extraordinary mingle-mangle of religion, politics, and philosophy, of “Bell and Ball: Ball and Bell,” Maria Schoening and Dr Price, called _The Friend_, whichever of its two forms[375] be taken. At the beginning there are one or two remarks which seem to promise matter of our kind, and there is some good Shakespeare comment at p. 299: but that is about all.

[Sidenote: Aids to Reflection, _&c._]

Neither should we expect (save on the principle that in Coleridge the unexpected very generally happens) anything in the _Aids to Reflection_ or the _Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit_, though in the first there are some of the usual girds at anonymous reviewing, and the second is important enough for that equivocal if not bastard variety of our kind which has “Biblical” or “Higher” tacked before it. But the three remaining volumes[376] are almost compact of our matter, while there is not a little of it, and of the very best quality, in the _Anima Poetæ_.

[Sidenote: _The_ Lectures on Shakespeare, _&c._]

The great storehouse next to the _Biographia_ is, of course, the _Lectures on Shakespeare_ with their satellite fragments, unsatisfactory as are the conditions under which we have all these things. There is perhaps no more astounding example of the tricks of self-deception than Coleridge’s statement to Allsop that he had “_written_” three volumes of five hundred pages each, containing a complete critical history of the English drama, and “requiring neither addition, omission, nor correction—nothing but mere arrangement.” What we actually have of his whole critical work, outside the _Biographia_, consists of perhaps one-third that amount of his own and other people’s notes of Lectures, very rarely consecutive at all, requiring constant omission because of repetition, and defying the art of the most ingenious _diaskeuast_ to get them into anything like order, and of a smaller but still considerable mass of _Marginalia_, pocket-book entries, and fragments of the most nondescript kinds. And we know from indisputable testimony by persons who actually heard the _Lectures_ which these notes represent, that if we possessed reports _in extenso_ by the most accurate and intelligent of reporters, things would be not so very much better, because of Coleridge’s incurable habit of apology, digression, anticipation, and repetition. That he found a written lecture an intolerable trammel, and even notes irksome, if he stuck close to them, we can readily believe. Many, if not most, lecturers would agree with him. But it is given to few people, and certainly was not given to him, to speak _ex-tempore_ on such subjects in a fashion which will bear printing. And his lectures have, as we have said, only very rarely had even the chance of standing this.

[Sidenote: _Their chaotic character_]

Nevertheless, we are perhaps not in reality so very much worse off. Extreme method in criticism is something of a superstition, and, as we have seen, the greatest critical book of the world, that of Longinus, has, as we possess it, very little of this, and does not appear ever to have had very much. The critic does his best work, not in elaborating theories which will constantly break down or lead him wrong when they come into contact with the myriad-sided elusiveness of Art and Humanity, but in examining individual works or groups of work, and in letting his critical steel strike the fire of mediate axioms and _aperçus_ from the flint of these. It does the recipient rather good than harm to have to take the trouble of selecting, co-ordinating, and adjusting such things for himself; at any rate, he escapes entirely the danger of that deadly bondage to a cut-and-dried scheme which was the curse of the Neo-classic system. And there is no critic who provides these examinations and _aperçus_ and _axiomata media_ more lavishly than Coleridge.[377]

[Sidenote: _and preciousness._]

I remember still, with amusement after many years, the words of, I suppose, a youthful reviewer who, admitting that an author whom he was reviewing had applied the method of Coleridge as to Shakespeare, &c., with some skill and even some originality, hinted that this method was quite _vieux jeu_, and that modern criticism was taking and to take an entirely different line. And I have been grateful to that reviewer ever since for giving me a mental smile whenever I think of him. That his new critical Evangel—it was the “scientific” gospel of the late M. Hennequin, if “amid the memories long outworn Of many-_volumed eve and_ morn” I do not mistake—has itself gone to the dustbin meanwhile does not matter, and is not the cause of the smile. The risibility is in the notion that any great criticism can ever be obsolete. We may, we must, we ought sometimes to differ with Aristotle and Longinus, with Quintilian and Scaliger, with Patrizzi and Castelvetro, with Dryden and Johnson, with Sainte-Beuve and Arnold. But what is good in them—and even what, though not so intrinsically good, is injured only by system and point of view, by time and chance and fatality—remains a possession for ever. “The eternal substance of their greatness” is of the same kind (although it be less generally recognised or relished) as the greatness of creation. _La Mort n’y mord_.

Of such matter Coleridge provides us with abundance everywhere, and perhaps most on Shakespeare. He acknowledges his debts to Lessing, and was perhaps unduly anxious to deny any to the Schlegels; but he has made everything that he may have borrowed his own, and he has wealth untold that is not borrowed at all. He can go wrong like other people. His favourite and constantly repeated denunciation of Johnson’s couplet—

“Let Observation with extensive view Survey mankind from China to Peru”—

as “bombast and tautology,” as equivalent to “let observation with extensive observation survey mankind extensively,” is not only unjust but actually unintelligent,[378] and probably due only to the horror of eighteenth-century personification, intensified in Coleridge by the fact that in his own early poems he had freely indulged therein.

[Sidenote: _Some noteworthy things in them: general,_]

But on the very opposite page[379]—in the very corresponding lines which shut up on this carping when the book is closed—we read, “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.” I have found nothing better for the motto of this Book; I cannot imagine anything better as a corrective of the faults of Neo-classic critics—as a “Take away that bauble!” the stop-watch. Again, observe the admirable separation of poet and dramatist in Lecture vii. of the 1811 course;[380] the remarks (suggested perhaps by Lessing, but in no respect an echo of him) on poetry and painting in the Ninth;[381] and the altogether miraculous “character” of Ariel which follows.[382] The defences of Shakespeare’s puns are always consummate[383]—in fact, “Love me, love my pun,” should be one of the chief articles of a Shakespearian Proverb-book. In the notes referring (or supposed to refer) to the course of 1818, variations of the _Biographia_ (published the year before) were sure to occur and do; one of the most noteworthy being the expansion and application of the idea of “suspension of disbelief.”[384] Note, too, the acuteness in the censure[385] (with half-apologies) of the absurd stage-directions which characterised German, and characterise Scandinavian, drama.

[Sidenote: _and particular._]

Of the separate notes on Shakespeare’s Plays it is impossible to say much here: and indeed it is not necessary. They are to be read—if possible in conjunction with the plays themselves—by everybody: to digest them into a formal treatise would be perhaps impossible, and, as hinted above, would not be a testimonial to their value if it were possible. But their great merit, next to their individual felicity, is the constant cropping up of those _aperçus_ of a more general, though not too general, cast which have been noticed.

[Sidenote: _Coleridge on other dramatists._]

Coleridge never admires Shakespeare too much; but the Devil’s Advocate may perhaps make something of a count against him that he is often apt to depress others by a comparison, which is not in the least necessary. On Ben Jonson he is rather inadequate than unjust; but he is certainly unjust to Beaumont and Fletcher, and I almost fear that his injustice, like his more than justice to Massinger, may be set down to extra-literary causes. It is extraordinary that such a critic should have used the language that he uses of Florimel in _The Maid of the Mill_.[386] Her devices to preserve her honour are extravagant: this extravagance, as compared with the perfect _naturalness_ of Shakespeare, is the constant note of “the twins”; and if Coleridge had confined himself to bringing it out, there would have been no more to be said. But his remarks are here not merely unjust, they are silly. And yet here, too, we could find the priceless _obiter dicta_, that on words that have made their way despite precisian objection,[387] those on metre[388] almost always, and others.

[Sidenote: _The_ Table Talk.]

The motes fly thick for us in the _Table Talk_; and as they are clearly headed and indexed in the edition referred to, there is the less need of additional specification, while there is, here as everywhere, a good deal of repetition.[389] But one must point in passing to the striking contrast of Schiller’s “material sublime”[390] (and Coleridge was not inclined to undervalue Schiller[391]) with Shakespeare’s economy of means; the pertinent, though by no means final, question, “If you take from Virgil his diction and metre, what do you leave him?”[392] the remarks on Spenser’s “swan-like movement”;[393] a remarkable cluster of literary dicta in the entry for Midsummer-Day 1827 (when H. N. says that his uncle talked “a volume”), to be supplemented by another sheaf on July 12; the contrast of Milton and Shakespeare;[394] the remarks on Rabelais;[395] the wonderfully pregnant one as to the “three silent revolutions in England”;[396] those on Latin Literature;[397] on the evolutionary quality of genius;[398] another great _obiter dictum_,[399] that “Great minds are never in the wrong, but in consequence _of being in the right imperfectly_,” which is truest of all in criticism itself; yet another,[400] “To please me, a poem must be either music or sense: if it is neither, I confess I cannot interest myself in it”; and, above all, that on Tennyson[401]—one of the _loci classici_ of warning to the greatest critics to distrust themselves when they are judging the poetry of the “younger generations.” And if we cannot help reproachfully ejaculating “Æschylus!” when he denies[402] sublimity to the Greeks, let us again remember that Æschylus was strangely _occulted_ to the whole Neo-classic age, and that it is very much Coleridge’s own doing that we of the last two or three generations have re-discovered him.

[Sidenote: _The_ Miscellanies.]

The few contributions, shortly supplemented from MS., to Southey’s _Omniana_ give little, but the volume now entitled _Miscellanies, Æsthetic and Literary_, is very nearly all ours. Much of it, however, is repetition in apparent title, and a good deal of the rest does not quite answer expectations. The general _Essays on the Fine Arts_ with which it opens (and of which the author, who had lost them, entertained that perhaps rather exaggerated idea which we usually entertain of lost loves, books, fishes, &c.) possess in abundance Coleridge’s uniquely stimulating quality, but, perhaps in not much less abundance, his extreme desultoriness and want of definition, save of the most indefinite character. The essay on the _Prometheus_ which follows excites (though hardly in the wary mind, Estesianly “alphabeted,” as he would himself say) great expectations. But it is scarcely too much to say that on this—the most purely poetical of all extant Greek dramas, a miracle of sublimity and humanity mingled, and the twin pillar, with the _Agamemnon_, of its author’s claim to be one of the greatest poets of the world—Coleridge has not a word to say that even touches the poetry. He is philosophico-mythological from the egg to the apple; and one is bound to add that he here shows one of his gravest drawbacks as a critic. The new fragments, however, of the 1818 lectures are full of good matter, on Cervantes especially, perhaps a little less specially on Dante, on Robinson Crusoe very particularly indeed, on Rabelais and Sterne and Donne: while these are taken up and multiplied in interest by the “Marginalia,” with which the literary part of the book concludes, and which contain, on Daniel and Chapman and Selden, Browne and Fuller, Fielding and Junius, some of the best known and nearly of the best of their author’s critical work. Here also, and here only, do we find much on Milton, Coleridge’s rather numerous lectures on him having left surprisingly little trace. He is, though a fervent admirer, not quite at his happiest.

[Sidenote: _The Lecture_ On Style.]

But the most interesting piece that the book contains is the Lecture on Style, with its satellite note (a small but sparkling star) on the “Wonderfulness of Prose.”[403] The author’s definition of his most elusive subject is indeed not only not satisfying, but (unless you remember his own dictum about being “right incompletely”) demonstrably and almost astoundingly _un_satisfactory. “Style is of course nothing but the art of conveying the meaning appropriately and with perspicuity.” One feels inclined in one’s haste to say, “That is just what it is _not_”; one must cool down a little before one can modify this to “Style begins exactly where” the art, &c., “leaves off,” and one can perhaps never come nearer to an accommodation than “The necessary preliminary to Style, and one essential ingredient of it,” is “the art,” and so forth.[404] It was no doubt this side of the matter that Coleridge was looking at, and at this he stopped, as far as his general way of looking at the thing went. But the main interest of the piece does not lie here. He bases his definition on, and tries to adjust it to, a survey of English style, which is probably one of the first of the kind ever attempted, after the notion of the Queen Anne men being the crown and flower of English had been given up. And though his history, as was natural, is sometimes shaky, and his conclusions are often to be disputed and even overthrown, the whole is of the highest value, not merely as a _point de repère_ historically, but as an introduction to the consideration of Style itself.

[Sidenote: _The_ Anima Poetæ.]

But the book of Coleridge which, next to the _Biographia_, is of most importance to the student of his criticism, is perhaps the long-posthumous _Anima Poetæ_. Mr Ernest Coleridge, in his preface to the _Anima_ itself, says that the _Biographia_ is now little read. I hope he is wrong: but if he is right it would explain many things.

This volume—a collection of extracts from Coleridge’s pocket-books— appeared[405] more than sixty years after the poet’s death, and the notice taken of it was comparatively small. That it contains passages of ornate prose superior to anything in the previously published writings is interesting, but for our purpose almost irrelevant: it is not so that it gives the fullest and clearest side-lights on Coleridge’s criticism that we have. The earliest years (and pages) are not very fertile, though I subjoin some references[406] which will assist the reader in looking them up. But from p. 119 for some fifty pages onward (it is significant that the time of writing, 1805-8, corresponds with Coleridge’s absence in Malta, &c., from which we have little or no published work) the entries are “diamondiferous.” On French poetry (mistaken but so informingly!);[407] on Cowper;[408] on the absurdity of calling etymology (how much more philology!) a “science”;[409] on the attitude to poetry and to books;[410] on Leibnitz’s “profound sentence” that “men’s intellectual errors consist chiefly in _denying_”;[411] on the “instinctive passion in the mind for one word to express one act of feeling” (Flaubert fifty years before date); on pseudo-originality,— Coleridge is at his very acme. The _yeast_ of criticism—the reagent which, itself created by the contact of the critical with the creative, re-creates itself in all fit media—has never been more remarkably represented than here.

And great as are these passages, there are many others (though not so many in close context) to match them. See the entry (which I venture to think has been wrongly side-headed as “A plea for poetic license” at the foot of p. 165) as to the desire of carrying things to a greater height of pleasure and admiration than they are susceptible of—the old “wish to write better than you can,” the “loss of sight between this and the other style.”[412] See the astonishing anticipation of the best side of Ruskinism in the note on architecture and climate;[413] and that on poetry and prose and on the “esenoplastic” power;[414] and that on somebody (Byron?) who was “splendid” everywhere, but nowhere poetical;[415] and that on scholastic terms;[416] and that on the slow comprehension of certain (in this case Dantean) poetry.[417] They are all _apices criticismi_—not easy reading, not for the running man, but for him who reads them fitly, certain to bear fruit if he reads them early, to coincide with his own painful and struggling attainments if he reads them late.

[Sidenote: _The_ Letters.]

Nor must the _Letters_[418] be omitted in any sufficient survey of Coleridge’s criticism. That at one early period[419] he apparently thought Schiller more sublime than Milton is not in the least to his discredit. He was twenty-two; he was, I think, demonstrably in love with _three_ ladies[420] at once, and extremely uncertain which of two of them he should marry—a state of mind neither impossible nor unnatural, but likely to lead to considerable practical difficulties, and to upset the judgment very decidedly. His minor critical remarks at this very time on Southey’s poems are excellent. That Bowles should be “divine” and Burke “sad stuff”[421] does not matter—we can explain both statements well enough. But how many men of three- or four-and-twenty (or for that matter of three- or four-and-seventy) were there, are there, have there ever been, who could ask, “Why pass an _Act of Uniformity_ against poets?”[422] one of the great critical questions of the world, and never, so far as I remember, formulated so pertinently before. It is odd that he should have forgotten (if he knew) Sidney, in his singular and pedantic complaint that to give the name Stella to a woman is “unsexing” it, and his supposition that “Swift is the authority.”[423] But another astonishing critical truth is that “Poetry ought not always to have its _highest_ relish”;[424] and yet another in the contrast[425] of himself with Southey, “I think too much to be a poet; he too little to be a great poet,” unjust as the application is in the first half; and yet again on metre itself “_implying_ a passion,”[426] a passage worth comparing with, and in some points better than, the _Biographia_ (with which compare also pp. 386, 387). Nor these alone, but many others later—the criticism on Wordsworth’s “Cintra” pamphlet;[427] that on the inadequacy of one style for all purposes;[428] the remarks on stage illusion,[429]—might be cited.

[Sidenote: _The Coleridgean position and quality._]

When the first volume of this history was published, an excellent scholar said to me, “How will you ever finish that book? Why, Coleridge himself would take a volume!” There is something to be said for the hyperbole. In this and that critic, of these many ages which we have essayed to survey, we may find critical graces which are not in him; but in all, save two, we shall find corresponding deficiencies. In all the ancient critics, save these two, the limitation of the point of view, the hamper of the scheme, are disastrously felt, nor is either Aristotle or Longinus quite free from them. In the greatest of the sixteenth-century Italians these limitations recur, and are repeated in most of those of the seventeenth and eighteenth. Dante is of the greatest, but he touches the subject very briefly and from a special side. Dryden is great, but he is not fully informed, and comes too early for his own point of view. Fontenelle is very nearly great, but he has the same drawbacks, and adds to them those of an almost, perhaps a quite, wilful eccentricity and capriciousness. Lessing is great, but he has fixed his main attention on the least literary parts of literature; while Goethe later is great but a great pedant.[430] Hazlitt is great; but Coleridge was Hazlitt’s master, and beside the master the pupil is insular and parochial in range and reading if not in spirit. In Sainte-Beuve himself we want a little more theory; some more enthusiasm; a higher and more inspiriting choice of subjects. And in Mr. Arnold the defects of Fontenelle reappear without Fontenelle’s excuse of chronology.

So, then, there abide these three, Aristotle, Longinus, and Coleridge. The defects of the modern, as contrasted with the ancient, man of letters are prominent in Coleridge when we compare him with these his fellows: and so we cannot quite say that he is the greatest of the three. But his range is necessarily wider: he takes in, as their date forbade them to take, all literature in a way which must for centuries to come give him the prerogative. It is astonishing how often, when you have discovered in others of all dates, or (as you may fondly hope) found out for yourself, some critical truth, you will remember that after all Coleridge in his wanderings has found it before, and set it by the wayside for the benefit of those who come after. For all, I believe, of these later days—certainly for all whose mother-tongue is English— Coleridge is the critical author to be turned over by day and by night. Never take him on trust: it is blasphemy to the Spirit of Criticism to do that with any critic. Disagree with him as often as you like, and as you can stand to the guns of your disagreement. But begin with him, continue with him, come back to him after excursions, with a certainty of suggestion, stimulation, correction, edification. _C’est mon métier à moi d'être professeur de littérature_, and I am not going to _parvify_ my office. But if anybody disestablished us all (with decent pensions, of course), and applied the proceeds of our Chairs to furnishing the boxes of every one who goes up to the University with a copy of the _Biographia Literaria_, I should decline to be the person chosen to be heard against this revolution, though I should plead for the addition of the _Poetics_ and of Longinus.

[Sidenote: _He introduces once for all the criterion of Imagination, realising and disrealising._]

And if any one is still dissatisfied with particular critical utterances, and even with the middle axioms interspersed among them, let him remember that Coleridge—not Addison, not the Germans, not any other— is the real introducer into the criticism of poetry of the realising and disrealising Imagination as a criterion. Even now, a hundred years after his earliest day as a critic, the doctrine, though much talked of, is apparently little understood. Even such a critic as the late Mr Traill, while elsewhere[431] admitting that “on poetic _expression_” Coleridge “has spoken the absolutely last word,” almost apologised[432] for his putting on a level “lending the charm of imagination to the real” and “lending the force of reality to the imaginary.” He confessed that, “from the point of view of the highest conception of the poet’s office there can be no comparison”—where indeed I might also “say ditto to Mr Burke,” but in a sense opposite to his. And if, on such a mind and such an appreciation as Mr Traill’s, this one-sided interpretation of “the _esenoplastic_ faculty” had hold, how much more on others in increasing measure to the present day? The fallacy is due, first, to the hydra-like vivacity of the false idea of _mimesis_, the notion that it is not re-presentation, re-creation _adding_ to Nature, but copying her; and, secondly, to the Baconian conception of poetry as a _vinum dæmonum_, a poison with some virtue as a medicine. What power these errors have all our history has shown,—all Histories of Criticism that ever can be written will show if they are written faithfully. But Coleridge has provided—once for all, if it be not neglected—the safeguard against this in his definitions of the two, the co-equal, the co-eternal functions of the exercise of the poetic Imagination.

[Sidenote: _The “Companions.”_]

In the title of the present chapter I have used the word “companions” in a double sense—the first and special application of it being that in which it is technically applied to the Companions of the Prophet—to the early coadjutors of Mahomet in his struggle with the Koreish. Of these the chief are Southey, Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and Hazlitt, with perhaps as an even closer ally—though unknowing and unknown—William Blake. Then follow companions in the wider sense—associates in the work, who varied from nearly complete alliance, as with Scott, to very distant and lukewarm participation, as in Campbell, and (in literary position) from the captaincy of Scott again and of Shelley to the more than respectable full-privateship of the contributors to the _Retrospective Review_. As for the “Adversaries,” they can be more briefly dealt with, for their work was mostly “wood, hay, stubble”; but Gifford and Jeffrey at least could not be excluded here, and a few more may deserve notice. So let the inquiry proceed in this order.

[Sidenote: _Southey._]

It may seem at first sight curious, and will perhaps always remain a little so, that we have no collected examples, nor many uncollected but singly substantive pieces, of strictly critical work, from the most widely read and the most industrious of the whole literary group of 1800-1830 in England—from a man who, for eleven years at least, wrote reviews almost wherever he could place them without hurting his conscience, and who for another five-and-twenty was a pillar of one of the greatest of critical periodicals. But Southey’s earlier reviewing is for the most part not merely whelmed in the dust-bins of old magazines, but, as his son and biographer complains, extremely difficult to trace even there; and his later was, by choice or by chance (more I think by the former than by the latter), mainly devoted to subjects not purely literary. If that great _Bibliotheca Britannica_[433] (which so nearly existed, and which is a thing lacking in English to this present day, a hundred years later) had come actually into existence, it would hardly have been necessary to look beyond that: as it is, one has the pleasing but rather laborious and lengthy duty of fishing out and piecing together critical expressions from _The Doctor_ and other books to some extent, and from the two parallel collections of the _Life and Correspondence_[434] and the _Letters_[435] to a still greater. The process is necessary for a historian of criticism, and the results, if hardly new to him, are interesting enough; but they cannot claim any exhibition at all correspondent to the time taken in arriving at them. Nor will any such historian, if he be wise, complain, for Southey is always delightful, except when he is in his most desperately didactic moods: and the Goddess of Dulness only knows how even the most egregious of her children, unless from pure ignorance, has managed to fix on him the title of “dull.”

[Sidenote: _General characteristics of his Criticism._]

That “a man’s criticism is the man himself” is almost truer than the original bestowal of the phrase; and it is nowhere truer than with Southey. That astonishing and almost godlike _sanity_ which distinguished him, in almost all cases save as regards the _Anti-Jacobin_, Mr Pitt, the Roman Catholic Church, and my Lord Byron (who, by the way, lacked it quite as conspicuously in regard to Southey), is the constant mark of his critical views. Except his over-valuation of Kirke White,[436] which was undoubtedly due to his amiable and lifelong habit of helping lame dogs, I cannot, at the moment or on reflection, think of any critical estimate of his (for that of himself as a poet is clearly out of the question) which is flagrantly and utterly wrong; and I can think of hundreds which are triumphantly right. In respect of older literature, in particular,[437] his catholicity is free from the promiscuousness of Leigh Hunt, and his eclecticism from the caprice of Charles Lamb: while, prejudiced as he can be, I do not remember an instance in which prejudice blinds or blunts his critical faculty as it does Hazlitt’s. On all formal points of English poetry he is very nearly impeccable. He may have learnt his belief in substitution and equivalence from Coleridge; but it is remarkable that his defences of it to Wynn[438] are quite early, quite original, and quite sound, while Coleridge’s own account long after, in the preface to _Christabel_, is vague and to some extent incorrect. He knew, of course, far more literary history than any one of his contemporaries—an incalculable advantage—and he could, sometimes at least, formulate general critical maxims well worth the registering.

[Sidenote: _Reviews._]

Of his regular critical work, however, which can be traced in the _Annual_ and _Quarterly Reviews_ from the list given by his son at the end of the _Life_, some notice must be taken, though the very list itself is a tell-tale in the large predominance of Travels, Histories, and the like over pure literature. That he should have made a rule for himself after he became Laureate not to review poetry (save in what may be called an eleemosynary manner) is merely what one would have expected from his unvarying sense of propriety; but there were large ranges of _belles lettres_ to which this did not apply. The articles which will best repay the looking up are, in the _Annual_, those on _Gebir_, Godwin’s _Chaucer_, Ritson’s _Romances_, Hayley, Froissart, _Sir Tristram_, Ellis’s _Specimens_, Todd’s _Spenser_, and _Ossian_; in the _Quarterly_, those on Chalmers’s _Poets_, Sayers, Hayley again, Camoens, and Lope de Vega, with some earlier ones on Montgomery (James, not Robert).[439]

[Sidenote: The Doctor.]

_The Doctor_ also must have its special animadversion, for this strangely neglected and most delightful book is full of critical matter. Its showers of mottoes—star-showers from the central glowing mass of Southey’s enormous and never “dead” reading—amount almost in themselves to a critical education for any mind which is fortunate enough to be exposed to them when young, while the saturation of the whole book with literature can hardly fail to produce the same effect. It is lamentable, astonishing, and (the word is not too strong) rather disgraceful that, except the “Three Bears” story, the appendix on the Cats, and perhaps the beautiful early passages on the Doctor’s birthplace and family, the book should be practically unknown. But it by no means owes its whole critical value to these borrowed and reset jewels. The passages of original criticism—direct or slightly “applied”—which it contains are numerous and important. The early accounts of the elder Daniel’s library[440] and of Textor’s dialogues[441] are valuable; the passage on “Taste and Pantagruelism”[442] much more so. On Sermons,[443] on Drayton,[444] on the Principles of Criticism,[445] on the famous verse-tournament of the Poitiers Flea,[446] on the Reasons for Anonymity,[447] on Mason[448] (for whom Southey manages to say a good word), on Bowdlerising and Modernising, and (by an easy transition) Spenser[449]—the reader will find nuggets, and sometimes whole pockets, of critical gold, the last-mentioned being one of the richest of all. It is to Southey’s immortal honour (an honour not sufficiently paid him by some Blakites) that he recognised and quoted at length[450] the magnificent “Mad Song,” which is perhaps Blake’s most sustained and unbroken piece of pure poetry. His discussion on Styles[451] is of great value: while the long account[452] of the plays of Langeveldt (Macropedius), and of our kindred English Morality _Everyman_, shows how admirably his more than once projected Literary Histories would have been executed.

[Sidenote: _Altogether somewhat_ impar sibi.]

Still, I am bound to say that he conveys to my mind the impression of not quite having his soul bound up in the exercise of his critical function. He was a little too fond of extending his love of books to those which, as Lamb would say, are no books—of giving the children’s bread unto dogs. Occasionally, moreover, that want of the highest enthusiasm and sympathy, the highest inspiration, which—after the rather ungracious and ungrateful suggestion of Coleridge—it has been usual to urge against him, and which cannot be wholly disproved, does appear. Some would say that this was due to his enormous reading, and to the penal servitude for life to what was mostly hack-work, which fate and his own matchless sense of duty imposed upon him. I do not think so; but of course if it be said that no one with the more translunary fancies, the nobler gusts, could have so enslaved himself, an authority[453] who takes so high a ground must be allowed his splendid say. Anyhow, and on the whole, we must return to the position that Southey does not hold a very high position among English critics, and that it is easier to give plausible reasons for the fact than entirely to understand it.[454]

[Sidenote: _Lamb._]

In criticising the criticism of Charles Lamb[455] one has to walk warily; for is he not one of the most justly beloved of English writers, and are not lovers apt to love more well than wisely? I shall only say that if any be an “Agnist,” I more. Ever since I can remember reading anything (the circumstance would not have seemed trivial to himself), I have read and revelled in, and for nearly forty years I have possessed in fee, a copy of the original _Elia_ of 1823, in the black morocco coat which it put on, at least seven years before Lamb’s death, in 1827. I have also read its contents, and all other attainable _Agnalia_, in every edition in which I have come across them, with introductions by “Thaunson and Jaunson,” in and on all sorts of shapes and types and papers and bindings. I have never wearied of reading them; I am sure I never shall weary as long as eye and brain last. That Lamb is one of the most exquisite and delightful of critics, as of writers, is a proposition for which I will go to the stake; but I am not prepared to confess him as one of the very greatest in his critical capacity.

[Sidenote: _His “occultism”_]

The reasons for this limitation are to be found in two passages of his friend Hazlitt—a ruthless friend enough, but one who seldom goes wrong in speaking of friend or foe, unless under the plain influence of a prejudice which here had not the slightest reason for existing. The passages (referred to again elsewhere) are that on “the Occult School” in the “Criticism”[456] and one in the “Farewell.”[457] The first speaks of those “who discern no beauties but what are concealed from superficial eyes, and overlook all that are obvious to the vulgar part of mankind.” “If an author is utterly unreadable they can read him for ever.” “They will no more share a book than a mistress with a friend.” “Nothing goes down with them but what is caviare to the multitude,” &c. The other, in which Lamb is actually named, contrasts his “surfeit of admiration,” the antiquation of his favourites after some ten years, with the “continuity of impression” on which Hazlitt prided himself.

[Sidenote: _and alleged inconstancy._]

I am inclined to think that both these charges—made with what is (for the author) perfect good-humour, and only in the first case slightly exaggerated, as was almost permissible when he was dealing ostensibly with a type not a person—are quite true. One would not indeed have them false; it would be most “miserably wise” economy to exchange Lamb, as he is, for a wilderness of consistent, equitable, catholic mediocrities. As Hazlitt himself admits, _this_ “Occult Criticism” does not or need not come from any affectation or love of singularity: indeed, some occult critics “smack of genius and are worth any money.” The Lothario part of the indictment, the desertion after enjoyment, is perhaps less easy to authenticate as well as to defend; but I think it existed, and was indeed a necessary consequence of the other tendency. If you love merely or mainly as a collector, and for rarity,—if not only thus but because others do _not_,—the multiplication of the object or of the taste must necessarily have a disgusting effect. “The bloom is _off_ the rye.” And I should say that, beyond all reasonable question, there is a distinct character of _eccentricity_ in the strict sense, of whim, of will-worship, about many, if not most, of Lamb’s preferences. There is no affectation about him; but there is what might be affectation in another man, and has been affectation in many and many another. Take the most famous instances of his criticism—the defence of Congreve and Wycherley, the exaltation of Ford, the saying (productive of endless tribulation to the matter-of-fact) that Heywood is “a prose Shakespeare,” the enthusiasm shown towards that rather dull-fantastic play _A Fair Quarrel_, while the magnificence of the same author’s _Changeling_ was left to Leigh Hunt to find out—these and other things distinctly show the _capriccio_. Lamb, not Hunt, is really the “Ariel of Criticism,” and he sometimes pushes tricksiness to a point which would, we fear, have made his testy Highness of Milan rather angry. It was probably in conversation rather than in writing that his fickleness showed itself: we can never conceive Lamb _writing_ down anything that he had ever written up. But something of disillusionment must, as has been said, almost necessarily have resulted from the peculiarly whimsical character of his inamoration. Canon Ainger has noted, as the distinguishing features of Lamb’s critical power, “width and versatility.” One differs with the Master[458] of the Temple unwillingly and _suo periculo_: but neither term seems to me quite appropriate. “Width” implies continuity, and there is little of this in Lamb: “versatility” implies a power of turning to what you will, and Lamb, I think, loved, not as he would but as he could not help it at the time.

[Sidenote: _The early Letters._]

But he wants nothing save method and certainty (in response—not even this in touch), and he has critical graces of his own which make him all but as great as Coleridge or Hazlitt, and perhaps more delightful than either. In his very earliest critical utterances, in the Letters to Coleridge and Southey especially, much of this delightfulness displays itself as well as its two parents—Lamb’s unconquerable originality of thought and feeling, and his unsurpassable quaintness and piquancy of phrase. The critic is, as is inevitable from his youth, and from the as yet very imperfect reading which he frankly confesses, a little uncertain and inadequate. His comparative estimates of Coleridge and Southey, Southey and Milton, Southey and Cowper, and of all or most of these poets and others in themselves, exhibit an obviously unregulated compass—a tendency to correct impression rather overmuch, because the first striking off of it has been hasty. But this soon disappears: and though the eccentricity above noted rather increases than lessens with years, the critic’s real virtues—those just indicated—appear ever and ever more distinctly and more delightfully.

[Sidenote: _The_ Specimens.]

In a certain sense they never appear to greater advantage than in the brief notes included in the _Specimens of Dramatic Poets_ (1808). Everything necessary to excite Lamb’s critical excellence united here,— actual merit, private interest (for, though the study of the minor as well as of the major Elizabethans had been progressing steadily, and “Dodsley” had gone through several editions, yet the authors were caviare to the general still); presence of the highest excellence; and, as we see from the _Letters_, years of familiarity and fondness on the part of the critic.

The _Notes_ themselves pretend to no method, and fulfil their pretence very strictly. Lamb is distinctly inferior to both his great friends and rivals in _grasp_. His appreciation is tangential—though in a different sense from that in which Hazlitt applies the word to Coleridge. Lamb is not so much desultory or divagatory as apt to touch his subject only at one (sometimes one very small) point. The impact results in a spark of the most ardent heat and glowing light, but neither heat nor light _spreads_ much. Sometimes, as is inevitable in this style of criticism, he can be only disappointing: one is inclined to be pettish with him for seeing nothing to notice in the vast and shadowy sweep of _Tamburlaine_ save an interesting evidence that Pistol was not merely jesting. Nor is perhaps Barabbas “a mere monster brought in with a large painted nose to please the rabble.” But you must get out of this mood if you are to enjoy Lamb. How he makes it all up, and more than up, on _Faustus_, and (when he comes to Dekker) on _Old Fortunatus_! “Beware! beware!” is the cry here also, lest we steal too much of his honeydew. Fortunately it has been so widely used, even for the vulgar purpose of sweetening school-editions, that it has become generally accessible. The famous passage on the Witches, which Hazlitt loved to quote, is perhaps as characteristic as any: the Webster and Chapman notices are perhaps critically the best.

Next in order of time come the articles contributed to the _Reflector_, especially the magnificent paper on “The Tragedies of Shakespeare” and their actableness. I may be prejudiced in favour of this, by caring myself infinitely to read the drama, and not caring at all to see it acted; but this objection could not be made to Lamb, who was notoriously a playgoer, and an eager though unfortunate aspirant to the honours of the boards. The piece, of course, shows some traces of the _capriccio_,— especially in the confession of being utterly unable to appreciate “To be or not to be,” because of its being “spouted.” Shakespeare himself might have taught Lamb better, in a certain passage about age and custom. To learn, to hear, nay, direst curse of all! to _teach_ “To be or not to be” leaves it perfect Cleopatra. But Lamb must be Lamb and keep his Lambish mind: and he keeps it here to great purpose. The _Lear_ passage, the best known and the most generally admitted as forcible, is not more so than those on the _Tempest_ and on _Macbeth_. They all come to that position of the true critic (as I believe it to be), which has been indicated elsewhere, that drama _may_ be literature but is not bound to be—that they are different things, and that the points which drama need not have, and perhaps to which it cannot do full justice, are in literature of the greatest importance.

[Sidenote: _The Garrick Play Notes._]

It is natural, though they were written so long afterwards, to take the “Notes on the Garrick Plays” with these other forerunners and suggesters; nor do I think that so much of the “first sprightly running” is lost as has sometimes been thought. How Lamb-like and how pleasant is the phrase on Day’s quaint _Parliament of Bees_—“the very air seems replete with humming and buzzing melodies.” (Most obvious, of course: only that nobody had _met_ it before!) And the imploration to Novello to set the song from Peele’s _Arraignment_; and the fine and forcible plea for the minor Elizabethans in the note to _The Two Angry Women of Abingdon_ (a play, by the way, every fresh reading of which makes one more thoroughly agree with Lamb). The fewness and slightness of these notes should not be allowed to obscure their quality.

[Sidenote: _Miscellaneous Essays._]

It was seldom that the bee-like nature of Lamb’s own genius could settle long on a single flower; and his regular “studies” are few, and not always of his very best. The actual state of the paper on _The Excursion_, after its mangling by Gifford, illustrates the wisdom of that editorial counsel, “Always keep a copy,” which the contributor (alas! we are all guilty) doth so unwisely neglect; and the two best that we have among the miscellaneous essays are those on Wither and on Defoe’s secondary novels. It is difficult to say which is the better: but the singular unlikeness of the two subjects (except that both Wither and Defoe are eminently _homely_) shows what I presume Canon Ainger meant by the “versatility” of the critic’s genius. Both are admirable, but most characteristically “promiscuous.” The Defoe piece avowedly gives stray notes; but the “Wither,” though it has a beginning, has very little middle, and no end at all.

[Sidenote: Elia.]

As for _Elia_ itself, it is fortunately too well known to need any analysis or much detailed survey. In the first and more famous collection the literary element is rather a saturation than a separable contingent. Except the “Artificial Comedy” paper, there is none with a definitely literary title or ostensible subject: while this itself starts in the closest connection with the preceding paper on Actors, and is dramatic rather than literary. But the “saturation” is unmistakable. As one turns the beloved and hundred-times-read pages, the constant undercurrent of allusion to books and reading strikes one none the less— perhaps indeed the more—for familiarity, whether it is at some depth, as in places, or whether it bubbles up to and over the surface, as in “Oxford in the Vacation,” and the book-borrowing close of “The Two Races of Men,” and that other close of that “New Year’s Eve” which so unnecessarily fluttered Southey’s orthodoxy, and not a little of “All Fool’s Day”; and in quotations everywhere. But in the _Last Essays_ Lamb exhibits the master-passion much more openly. The “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading” of course lays all concealment aside,—it is a regular _affiche_, as are also “The Genteel Style in Writing” and (most of all) “On Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sidney”—the valiant and triumphant sally against Hazlitt—with not a little of “Old China” itself. Everywhere there is evident the abiding, unfailing love of “the book.”

[Sidenote: _The later_ Letters.]

And if we recur to the _Letters_ we shall find the most abundant proof of this quality. How admirable are those criticisms[459] of the second edition of _Lyrical Ballads_ which, because they are not “neat” praise, roused the poetic irritability, not merely of Wordsworth, whose views respecting the reception of his own verse were always Athanasian, but of Coleridge, who had, at any rate, intervals of self-perception! How sound the judgment of Mrs Barbauld and of Chapman (a pleasing pair) to Coleridge himself on Oct. 23, 1802![460] How sure the touch of the finger on that absurdity in Godwin’s _Chaucer_ which has been so frequently copied since, “the fondness for filling out the picture by supposing what Chaucer did and how he felt”![461] The choicest of his observations are naturally those to Coleridge, almost _passim_: but the vein is so irrepressible that he indulges it even in writing to Wordsworth, though he knew perfectly well that the most favourable reception could only be a mild wonder that people could think or talk of any literature, and especially any poetry, other than “W. W.’s” own. Even his experiences in 1800 could not prevent him from handling[462] the Poems of 1815 with the same “irreverent _parrhesia_” which he uses immediately after[463] also to Southey on _Roderick_ as compared with _Kehama_ and _Madoc_. His famous appreciation of Blake[464] (of whom 'tis pity that he knew no more) is one of the capital examples of pre-established harmony between subject and critic. That he could not, on the other hand, like Shelley, is not unsusceptible of explanations by no means wholly identical, though partly, with those which account for Hazlitt’s error. Lamb did not like the word “unearthly” (he somewhere objects to its use) and he did not like the thing unearthliness. The regions where, as Mr Arnold has it, “thin, thin, the pleasant human noises sound,” were not his haunt. Now Blake always has a homely domestic everyday side close to his wildest prophetisings,[465] and Shelley has not. On the other hand, how completely does he grasp even Cervantes in the few _obiter dicta_ to Southey on Aug. 19, 1825,[466] and how instantly he seizes the “charm one cannot explain” in _Rose Aylmer_.[467] And his very last letter concerns a book, and a book on poetry, Phillips’s _Theatrum Poetarum_.

[Sidenote: _Uniqueness of Lamb’s critical style_]

His love was, as we said, “of the book,” perhaps, rather than, as in Hazlitt’s case, “of literature.” The Advocatus Diaboli may once more suggest that to Lamb the book was a very little too much on a level with the tea-pot and the engraving—that he had a shade in excess of the collector’s feeling about him. But the Court will not call upon the learned gentleman to say anything more on that head. It is time to acknowledge, without reservations or provisos, the unique quality of “Elia’s” critical appreciation. Very much of this quality—if a quality be separable into parts—arises from his extraordinary command of phrase,—the phrase elaborate without affectation, borrowed yet absolutely individual and idiosyncratic, mannered to the _n_th, but never mannerised, in which, though he might not have attained to it without his great seventeenth-century masters, he stands original and alone. In no critic perhaps—not even in Mr Pater—does style count for so much as in Lamb; in none certainly is it more distinctive, and, while never monotonous, more homogeneous, uniform, instantly recognisable and self-bewrayed. The simulative power—almost as of the leaf-insect and suchlike creatures—with which he could imitate styles, is of course most obvious in the _tour de force_ of the Burton counterfeits. But in his best and most characteristic work it is not this which we see, but something much nobler, though closely allied to it. It is not Browne, or Fuller, or Burton, or Glanvill, but something like them, yet different. And though it has more _outré_ presentation in some of his miscellaneous writing than in his criticism, yet it is never absent in the most striking pieces of this, and gives them much of their hold on us.

[Sidenote: _and thought._]

Still, those who, however unnecessarily (for no one surely is going to deny it save in a mood of paradox or of monomania), insist that style must be the body of thought—nay, that this body itself must think (in Donne’s phrase), and not merely live, will find no difficulty in claiming Lamb as theirs. Nothing of the kind is more curious than the fact that, strongly marked as are his peculiarities and much as he may himself have imitated, he is not imitable; nobody has ever, except in the minutest shreds—rather actually torn off from his motley than reproducing it—written in Lamb’s style save Lamb. And accordingly no one (though not a few have tried) has ever criticised like Lamb. It is very easy to be capricious, fantastic, fastidious—as easy as to wear yellow stockings and go cross-gartered, and as effective. To Lamb’s critical attitude there go in the first place that love for the book which has been spoken of; then that faculty of sound, almost common-sense, “taste” which is shown in the early letters to Coleridge and Southey; then the reading of years and decades; and, lastly, the _je ne sais quoi_ that “fondoos” the other things, as the old Oxford story has it—a story to be constantly borne in mind by the critic and the historian of criticism.[468] Even the other ingredients are not too common, especially in conjunction: the _je ne sais quoi_ itself is here, and nowhere else.

[Sidenote: _Leigh Hunt: his somewhat inferior position._]

Leigh Hunt[469] claims less space from us than either of his friends Hazlitt and Lamb. This is not because he is an inconsiderable critic, for he is by no means this. As has been said, he has the immense and surprising credit of having first discovered the greatness of the tragic part of Middleton’s _Changeling_, as an individual exploit, and in more general ways he has that, which Macaulay duly recognised in a well-known passage,[470] of being perhaps more _catholic_ in his tastes as regards English Literature than any critic up to his time. He has left a very large range of critical performance, which is very rarely without taste, acuteness, and felicity of expression; and he has, as against both the greater critics just named, the very great advantage of possessing a competent knowledge of at least one modern literature[471] besides his own, and some glimmerings of others. He has the further deserts of being almost always readable, of diffusing a pleasant sunny atmosphere, and of doing very much to keep up the literary side of that periodical production which, for good or for evil, was, with the novel, the great literary feature of the nineteenth century. These are not small merits: and while they might seem greater if they were not thrown somewhat into the shade by the superior eminence of Coleridge and Hazlitt, and the superior attractiveness of Lamb, they retain, even in the vicinity of these, claims to full acknowledgment.

[Sidenote: _Reasons for it._]

A severely critical estimate, however, will discover in Leigh Hunt— perhaps in very close juxtaposition and in a sort of causal relation to these merits themselves—something which is not quite so good. Even his catholicity may be set down in part, by the Enemy, to a certain loose facility of liking, an absence of fastidiousness and selection. If Lamb goes too far towards the ends of the English literary earth for the objects of his affection, Hunt is rather too content to find them _in triviis et angiportis_. He does not exactly “like grossly,” but he likes a little promiscuously. The fault is no very bad one; and it becomes exceedingly venial—nay, a positive virtue in time and circumstance—when we compare it with the unreasonable exclusiveness of the Neo-classic period. But it is a kind of criticism which inclines rather too much to the uncritical.

[Sidenote: _His attitude to Dante._]

A further objection may be taken by applying that most dangerous of all tests, the question “What does he _dis_like?” For the twentieth time (probably) let us repeat that in criticism likes and dislikes are free; and that the man who, however unfortunately, still honestly dislikes what the consensus of good criticism approves, is entitled to say so, and had much better say so. But he gives his reasons, descends upon particulars, at his peril. Leigh Hunt, to do him justice, is not like Mr Rymer—it is not his habit “no wise to allow.” But it is certainly a pity that one of his exceptions should be Dante, and it is certainly a much greater pity that among the reasons given for unfavourable criticism[472] should be because Dante “puts fabulous people with real among the damned,” because Purgatory is such a very disagreeable idea, and because the whole poem contains “absurdities too obvious nowadays to need remark.”

This, however, was merely an exceptional outburst of that “Liberal” Philistinism and blundering which, it is only fair to say, had been provoked by plentiful exhibition of the same qualities on the other side, and which was more particularly excusable in Leigh Hunt (humanly, if not critically, speaking), because nobody, not even Hazlitt, had received worse treatment from that side than himself. But it does something affect his critical position; for even Hazlitt managed, in some queer fashion, to distinguish between the prostitute baronet, Sir Walter Scott, and “the Author of _Waverley_,” between that wicked Mr Burke and the author of the great speeches and treatises. But the main reasons why Hunt must go with shorter measure than others, is the combination of abundance in quantity with a certain want of distinction in quality, which mars his writings. Not even the largest space here possible would enable us to go through them all, and we should be able to select but a few that are of unquestionably distinctive and characteristic _race_. It is, indeed, rather in his favour that you may dip almost anywhere into him with the certainty of a wholesome, pleasant, and refreshing critical bath or draught. He is very rarely untrustworthy; and when he is, as in the _Dante_ case, he tells the fact and its secret more frankly even than Hazlitt himself. But it would be unjust to refer to no samples of him, and a few of the most characteristic shall therefore be given.

[Sidenote: _Examples from_ Imagination and Fancy.]

Fortunately there is an extremely favourable example of his criticism which fills a whole book to itself, and is written under something like a general scheme. This is the volume—modestly sub-titled “Selections,” but containing a very large proportion of comment and original matter— which he called _Imagination and Fancy_,[473] and intended to follow up with four others, though only one, _Wit and Humour_,[474] was ever written. The plan was begun late (1844); but as we have seen in almost every instance, a man’s critical work very rarely declines with years, unless he actually approaches dotage: and the book is, on the whole, not merely the most favourable but the most representatively favourable example of Leigh Hunt’s criticism. It opens by a set Essay on the question “What is Poetry?” from which, perhaps, any one who knew the author’s other work, but not this, might not expect very much, for Hunt had not an abstract or philosophical head. He acquits himself, however, remarkably well. His general definition that Poetry is “the utterance of a passion for truth, beauty, and power, embodying and illustrating its conceptions by imagination and fancy, and modulating its language on the principle of variety in uniformity,” is not bad; but these things are never very satisfactory. It will be seen that Hunt, like Coleridge, though with a less “Cimmerian” obscurity of verbiage, “dodges” the frank mention of “metre” or “verse”; but this is not because he is in any way inclined to compromise. On the contrary, he says[475] (taking, and perhaps designedly, the very opposite line to Wordsworth) that he “knows of no very fine versification unaccompanied with fine poetry.” But the strength of the “Essay,” as of the whole book, is in the abundant and felicitous illustration of the various points of this definition by commented selections from the poets themselves.

That catholicity which has been said to be his main critical virtue will be found (without any of the vice which has been hinted as sometimes accompanying it) in the very list of the authors selected from—Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Middleton, Dekker, and Webster, Milton, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats: while the less “imaginative” poets are by no means neglected, and in particular Leigh Hunt brings out, often as no one had ever done before, that sheer poetical quality of Dryden to which the critics of 1800-1830 had been as a rule unjust. But the comment (and one cannot say more) is usually worthy of the selection. The fullest division of all is that on Spenser— indeed Leigh Hunt’s appreciation of this at once exquisite and magnificent poet is one of the very best we have, and would be the best of all if it had been a little more sensitive to Spenser’s “brave_st_ translunary things,” to the pervading exaltation and sublimation of thought and feeling which purifies the most luscious details, and unites the most straggling divagations in a higher unity. But, short of this, it would be difficult to have a better detailed eulogium, _pièces en main_, of the subject; nor does Hunt fail to make out something of a case against, at least, the exaggeration of Lessing’s attack on the _ut pictura poesis_ view. But his limitations appear in his complete misunderstanding of Coleridge’s exact and profound observation that Spenser’s descriptions are “not in the true sense of the word _picturesque_, but composed of a wondrous series of images as in dreams.” What Coleridge meant, of course, is that sequence rather than strict “composition” is Spenser’s secret—that his pageants _dissolve into_ one another. But in these finesses Hunt is seldom at his ease. So, again, he blasphemes one of the most beautiful lines of _The Tempest_—

“The fringed curtains of thine eye advance”—

as “elaborate nothingness, not to say nonsense” [how nothingness can in any case be sense he shall tell us], “pompous,” “declamatory,” and disapproved of by—Pope!

One really blushes for him. Could he possibly be unaware that when a person is about to look at anything, the natural gesture is to lower the head and thrust it a little forward, raising or depressing the eyelids at the same time? or be insensible to the exquisite profile image of Miranda with the long eyelashes projected against the air? And he was the author of _A Criticism of Female Beauty_! But if he sometimes misunderstands, he seldom misses good things such as (it is true Warton put him on this) the Medea passage of Gower.[476] Ben Jonson made him uncomfortable, which is again a pity; and on Beaumont and Fletcher he is at almost his very worst: but he is sounder than some greater ones on Ford and Massinger, and his great “catch” of De Flores deserves yet a third mention. He is at his very best and pleasantest, too, where most men fail—where they are even often very _un_pleasant—on his contemporaries, Coleridge, and Shelley, and Keats. When you have said such a thing as this[477] of Coleridge, “Of pure poetry, ... consisting of nothing but its essential self, ... he was the greatest master of his time,” you had better “stand down.” Your critical claim is made out: you may damage but can hardly increase it. Yet it is only in the severe court of critical history that one would wish to silence Hunt: for, in truth, nine-tenths of his criticism is admirable, and most admirably suited to instruct and encourage the average man. Impressionism and Rulelessness are almost as fairly justified of him, their child, as of any other that I can think of. They scarcely ever lead him wrong in liking; and he mentions what he dislikes so seldom that he has only occasional chances of being wrong there.

[Sidenote: _Hazlitt._]

But the greatest of the “Cockney critics” (_quelle Cocaigne!_) has yet to come. There is “a company of warm young men,” as Dryden has it, who would doubtless disdain the inquiry whether Coleridge or Hazlitt is the greatest of English critics; and it is quite certain that this inquiry might be conducted in a sufficiently futile sense and manner. There are others, less disdainful, who might perhaps be staggered by the acknowledgment _in limine_ that it is possible to answer the question either way—nay, for the same person to give both answers, and yet be “not unwelcome back again” as a reasonable disputant. I have myself in my time, I think, committed myself to both propositions; and I am not at all disposed to give up either—for reasons which it will be more proper to give at the end than at the beginning of an examination of Hazlitt himself. That he was a great critic there will probably now be little dispute, though Goethe is said not to have found much good in him; though persons of worship, including Mr Stevenson, have thought him greater as a miscellaneous essayist; and though you may read writings of considerable length upon him in which no attempt is made to bring out his critical character at all.

[Sidenote: _Method of dealing with him._]

His critical deliverances are so numerous and so voluminous that the “brick of the house” process, which we have frequently found applicable, has in his case to be given up, or at least considerably modified—for it is too much the principle of the present History to be given up altogether. Fortunately there is no difficulty in the modification. Hazlitt is not, like Coleridge, remarkable for the discovery and enunciation of any one great critical principle, or for the emission (_obiter_ or otherwise) of remarkable mediate _dicta_, or for _marginalia_ on individual passages or lines, though sometimes he can do the last and sometimes also the second of these things. What he is remarkable for is his extraordinary fertility and felicity, as regards English literature, in judgments, more or less “grasped,” of individual authors, books, or pieces. As, by preference, he stops at the passage, and does not descend to the individual line or phrase, so, by preference also,[478] he stops at the individual example of the Kind, and does not ascend to the Kind itself, or at least is not usually very happy in his ascension. But within these limits (and they are wide enough), the fertility and the felicity of his criticism are things which strike one almost dumb with admiration; and this in spite of certain obvious and in their way extremely grave faults.

The most obvious, though by far the least, of these,—indeed one which is displayed with such frankness and in a way so little delusive as to be hardly a fault at all, though it is certainly a drawback,—is a sort of audacious sciolism—acquiescence in ignorance, indifference about “satisfying the examiners”—for half a dozen different names would be required to bring out all the sides of it.

[Sidenote: _His surface and occasional faults: Imperfect knowledge and method._]

His almost entire ignorance of all literatures but his own gives him no trouble, though it cannot be said that it does him no harm. In treating of comic writers, not in English only but generally, he says[479] (with perfect truth) that Aristophanes and Lucian are two of the four chief names for comic humour, but that he shall say little of them, for he knows little. Would all men were as honest! but one cannot say, “Would all critics were as ignorant!” In his _Lectures on the English Poets_ he is transparently, and again quite honestly, ignorant of mostly all the earlier minorities, with some not so minor. He almost prided himself upon not reading anything in the writing period of his life; and he seems to have carried out his principles so conscientiously that, if anything occurred in the course of a lecture which was unknown to him, he never made the slightest effort to supply the gap. His insouciance in method was equal to that in regard to material; and when we find[480] Godwin and Mrs Radcliffe included, with no satiric purpose, among “The English Comic Writers,” they are introduced so naturally that the absurdity hardly strikes us till some accident wakes us up to it. If inaccuracies in matters of fact are not very common in him, it is because, like a true critic, he pays very little attention to such matters, and is wholly in opinion and appreciation and judgment, and other things where the free spirit is kept straight, if at all, by its own instinct. But he does commit such inaccuracies, and would evidently commit many more if he ran the risk of them oftener.

[Sidenote: _Extra-literary prejudice._]

The last and gravest of his drawbacks has to be mentioned, and though it may be slurred over by political partisanship, those who admire and exalt him in spite of and not because of his politics, are well entitled to call attention to it. To the unpleasantness of Hazlitt’s personal temper we have the unchallengeable testimony of his friends Lamb, who was the most charitable, and Hunt, who with all his faults was one of the most good-natured, of mortals. But what we may call his political temper, especially when it was further exasperated by his personal, is something of the equal of which no time leaves record. Whenever this east wind blows, the true but reasonable Hazlittian had better, speaking figuratively, “go to bed till it is over,” as John Hall Stevenson is said to have done literally in the case of the literal Eurus. Not only does Hazlitt then cease to be a critic,—he ceases to be a rational being. Sidney and Scott are the main instances of its effect, because Sidney could not have annoyed, and Scott we know did not in any way annoy, Hazlitt personally. Gifford is not in this case, and he was himself so fond of playing at the roughest of bowls that nobody need pity him for the rubbers he met. But Hazlitt’s famous _Letter_ to him, which some admire, always, I confess, makes me think of the Doll’s-dressmaker’s father’s last fit of the horrors in _Our Mutual Friend_, and of the way in which the luckless “man talent” fought with the police and “laid about him hopelessly, fiercely, staringly, convulsively, foamingly.” Fortunately the effect was not so fatal, and I know no other instance in which Hazlitt actually required the strait waistcoat.[481] But he certainly did here: and in a considerable number of instances his prejudices have made him, if not exactly _non compos mentis_, yet certainly _non compos judicii_.

[Sidenote: _His radical and usual excellence._]

Fortunately, however, the wind does not always blow from this quarter with him, and when it does the symptoms are so unmistakable that nobody can be deceived unless he chooses to be, or is so stupid that it really does not matter whether he is deceived or not. Far more usually it is set in a bracing North or fertilising West, not seldom even in the “summer South” itself. And then you get such appreciations, in the best, the most thorough, the most delightful, the most _valuable_ sense, as had been seldom seen since Dryden, never before, and in him not frequently. I do not know in what language to look for a parallel wealth. Systematic Hazlitt’s criticism very seldom is, and, as hinted above, still seldomer at its best when it attempts system. But then system was not wanted; it had been overdone; the patient required a copious alterative. He received it from Hazlitt as he has—virtue and quantity combined—received it from no one else since: it is a “patent medicine” in everything but the presence of quackery. Roughly speaking, Hazlitt’s criticism is of two kinds. The first is very stimulating, very interesting, but, I venture to think, the less valuable of the two. In it Hazlitt at least endeavours to be general, and takes a lesson from Burke in “prodigious variation” on his subject. The most famous, the most laboured, and perhaps the best example is the exordium of the _Lectures on the English Poets_, with its astonishing “amplification” on what poetry in general is and what it is not. A good deal of this is directly Coleridgean. I forget whether this is the lecture which Coleridge himself, when he read it, thought that he remembered “talking at Lamb’s”; but we may be quite sure that he had talked things very like it. Much in the “Shakespeare and Milton” has the same quality, and may have been partly derived from the same source: the critical character of Pope[482] is another instance, and probably more original. For Hazlitt had not merely learnt the trick from his master but had himself a genius for it; and he adorned these disquisitions with more _phrase_ than Coleridge’s recalcitrant pen usually allowed him, though there seems to have been plenty in his speech.

The Pope passage is specially interesting, because it leads us to the second and, as it seems to me, the chief and principal class of Hazlitt’s critical deliverances—those in which, without _epideictic_ intention, without, or with but a moderate portion of, rhetoric and amplification and phrasemaking, he handles separate authors and works and pieces. I have said that I think him here unsurpassed, and perhaps unrivalled, in the quantity and number of his deliverances, and only surpassed, _if so_, in their quality, by the greatest things of the greatest persons. These deliverances are to be found everywhere in his extensive critical work, and it is of a survey of some of them, conditioned in the manner outlined above, that the main body of any useful historical account of his criticism must consist. The four main places are the Lectures on _The English Poets_ (1818), on _The English Comic Writers_ (1819), on _Elizabethan Literature_ (1820), and the book on _Characters of Shakespeare_ (1817). We may take them in the order mentioned, though it is not quite chronological, because the chronological dislocation, in the case of the second pair, is logically and methodically unavoidable.

[Sidenote: The English Poets.]

How thoroughly this examination of the greater particulars (as we may call it) was the work which he was born to do is illustrated by the sketches (at the end of the first Lecture on _The English Poets_[483]) of _The Pilgrim’s Progress_, _Robinson Crusoe_, the _Decameron_, Homer, the Bible, Dante, and (O Groves of Blarney!) _Ossian_. Hazlitt’s faults (except prejudice, which is here fortunately silent) are by no means hidden in them—irrelevance, defect of knowledge, “casualness,” and other not so good things. But the _gusto_,[484] the spirit, the inspiriting quality, are present in tenfold measure. Here is a man to whom literature is a real and live thing, and who can make it real and alive to his readers—a man who does not love it or its individual examples “by allowance,” but who loves it “with personal love.” Even his Richardsonian digression[485]—horrible to the stop-watch man—is alive and real and stimulating with the rest. The Dante passage is a little false perhaps in parts, inadequate, prejudiced, what you will in others. But it is criticism—an act of literary faith and hope and charity too—a substance; something added to, and new-born in, the literary cosmos. He is better (indeed he is here almost at his very best) on Spenser than on Chaucer, but why? Because he _knew_ more about Spenser, because he was plentifully read in sixteenth- and hardly read at all in fourteenth-century literature. And so always: the very plethora of one’s notes for comment warning the commentator that he is lost if he indulges rashly. Where Hazlitt is inadequate (as for instance on Dryden) he is more instructive than many men’s adequacy could be, and where he is not— on Collins, on the Ballads, and elsewhere—he prepares us for that ineffable and half-reluctant outburst—a very Balaam’s blessing—on Coleridge,[486] which stands not higher than this, not lower than that, but as an _A-per-se_, consummate and unique.

[Sidenote: _The_ Comic Writers.]

In a sense the _Comic Writers_ are even better. The general exordium on Wit and Humour belongs to the first class of Hazlitt’s critical performances as defined above, and is one of the cleverest of them; though it may perhaps have the faults of its class, and some of those of its author. That on Comedy—the general part of it—incurs this sentence in a heavier degree; for Aristotle or somebody else seems to have impressed Hazlitt too strongly with the necessary _shadiness_ of Comedy, and it is quite clear that of the Romantic variety (which to be sure hardly anybody but Shakespeare has ever hit off) he had an insufficient idea. He is again inadequate on Jonson; it is indeed in his criticism, because of its very excellence, that we see—more than anywhere else, though we see it everywhere—the truth of his master’s denunciation of the “criticism which denies.” But his lecture or essay on the capital examples of the comedy which he really liked—that of the Restoration—is again an apex: and, as it happens, it is grouped for English students with others—the morally excellent and intellectually vigorous but rather purblind onslaught of Collier, the again vigorous but somewhat Philistine following thereof by Macaulay, the practical confession of Lamb’s fantastic and delightful apology, Leigh Hunt’s rather feeble compromise—after a fashion which shows it off to a marvel. While as to the chapter on the Eighteenth-century Novel it has, with a worthier subject, an equal supremacy of treatment. You may differ with much of it, but always agree to differ: except in that estimate of Lovelace which unfortunately shows us Hazlitt’s inability to recognise a _cad_ in the dress and with the manners of a fine gentleman.[487]

[Sidenote: The Age of Elizabeth.]

The _Lectures on the Age of Elizabeth_ (which succeeded the _Comic Writers_, as these had succeeded the _Poets_) maintain, if they do not even raise, the standard. Perhaps there is nothing so fine as the Coleridge passage in individual and concentrated expression; nor any piece of connected criticism so masterly as the chapter on the Novel. But the level is higher: and nowhere do we find better expression of that _gusto_—that amorous quest of literary beauty and rapturous enjoyment of it—which, has been noted as Hazlitt’s great merit. His faults are here, as always, with him and with us. Even the faithful Lamb was driven to expostulate[488] with the wanton and, as it happens, most uncritical belittlement of Sidney,[489] and (though he himself was probably less influenced by political partisanship or political feeling of any kind than almost any great writer of whom we know) to assign this to its true cause. It is odd[490] that a critic, and a great critic, should contrive to be inadequate both on Browne and on Dryden: and again one cannot but suspect the combination to be due to the fact that both were Royalists. But the King’s Head does not always come in: and it is only fair to Hazlitt to say that he is less biassed than Coleridge by the royalism itself of Beaumont and Fletcher, and the supposed republicanism of Massinger. And in by far the greater part of the book— nearly the whole of that part of it which deals with the dramatists— there is no disturbance of this kind. The opening, if somewhat discursive, is masterly, and with very few exceptions the lecturer or essayist carries out the admirable motto—in fact and in deed the motto of all real critics—“I have endeavoured to feel what was good, and to give a reason for the faith that was in me when necessary and when in my power.”[491] Two of his sentences, in dealing with Beaumont and Fletcher, not merely set the key-note of all good criticism but should open the stop thereof in all fit readers. “It is something worth living for to write or even read such poetry as this, or to know that it has been written.” Again, “And so it is something, as our poets themselves wrote, ‘far above singing.’”[492]

[Sidenote: Characters of Shakespeare.]

The _Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays_ is perhaps not as good as any of these three courses of Lectures; but it should be remembered that it came earlier in time, and that the critic had not “got his hand in.” The notes are as a rule nearly as desultory as Coleridge’s, with less suggestiveness; there is at least one outburst, in the case of _Henry V._, of the usual disturbing influence; there is very much more quotation than there need be from Schlegel; and there are other signs of the novitiate. Yet the book contains admirable things, as in the early comparison of Chaucer and Shakespeare, where, though Hazlitt’s defective knowledge of Chaucer again appears, there is much else good. Among the _apices_ of Shakespearian criticism is the statement that the poet “has no prejudice for or against his characters,”[493] that he makes “no attempt to force an interest: everything is left for time and circumstance to unfold.”[494] There is perhaps something inconsistent with this as well as with truth in the observation on _Lear_,[495] that “He is here fairly caught in the web of his own imagination”; but, like most of the greater critics, Hazlitt cares very little for superficial consistency. The characters of Falstaff and Shylock are masterpieces in his _bravura_ style, and one need perhaps nowhere seriously quarrel with any critical statement of his except the astonishing one, that _All’s Well that Ends Well_ is “one of the most _pleasing_” of the plays.

In the remaining volumes the literary articles or passages are only occasional, and are often considerably adulterated with non-literary matter. In _The Plain Speaker_, for instance, the opening paper on “The Prose Style of Poets” holds out almost the highest promise, and gives almost the lowest performance. Hazlitt, as is not so very uncommon with him, seems to have deliberately set himself to take the other side from Coleridge’s. That it happens also to be the wrong side matters very little. But even his attack on Coleridge’s own prose style (open enough to objection) has nothing very happy in it except the comparison, “To read one of his disquisitions is like hearing the variations to a piece of music without the score.” So, too, “On the Conversation of Authors,” though intensely interesting, has no critical interest or very little— the chief exception being the passage on Burke’s style. Far more important is the glance at the theory of the single word in “On Application to Study,”[496] and in that in “On Envy”[497] on the taste of the Lake School.

[Sidenote: The Plain Speaker.]

Much of _The Plain Speaker_ is injured as a treasury of criticism, though improved as a provision of amusement, by Hazlitt’s personal revelations, complaints, agonies; but the critical _ethos_ of the man was so irrepressible that it will not be refused. There is a curious little piece[498] of critical blasphemy, or at least “dis-_gusto_” (the word is wanted and is fairly choice Italian), in “On the Pleasure of Hating,” and, almost throughout the series, the sharp flux and reflux of literary admiration and political rage in respect of Scott is most noteworthy. “On the Qualifications necessary to Success in Life” contains yet another[499] of those passages on Coleridge which are like nothing so much as the half-fond, half-furious, retrospects of a discarded lover on his mistress—which are certainly like nothing else in literature. But “On Reading Old Books” does not belie the promise of its title, and is a complete and satisfactory palinode to the fit of critical headache noted just now. One must not venture to cite from it; it is to be read and re-read, and hardly any single piece, except the immortal “Farewell to Essay-Writing,” gives us so much insight into Hazlitt’s critical temperament as this. “On People of Sense” contains many critical glances, and, unfortunately, one[500] of those on Shelley which show Hazlitt at his worst. One might think that he who found others so “far above singing” could not miss the similar altitude of the author of _Prometheus Unbound_. But Shelley was a contemporary, something of an acquaintance, a man of some means, a gentleman—so Hazlitt must snarl[501] at him. Let us sigh and pass.

“Antiquity,” though on one side only, is almost throughout ours, and therefore not ours: and there is not a little for us in “On Novelty and Familiarity,” while “Old English Writers and Speakers” speaks for itself, and is specially interesting for its glances on matters French and its characteristically Hazlittian fling—one I confess with which I have for once no quarrel—that “_’Tis pity She’s a Whore_ will no more act than Lord Byron and Goethe together could have written it.”[502] It puts one in charity for the absurd description,[503] contradicted by

his own remarks, of _Redgauntlet_s “the last and almost worst” of Scott’s novels, and the prediction (alas! to be falsified) that “Old Sir Walter will last long enough”—in the flesh, not in fame.[504] “Scott, Racine, and Shakespeare” is not unworthy of its title, though it is really on the first and last only. Racine is brought in perfunctorily, and justice is done to him in neither sense.

_Table-Talk_, one of the greenest pastures of the Hazlittian champaign generally, is among the least literary of the books, and yet so literary enough. “On Genius and Common Sense” contributes its Character of Wordsworth,[505] on whom Hazlitt is always interesting, because of the extraordinary opposition between the men’s temperaments. The companion on Shelley,[506] which is supplied by “On Paradox and Commonplace,” is hardly less interesting, though, for the reasons above indicated, much less valuable. “On Milton’s Sonnets,” however, is, as it ought to be, a pure study and an admirable one.[507] “The Aristocracy of Letters” carries its hay high on the horn, yet it is not negligible: and “On Criticism,” which follows, really deserves the title, despite its frequent and inevitable flings and runnings-amuck. The good-humoured, though rather “home” description of “the Occult School”[508] (_v. supra_ on Lamb) is perfectly just. “On Familiar” Style is also no false promiser, and yet another passage on Coleridge meets us in the paper “On Effeminacy of Character.”

[Sidenote: The Round Table, _&c._]

Nor is the interesting “omnibus” volume, which takes its general title from _The Round Table_, of the most fertile. The collection of short papers, properly so called, was written earlier (1817) than most of the books hitherto discussed, and therefore has some first drafts or variants of not a little that is in them. In a note of it[509] occurs the passage on Burke, which, with that on Scott in the _Spirit of the Age_, is Hazlitt’s nearest approach to the sheer _delirium tremens_ of the Gifford Letter: but he is not often thus. “The Character of Milton’s Eve” is a fine critical paper of its kind, and “takes the taste out” well after the passage on Burke. The long handling of _The Excursion_ is very interesting to compare with that in the _English Poets_, as is the earlier “Midsummer Night’s Dream” with similar things elsewhere. “Pedantry” and others give something: and though no human being (especially no human being who knows both books) has ever discovered what made Hazlitt call _John Buncle_ “the English Rabelais,” the paper on Amory’s queer novel is a very charming one. “On the Literary Character” does somewhat deceive us: “Commonplace Critics” less so: but to “Poetical Versatility” we must return. Of the remaining contents of the volume, the well-known _Conversations with Northcote_ (where the painter plays Hazlitt’s idea of an Advocatus Diaboli on Hazlitt) gives less still. But there is a striking passage on Wordsworth,[510] a paradox (surely?) on Tom Paine[511] as “a fine writer” (you might as well call a good getter of coal at the face “a fine sculptor”), an interesting episode[512] on early American nineteenth-century literature; and not a few others, especially the profound self-criticism (for no doubt Northcote had nothing to do with it) on Hazlitt’s abstinence from society.[513] In _Characteristics_, one of the few notable collections of the kind in English, CCXC, a most curious and pretty certainly unconscious echo of Aristotle,[514] is our best gleaning; while the 52d “Commonplace,” on Byron and Wordsworth, and the 12th and 11th “Trifles light as air,” on Fielding and on “modern” critics, play the same part there.

[Sidenote: The Spirit of the Age.]

On the other hand, _The Spirit of the Age_ (with the exception of some political and philosophical matter) is wholly literary; and may rank with the three sets of _Lectures_ and the _Characters of Shakespeare_ as the main storehouse of Hazlitt’s criticism. Here, too, there is much repetition, and here, at the end of the Scott article, is the almost insane outburst more than once referred to. But the bulk of the book is at Hazlitt’s very best pitch of appreciative grasp. If he is anywhere out of focus, it is in reference to Godwin’s novels—the setting of which in any kind of comparison with Scott’s (though Hazlitt was critic enough from the first to see that Godwin could by no possibility be the “Author of _Waverley_”) is a remarkable instance of the disadvantage of the contemporary, and, to some extent, the sympathiser. But the book certainly goes far to bear out the magnificent eulogy of Hazlitt for which Thackeray[515] took it as text, quite early in his career.

[Sidenote: Sketches and Essays.]

The _Sketches and Essays_ are again very rich, where they are rich; and advertise the absence of riches most frankly where they are not. “On Reading New Books”; not a little of “Merry England”; the whole of “On Taste” and “Why the Heroes of Romances are insipid” speak for themselves, and do not bewray their claim. “Taste,” especially, contains[516] one of Hazlitt’s own titles to critical supremacy in his fixing on Perdita’s primrose description as itself supreme, when “the scale of fancy, passion, and observation of nature is raised” high enough. [Sidenote: Winterslow.] And as for _Winterslow_, its first and its last papers are “things enskied” in criticism, for the one is “My First Acquaintance with Poets,” and the last “The Farewell to Essay Writing.”

[Sidenote: _Hazlitt’s critical virtue,_]

These two last, the sentence on

“That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty”;

and (say) the paper referred to a little above on “Poetical Versatility,” will serve as texts for some more general remarks on Hazlitt’s critical character. We have said at the beginning of this notice everything that need be said by way of deduction or allowance; we have only hinted at the clear critical “balance to credit” which remains; and these essays and passages will help to bring this out.

To take the “Poetic Versatility” first, it is an interesting paper, and with the aid of those “characters” of poets, &c., which have been indicated in the survey just completed, gives the best possible idea of one (and perhaps the most popular) of Hazlitt’s forms of critical achievement and influence. In it he eddies round his subject—completing his picture of it by strokes apparently promiscuous in selection, but always tending to body forth the image that presents itself to him, and that he wishes to present to his readers. “Poetry dwells in a perpetual Utopia of its own.” It “does not create difficulties where they do not exist, but contrives to get rid of them whether they exist or not.” “Its strength is in its wings; its element the air.” We “may leave it to time to take out the stains, seeing it is a thing immortal as itself.” Poets “either find things delightful or make them so,” &c. &c., some of the etceteras drawing away from the everlasting, and condescending rather lamentably to the particular.

[Sidenote: _in set pieces,_]

Now there is no need to tell the reader—even the reader of this book, I hope—that this, of these utterances, is a reproduction of Longinus (whom Hazlitt most probably had not read), or that of Coleridge, whom most certainly he had both read and heard.[517] “The man who plants cabbages imitates too”: and it is only the foolishest folk of rather foolish times who endeavour to be original, though the wisest of all times always succeed in being so. The point with Hazlitt is that in these circlings round his subject—these puttings of every possible way in which, with or without the help of others, it strikes him—he gives the greatest possible help to others in being struck. One of the blows will almost certainly hit the nail on the head and drive it home into any tolerably susceptible mind: many may, and the others after the first will help to fix it. Of method there may not be very much—there is rather more here than in most cases; but whether there is method or not, “everything,” in the old military phrase, “goes in”; the subject and the reader are carried by assault, mass, variety, repetition of argument, imagery, phrase. Hazlitt will not be refused; he takes towns at a hand-gallop, like Condé at Lerida—and he does not often lose them afterwards.

[Sidenote: _and universally._]

In this phase of his genius, however, there is perhaps, for some tastes at any rate, a little too much of what has been called _bravura_—too much of the merely epideictic. It is not so in the other. Appreciate the appreciation of the _Winter’s Tale_ passage; still more take to heart (they will go to it without much taking where there is one) the “First Acquaintance with Poets,” or still better the marvellous critical swan-song of the “Farewell,” and there can be no more doubt about Hazlitt. _Quia multum amavit_ is at once his best description and his greatest glory. In all the range of criticism which I have read I can hardly think of any one except Longinus who displays the same faculty of not unreasonable or unreasoned passion for literature; and Longinus, alas! has, as an opportunity for showing this to us, scarcely more than the bulk of one of Hazlitt’s longest Essays, of which, long and short, Hazlitt himself has given us, I suppose, a hundred. Nor, as in some others (many, if not most of whom, if I named them, I should name for the sake of honour), is a genuine passion made the mere theme of elaborate and deliberate literary variations. As we have seen, Hazlitt will often leave it expressed in one sentence of ejaculatory and convincing fervour; it seldom appears at greater length than that of a passage, while a whole lecture or essay in the key of rapture is exceedingly rare. Hazlitt is desultory, irrelevant, splenetic, moody, self-contradictory; but he is never merely pleonastic,—there is no mere verbiage, no mere virtuosity, in him.

And the consequence is that this enthusiastic appreciation of letters, which I have, however heretically, taken throughout this book to be really the highest function of criticism, _catches_: that the critical yeast (to plagiarise from ourselves) never fails to work. The order of history, as always, should probably be repeated, and the influence of Coleridge should be felt, as Hazlitt himself felt it, first: it is well to fortify also with Longinus himself, and with Aristotle, and with as many others of the great ones as the student can manage to master. But there is at least a danger, with some perhaps of not the worst minds, of all this remaining cold as the bonfire before the torch is applied. The _silex scintillans_ of Hazlitt’s rugged heart will seldom fail to give the vivifying spark from its own inward and immortal fire.[518]

[Sidenote: _Blake._]

There have been times—perhaps they are not quite over—when the admission of William Blake[519] into the category of critics would have been regarded as an absurdity, or a bad jest. Nothing is more certain, however, than that the poet-painter expresses, with a force and directness rather improved by that lack of complete technical sanity which some of his admirers most unwisely and needlessly deny, the opinions of the “Extreme Right,” the high-fliers of the Army of Romanticism. He may often be thinking of painting rather than of poetry; but this is sometimes expressedly not the case, and many of his most pointed sayings apply to the one art just as well as to the other—if indeed it would not be still more correct to say that, except when they concern mere technique, they always apply to both. His work, despite the attention which it has received from hands, sometimes of the most eminent, during the last forty years, has never yet been edited in a fashion making its chaos cosmic or the threading of its labyrinths easy: and it may be well to bring together some of the most noteworthy critical expressions in it. That which has been referred to in a former passage,[520] “Every man is a judge of pictures who has not been connoisseured out of his senses,”[521] is in itself almost a miniature manifesto of the new school of criticism. For “connoisseurship”—the regular training in the orthodox system of judgment by rule and line and pattern—is substituted the impression of the natural man, unconditioned except by the retirement that it _shall_ be impression, and not prejudice.

[Sidenote: _His critical position and dicta._]

So, again, that remarkable expression of the Prophet Isaiah[522] when, as Blake casually mentions, he and Ezekiel “dined with me”—an occasion on which surely any one of taste would like to have completed the quartette. The poet-host tells us that he asked, “Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so make it so?” and that the prophet-guest answered, “All poets believe that it does”—a position from which La Harpism and the reluctance to “surrender disbelief” are at once crushed, concluded, and quelled.

In the remarkable engraved page on Homer and Virgil,[523] Blake adventures himself (not with such rashness as may at first seem) against Aristotle (or what he takes for Aristotle), by laying it down that Unity and Morality belong to philosophy, not poetry, or at least are secondary in the latter; that goodness and badness are not distinctions of “character” (a saying in which there is some quibbling but much depth as well); that the Classics, not Goths or Monks, “desolate Europe with wars” (a great enough dictum at the junction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries); and that “Grecian wit is mathematical form,” which is only “eternal in the reasoning memory,” while Gothic is “living form, that is to say, eternal existence”—perhaps the deepest saying of the whole, though it wants large allowance and intelligent taking.

The “Notes on Reynolds” are naturally full of our stuff.

[Sidenote: _The “Notes on Reynolds”_]

“Enthusiastic admiration is the first principle of knowledge.” [Sir Joshua had stated just the contrary.]

“What has reasoning to do with the art of painting [or, we may safely add, of poetry]?”

“Knowledge of ideal beauty is not to be acquired; it is born in us.”

“One central form ... being granted, it does not follow that all other forms are deformity. All forms are perfect in the poet’s mind, ... they are from imagination.”

“To generalise is to be an idiot. To particularise is the great distinction of merit.” [The “streak of the tulip” re-habilitated, and with a vengeance!]

“Invention depends altogether upon execution.”

“Passion and expression are beauty itself.”

“Ages are all equal: but genius is always above its age.”

[Sidenote: _and Wordsworth._]

It is worth while to add to these the very remarkable annotations upon Wordsworth’s Prefaces: “I don’t know who wrote these: they are very mischievous, and direct contrary to Wordsworth’s own practice” [where if Blake had added the words “when he is a poet,” he would simply have given the conclusion of the whole matter], with the very shrewd addendum that Wordsworth is not so much attacking poetic diction, or defending his own, as “vindicating unpopular poets.”

[Sidenote: _Commanding position of these._]

Scanty as this critical budget may seem, its individual items are of extraordinary weight, when we remember that some of them were written before the _Lyrical Ballads_ themselves appeared, and all of them by a man of hardly any reading in contemporary literature, and quite out of the circle of Coleridgean influence. It is scarcely, if at all, too much to say that they are almost enough to start, in a fit mind, the whole system of Romantic criticism in its more abstract form, and sometimes even in its particular and concrete applications. All the eighteenth-century Dagons—the beliefs in official connoisseurship, in the unapproachable supremacy of the ancients, in the barbarism and foolishness of Gothic art and literature, in the superiority of the general to the particular, in the necessity of extracting central forms and holding to them, in the supremacy of reason, in the teachableness of poetry, in the virtues of copying, in the superiority of design to execution,—all are tumbled off their pedestals with the most irreverent violence. That the critic’s applications in the sister art to Rubens, to Titian, to Reynolds himself, are generally unjust, and not infrequently the result of pure ignorance, does not matter; his own formulas would often correct him quite as thoroughly as those of the classical school. What is important is his discovery and enunciation of these formulas themselves.

For by them, in place of these battered gods of the classical or neo-classical Philistia, are set up Imagination for Reason, Enthusiasm for Good Sense, the Result for the Rule; the execution for the mere conception or even the mere selection of subject; impression for calculation; the heart and the eyes and the pulses and the fancy for the stop-watch and the boxwood measure and the table of specifications. It is not necessary to argue the question whether Blake’s own poetical work (we are not concerned with his pictorial) justifies or disconcerts the theories under which it was composed; it may be very strongly suspected, from utterances new as well as old, that approval of the theory and approval of the practice, as well as disapproval in each case, are too intimately bound up with each other to make appeal to either much of an argument. But for our main purpose, which is purely historical, the importance of Blake should, even in these few pages, have been put out of doubt. In no contemporary—not in Coleridge himself—is the counter-creed to that of the Neo-classics formulated with a sharper precision, and withal a greater width of inclusion and sweep.

[Sidenote: _Sir Walter Scott commonly undervalued as a critic._]

There are more senses than one (or for the matter of that two) in the famous proverb, “The better is the enemy of the good.” And in one of them, though not the commonest, it is eminently true of the criticism of Sir Walter Scott. No one, of course, would give to Scott any such relative rank as a critic as that which is his due either as poet or as novelist; but the extent to which his fame as poet and novelist has obscured his reputation as critic is altogether disproportionate and unfair. It is even doubtful whether some tolerably educated persons ever think of him as a critic at all. For his so-called “Prose Works” (except _Tales of a Grandfather_) are very little read, and as usual the criticism is the least read part of them. Yet it is a very large part— extending, what with the Lives of _Swift_ and _Dryden_, the shorter “_Biographies_,” the _Chivalry, Romance, and Drama_, and the collection or selection of _Periodical Criticism_, to ten pretty solid volumes, while even this excludes a great amount of critical matter in the notes and Introductions to the _Poems_, the Novels, the _Dryden_ and _Swift_ themselves, and other by-works of Sir Walter’s gigantic industry.

Mere bulk, however, it may be said, is nothing—indeed it is too often, in work of which posterity is so shy as it is of criticism, a positive misfortune and drawback. What makes the small account taken of Scott as a critic surprising and regrettable is the goodness as well as the bulk of his critical production. Perhaps it may be urged with some justice, in defence of this popular neglect, that his want of attention to style is particularly unfortunate here. He is notoriously a rather “incorrect” writer; and he does not, as many so-called incorrect writers have known how to do, supply the want of academic propriety by irregular brilliances of any kind.

[Sidenote: _Injustice of this._]

Another charge sometimes brought against him—that he is too good-natured and too indiscriminate in praise—will less hold water;[524] and indeed is much too closely connected with the popular notion of the critic as a sort of “nigger”-overseer, whose business is to walk about and distribute lashes—a notion which cannot be too often reprobated. As a private critic Scott _was_ sometimes too easy-going, but by no means always or often in his professional utterances. And he had what are certainly two of the greatest requirements of the critic, reading and sanity. Sometimes some amiable prepossession (such as the narrower patriotism in his relative estimate of Fielding and Smollett) leads him a little astray; but this is very seldom—far seldomer than is the rule with critics of anything like his range. Here, as elsewhere, he does not much affect the larger and deeper and higher generalisations; but here, as elsewhere, his power of reaching these has been considerably underrated. And the distaste itself saves him—and his readers—from the hasty and floundering failures of those who aim more ambitiously at width, depth, and height. In the methodic grasp and orderly exposition of large and complicated subjects (as in the _Romance_[525] and _Drama_ examples) he leaves nothing to desire. Sometimes, in his regular reviews, he condescends too much to the practice of making the review a mere abstract of the book; but I have known readers who complain bitterly of any other mode of proceeding.

Moreover, in two most important divisions of the critic’s art Scott has very few superiors. These are the appreciation of particular passages, books, and authors, and the writing of those critical biographies which Dryden first essayed in English, and of which Johnson is the acknowledged master. The Prefaces to the Ballantyne Novels[526] are the best among Scott’s good things in this kind on the small scale, as the _Dryden_ and the _Swift_ are on the great: for evidences of the former excellence the reader has only to open any one of the half-score volumes referred to above. And those golden qualities of heart which accompanied his genius are illustrated, as well as that genius itself, in his frequent critical writing on other novelists. The criticism of creators on their fellows is not always pleasant reading, except for those who delight to study the weaknesses of the _verdammte Race_. Scott criticises great and small among the folk of whom he is the king, from the commonest romancer up to Jane Austen, with equal generosity, acuteness, and technical mastery. Nor ought we, in this necessarily inadequate sketch, to omit putting in his cap the feather so often to be refused to critics—the feather of catholicity. Macaulay could not praise the delightful lady, whom both he and Scott did their utmost to celebrate, without throwing out a fling at _Sintram_, as if there were no room for good things of different kinds in the great region of Romance. In Scott’s works you may find,[527] literally side by side, and characterised by equal critical sense, the eulogy of _Persuasion_ and the eulogy of _Frankenstein_.[528]

[Sidenote: _Campbell: his_ Lectures on Poetry.]

Campbell’s critical work is chiefly concentrated in two places, one of them accessible with some difficulty, the other only too accessible after a fashion. The first is the _Lectures on Poetry_, which, after delivering them at the Royal Institution during the great vogue of such things in 1820, he refashioned later for the _New Monthly Magazine_ when he was its editor, so that they are only to be had by one of the least agreeable of all processes, the rummaging _for a purpose_ in an old periodical.

[Sidenote: _His_ Specimens.]

The accessibility of the other place—the critical matter contributed to the well-known _Specimens of the British Poets_, and to some extent the actual selections themselves—is greater because they are in nearly all the second-hand book-shops, where from sixpence to a shilling a volume will buy—well bound often and in perfectly good condition—matter which, at any proper ratio of exchange, is worth a dozen times the money. This worth consists of course mainly in the matter selected: but the taste which selected it must figure for no small increment, and the purely critical framework is, to say the least, remarkably worthy of both. Campbell, a very puzzling person in his poetry, is by no means a very easily comprehensible or appraisable one in his critical attitude. In the general arrangement of this he is distinctly of the older fashion, as the fashions of his time went. Like his style, though this is a very fair specimen of the “last Georgian,” still in a manner the standard and staple of the plainer English prose, his opinions are a thought periwigged and buckrammed. He demurs to the “Romantic Unity” of Hurd earlier and Schlegel later; and when in his swashing blow (and a good swashing blow it is of its kind) on the side of Pope in the weary quarrel, he tries to put treatment of artificial on a poetical level with treatment of natural objects, we must demur pretty steadily ourselves. But, on the other hand, he distinctly champions (and was, I believe, the first actually so to formulate) the principle that “in poetry there are many mansions,” and, what is more, he lives up to it. He really and almost adequately appreciates Chaucer: it is only his prejudice about Unity and the Fable that prevents him from being a thorough-going Spenserian; and when we come to the seventeenth century he is quite surprising. Again, it is true, his _general_ creed makes him declare that the metaphysicians “thought like madmen.” But he is juster to some of them than Hazlitt is; he has the great credit of having (after a note of Southey’s, it is true) re-introduced readers to the mazy but magical charms of _Pharonnida_; and he admits Godolphin and Stanley, Flatman and Ayres. If the history of the earlier part of his Introductory Essay is shaky, it could not have been otherwise in his time; and it shows that the indolence with which he is so often charged did not prevent him from making a very good use of what Warton and Percy, Tyrwhitt and Ritson and Ellis, had provided.

This indolence, however, is perhaps more evident in the distribution of the criticism, which, if not careless, is exceedingly capricious. Campbell seems at first to have intended to concentrate this criticism proper in the Introduction (to which nearly the whole of the first volume is allotted), and to make the separate prefaces to the selections mainly biographical. But he does not at all keep to this rule; the main _Introduction_ itself is, if anything, rather too copious at the beginning, while it is compressed and hurried at the end: not a few of the minor pieces and less prominent poets have no criticism at all; while, in the case of those that have it, it is often extremely difficult to discover the principle of its allotment. Yet, on the whole, Campbell ought never to be neglected by the serious student; for even if his criticism were solely directed from an obsolete standpoint, it would be well to go back to it now and then as a half-way house between those about Johnson and those about Coleridge, while as a matter of fact it has really a very fair dose of universal quality.[529]

[Sidenote: _Shelley: his_ Defence of Poetry.]

There are several critical passages in Shelley’s _Letters_, but, as formally preserved, his criticism is limited to the _Defence of Poetry_, which, despite its small bulk, is of extreme interest.[530] It is almost the only return of its times to that extremely abstract consideration of the matter which we found prevalent in the Renaissance, and which in Shelley’s case, as in the cases of Fracastoro or of Sidney, is undoubtedly inspired by Plato. It seems to have been immediately prompted by some heresies of Peacock’s: but, as was always its author’s habit, in prose as well as in verse, he drifts “away, afar” from what apparently was his starting-point, over a measureless ocean of abstract thinking. He endeavours indeed, at first, to echo the old saws about men “imitating natural objects in the youth of the world” and the like, but he does not in any way keep up the arrangement, and we are almost from the outset in contact with his own ardent imagination—of which quality he at once defines poetry as the expression. Again, the poetic faculty is “the faculty of approximation to the beautiful.” Once more we have the proud claim for poetry that poets are not merely the authors of arts, but the inventors of laws, the teachers of religion. They “participate in the eternal, the infinite, and the one.” They are not necessarily confined to verse, but they will be wise to use it. A poem is the very image of life, expressed in its eternal truth. “Poetry is something divine,” the “centre and circumference of knowledge,” the “perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things,” the “record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.” All which (or all except the crotchet about verse) I for one do most powerfully and potently believe: though if any one says that, as generally with Shelley, one is left stranded, or rather floating, in the vague, denial is not easy. One can only wish oneself, as Poins wished his sister, “no worse fortune.”[531]

[Sidenote: _Landor._]

In the course of this History we have seen not infrequent examples of Criticism divorced from Taste—a severance to which the peculiarities of classical and neo-classical censorship lent but too much encouragement. It must be obvious that the general tendency of the criticism which we are calling Modern inclines towards the divorce of Taste from Criticism— to the admission of the monstrous regiment of mere arbitrary enjoyment and liking, not to say mere caprice. But it is curious that our first very distinguished example of this should be found in a person who, both by practice and in theory, had very distinct “classical” tendencies—who, in fact, with the possible exception of Mr Arnold, was the most classical of at least the English writers of the nineteenth century.

[Sidenote: _His lack of judicial quality._]

Landor’s[532] critical shortcomings, however, are the obvious and practically inevitable result of certain well-known peculiarities of temperament, moral rather than intellectual, and principles of life rather than of literature. With him, as with King Lear (whom in more ways and points than one he resembled, though, luckily, with the tragedy infinitely softened and almost smoothed away), the dominant is _impotentia_—the increasing and at last absolute incapacity of the intellect and will to govern the emotions and impulses. Now, as criticism is itself an endless process of correcting impressions—or at least of checking and auditing them till we are sure that they are genuine, co-ordinated, and (with the real if not the apparent consistency) consistent—a man who suffers from this _impotentia_ simply cannot be a real critic, though he may occasionally make observations critically sound.

[Sidenote: _In regular Criticism._]

The rule and the exceptions hold good with Landor unfailingly. He was an excellent scholar; his acquaintance with modern literatures, though much smaller and extremely arbitrary, was not positively small, and his taste, in some directions at least, was delicate and exquisite. But of judicial quality or qualities he had not one single trace, and, even putting them out of the question, his intelligence was streaked and flawed by strange veins of positive silliness. We need not dwell too much on his orthographical and other whims, which have been shared by some great ones—the judgments are the things. In the very first paragraph of his very first regular criticism we find the statement that the Poems of Bion and Moschus are not only “very different” from those of Theocritus but “very inferior.” Inferior in what? in bulk certainly: but in what else are the _Adonis_ and the _Bion_ itself inferior to anything Theocritean? A critic should have been warned by his own “different” not to rush on the “inferior,” which is so often fallaciously consequent. I shall not be accused of excessive Virgil-worship, but what criticism is there in the objection to _me ceperat annus_ as “scarcely Latin” (really! really! Mr Landor, you were not quite a Pollio!), and in the flat emendation of _mihi coeperat_; or in the contemptuous treatment of that exquisite piece containing

ὁ θὴρ δ' ἔβαινε δειλῶς, φοβεῖτο γὰρ Κυθήρην,

a phrase which, for simplicity, pictorial effect, and suggestion, is almost worthy of Sappho? Such a sentence as that of Politian’s poems, “one only has any merit,” is simply disabling: mere schoolboy prejudice has evidently blinded the speaker. Yet it occurs in his best critique, that on Catullus.

[Sidenote: _The Conversations._]

These set criticisms, however, are few, and Landor was evidently not at ease in them. The literary “Conversations,” it may be said, are the true test. And it is at least certain that these conversations supply not a few of those more excellent critical observations which have been acknowledged and saluted. Especially must we acknowledge and salute one[533] which, though of considerable length, must be made an exception to the rule of “not quoting.” Nowhere, in ancient or modern place, is the education of the critic outlined with greater firmness and accuracy; and those who, by this or that good fortune, have been put through some such a process, may congratulate themselves on having learnt no vulgar art in no vulgar way.

[Sidenote: _Loculus aureolus._]

l would seriously recommend to the employer of our critics, young and old, that he oblige them to pursue a course of study such as this; that, under the superintendence of some respectable student from the University, they first read and examine the contents of the book—a thing greatly more useful in criticism than is generally thought; secondly, that they carefully write them down, number them, and range them under their several heads; thirdly, that they mark every beautiful, every faulty, every ambiguous, every uncommon expression. Which being completed, that they inquire what author, ancient or modern, has treated the same subject; that they compare them, first in smaller, afterwards in larger portions, noting every defect in precision and its causes, every excellence and its nature; that they graduate these, fixing _plus_ and _minus_, and designating them more accurately and discriminately by means of colours stronger or paler. For instance purple might express grandeur and majesty of thought; scarlet, vigour of expression; pink, liveliness; green, elegant and equable composition; these, however, and others as might best attract their notice and serve their memory. The same process may be used where authors have not written on the same subject, when those who have are wanting or have touched on it but incidentally. Thus Addison and Fontenelle, not very like, may be compared in the graces of style, in the number and degree of just thoughts and lively fancies; thus the dialogues of Cicero with those of Plato, his ethics with those of Aristotle, his orations with those of Demosthenes. It matters not if one be found superior to the other in this thing and inferior in that: the qualities of two authors are explored and understood and their distances laid down, as geographers speak, from accurate survey. The _plus_ and _minus_ of good and bad and ordinary will have something of a scale to rest upon: and after a time the degrees of the higher parts in intellectual dynamics may be more nearly attained, though never quite exactly.

[Sidenote: _But again disappointing._]

Yet in close context with this very passage comes an idle “splurt” (evidently half-due to _odium anti-theologicum_) at Coleridge—a thing exactly of the kind which such discipline as has been just recommended should check. And everywhere, especially in the long Miltonic examen between “Southey and Landor,” the effects of Landor’s character appear side by side with a sort of peddling and niggling censorship which one might have thought not natural to that character at all, and which perhaps is a _damnosa hereditas_ from the worse kind of classical scholarship. Even on Boileau[534] he manages to be unfair; and at his objection to one of Milton’s most exquisite and characteristic lines—

“Lancelot and Pelleas and Pellinore”—

one can but cover the face. Caprice, arbitrary legislation, sometimes positive blindness and deafness,—these are Landor’s critical marks when he quits pure theory, and sometimes when he does not quit it.

[Sidenote: _The revival of the Pope quarrels._]

With him we leave the “majorities”—those who, whether greater or lesser critics, were great either as such or in other paths of letters. Some smaller, but in some cases not so small, persons remain, with one or two examples—one specially famous—of what we have called “the Adversaries.” And first we must touch (if only in order to deal with yet another of the majorities themselves, who has seemed to some to be a critic) on the “Pope a Poet” quarrel.

[Sidenote: _Bowles._]

We have seen[535] that this quarrel, originally raised by Joseph Warton, was even by him latterly waged as by one _cauponans bellum_; but a lazily and gingerly waged war is generally a long one, and this instance did not discredit the rule. Johnson’s intervention[536] in it, in his _Life_ of Pope, was sensible and moderate—indeed, with certain necessary allowances, it is fairly decisive. But Pope, among his other peculiarities, has had the fate of making foes of his editors, and this was the case with the Reverend William Lisle Bowles, who revived the fainting battle,[537] not to any one’s advantage or particular credit, and to his own dire tribulation. Bowles is one of those not uninteresting people, in all divisions of history, who, absolutely rather null, have not inconsiderable relative importance. The influence of his early sonnets on Coleridge, and through Coleridge on the whole Romantic revival in England, is well known, and not really surprising. In the remainder of his long and on the whole blameless life, he committed a great deal of verse which, though not exactly bad, is utterly undistinguished and unimportant. His theory of poetry, however, though somewhat one-sided, was better than his practice: and it was rather as a result of that dangerous thing Reaction, and from a lack of alertness and catholicity, than from positive heresy, that he fell foul of Pope. In his edition he laid down, and in the controversy following he defended,[538] certain “invariable principles of Poetry,” of which the first and foremost was that images, thoughts, &c., derived from Nature and Passion, are always more sublime and pathetic than those drawn from Art and Manners. And it was chiefly on this ground that he, of course following his leader Warton, but using newer material and tactics, disabled, partially or wholly, the claims of Pope. Hereupon arose a hubbub. Campbell in the _Specimens_[539] took a hand; Byron wrote a _Letter to John Murray_[540] in defence of his favourite, and in ridicule of Bowles; auxiliaries and adversaries ran up on both sides. Whether Bowles was most happy or unhappy in the turmoil I am unable to say, but he was certainly put in a great state of agitation, and showered Pamphlets with elaborate titles, which one may duly find, with their occasions and rejoinders, in the library of the British Museum. At last dust settled on the conflict, which, however, is itself not quite settled to the present day, and in fact never can be, because it depends on one of the root differences of poetical taste. However, it probably helped the wiser sort to take the _via media_, even such a Romantic as Hazlitt vindicating Pope’s possession of “the poetical point of view,” and did, for the same sort, a service to the general history of criticism by emphasising the above-mentioned difference. Bowles himself, if he had been less fussy, less verbose, less given to “duply and quadruply” on small controversial points, and more a man of the world and of humour, might not have made by any means a bad critic. As it was, he was right in the main.

[Sidenote: _Byron._]

We must, however, I suppose, say something, if only in this connection, of Byron as a critic. I do not think it necessary to say very much; and I shall not, as I could most easily do, concatenate here the innumerable contradictions of critical opinion in his _Letters_, which show that they were mere flashes of the moment, connected not merely by no critical theory but by no critical taste of any consistency, flings, “half-bricks” directed at dog or devil or divinity, according to the mood in which the “noble poet” chose to find himself. [Sidenote: _The_ Letter to Murray, _&c._] Let us confine ourselves to that unquestionably remarkable _Letter to John Murray_ on Bowles and Pope, which is admittedly his critical diploma-piece. There are of course very good things in it. Byron was a genius; and your genius will say genial things now and then, whatsoever subject he happens to be treating. But he cannot in the very least maintain himself at the critical point: he is like the ball in the fountain, mounting now and then gloriously on the summit of the column and catching the rays that it attracts and reflects, much more often lying wallowing in the basin. Never was such critical floundering. He blasphemes at one moment the “invariable principles of poetry,” about which the amiable but somewhat ineffectual Bowles prated; he affirms them at the next, by finding in his way, and blindly picking up, the secret of secrets, that the poet who _executes_ best is the highest, whatsoever his department; and he makes his affirmation valueless, by saying, almost before we have turned the page, that Lucretius is ruined by his ethics, and Pope saved by them. Even setting ethic against ethic, the proposition is at least disputable: but what on earth has Ethic to do with Execution, except that they both occur in the dictionary under E? There are other excellent things in the letter, and yet others the reverse of excellent; but I have not the least intention here of setting up a balance-sheet after the manner of Robinson Crusoe, of ranging Byron’s undoubtedly true, though not novel, vindication of the human element as invariably necessary to poetry, against his opinion of Shelley, and of Keats, and of the English poetry of his greatest contemporaries generally, as “all Claudian,” and against the implied estimate of Claudian himself. This would be a confusion like his own, a parallel _ignoratio elenchi_, a _fallacia a fallacioribus_. Suffice it to say, that to take him seriously as a critic is impossible.[541]

[Sidenote: _Others: Isaac Disraeli._]

Of the work which—sometimes of the inner citizenship of the critical Rome and at the worst of its “utmost last provincial band”—was done by a great number of individuals and in no small number of periodicals, dictionaries, and what not, we cannot speak here as fully as would be pleasant,—the historian must become a “reasoned cataloguer” merely, and that by selection. Two contemporary and characteristic figures are those of Isaac Disraeli and of Sir Egerton Brydges. Both had the defects of the antiquarian quality. Rogers, though unamiable, was probably not unjust when, in acknowledging the likelihood of Isaac Disraeli’s collections enduring, he described him as “a man with half an intellect.” In formation and expression of opinion, Lord Beaconsfield’s father too often wandered from the silly to the self-evident and back again, like Addison between his two bottles at the ends of the Holland House gallery: and his numerous _collectanea_ would certainly be more useful if they were more accurate. But the _Curiosities_, the _Amenities_, the _Quarrels_, and all the rest show an ardent love for literature itself, and a singularly wide knowledge of it: they are well calculated to inoculate readers, especially young readers, with both.

[Sidenote: _Sir Egerton Brydges._]

Brydges’s work, less popular, is of a higher quality. His extensive editing labours were beyond price at his date; in books like the _Censura Literaria_ much knowledge is still readily accessible, which can only be picked up elsewhere by enormous excursions of reading at large; and his original critical power was much higher than is generally allowed. Such enthusiastic admiration of Shelley as is displayed in the notes to his Geneva reprint of the English part of Phillips' _Theatrum Poetarum_ in 1824,[542] is not often shown by a man of sixty-two for a style of poetry entirely different from that to which he has been accustomed. And it shows, not merely how true a training the study of older literature is for the appreciation of newer, but that there must have been something to train.

[Sidenote: The Retrospective Review.]

Moreover, this first period of enthusiastic exploration did not merely produce the lectures of Coleridge and Hazlitt, and the unsurpassed essays of Lamb, the hardly surpassed ones of Leigh Hunt. It produced also, by the combined efforts of a band of somewhat less distinguished persons, a periodical publication of very considerable bulk and of almost unique value and interest. It is not for nothing that while old magazines and reviews are usually sold for less than the cost of their binding, and not much more than their value as waste-paper, _The Retrospective Review_[543] still has respectable, though of course not fantastic, prices affixed to it in the catalogues. It was started in 1820, under the editorship of Henry Southern,[544] a diplomatist from the Cantabrigian Trinity, and of the antiquary afterwards so well known as Sir Harris Nicolas. Opening with a first volume of extraordinary excellence, it kept up for seven years and fourteen volumes, on a uniform principle. The second series, however, which was started after I know not what breach of continuity,[545] was less fortunate, and extends to two volumes only, though these contain much more matter apiece than the earlier ones. It is not uncommon to find these two volumes, and even some of the first series, wanting in library sets, which librarians should do their best to complete; for though, toward the end, the purely antiquarian matter encroached a very little upon the literary, there is not a volume from first to last which does not contain literary matter of the highest interest and value.[546]

The proud-looked and high-stomached persons who pronounce the best in this kind but shadows, and regard old criticism as being—far more than history in its despised days—“an old almanack,” will of course look prouder and exalt their stomachs higher at the use of such terms. So be it. Some day people will perhaps begin to understand generally what criticism is, and what is its importance. Then more—as some do already— will appreciate the interest and the value of this work of Nicolas, Palgrave, Talfourd, Hartley Coleridge, and other good men. It would be perfectly easy to make fun of it. The style may be to modern tastes a little stilted when it is ambitious, and a little jejune when it is not— in both cases after the way of the last Georgian standard prose. Although there is much and real learning, our philologers might doubtless exalt _their_ stomachs over the neglect of their favourite study: and the fetichists of biography might discover that many a Joan is called Jane, and many a March made into February. These drawbacks and defects are more than compensated by the general character of the treatment. While not despising bibliography, the writers as a rule do not put it first, like Sir Egerton Brydges: nor do they indulge in the egotistical _pot-pourri_ of “Chandos of Sudeley.” They have the enormous advantage, in most cases, of coming quite fresh to their work,—of being able to give a real “squeeze” direct from the original brass, with the aid of their own appreciation, unmarred and unmingled by reminiscences of this essay and that treatise, by the necessity of combating this or that authority on their subject. They look at that subject itself, and even when they show traces of a little prejudice—as in the opposite cases of the man who is rather hard on Dryden and the man who is, for the nineteenth century, astonishingly “soft” on Glover—the impression is obviously genuine and free from forgery.

What is more, these Reviewers give themselves, as a rule, plenty of room, and supply abundant extracts—things of the first importance in the case of books, then as a rule to be found only in the old editions, and in many cases by no means common now. The scope is wide. The first volume gives, _inter alia_, articles on Chamberlayne (one for _Pharonnida_ and one for _Love’s Victory_), on Crashaw and Dryden, on Rymer and Dennis and Heinsius, on Ben Jonson and Cyrano de Bergerac, on the _Urn Burial_, and on such mere curiosities as _The Voyage of the Wandering Knight_. The papers throughout on Drama, from the Mysteries onward, and including separate articles on the great Elizabethan minors, were, till Pearson’s reprints thirty years ago, the most accessible source of information on their subjects, and are still specially notable; as are also the constituents of another interesting series on Spanish Literature. The _Arcadia_ balances Butler’s _Remains_ in vol. ii. Vaughan and Defoe, _Imitations of Hudibras_, and that luckless dramatist and mad but true poet, Lee,[547] have their places in the Third, where also some one (though he came a little too early to know the _Chansons de gestes_, and so did not put “things of Charlemagne” in their right order) has an interesting article on the Italian compilation _La Spagna_. I should like to continue this sampling throughout the sixteen volumes, but space commands only a note on the rest in detail.[548]

Nor are they afraid of more general discussion. In the above-mentioned article on John Dennis there is a long passage which I do not remember to have seen anywhere extracted, dealing in a singularly temperate and reasonable fashion with the “off-with-his-head” style of criticism put in fashion by the _Edinburgh_; and others will be easily found. But they do not as a rule lay themselves out much for “preceptive” criticism. It is the _other_ new style of intelligent and well-willing interpretation to which they incline, and they carry it out with extraordinary ability and success. To supply those who may not have time, opportunity, or perhaps even inclination to read more or less out-of-the way originals with some intelligible and enjoyable knowledge of them at second-hand; to prepare, initiate, and guide those who are able and willing to undertake such reading; to supply those who have actually gone through it with estimates and judgments for comparison and appreciation—these may be said to be their three objects. Some people may, of course, think them trivial objects or unimportant; to me, I confess, they seem to be objects extremely well worth attaining, and here very well attained. The papers in the _Retrospective Review_, be it remembered, anticipated Sainte-Beuve himself (much more such later English and American practitioners as Mr Arnold, who was not born, and Mr Lowell, who was but a yearling when it first appeared) in the production of the full literary _causerie_, the applied and illustrative complement, in regard to individual books, authors, or small subjects, of the literary history proper. When people at last begin to appreciate what literary history means, there will probably be, in every country, a collection of the best essays of this kind arranged from their authors’ works conveniently for the use of the student. And when such a collection is made in England, no small part in it will be played by articles taken from the _Retrospective Review_.

[Sidenote: _The_ Baviad _and_ Anti-Jacobin,]

For the last subdivision of this chapter we must go a little backwards. The phenomena of English criticism in the last decade of the eighteenth century are curious: and they might be used to support such very different theories of the relations of Criticism and Creation, that their most judicious use, perhaps, is to point the moral of the riskiness of _any_ such theories. During this decade one great generation was dying off and another even greater was but coming on. Except Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_, and Burke’s last and best work (which were both entirely of the past, and in the former case, at least, presented a purely personal product), and the _Lyrical Ballads_ (which were wholly of the future), with the shadowy work of Blake (hardly of any time or even any place), nothing of extraordinary goodness appeared. But a great deal appeared of a most ordinary and typical badness, and this seems to have excited a peculiar kind of irregular or Cossack criticism to carry on a guerilla war against the hosts of dreary or fantastic dulness. Criticism had at this time little of a standing army: the old _Critical_ and _Monthly_ Reviews were sinking into dotage (though such a man as Southey wrote in the former), and the new class of comparatively independent censorship, which put money in its purse and carried its head high, was to wait for the _Edinburgh_ and the next century. But Hayley and Sir James Bland Burges and the Della Cruscans; but Darwin even, and even Godwin; nay, the very early antics of such men as Coleridge and Southey themselves, with some things in them not so antic perhaps, but seeming to their contemporaries of an antic disposition—were more than critical flesh and blood could stand. [Sidenote: _with Wolcot and Mathias._] The spirit which had animated Rivarol[549] on the other side of the Channel came to animate Wolcot (who had indeed showed it for some time[550]) and his enemy Gifford, and the greater wits of the _Anti-Jacobin_, and even the pedantic and prosaic Mathias.

Now the result of dwelling upon the works of that Pindar who was born not in Bœotia but in Devonshire, and on the ever-beloved and delightful _Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin_, if not also on its prose, would no doubt be far more agreeable to the reader than much of what he actually finds here: and to dwell on them would fall in with some of the writer’s oldest and most cherished tastes. Nay, even the _Baviad_ and _Mæviad_, out of proportion and keeping as is much of their satire, and the _Pursuits of Literature_ itself,—despite its tedious ostentation of learning, its endless irrelevance of political and other note-divagation, and its disgusting donnishness without the dignity of the better don,—give, especially in the three first cases, much marrowy matter in the texts, and an abundance of the most exquisite unintentional fooling in the passages cited by the copious notes. Unfortunately so to dwell would be itself out of keeping and proportion here. The things[551] are among the lightest and best examples of the critical _soufflé_, well cheesed and peppered. Or (if the severer muses and their worshippers disdain a metaphor from Cookery, that Cinderella of the Fine Arts) let us say that they exemplify most agreeably the substitution of a sort of critical _banderilla_, sometimes fatal enough in its way, for the Thor’s hammer of Dryden and the stiletto of Pope. But they are only symptoms—we have seen things of their kind before, from Aristophanes downwards—and we must merely signal and register them as we pass in this adventure, keeping and recommending them nevertheless for quiet and frequent reading _delectationis causa_. The infallibility and vitality of the _Anti-Jacobin_, in particular, for this purpose, is something really prodigious. The _Rovers_ and the _New Morality_ and the _Loves of the Triangles_ seem to lose none of their virtue during a whole lifetime of the reader, and after a century of their own existence.

[Sidenote: _The influence of the new_ Reviews, &c.]

There is, however, one point on which we not only may but must draw special attention to them. There can be little doubt that these light velitations of theirs prepared the way and sharpened the taste for a very considerable refashioning and new-modelling of the regular critical-Periodical army which followed so soon. In this new-modelling some of them—Gifford, Canning, Ellis—were most important officers, and there can be no doubt at all that many others transferred, consciously or unconsciously, this lighter way of criticising from verse to prose, or kept it up in verse itself such as _Rejected Addresses_, which in turn handed on the pattern to the _Bon Gaultier Ballads_ in the middle, and to much else at the end, of the nineteenth century. Part of the style was of course itself but a resharpening of the weapons of the Scriblerus Club; but these weapons were refurbished brightly, and not a little repointed. The newer critic was at least supposed to remember that he was not to be dull. Unfortunately the personal impertinence which, though not pretty even in the verse-satirist, is by a sort of prescription excusable or at least excused in him, transferred itself to the prose: and the political intolerance became even greater.[552]

[Sidenote: _Jeffrey._]

It is not the least curious freak of the whirligig of time, as shown working in this history, that not a century ago one of the chief places here would have seemed inevitably due to Francis Jeffrey, while at the present moment perhaps a large majority of readers would be disposed to grudge him more than a paragraph, and be somewhat inclined to skip that.

[Sidenote: _His loss of place and its cause._]

We cannot “stint his sizings” to that extent. Yet it is also impossible to give him much space, more particularly because his interest has shrunk to, and is very unlikely ever greatly to swell from, that of a kind of representative position. Jeffrey is no mere English La Harpe, as some think: he does not exemplify the Neo-classical “Thorough,” the rigour of the Rule, after the fashion which makes that remarkable person so interesting. On the contrary, he is only the last and most noteworthy instance of that mainly Neo-classic inconsistency which we pointed out and on which we dwelt in the last volume. Except that he looks more backward than forward, Jeffrey often reminds us rather of Marmontel. He has inherited to the fullest extent the by this time ingrained English belief that canons of criticism which exclude or depreciate Shakespeare and Milton “will never do,” as he might have said himself: but he has not merely inherited, he has expanded and supplemented it. He has not the least objection to the new school of students and praisers of those other Elizabethan writers, compared with whom Shakespeare would have seemed to La Harpe almost a regular dramatist, and quite a sane and orderly person. He has a strong admiration for Ford. He will follow a safe fellow-Whig like Campbell in admiring such an extremely anti-“classical” thing as Chamberlayne’s _Pharonnida_. He uses about Dryden and Pope language not very different from Mr Arnold’s, and he is quite enthusiastic (though of course with some funny metrical qualms) about Cowper.

[Sidenote: _His inconsistency._]

But here (except in reference to a man like Keats, who had been ill-treated by the Tories) he draws the line. There may have been something political in the attitude which the _Edinburgh_ assumed towards the great new school of poetry which arose between 1798 and 1820. But politics cannot have had everything to do with the matter, and it cannot be an accident that Crabbe is about the only contemporary poet of mark, except Byron, Campbell, and Rogers, whom Jeffrey cordially praises. Above all, the reasons of his depreciation of poets so different as Scott and Wordsworth, and the things of theirs that he specially blames, are fatal. There is plenty to be said against Scott as a poet, and plenty to be said against Wordsworth. _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_ is far from faultlessly perfect: but the beauty of its subject, its adaptation of antique matter and manner, and its new versification, are almost beyond praise from the poetical point of view. It is exactly these three things that Jeffrey most blames. There are scores and hundreds of things in Wordsworth which are helplessly exposed to the critical arrows: but a man who pronounces the _Daffodils_ “stuff” puts himself down once for all, irrevocably, without hope of pardon or of atonement, a person insensible to poetry as such, though there may be kinds and forms of poetry which, from this or that cause, he is able to appreciate.[553]

[Sidenote: _His criticism on Madame de Staël._]

Once more, as in Leigh Hunt’s case (though on the still smaller scale desirable), we can take a “brick of the house” with advantage and without absurdity. Indeed I hardly know anywhere a single Essay which exhibits a considerable critic so representatively as is done for Jeffrey by his article on Madame de Staël’s _De La Littérature_, which appeared in the _Edinburgh_ for November 1812 and stands after the Tractate on Beauty in the forefront of his Collected Works.[554] He was in the full maturity of his critical powers; as a woman (for Jeffrey was quite a chivalrous person), and as a kind of foreign and female Whig, his author was sure of favourable treatment; the “philosophic” atmosphere of the book appealed to his education, nationality, and personal sympathies; and he had practically most of the knowledge required.[555]

And the article is a very good article,—polite in its mild exposure of Madame de Staël’s hasty generalisations, extremely clever and capable in its own survey of literature—Jeffrey was particularly good at these surveys and naturally inclined to them—sensible, competent, in the highest degree readable. It would not be easy, unless we took something of Southey’s on the other side, better to illustrate the immense advance made by periodical criticism since the _Edinburgh_ itself had shown the way.

Yet there are curious drawbacks and limitations which explain why Jeffrey has not kept, and why he is perhaps not very likely to recover, his pride of place. Part of his idiosyncrasy was a very odd kind of pessimism, which one would rather have expected from a High Tory than from a “blue and yellow,” however symbolical these colours may be of fear. To Jeffrey—in the second decade of the new flourishing of English poetry, which had at least eighty good years to run; in the very year of the new birth of the novel; with Goethe still alive and Heine a boy in Germany; with the best men of the great French mid-nineteenth century already born—it seems that “the age of original genius is over.” Now, when a man has once made up his mind to this, he is not likely to be very tolerant of attempts on the age’s part to convince him that he is wrong. But even his judgments of the past exhibit a curious want of catholicity. The French vein, which is so strong in him, as well as the general eighteenth-century spirit, which is so much stronger, appears in a distinct tendency to set Latin above Greek. He commends the Greeks indeed for their wonderful “rationality and moderation in imaginative work,” suggesting, with a mixture of simplicity and shrewdness, that the reason of this is the absence of any models. Having no originals, they did not try to be better than these. His criticism of the two literatures is taken from a very odd angle—or rather from a maze and web of odd angles. “The fate of the Tarquins,” he says, “could never have been regarded at Rome as a worthy occasion either of pity or horror.” And he does not in the least seem to see—probably he would have indignantly denied—that in saying this he is denying the Romans any _literary_ sense at all. In Aristophanes he has nothing to remark but his “extreme coarseness and vulgarity”; and “the immense difference between Thucydides and Tacitus” is adjusted to the advantage of the Roman. He actually seems to prefer Augustan to Greek poetry, and makes the astonishing remark that “there is nothing at all in the whole range of Greek literature like ... the fourth book of Virgil,” having apparently never so much as heard of Apollonius Rhodius.[556]

That of mediæval literature he says practically nothing is not surprising, but it must be taken into account: and his defence of English Literature against his author, though perfectly good against _her_, is necessarily rather limited by its actual purpose, and suggests somehow that other limitations would have appeared if it had been freed from this.

[Sidenote: _Its lesson._]

In short, though we cannot support the conclusion further, the very word “limitation” suggests the name of Jeffrey, in the sphere of criticism. He seems to be constantly “pulled up” by some mysterious check-rein, turned back by some half-invisible obstacle. Sometimes—by no means quite always—we can concatenate the limiting causes,—deduce them from something known and anterior, but they are almost always present or impending. As Leigh Hunt is the most catholic of critics, so Jeffrey is almost the most sectarian: the very shibboleths of his sectarianism being arbitrarily combined, and to a great extent peculiar to himself.[557]

[Sidenote: _Hallam._]

Let us conclude the chapter with a figure scarcely less representative of the anti-enthusiast school of critics, and much more agreeable than either Gifford or Jeffrey. To the English student of literary history and of literary criticism, Henry Hallam must always be a name _clarum et venerabile_; nor—as has been so often pointed out in these pages, and as unfortunately it seems still so often necessary[558] to point out—need disagreement with a great many of his own critical judgments and belief that—for those who merely swallow such judgments whole—he is not the safest of critical teachers, interfere with such due homage. [Sidenote: _His achievement._] For Hallam was our first master in English of the true comparative-historical study of literature—the study without which, as one main result of this volume should be to show, all criticism is now unsatisfactory, and the special variety of criticism which has been cultivated for the last century most dangerously delusive. His Introduction to the _Literature of Europe_, with its sketch of mediæval and its fuller treatment of Renaissance and seventeenth-century Literature, is the earliest book of the kind in our language: it is not far from being, to this day, the best book of the kind in any.

[Sidenote: _Its merits_]

A first attempt of its sort (it cannot be said here with too much frankness and conviction) can even less than any other book be faultless: and it is almost a sufficient proof of Hallam’s greatness that his faults are not greater. Some things, indeed, that seem to me faults may not even seem to be so at all to others. He was aware that he must “pass over or partially touch” some departments of at any rate so-called literature; but his preference or rejection may seem somewhat remarkable. Few will quarrel, at least from my point of view, with the very large space given to mere “scholars,” but it is surely strange that a historian should have thought History of secondary importance, while according ample space not only to Philosophy and Theology, but even to Anatomy and Mathematics. A more serious and a more indisputable blemish is the scanty and second-hand character of his account of mediæval literature, which he might almost as well have omitted altogether. It cannot be too peremptorily laid down that second-hand accounts of literature are absolutely devoid of any value whatever:—the best and latest authorities become equally “not evidence” with the stalest and worst. [Sidenote: _and defects._] Hallam was aware of this principle to some extent, and he almost states it, though of course in his own more measured way, and with reference to quotation mainly, in his preface. But his first chapter is really nothing but a tissue of references to Herder and Eichhorn, Meiners and Fleury, with original remarks which do not console us. The account of Boethius at the very beginning is a pretty piece of rhetoric, but, as the Germans would say, not in the least “ingoing.” It is a horrible heresy to say[559] that “It is sufficient to look at any extracts” from the Dark Ages “to see the justice of this censure,” for no collection of extracts will justify the _formation_ of any critical opinion whatsoever, though it may support, or at least illustrate, one formed from reading whole works.

[Sidenote: _In general distribution and treatment._]

Further, in a note of Hallam’s[560] I think may be found the origin of Mr Arnold’s too exclusive preference for “the best and principal” things and his disparagement of the historic estimate, though I trust that Mr Arnold[561] would not have shared Hallam’s contempt, equally superfine and superficial, for the “barbarous Latin” of the Dark Ages. Finally, it is difficult to conceive a more inadequate reference to one of the most epoch-making of European poems (which is at the same time in its earlier part one of not the least charming) than the words “A very celebrated poem, the _Roman de la Rose_, had introduced an unfortunate taste for allegory in verse, from which France did not extricate herself for several generations.” It is all the worse because nothing in it is positively untrue.

It may be said to be unjust to dwell on what is avowedly a mere overture: but unluckily, when Hallam comes to his subject proper, all trace of second-hand treatment does not disappear. The part played by direct examination becomes very much larger; and the writer’s reading is a matter of just admiration, nor does he ever for one moment pretend to have read what he has not. But he has no scruple in supplementing his reading at second-hand, or even in doubling his own frequently excellent judgments with long quoted passages from writers like Bouterwek. Further, the surprise which has been hinted above as to his admissions and exclusions, and at his relative admissions in point of departments, may perhaps after a time change into a disappointed conviction that his first interest did not lie in literature, as literature, at all; but in politics ecclesiastical and civil, juristics, moral and other philosophy, and the like. I am inclined to think that Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, and Grotius have, between them, more space than is devoted to all Hallam’s figures in _belles lettres_ from Rabelais to Dryden.

[Sidenote: _In some particular instances._]

I could support this with a very large number of _pièces_ if it were necessary; but a few must suffice, and in those few we shall find a further count against Hallam arising. Note, for instance, his indorsement of Meiners' complaint that Politian “did not scruple to take words from such writers as Apuleius and Tertullian,” an indorsement which in principle runs to the full folly of Ciceronianism, and with which it is well to couple and perpend the round assertion elsewhere that Italian is—even it would seem for Italians—an inferior literary instrument to Latin. Secondly, take the astounding suggestion that the _Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum_ “surely” have “not much intrinsic merit,” and the apparent dismissal of them as “a mass of vapid nonsense and bad grammar.” As if the very vapidity of the nonsense did not give the savour, and the badness of the grammar were not the charm! Here again another judgment (on the _Satire Menippée_) clinches the inference that Hallam’s taste for humour was small. If he is not uncomplimentary, he is strikingly inadequate, on Marot: and in regard to the Pléiade he simply follows the French to do evil, and as elsewhere puts himself under the guidance of—La Harpe! Few “heroic enthusiasts” will read his longer and more appreciative notice of Spenser without perceiving “some want, some coldness” in it; fewer will even expect not to find these privations in that of Donne. But the shortest of his shortcomings are reached in his article on Browne, and in part of that on Shakespeare. In the latter the famous sentence on the Sonnets is not, I think, so unforgivable as the slander on Juliet;[562] in the former one can simply quote in silence of comment. “His style is not flowing, but vigorous; his choice of words not elegant, and even approaching to barbarism in English phrase: yet there is an impressiveness, an air of reflection and serenity, in Browne’s writings which redeem many of his faults.”[563] The sentence that “_Gondibert_ is better worth reading than _The Purple Island_, though it may have less of that which distinguishes a poet from another man”—in other words, that an unpoetical poem is better worth reading than a poetical one—is sufficiently tell-tale. It is not surprising, after it, that Hallam speaks respectfully of Rymer—a point where Macaulay, so often his disciple, fortunately left him.

[Sidenote: _His central weakness,_]

Something, it has been said, will inevitably emerge from these utterances on a tolerably intelligent consideration. Hallam has abundant erudition, much judicial quality, a shrewdness which generally guides him more or less right in points of fact; sense; fairness; freedom from caprice—even (except as regards the Middle Ages, and especially mediæval Latin and its ancestors back to the late Silver Age) a certain power of regarding literature impartially. But he has, as is so often done (he alludes to the fact himself somewhere), spoken his own doom in words which he applies (with remarkable injustice as it happens) to Fontenelle. He has “cool good sense, and an incapacity, by natural privation, of feeling the highest excellence in works of taste.”

[Sidenote: _and the value left by it._]

In short, “The Act of God”: and for such acts it is as unreasonable as it is indecent to blame their victims. But at the same time we may carry our forbearance to natural privations too far by accepting blind men as guides in precipitous countries, or using as a bloodhound a dog who has no scent. And therefore it is impossible to assign to Hallam a high place as a critic. He may be—he is—useful even in this respect as a check and a reminder of the views which once were taken by men of wide information, excellent discipline, literary disposition, and (where it was not seared or paralysed) positive taste; but he will not soon recover any other value. Even thus he is to a critic that always critically estimable thing a _point de repère_, and in the kindred but not identical function of literary historian, the praise which was given to him at the opening of this notice may be maintained in spite of, and not inconsistently with, anything that has been said meanwhile.[564]

Nay, more, Specialism has made such inroads upon us—has bondaged the land to such hordes of robber-barons—that we may not soon expect again, and may even regard with a tender _desiderium_, the width, the justice, the far-reaching and self-sufficing survey and sovereignty of Hallam.