CHAPTER IV.

THE CHANGE IN THE OTHER NATIONS.

The present chapter could hardly be omitted; but it must be almost necessarily rather an apology for what does not appear than a substantive presentation. Something has been said already[804] of the state of Italian and of Spanish criticism during the eighteenth century. Its lethargy was only quickened after (and even some time after) the beginning of the nineteenth, by the spread of those very waves of influence which have been described, and their origin and progress traced, partly in the last Book, and partly in the three preceding chapters of the present. Neither country contributed anything original to the critical change—to the establishment of Romanticism—though both had much to do with that establishment as furnishing those texts of past creation which were, as we have seen, almost the most powerful, and certainly the most beneficent, of all agencies in the revolution. None, perhaps, did so much by furnishing further scenery and apparatus to the new movement: though Byron, by adopting these, enhanced their influence in this way, yet it had been exercised long before he wrote—before he even existed—in England, from the time of the _Castle of Otranto_, in Germany, from one somewhat, but not so very much, later. But all this belongs to the far-off fringes of our subject, if even to them; and we have only too little room for its central and substantive portions.

The critical awakening of more backward and outlying nations and languages, such as Russian, Polish, and Hungarian, was in much the same case; that of the Scandinavian countries was a little more advanced. The closer relations in which Denmark at all times stood with Germany, and those which Sweden maintained, not merely with Germany but with France, must have kept them more to the front in these matters, while the double influence was of course still more constantly, though not quite so effectually, at work in Holland. Holberg and Tullin and Ewald, with Baggesen a little later in Denmark, rather accompanied than followed the reconstructive reformation of German literature; Kellgren, Leopold, and Thorn conducted the attack and defence in Sweden a little later still; and the literary decadence of Dutch was at last relieved, towards the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, by Southey’s friend, Bilderdijk. In regard to all the languages referred to in this paragraph, though not in regard to Italian and Spanish, I am in the disability formerly acknowledged, as to one of them—Dutch. But I cannot learn from any good authority that this disability is likely here to be fatal, or even injurious. In the history of the individual literatures their criticism is of course of great importance: but in the history of the general subject it can have very little.[805]

INTERCHAPTER VIII. (WITH AN EXCURSUS ON PERIODICAL CRITICISM.)

We here come to the point antipolar to that of the last volume, at which[806] we ventured to give a sketch of the Classic or Neo-classic creed. The challenge to array definitions of Classicism and Romanticism in a tabular form has already[807] been respectfully declined: but that this “declinature” comes neither from pusillanimity, nor from complacency in purblindness, may be best proved by undertaking the much more perilous adventure of an anti-creed to that formerly laid down. Even there we had to interpose the caution that absolute subscription, on the part of all the critics concerned, ought not to be thought of: but here the very essence and quiddity of the situation is that no such agreement is in any way possible. In fact, no single and tolerably homogeneous document could possibly here be drawn up, for there would be minority (and sometimes majority) counter-reports on every article. Even those who resist the extremer developments take large licenses upon the old classical position. You have your Jeffrey expressing admiration of a _Pharonnida_ which would have seemed to Dennis a monstrous stumbling-block, and to Johnson mere foolishness: while among the extremists themselves, each man is a law unto himself. Still, it is perhaps possible to draw up some articles of the Modern or Romantic Criticism which was reached during this period, and we have already, in the last two books, described at some length the process by which they were reached. These articles will be best separated into two batches, the first representing the creed of centre and extremes at once, the second that of extremes (left or right) only: and it will be well to mark the difference from the former statement by giving the articles separately, and not arranging them in paragraphs.

The more catholic creed is very mainly of a negative and protesting character, and its articles might run somewhat thus:—

All periods of literature are to be studied, and all have lessons for the critic. “Gothic ignorance” is an ignorant absurdity.

One period of literature cannot prescribe to another. Each has its own laws; and if any general laws are to be put above these, they must be such as will embrace them.

Rules are not to be multiplied without necessity: and such as may be admitted must rather be extracted from the practice of good poets and prose-writers than imposed upon it.

“Unity” is not itself uniform, but will vary according to the kind, and sometimes within the kind, itself.

The Kind itself is not to be too rigidly constituted: and subvarieties in it may constantly arise.

Literature is to be judged “by the event”: the presence of the fig will disprove the presence of the thistle.

The object of literature is Delight; its soul is Imagination; its body is Style.

A man should like what he does like:[808] and his likings are facts in criticism for him.

To which the extremer men would add these, or some of them, or something like them:—

Nothing depends upon the subject; all upon the treatment of the subject.

It is not necessary that a good poet or prose writer should be a good man: though it is a pity that he should not be. And Literature is not subject to the laws of Morality, though it is to those of Manners.[809]

Good Sense is a good thing, but may be too much regarded: and Nonsense is not necessarily a bad one.

The appeals of the arts are interchangeable: Poetry can do as much with sound as Music, as much with colour as Painting, and perhaps more than either with both.

The first requisite of the critic is that he should be capable of receiving Impressions: the second that he should be able to express and impart them.

There cannot be Monstrous Beauty: the Beauty itself justifies and regularises.

Once more it has to be stipulated that these articles are not to be regarded as definitely proposed ends and aims, which the critical practice of the period set before itself, and by which it worked. They are, for the most part, piece-meal results and up-shots of a long and desultory campaign, often reached as it were incidentally, “windfalls of the Muses,” kingdoms found while the finder is seeking his father’s (or anybody’s) asses. If anything general is to be detected before and beneath them, it is a sort of general feeling of irksomeness at the restraints of Neo-classicism—a revolt against its perpetual restrictions and taboos.

To recur once more to those egregious _juvenilia_ of Addison’s, which, though not to be too much pressed as stigmata on his own memory, are a useful caricature of Neo-classicism in regard to English, some English lover of literature feels that there is much more in Chaucer than vulgar jests, now not even fashionably vulgar, and in Spenser than tiresome preaching. He looks about to support his feeling with reasons, and he “finds salvation” in the Romantic sense, more or less fully, more or less systematically, more or less universally. The ways and manners of the finding are very much the same in all countries, and have been dealt with in the first Book of this volume; the results of it, in critical form, have been set forth in that just finished, but may deserve some summary and _rationale_ here.

In the remarkable group of English critics whom we have called “the companions” of Coleridge, and in Coleridge himself, the contemporary quality, and in some cases the direct suggestion, of that great critic appear unmistakably, while in at least most cases they are free from the chaotic or paralytic incompleteness which he hardly ever, save in the _Biographia_, shook off. They all show, as he does, though in varying degrees, the revolt or reaction from the hidebound failure of the baser kind of Neo-classic to _appreciate_—the effort really to taste, to enjoy, and so to deliver that judgment which without enjoyment is always inadequate. And it would be unjust to regard them as merely the sports and waifs of an irresistibly advancing tide. There _is_ something of this in them,—the worst of the something being the uncritical scorn with which they sometimes regarded even the greatest of the departed or departing school—the astonishing injustice of Coleridge himself to Gibbon, and Johnson, and the Queen Anne men; of many of them to Pope; of Hazlitt even to Dryden. But they were not only carried, they swam,—swam strongly and steadily and skilfully for the land that was ahead. Their appreciation is not mere matter of fashion; it is genuine. They are honestly appetent of the milk and honey of the newly opened land of English literature for themselves, and generously eager to impart of it, and of the taste for it, to others.

But we must not—for these merits, or even for what some may think the still greater one of providing, for almost the first time in any literature, a great bulk of matter which is at once valuable criticism and delightful literature itself—make a refusal of our own critical duty as to their shortcomings, which were neither few nor inconsiderable, and which led directly to the sad and singular decadence of English criticism in the middle third of the century. The first and the greatest of these—let us fling it frankly and fairly to any partisan of the older critical dispensation who “expects his evening prey” as our history draws towards its close—was, or at any rate was a result of, the very lawlessness and rulelessness by which they had effected their and our emancipation. True, many of the rules that they threw off were bad and irrational, most perhaps were inadequate, irrelevant, requiring to be applied with all sorts of provisos and easements. But they had at any rate kept criticism methodical, and tolerably certain in its utterances. There had been a Creed; there had been not the slightest difficulty in giving reasons, though they might be doubtful ones, for a faith which, if incomplete and not really catholic, was at any rate formally constituted. With the new men it was different. Coleridge indeed boasted mediate and even higher rules and principles behind his individual judgments. But with the rest it was rather a case of sheer private judgment, of “meeting by yourself in your own house.”

Another drawback, dangerous always but intensified in danger by its connection with the former, is that, while most of them were much less intimately acquainted with the classics than the critics of former generations had been, this deficiency was not generally compensated by any of that extensive knowledge of _modern_ literature which the ruleless or scantily ruled system of criticism imperatively requires. Nay, they were all, including even Coleridge himself and De Quincey (the two most learned, not only of these but of all English critics), very imperfectly acquainted with _French_ literature—which, as a whole, is the best suited to qualify the study of our own, correct it, and preserve it from flaws and corruptions. Leigh Hunt knew little but Italian; and in Italian knew best the things that are of least real importance for the English student. As for Lamb, he was more than a fair Latin scholar; but he seems to have known very little Greek, and not to have had wide reading in the classics, either Greek or Latin, while he betrays hardly the slightest knowledge of, or interest in, any foreign modern literature whatever. Hazlitt’s case is worse still, for he evidently knew very little indeed, either of the classics or of foreign modern literature, except a few philosophic writers, here of next to no use. In fact, one cannot help wondering how, knowing so little, he came to judge so well—till the wonder nearly disappears, as we see how much better he would have judged if he had known more. Wilson (to look forward a little as we have done with De Quincey) had some classics: and Lockhart had not only classics, but German and Spanish. But one suspects the former to have known next to nothing of modern literature: and the latter did not use critically that which he knew. Even as regards English itself the knowledge of all these critics was very gappy and scrappy. They did not, with all their advantages of time, know anything like so much of early English literature (even putting Anglo-Saxon out of the question) as Gray had known nearly a hundred years earlier, and Mitford in their own early days.

Thus, while they had deliberately, and in the main wisely, discarded the rules which at least were supposed deductively to govern _all_ literature, they had not furnished themselves with that comparative knowledge of _different_ literatures, or at the very least of all the different periods of one literature, which assists literary induction, and to some extent supplies the place of the older Rules themselves. They were therefore driven to judge by the inner light alone; and as, fortunately, that inner light, in at least some of them, burnt with the clearest and brightest flame, they judged very well by it. But their system was a dangerous one when it came to be applied, as it inevitably had to be applied, in the majority of cases, when their own torches went out, by the aid of smoky farthing rush-lights in blurred horn lanterns.

Yet, allowing for these drawbacks of commission and of example in the most illiberally liberal manner, there will yet remain to their credit such a sum as hardly any other group[810] in any country—as none in ours certainly—can claim. Here at last, and here almost for the first time, appears that body of pure critical appreciation of the actual work of literature for which we have been waiting so long, which we have missed so sorely in ancient times, and which, in the earlier modern, has been given to us stinted and, what is worse, adulterated, by arbitrary restrictions and preoccupations. In Coleridge, in Hazlitt, in Lamb, in Leigh Hunt even, to name no others, we have real “judging of authors,” not—or at any rate not mainly—discussion of kinds, and attempts to lay down principles. They are judges, not jurists, “lawmen,” not lawmongers and potterers with codes. Appreciation and enjoyment, with their, in this case necessary, consequences, the communication of enjoyment and appreciation—these are the chief and principal things with them, and these they never fail to provide.

The same merits and drawbacks, differently adjusted and conditioned, appear in the French division of the subject. Perhaps there is nothing, even in Sainte-Beuve, of the same consummate merit, from the point of view of appreciation, as the best things of Hazlitt and Lamb: and I do not think there are any critical generalities, either in Sainte-Beuve or in any other, that quite approach the best things of Coleridge. The length and the bitterness of the Classic-Romantic quarrel threw some French critics into a mood of partisanship too extreme to be quite judicial: but on the other hand it gave us that admirably trenchant profession and confession of the faith that “nothing depends on the subject” which we have dealt with from Victor Hugo, and other things from other men. And, moreover, the interest excited by this quarrel, coming to reinforce the general French spirit of system, order, and artistic adequacy, brought about that high general level in the new appreciative criticism which attracted the admiration of Mr Arnold and others, and which certainly for a time (_cir._ 1830-1860) was much above the level of English. Numerous as are the writers whom I have discussed in the chapter on this subject, I feel half ashamed of not having included more, and could easily do so. But it is almost enough to say that, in accordance with that gregarious or scholastic spirit which has always characterised Frenchmen, the merits which have been so fully displayed in Sainte-Beuve are visible more or less in almost all his fellows.

There is no doubt that these merits were to some extent (as Sainte-Beuve himself allowed with equal judgment and generosity) transmitted or inherited from the Empire critics, especially Chateaubriand and, in a different way and lower sense, Villemain: while the whole secret of the method had been revealed, or concealed, in and by the “fuliginous flashes” of Diderot long before. But this sudden and enormous development of it is still rather wonderful. It cannot be put down merely to Sainte-Beuve, though Sainte-Beuve was its most eminent representative; for, as we have seen, he did not himself reach his perfection at once, or for a very long time, and critical results as good as, or better than, his own _at the time_ had been produced by others earlier. It was a case of a plenteous and great vintage, with one growth improving beyond the rest. To this day it is impossible to read over again, well as one may have known it, any of the better critical work of France in this period without astonishment at its varied and yet even excellence. But, as has just been said, it is not always, even in its highest examples, of the _very_ highest: and perhaps at no time is what we have so often called “grasp” a characteristic of it. It would be absurd to call it superficial: yet, if it has a tendency towards something not of the best, that tendency is towards superficiality.

Further, the French, though largely influenced by foreign nations and literatures at this period, hardly shine so much as some others do in criticism of those literatures. But, in reference to their own, they exemplify the new process of “judging by the result,” and setting forth that result, with attractiveness rivalled by hardly any, and with facility and craftsmanship rivalled perhaps by none. From the elaborate process of Sainte-Beuve to the impressionism of Gautier, and from the strong meat and drink of Nisard to the froth of Janin, whatever is provided is provided so as to give the user and consumer the least fatigue and the most delectation. The severer critics are not pedantic, and the lighter ones are seldom merely frivolous or horse-playful. Occasionally, as in Nisard’s case again, there is a solidly constructed, if not quite a solidly based, system: occasionally, as with Planche, there are serious, if disputable, philosophical starting-points. In Sainte-Beuve himself there is perhaps the greatest and most orderly accumulation of positive knowledge, never of the “marine store” kind, that any critic has brought together. But these dignified things never take leave of the Graces: and even the lightest armed of the army—even Janin and those about Janin—seldom write with the appalling absence of knowledge and of method to which we are only too well accustomed in the critics of some other countries.

The part played by Germany in this process was, of course, of the utmost importance, and it is by no means out of a pusillanimous desire to disarm the indignation or the contempt invited by some things already written that I repeat and emphasise this acknowledgment. Germans (taking their Swiss brethren with them) were among the very first to move the stagnant waters. They were among the most—they _were_ the most— industrious engineers in continuing the process—in clearing out the water-courses and turning the new streams into them. It is impossible to exaggerate their merits in putting at the service of criticism the massive and acute intellect of Lessing, to substitute a new Preceptism for the old: the wide range and towering literary faculty of Goethe, to extend and popularise the new methods: the attractive and contagious alacrity of the Schlegels in overrunning the provinces and the empires of literature. But in the highest and purest work of criticism, as we here define it, even these their greatest are sometimes strangely wanting: and others are wanting less strangely but more disastrously. As a rule, the German is far _too_ scientific (the epithet of praise usually selected for him and by him) in his criticism. He has curiosity, but not passionate or intimate enjoyment; intelligence, but not enthusiasm; industry, but little (and hardly at all subtle) intuition. He only gets out of the pupillary state—if he ever does so—to get into the pedagogic. And it is difficult to say which of these is the more unfavourable to true critical accomplishment.

We may, however, be justly asked, in this place or in that, to face that view of German criticism which Carlyle was the first to put in England by a famous (and indeed very admirable) “State of German Literature,”[811] and which, with some modifications, was maintained and enforced later by Mr Arnold, who did not like Carlyle. The eulogium is well known, and it is a magnificent one. The Germans are [1827] distinctly and considerably in advance of other nations in Criticism. They have “raised it to a higher power,” in fact: though he does not, I think, use the phrase. They neither, in the old way, discuss diction, figures, logical value, &c., nor, as is usual with the best of our own critics at present, discover and debate the particular nature of the poet from his poetry: but, subordinating these two, attack the essence and peculiar life of the poetry itself. “How did Shakespeare organise his dramas?” they ask. “What unmixed reality is bodied forth in them?” &c. Then, too, how do they proceed? Not by gorgeous mystic phraseology[812] and vague declamation? No: by “rigorous scientific inquiry,” of which much is said, the illustration and the enforcement at once being drawn from Schiller on “Æsthetic Education,” and Fichte on the “Nature of the Scholar.”[813]

This abstract is designedly cut short, not out of unfairness, but because the original is known to many and accessible easily to all. It is a high encomium: and even the contents of this book will show that it is, beyond controversy, in part at least a deserved one. From Lessing onwards there can be no question of the intent of the Germans to bring about a complete critical Reformation: nor can it be denied that, after a time, and to no small extent in consequence of their efforts, something like a complete critical Reformation was brought about. But whether there is not an indispensable nexus wanting somewhere—whether the general improvement of actual criticism in Germany and elsewhere, though not perhaps more in Germany than elsewhere, is a consequence of the endeavour to consider the essence of Poetry and frame theories of it—that is the question. It would be fatuous to say that I have shown, but I have at least endeavoured to show, some cause against the affirmative answer. In particular, I should like to re-invite the reader’s attention to that _aporia_ which has been stated earlier— whether the famous criticism of _Hamlet_ in _Wilhelm Meister_ (to which Carlyle, of course, appeals here) might not have been written without any knowledge of the original, of its language, and of its form—in short, on a German prose translation of Shakespeare? If anybody is bold enough to say “Yes: and so much the better,” well and good. But in that case his idea of the essence of poetry and mine are so different that I must necessarily seem a Completed Bungler to him, and that he must necessarily seem to me (let us say) a Person to be Sincerely Commiserated.

In actual “judging of authors” I have endeavoured to collect some facts showing that the Germans did not attain to any remarkable proficiency[814] by the application of their new systems of Æsthetic—in regard to which, by the way, no two authorities agreed among them, and of which, as a whole, some great authorities among them used language not much more respectful than my own. And so, far from this “scientific” criticism having any effect in the _production_ of great poetry or of great literature, it is a notorious fact that since Heine—who was a hopeless rebel to the whole system—Germany has produced no great poet, and very few great men of pure letters. While other countries, besides producing in their unscientific way critics at least not less great (I should of course myself say, much greater) than Germany’s own, have maintained the production of creative literature for the best part of a century—for all but the whole of it.

And I have also endeavoured—if only by such hints and glances and instances as are allowable on the plan of this book—to show _why_ the Germans seem to me to have failed, if not exactly where they seemed to Carlyle to have succeeded, yet in the same neighbourhood—how they have generally either flown too high or grubbed too low, and so have failed to gather the flowers and garner the fruit of the field of literature. Very likely these opinions are quite unjust, but at any rate they are not founded on ignorance; and he who holds them is perfectly ready to fight for them at any time with the due arms and in the proper lists.

If, more shortly and in slightly altered form, I may once more put my objection to German criticism, I can, as it happens, do so by simply inserting a “not” in a German boast on this very subject. Professor Schelling, of the University of Pennsylvania, in the _Alumni-Register_[815] of that Institution, quotes these remarkable words from Professor Lemcke of Marburg: “Let us for once lay aside our proverbial modesty and openly declare that it is not the affinity of race, nor the indications in his poetry of a German spirit, which have brought us so close to Shakespeare, but it is that God-given power, vouchsafed to us Germans before all other nations, by the grace of which we are enabled to recognise true genius, of whatever nation, better than other nations, ofttimes better than its own, and better to enjoy and appreciate its gifts.” Far be it from me to anticipate the obvious comments of different kinds upon this utterance of Germanism _in cuerpo_, and with the encumbrances of modesty laid aside. I shall only observe that it is precisely this “God-given power” of recognition or appreciation which German criticism seems to me to lack. It has the best intentions; it takes the most enormous trouble; it accumulates the most extensive and sometimes not the least valuable material and plant for appreciation. But, except in the case of its very greatest exponents, it does not seem to me often to _appreciate_.

But—French, or German, or English, with whatever diversity of immediate aim, exact starting-point, felicity of method, and perfection of result— all the dominant and representative criticism of this time tends in the direction and obeys the impulse of some form or other of that general creed which we have endeavoured to sketch earlier in this Interchapter, and so contributes to the general progress (straight or circular, who shall say?) of which this Book is the history. And when, rather, as usual, by the influence of creative than of critical literature, and by that of Scott and Byron above all, the same purpose was inspired in yet other countries, the results were again the same. The dislike of Rule; the almost instinctive falling back upon mediæval literature as an alterative from classical and (recent) modern; the blending of the Arts; the cultivation of colour- and sound-variety in poetry; the variegation and rhythmical elaboration of prose,—in all these ways, by all these agencies, literary Criticism as well as literary practice was reconstructed. And the end is not even yet.

Some more general remarks on the sub-period must be postponed to the several parts of the Conclusion. But there is one phenomenon which, first appearing towards the end of the last volume, and much more noticeable in the last Book, now becomes what the Germans call _hervorragend_, persistently and almost aggressively prominent. And on this we must say something.

[816]To enter into all the questions connected with the Periodical here, would be obviously impossible. That it has multiplied criticism itself is a truism; that it has necessarily multiplied bad criticism is maintainable; the question is whether it has actually multiplied good. I think it has. It is very difficult to conceive of any other system under which a man like Sainte-Beuve—not of means, and not well adapted to any profession—could have given his life practically to the service of our Muse as he actually did. It is difficult to imagine any other which would have equally well suited a man like Mr Arnold, with abundant, and fairly harassing, avocations on the one hand, and with apparently no great inclination to write elaborate books on the other. Many officials, professional men, persons “avocated” (in the real sense) from criticism by this or that vocation, have been enabled by the system to give us things sometimes precious, and probably in most times not likely to have been given at all under the book-and-pamphlet dispensation. Above all, perhaps, the excuse of the surplusage which beset the regular treatise has disappeared, while the blind (or too well-seeing) editor, with his abhorred shears, is apt to lop excrescences off if they attempt to appear.[817] Although there certainly has been more bad criticism written in the nineteenth century than in any previous one,—probably more than in all previous centuries put together,—it is quite certain that no other period can show so much that is good. And the change which has resulted in it was needed. The early _Bibliothecæ_ of the late seventeenth century wanted pliancy, variety, combination of industrial power: the later _Reviews_ were far too apt to be mere booksellers’ instruments, while their wretched pay kept many of the best hands from them, and kept those who were driven to them in undue dependence. And further, the increasing supply of actual literature _required_ more criticism than could easily be had under the old system of few periodicals, eked out by independent treatises and pamphlets.

These are not unimportant considerations, but they lie a little outside of—or only touch—the question of the altered quality and increased or decreased goodness of criticism as a whole and in itself. And when we come to discuss this, the question assumes rather a different aspect. The better pay, the increased repute, the greater independence, might be thought likely to attract, and did attract, a better class of writers to the work: but whether this better class was always better fitted for the particular task itself one may sometimes doubt. And there can be no doubt at all that the same attractions must necessarily tempt, and that the increased demand must almost force, a very much larger supply of inferior talent to the said task. Again, this increased demand, if not for critics, for somebody who would undertake to criticise (which is not quite the same thing), coincided with a gradual removal of the not very severe requisitions of competence which had up to this time been imposed upon the aspirant. The Mr Bludyer of the eighteenth century was at least supposed to know his Aristotle and his Longinus, his Horace and his Quintilian, his Boileau and his Le Bossu, his Dryden and his Addison. In the majority of cases he did know them—after a fashion—though he constantly misinterpreted the best of them and put his faith chiefly in the worst. But the Mr Bludyer of the nineteenth has not been supposed to know anything at all of the history and theory of his art. Now, when you at once set up a Liberty Hall, and dispense good things therein freely to all comers, your Liberty Hall is too likely before long to become a Temple of Misrule.

As the older arrangements went to make the critic’s trade not merely homely and slighted, but cramped by too many, too strict, and too little comprehended rules and formulas, so the new tended rather to make it a paradise of the ignoramus with a touch of impudence. It has never perhaps been quite sufficiently comprehended, by what may be called the laity, that though, in a sense, Blake was perfectly right in saying that every man is a judge of art who is not connoisseured out of his senses, yet it does not quite follow that every man, without training and without reading, is qualified to _deliver judgment_, from the actual bench, on so complicated and treacherous a work of art as a book. You can take in at least great part of the beauty of a picture at the first glance; and, no matter what the subject may be, many of the details, with all the colour and some of the drawing and composition, require neither previous education nor prolonged and attentive study, though study and attention will no doubt greatly improve the comprehension and enjoyment of them. In the case of a book it is very different. The most rapid and industrious reader[818] will require some minutes—it may even be some hours—to put himself in a position to deliver any trustworthy judgment on it at all: and he must be an exceedingly well-informed one who is at home with every subject treated in every volume that he has to review. You have to find out what it is that the author has endeavoured to do, and then—the most impossible of tasks to some critics, it would seem—to consider whether he has done it, and not whether he has or has not done something else which you wanted him to do. You have to guard against prejudices innumerable, subtle, Hydra-headed,—prejudices personal and political, prejudices social and religious, prejudices of style and of temperament, prejudices arising from school, university, country, almost every conceivable predicament of man. You must be able first to grasp, then to take off a total impression, then to produce that impression in a form suitable to the conveyance of it to the public. One would not perhaps be quite prepared to assert that every one of the hundreds and thousands who have, under the new dispensation, undertaken the office of a critic, has been divinely endowed with these gifts before undertaking that office, or that all of them, even if they took the trouble to acquire what may be acquired, were likely to succeed. There remains, of course, the comfortable doctrine that “practice makes perfect”: or, as one of the most agreeable and acute of modern political satirists, himself an admirable critic, has ironically put it—

“That by much engine-driving at intricate junctions One learns to drive engines along with the best.”

And if this seem small comfort to the suffering author, who thinks that he has had too great a share of the bad criticism and too little of the good—if it make him think of that inspiriting substitute in the Secularist hymn for our old-fashioned Glorias—

“The social system keep in view! Good night! dear friends, good night!”—

there are two other consolations which may suit him according to his temperament. The one is that under any other system his book would very probably have received no notice at all, which would in some cases (not in all) annoy him worse than blame. If he be of another sort, he may perhaps anticipate the all-healing question to any _alma_ passably _sdegnosa_, “Would you rather _not_ have written so, and be praised?”

One very necessary branch of the new criticism, as regarded poetry, the average critic, whether in or out of periodicals, was sadly slow to learn—indeed for the most part he recalcitrated furiously against learning it. This was the proper appreciation of the new effects in verbal painting and verbal music. There had always, of course, been much of this in the great old masters: but there had not been _so_ much of it, and the critic had been wont to treat it alternately in a peddling and in a high-sniffing fashion.[819] On the musical side especially, theory had chiefly confined itself to the remarks on “suiting the sound to the sense,” in a comparatively infantine fashion—putting plenty of _ss_'s into a line about a snake or a goose, and plenty of _r_'s into a line about a dog; giving trisyllabic feet in a line that meant swift movement, and clogging it with consonants when effort or tardiness came in. The new poets—Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson,—in increasing degree, changed this simple and rudimentary proceeding into a complicated science of word-illumination and sound-accompaniment, which the new critics perhaps could not see or hear, and at which they were by turns loftily contemptuous and furiously angry. That there was some genuine inability in the matter may appear from looking back to Johnson’s well-known and very interesting surprise at Pope’s fondness for his couplet—

“Lo! where Mœotis sleeps, and hardly flows The freezing Tanais, through a waste of snows.”

This couplet _is_ beautiful, though the _homœoteleuton_ of “Mœot_is_” and “Tana_is_” is a slight blemish on it. But its beauty arises from such subtle things as the contrast of the metrical rapidity of “Tănăĭs” and the sluggish progression of its waters, and from the extremely artful disposition and variation of the vowel notes _o_, _a_, _ee_.

Even this is not _very_ complicated: and it occurs with Pope and his clan once in a thousand or ten thousand lines. _The Ancient Mariner_ and _Kubla Khan_ are simply compact of the colouring symphonies of sound: and the palette becomes always more intricate, the tone-schemes more various and more artful, as you journey from the _Eve of St Agnes_ to the _Palace of Art_, and from the _Dream of Fair Women_ to _Rose Mary_. In the _Palace_ especially[820] the series of descriptions of the pictures pushes both these applications of the two sister arts towards— almost to—the limits of the possible. Rossetti alone has since surpassed them. Take, for instance, the cunning manipulation of the quatrain stanza[821] itself to begin with; the figures and colour of the actual designs; and the sound-accompaniment, to suit these figures and colours, in such a stanza as—

“One seemed all dark and red: a tract of sand, And some one pacing there alone, Who paced for ever in a glimmering land, Lit with a low large moon.”[822]

Now the “values” of this are not really difficult to make out: they can be thoroughly mastered for himself, without book or teacher, by an intelligent boy of sixteen or seventeen, who, having a taste for poetry, has read some—and who happens to have been born within the nineteenth century. But they do need intelligent, sympathetic, and to a certain extent submissive, co-operation on the part of the person who is to enjoy them. The adjustment of the stanza, with its successive lines of varying capacity and cadence; the fitness of those lines themselves to receive and express more or less detailed images, and add, as it were, not merely stroke after stroke, but plan after plan, to the picture; the monosyllables; the alliteration of the last line, and the crowning effect whereby the picture is lightened after being displayed in shadow; the trisyllabic foot thrown in by “glimmering,” whether you take it in the last or the last but one of the third verse; the atmosphere-accompaniment,—all these things might well be almost invisible and inaudible to a critic brought up on eighteenth-century principles. And if he saw or heard them at all, they might affect him with that singular impatience and disgust at refinement and exquisiteness in pleasure which was affected by ancient philosophers, and which seems to be really genuine in many excellent Englishmen whom the Gods have not made in the very least philosophical. I have never myself understood why it is godliness to gulp and sin to savour; why, if a pleasure be harmless in itself, it becomes harmful in being whetted, and varied, and enhanced by every possible innocent agency. But there are doubtless some people who think it a “poisoning of the dart too apt before to kill.” And there are, I strongly suspect, a good many more whose senses are too blunt to taste or feel the refinements, and who receive the attentions of the poetic fairies with as little appreciation, though usually with by no means as much good-humour, as Bottom showed to those of Titania and her meyny.

This, however, is undoubtedly something of a digression, perhaps something too much of it. But it illustrates the perils to which the new reviewers were exposed, and at the same time (which is the excuse for the divagation) the constant opportunity of salvation which reviewing provides.

[Sidenote: _Saws and instances._]

Nor need much be said of the general quality of the articles in these famous collections. Persons of enterprise have sometimes gone “exploring,” like Mrs Elton (on or off their donkeys, and with or without their little baskets), in this direction, and have come back saying, more or less wisely, that the land is barren. Some of the more practical of them have brought back specimens of its flora and fauna, its soil and its rocks.[823] It is perhaps more profitable to digest some of the general considerations which have already been stated or indicated than to dwell on particulars. Not that these particulars are useless or always uninteresting. It is good to know that _The Monthly Review_, in an article which could not be called unfriendly, thought _The Ancient Mariner_ “a rhapsody of unintelligible wildness and incoherence” [the whole thing is as clear to _us_ as a proposition in Euclid], with “poetic touches of an exquisite kind.” It is very interesting, and not at all surprising (especially when we remember Voltaire) to find the _Edinburgh_, the oracle of political Whiggery, enunciating the doctrine of Poetical Divine Right in its article on _Thalaba_.[824] It is interesting, again, and almost more instructive, to find the _Quarterly_, in the article which did _not_ kill John Keats, finding fault with that poet and his master Leigh Hunt, not (as might have been done plausibly enough) for a flaccid _mollities_, for the _delumbe_ and the _in labris natantia_,[825] but, of all things, for “ruggedness.” If we have pursued our critical studies aright, we know the symptoms, we know the diseases. They are all varieties of _Kainophobia_,—the horror and the misunderstanding of the unaccustomed.

[Sidenote: _Their justification, such as it is._]

But though it is not original, it is very far from superfluous to point out that these poor old unjust judges, these Doubters and Bloodmen of the poetic Mansoul at this crisis of its history, were by no means without their excuses. The original form of _The Ancient Mariner_ is only less inferior to the later form which most people know now than Tennyson’s Poems[826] as they appear in the editions since 1842 are superior to themselves as they appeared to risk the knout of Wilson and the thumbikins of Lockhart. Southey’s unrhymed _vers libres_ in _Thalaba_ are, when all is said and done, a mistake: and their arrangement is sometimes as unmusical as the least successful parts of Mr Arnold’s followings of them. Exquisite as are the beauties, intoxicating as is the atmosphere, of _Endymion_, no one nowadays could pronounce it free from faults of taste of more kinds than one, or deny that as, after all, it holds itself out to be a story, the demand for some sort of intelligible narrative procession is not so irrelevant as when it is put to a lyric, in even the widest sense of that word. And the critics were, in every one of these cases, justified of their victims. Coleridge and Tennyson altered into perfection the poems which had been so imperfect. Southey added rhyme and better rhythm in _Kehama_; Keats grew from the incoherence of _Endymion_, and its uncertain taste, to the perfection of _Lamia_ and the great _Odes_ and the _Eves_ of St Agnes and St Mark. “They also serve, who only stand and—_whip_.” But it is better to have a soul above mere whipping.

BOOK IX

THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY

“_En critique littéraire, les œuvres n’ont d’intérêt que par leur beauté et leur perfection._”—ÉMILE MONTÉGUT.

“_Der Teufel hole alle Theorien!_”—GRILLPARZER.