CHAPTER IV.

DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.

DEAD WATER IN ENGLISH CRITICISM—MILTON—COWLEY—THE PREFATORY MATTER OF ‘GONDIBERT’—THE “HEROIC POEM”—DAVENANT’S ‘EXAMEN’—HOBBES’S ANSWER—DRYDEN—HIS ADVANTAGES—THE EARLY PREFACES—THE ‘ESSAY OF DRAMATIC POESY’—ITS SETTING AND OVERTURE—CRITES FOR THE ANCIENTS—EUGENIUS FOR THE “LAST AGE”—LISIDEIUS FOR THE FRENCH—DRYDEN FOR ENGLAND AND LIBERTY—‘CODA’ ON RHYMED PLAYS, AND CONCLUSION—CONSPICUOUS MERITS OF THE PIECE—THE MIDDLE PREFACES—THE ‘ESSAY ON SATIRE’ AND THE ‘DEDICATION OF THE ÆNEIS’—THE PARALLEL OF POETRY AND PAINTING—THE ‘PREFACE TO THE FABLES’—DRYDEN’S GENERAL CRITICAL POSITION—HIS SPECIAL CRITICAL METHOD—DRYDEN AND BOILEAU—RYMER—THE ‘PREFACE TO RAPIN’—THE ‘TRAGEDIES OF THE LAST AGE’—THE ‘SHORT VIEW OF TRAGEDY’—THE RULE OF TOM THE SECOND—SPRAT—EDWARD PHILLIPS—HIS ‘THEATRUM POETARUM’—WINSTANLEY’S ‘LIVES’—LANGBAINE’S ‘DRAMATIC POETS’—TEMPLE—BENTLEY—COLLIER’S ‘SHORT VIEW’—SIR T. P. BLOUNT—PERIODICALS: THE ‘ATHENIAN MERCURY,’ ETC.

The middle third, if not the whole first half, of the seventeenth century in England was too much occupied with civil and religious broils to devote attention to such a subject literary criticism. [Sidenote: _Dead water in English Criticism._] Between the probable date of Jonson’s _Timber_ (1625-37) and the certain one of Dryden’s _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_ (1668) we have practically nothing substantive save the interesting prefatory matter to _Gondibert_ (1650). [Sidenote: _Milton_] Milton, the greatest man of letters wholly of the time, must indeed during this time have conceived, or at least matured, that cross-grained prejudice against rhyme, which is more surprising in him than even in Campion, and which was itself even more open to Daniel’s strictures. For not only is Milton himself in his own practice a greater and more triumphant vindicator of rhyme than Campion, but Daniel’s strongest and soundest argument, “Why condemn this thing in order to establish that?” applies far more strongly to blank verse than to Campion’s artificial metres. Custom and Nature, those greater Cæsars to whom Daniel so triumphantly appealed, had already settled it, as they were to confirm it later, that rhymed and unrhymed verse, each obeying the natural evolution of English prosody, should be the twin horses to draw its car. But Milton never developed his antipathy to rhyme (which in all probability arose, mainly if not merely, from the fact that nearly all the most exquisite rhymers of his time, except himself, were Cavaliers) in any critical fashion, contenting himself with occasional flings and _obiter dicta_.[484]

-----

Footnote 484:

The chief critical _loci_ in Milton are all among the best known passages of his work. They are the peremptory anathema on rhyme in the prose note added to _Paradise Lost_, in what Professor Masson has settled to be the “Fifth Form of the First Edition”; the short Defence of Tragedy, wholly on Italian principles but adapted to Puritan understandings, prefixed to _Samson Agonistes_; the first description of his own studies in _The Reason of Church Government_; the more elaborate return upon that subject—a singular mixture of exquisite phrasing and literary appreciation with insolent abuse—in the _Apology for Smectymnuus_ (which is not, as some have thought, the same thing as _The_ [Platonic] _Apology_) and divers clauses in the _Tractate of Education_, especially the reference to “Castelvetro, Tasso, and Mazzoni,” whom he credits with “sublime art,” and puts on a level with Aristotle and Horace. We might add a few casual girds, such as that at the supposed cacophony of Hall’s “Teach each” in the _Apology for Smectymnuus_, which has been compared to Malherbe’s vellications of Desportes (_cf. sup._, p. 245). A complete critical treatise from him (if only he could have been prevailed upon to write in a good temper) would have been of supreme interest: it is not so certain that it would have been of supreme value, even if he had been in that temper.

-----

Another poet of the time, Cowley, ought to have given us criticism of real importance. [Sidenote: _Cowley._] He had the paramount, if not exclusive, literary interests which are necessary to a great critic; he had the knowledge; and he was perhaps the first man in England to possess the best kind of critical style—lighter than Daniel’s, and less pregnant, involved, and scholastic than Jonson’s—the style of well-bred conversational argument.[485] But he was a little bitten with the scientific as opposed to the literary mania, and, in his own person, he was perhaps too much of a Janus as regards literary tastes to be able to give—or indeed to take—a clear and single view. There were, as in Lope, two poets in Cowley, and each of these was wont to get in the way of the other. The one was a “metaphysical” of the high flight, who at least would, if he could, have been as intensely fantastic as Donne, and as gracefully fantastic as Suckling. The other was a classical, “sensible,” couplet-poet, who was working out Ben Jonson’s theories with even less admixture of Romanticism than that which tinged Ben Jonson’s practice. The entanglement of these was sufficiently detrimental to his poetry; but it would have been absolutely fatal to his criticism, which must either have perpetually contradicted itself or else have wandered in a maze, perplexing as perplexed.

-----

Footnote 485:

He has practically given us nothing but a slight apology for sacred verse (common in his time and natural from the author of the _Davideis_); with a slighter seasoning of the also familiar defence of poetry from being mere “lying,” in the Preface to the folio edition of his Poems; some still slighter remarks on Comedy in that to _Cutter of Coleman Street_; and hardly more than a glance at literary education in his _Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy_. In this last we may feel a sort of gust of the same spirit which appears in his disciple Sprat’s _History of the Royal Society_ (_v. infra_).

-----

It is with Davenant’s Preface to _Gondibert_, in the form of a Letter to Hobbes, and with Hobbes’s answer to it,[486] that England strikes once more into the main path of European critical development. [Sidenote: _The Prefatory matter of_ Gondibert.] And it is of capital importance that, both the writers being exiled royalists, these documents were written at Paris in the year 1650. There was much interest there in English affairs, while, as we have seen, the habit of literary discussion had, for more than a generation, become ingrained in Frenchmen. When Davenant set himself to write _Gondibert_, he was doing exactly what Chapelain and Desmarets and the rest were doing; and when he and his greater friend exchanged their epistles, they were doing exactly what all the French literary world had been doing, not merely, as is commonly thought, from the time of the _Cid_ dispute, but from one much earlier. Taking all things together, it was natural that the subject should be the _Heroic Poem_, which had been a favourite of Italian and French critics for some seventy years and more, but had been little touched in England, though the conclusion of Ben’s _Discoveries_ shapes a course for it. Hints have been given before in this History that in the opinion of its writer the “Heroic Poem” had much in common with that entity which was long without a literary name, but which an admirable humourist has now enabled us to describe scientifically as a Boojum[487]—that is to say, it was not only something undiscoverable, but something which had a malign and, indeed, destructive influence on those who thought they had discovered it.

-----

Footnote 486:

Both these will be found in Chalmers’ _Poets_, vi. 349-372. Hobbes’s _Answer_ is also in Molesworth’s ed. of the _Works_, iv. 443-458. It is there followed by a short literary letter to Edward Howard of the _British Princes_, the most egregious of Dryden’s egregious leash of brothers-in-law. To these may be added the brief literary passage in the chapter of “Intellectual Virtues” in the First Part of _Leviathan_ (ibid., iii. 58) and the “Brief” of the _Rhetoric_ (referred to _supra_, vol. i. p. 40); ibid., vi. 416-510. I have a copy of the first edition of this, anonymous and undated, but assigned to 1655-57 by bibliographers. It does not contain the shorter _Art of Rhetoric_, which follows in Molesworth.

Footnote 487:

This Boojum, I fear, will disturb some of my friends. But I put him under the protection of the Powder of Pimperlimpimp, and of the Equinoctials of Queubus.

-----

The “Heroic Poem” was to be neither pure Romance nor pure Epic, but a sort of medley between the two. [Sidenote: _The “Heroic Poem.”_] Or, rather, it was to be a thing of shreds and patches, strictly epic (or at least Virgilian-epical) in theory and rules, but borrowing from Romance whatever it could, as our Elizabethans would say, “convey cleanly” enough in the way of additional attractions. The shreds and patches, too, were not purely poetical: they were not taken simply from Homer and Virgil, nor even from Horace, Virgil, Lucan, Statius, and the rest down to that Musæus whom Scaliger thought so superior to the Chian. A great deal of ancient critical dictum was brought in, and as Aristotle and Horace had said less about Epic than about Drama, they were to be supplemented from others, especially by that treacherous and somewhat obscure passage of Petronius which has been commented on in its place. In fact the whole of this Heroic-Poem matter is a sort of satire on criticism by Kinds, in its attempt—and failure—to discover a kind. If the founders of the novel (who, indeed, in some notable cases were by no means free from the obsession) had persisted in constructing it on the lines of the Heroic Poem, it would indeed have been all up with Fiction. To read Tasso (who, as we might expect, is not the least reasonable) and others, from Ronsard and Du Bellay down to Desmarets and Le Bossu (both of whom, let it be remembered, wrote some time after Davenant)—to find even Dryden a Martha of “machinery,” and comforting himself with a bright new idea of getting the _deorum ministeria_ out of the limited intelligences of angels, so that you might not know at once which side was going to win, as you do in the ordinary Christian Epic[488]—is curious. Nay, it is more—humorous, with that touch of “the pity of it” which humour nearly always has.

The ingenious knight, in explaining his performance and its principles to his friend the philosopher, takes a very high tone. Homer, Virgil, Lucan, and Statius are passed successively in review, and receive each his appropriate compliment, put with dignified reserves, especially in the two latter cases. [Sidenote: _Davenant’s_ Examen.] Only two moderns are admitted—Tasso of the Italians—“for I will yield to their opinion who permit not Ariosto—no, not Du Bartas—in this eminent rank of the heroicks, rather than to make way by their admission for Dante, Marino, and others”[489]—and Spenser of our own men. But Tasso is roundly taken to task for his fairy-tale element, Spenser for his allegory and his archaism. And the faults of all from Homer downwards are charged against “the natural humour of imitation.”[490]

-----

Footnote 488:

See the _Discourse on Satire_—Scott (in the edition revised by the present writer) (London, 1882-93), xiii. 24 _sq._, or Ker (_ed. cit. post_), ii. 33 _sq._

Footnote 489:

I do not smile so much as some may over “no, not Du Bartas.” But though oases are far from rare in what may seem, to those who know it not, this thirsty land of criticism, I hardly know a more delightful “diamond of the desert” than the refusal to admit somebody else lest you should have to admit Dante, and the subsequent “Dante, Marino, _and others_.” When the eye is weary of italic print, or of a too closely packed quarto page, or of François Hédelin, Abbé d’Aubignac, in any type or _format_, it is pleasant half to shut it, and let the dream of these “others” wave before one. I see that they must have written in Italian; but other common measure, other link to bind them both to the _Commedia_ and to the _Adone_, is yet to seek for me.

Footnote 490:

Lest the last note should lead any one to think that I wish to make inept and ignoble game of Davenant, let me observe that he can write admirable things, worthy a son, in double sense, of Oxford. Could anything be happier than this of Spenser: “His _noble and most artful hands_”? The mere selection of the epithets is good, the combination of them famously so.

-----

After a by no means despicable, but somewhat rhapsodical, digression on this—it is to be observed that Davenant uses “Imitation” in the frank modern sense—and an apology for it as “the dangerous fit of a hot writer,” he gives reasons, partly no doubt drawn from Italian and French sources, why he has made his subject (1) Christian, (2) antique but not historical, (3) foreign, (4) courtly and martial, (5) displaying the distempers of love and ambition. Then he expounds in turn his arrangement of five books (to correspond to acts), with cantos to answer to scenes,[491] his arguments, his quatrain-stanza. He asserts that “the substance is wit,” and discusses that matter at some length, and with a noteworthy hit at conceits, which reminds us that Davenant was _à cheval_ between the First and the Second Caroline period. He indulges in not unpardonable loquacity about his poetic aspirations, with a fresh glance at the great poets of old, and brings in thereby, with some ingenuity but at too great length as a finale, the old prefatory matter of the _Arts Poetic_ about the importance and dignity of poetry in the world, concluding exactly where most begin, with Plato and that “divine anger” of his which some have turned to the “unjust scandal of Poesie.” And so a pleasant echo of Sir Philip blends agreeably with the more prosaic tone, and time, and temper of Sir William.

-----

Footnote 491:

This attempt to get Epic as close as possible to Drama—to work all the kinds of Imitation back into one arch-kind—appears more or less fitfully in the whole Neo-Classic school. And we shall never quite understand the much discussed “Heroic Play,” till we take it in conjunction with the “Heroic Poem.”

-----

Hobbes, as we should expect, is much briefer; and those bronze sentences of his (though he had not at this time quite brought them to their full ring and perfect circumscription) give no uncertain sound. [Sidenote: _Hobbes’s Answer._] He is not, he says, a poet (which is true), and when he assigns to _Gondibert_ “various experience, ready memory, clear judgment, swift and well-governed fancy,” it is obvious enough that all these might be there and yet poetry be absent. He divides the kinds of poetry “swiftly” enough, and ranges himself with his customary decision against those who “take for poesy whatsoever is writ in verse,” cutting out not merely didactic poetry, but sonnets, epigrams, and eclogues, and laying it down that “the subject of a poem is the manners of men.” “They that give entrance to fictions writ in prose err not so much,” but they err. And accordingly he begins the discussion of verse. He does not quarrel with Davenant, as Vida would have done, for deliberately eschewing Invocation; and rapidly comments on the plot, characters, description, &c., of the poem. On the head of diction he would not be Hobbes if he could or did spare a sneer at words of no sense, words “contunded by the schools,” and so forth. And since he _is_ Hobbes, there is piquancy in finding him at one with Walton in the objection to “strong lines.” He is rather striking on a subject which has been much dwelt on of late, the blunting of poetic phrase by use. And when he says that he “never yet saw poem that had so much shape of art, health of morality, and vigour of beauty and expression” as _Gondibert_—when, in the odd timorousness he had caught from Bacon, he adds, that it is only the perishableness of the modern tongues which will prevent it from lasting as long as the _Æneid_ or the _Iliad_—let us remember that, though criticism is one thing and compliment another, they sometimes live in a rather illicit _contubernium_. At any rate, there _is_ criticism, and real criticism, in the two pieces; and they are about the first substantial documents of it in English of which as much can be said for many years.[492]

-----

Footnote 492:

There is, of course, critical matter in Howell’s _Letters_, and in a score or scores of other places; but it is of the kind that we must _now_ neglect, or select from with the most jealous hand.

-----

Thus, although two of these four were of the greatest of our writers, the third an interesting failure of greatness, and the fourth far from contemptible, they were in all cases prevented, by this or that disqualification, from doing much in criticism.

Dryden, on the contrary, started with every advantage, except those of a body of English criticism behind him, and of a thorough knowledge of the whole of English literature. [Sidenote: _Dryden._] He was a poet nearly, if not quite, of the first class: and though his poetry had a strong Romantic spirit in virtue of its perennial quality, it took the form and pressure of the time so thoroughly and so kindly that there was no internal conflict. Further, he had what by no means all poets of the first class have had, a strong, clear, common-sense judgment, and a very remarkable faculty of arguing the point. And, finally, if he had few predecessors in English, and perhaps did not know much of those few except of Jonson, he was fairly, if not exactly as a scholar, acquainted with the ancients, and he had profited, and was to profit, by the best doctrine of the moderns.

[Sidenote: _His advantages._]

Moreover, from a certain not unimportant point of view, he occupies a position which is only shared in the history of criticism by Dante and (in some estimations, though not in all) by Goethe,—the position of the greatest man of letters in his own country, if not also in Europe, who is at the same time the greatest critic, and who is favoured by Fortune with a concentration of advantages as to time and circumstance. His critical excellence has indeed never been wholly overlooked, and, except by the unjuster partisanship of the early Romantic movement in England, generally admitted with cheerfulness.[493] The want, however, of that synoptic study of the subject, which it is the humble purpose of this book to facilitate, has too often prevented his full pre-eminence from being recognised. It may even be said that it is in criticism that Dryden best shows that original faculty which has often been denied him elsewhere. He borrows, indeed, as freely as everywhere: he copies, with a half ludicrous deference, the stock opinions of the critics and the criticasters in vogue; he gives us pages on pages of their pedantic trivialities instead of his own shrewd and racy judgments. But, despite of all this, there is in him (and with good luck we may perhaps not fail to disengage it) a vein and style in “judging of Authours” which goes straight back to Longinus, if it is not even independent of that great ancestry.[494]

-----

Footnote 493:

Of the great critical men of letters of 1800-1850 only Leigh Hunt—the least of them—was just to Dryden; even Hazlitt is inadequate on him. Among our _preceptistas_ of the same or a little later date, Keble (_Præl._ v.) mildly perstringes Dryden’s inconsistency (“_male sibi constat D._”), but rather as poet than as critic. Garbett, his successor and opponent, a great admirer of Dryden’s style, and one who expresses just regret at the want of common knowledge of it, is very severe (_Præl._ x.) on his want of philosophical profundity and sincerity. But the reverend Professor had found nearly as much fault on this score with Longinus.

Footnote 494:

Dryden made no mistake about Longinus. He calls him, in the _Apology_ prefixed to _The State of Innocence_, “the greatest critic among the Greeks after Aristotle,” cites him often, and parades and uses a long passage of the Περὶ Ὕψους in the Preface to _Troilus and Cressida_. The references are conveniently collected in Mr Ker’s index (_v. inf._)

-----

This vein is perceptible[495] even in the slight critical essays which precede the _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_, though of course it is much more evident in the _Essay_ itself. [Sidenote: _The Early Prefaces._] In the preface to the _Rival Ladies_ (written, not indeed when Dryden was a very young man, but when, except for _Juvenilia_, he had produced extremely little) we find his critical path clearly traced, and still more in the three years later Preface to _Annus Mirabilis_. The principles of this path-making are as follows: Dryden takes—without perhaps a very laborious study of them, but, as has been said already, with an almost touching docility in appearance—the current theories and verdicts of the French, Italian (and Spanish?) critics whom we should by this time have sufficiently surveyed. He does not—he never did to the date of the glorious Preface to the _Fables_ itself—dispute the general doctrines of the sages from Aristotle downwards. But (and this is where the Longinian resemblance comes in) he never can help considering the individual works of literature almost without regard to these principles, and simply on the broad, the sound, the unshakable ground of the impression they make on him. Secondly (and this is where the resemblance to Dante comes in), he is perfectly well aware that questions of diction, metre, and the like are not mere catchpenny or claptrap afterthoughts, as ancient criticism was too apt to think them, but at the root of the pleasure which literature gives. Thirdly (and this is where, though Aristotle did not deny the fact, the whole criticism of antiquity, except that of Longinus, and most of that of modern times, swerves timorously from the truth), he knows that this delight, this transport, counts first as a criterion. Literature in general, poetry in particular, should, of course, instruct: but it _must_ delight.[496]

-----

Footnote 495:

Dryden’s critical work, which until recently was accessible with ease only in Scott’s elaborate edition of his works, or in Malone’s less bulky, but still bulky and not excessively common, edition of the Prose, has recently been given, with quite admirable editorial matter, by Professor Ker (2 vols., Oxford, 1900). I wish he had included one or two more things, especially the _Heads of an answer to Rymer_; but it must be admitted that the authenticity of these, though I think not doubtful, is not absolutely certain, and the correct text still less so. See note on Rymer _infra_, and my edition of Scott, xv. 378 _sq._, for text and history.

Footnote 496:

_Defence of an Essay of Dramatic Poesy._ Scott, _ed. cit._, xi. 295: Ker, i. 113.

-----

The “blundering, half-witted people,” as in one of his rare bursts of not absolutely cool contempt[497] he calls his own critics, who charged him with plagiarising from foreign authors, entirely missed these differences, which distinguish him from every foreign critic of his day, and of most days for long afterwards. He may quote—partly out of that genuine humility and generosity combined which make his literary character so agreeable; partly from an innocent parade of learning. But he never pays for what he borrows the slavish rent, or royalty, of surrendering his actual and private judgment.

-----

Footnote 497:

Preface to _Miscellanies_, ii.; Scott, _ed. cit._, xii. 295; Ker, i. 263. I wish that Dryden were alive for many reasons: not least because he would certainly pay the debt that he owes to my friend Mr Ker _magnificentissime_. No one has vindicated him better against the half-witted blunderers. But I am not quite so much inclined as even Mr Ker is to father his critical _style_ on Chapelain and La Mesnardière, Sarrasin and Scudéry, or on Corneille himself. It is not till Saint-Evremond, perhaps even till Fénelon, that I can find in French the indescribable _omne tulit punctum_ as in him. And both, are his inferiors.

-----

In the Preface to the _Rival Ladies_ the poet-critic takes (as indeed he afterwards himself fully acknowledged) a wrong line—the defence of what he calls “verse” (that is to say, rhymed heroic couplets, not blank verse) for play-writing. This was his mistress of the time; he rejoiced in her caresses, he wore her colours, he fought for her beauty—the enjoyment authorising the argument. But as he has nothing to say that has not been better said in the _Essay_, we may postpone the consideration of this. There is one of the slips of fact which can be readily excused to (and by) all but bad critics,—and which bad critics are chiefly bound to avoid, because accuracy of fact is their only title to existence—in his mention of “Queen” _Gorboduc_ and his addition that the dialogue in that play is rhymed; there is an interesting sigh for an Academy (Dryden, let it be remembered, was one of the earliest members of the Royal Society); and there is the well-known and very amiable, though rather dangerous, delusion that the excellence and dignity of rhyme were never known till Mr Waller taught it, and that John Denham’s _Cooper’s Hill_ not only is, but ever will be, the exact standard of good writing. But he knows Sidney and he knows Scaliger, and he knows already that Shakespeare “had a larger soul of poesy than any of our nation.” And a man who knows these three things in 1664 will go far.

The Preface to _Annus Mirabilis_[498] is again submissive in form, independent in spirit. Dryden obediently accepts the prescription for epic or “Heroic” poetry, and though he makes another slip of fact (or at least of term) by saying that Chapman’s _Homer_ is written in “Alexandrines or verses of six feet” instead of (as far as the _Iliad_ is concerned) in the fourteener, he is beautifully scholastic on the differences between Virgil and Ovid, the Heroic and the Burlesque, “Wit Writing” and “Wit Written.” But he does it with unconquerable originality, the utterance of his own impression, his own judgment, breaking through all this school-stuff at every moment; and also with a valuable (though still inadequate) account of “the Poet’s imagination.”[499]

-----

Footnote 498:

I have not thought it necessary to encumber the page with references in the case of the shorter Essays, where any one can discover the passages cited, whether he uses Scott, Malone, the originals, or Mr Ker’s special collection, with no more labour than is good for him and deserved by them. In the case of the longer pieces the references will be given at least sufficiently often to make the locating of the others easy, without turning the lower part of the page into a kind of arithmetical table.

Footnote 499:

As including Invention, Fancy, and Elocution, but in itself merely considered as synonymous with “Wit.” It was probably from this that Addison (see below) started that Imagination theory of his which has been so much overrated.

-----

Yet another point of interest is the avowed intention (carried out in the poem, to the disgust or at least distaste of Dr Johnson) of using technical terms. This, one of the neoclassic devices for attaining propriety, was, as we have seen, excogitated in Italy, and warmly championed by the Pléiade; but it had been by this time mostly abandoned, as it was later by Dryden himself.

[Sidenote: _The_ Essay of Dramatic Poesy.]

The _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_ is much better known than it was only a couple of decades ago,[500] and it is perhaps superfluous to say that it is a dialogue in form, and that the interlocutors are Dryden himself (Neander), his brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard (Crites), Sir Charles Sedley (Lisideius), and Lord Buckhurst (Eugenius). The two last, though at the time the wildest of scapegraces, were men of distinct poetic gift and varied literary faculty. And Howard, though no great poet, and possessing something of the prig, the coxcomb, and the pedant in his composition, was a man of some ability, of real learning of a kind, and of very distinct devotion to literature.

-----

Footnote 500:

When the present writer began his revision of Scott’s _Dryden_ in the year 1881 there were no separate editions of the _Essay_ since the originals. There are now, of annotated issues of it, either by itself or with more or less of its author’s related work, no less than five known to me,—those of Mr Thomas Arnold (Oxford, 1886), Mr Strunk (New York, 1898), Mr Low (London, n. d.), Mr Nichol Smith (Glasgow, 1900), and Professor Ker’s. The study of English literature in schools and colleges has been much abused, very foolishly talked about by some of its advocates, and no doubt not always wisely directed. But it is at least something to be said for it that it has made such a masterpiece as this known to probably a hundred persons for every one who knew it twenty years ago.

-----

The _Essay_ was first published in 1668, but had been written, according to Dryden’s statement in his Preface to Lord Buckhurst, “in the country” (at his father-in-law Lord Berkshire’s seat of Charlton near Malmesbury), when the author was driven out of London by the Great Plague three years before. [Sidenote: _Its setting and overture._] He had, he says, altered some of his opinions; but it did not much matter in an Essay “where all I have said is problematical.” The “Address to the Reader” promises a second part dealing with Epic and Lyric, which never appeared, and of which only the Epic part is represented by later works. This is a pity, for while we have treatises on Drama and Epic _ad nauseam_, their elder and lovelier sister has been, “poor girl! neglected.” It begins with a picturesque setting, which represents the four interlocutors as having taken boat and shot the bridge, attracted by the reverberation of the great battle with the Dutch in the early part of June 1665, when Admiral Opdam’s flag-ship was blown up. Eugenius augurs victory from the gradual dying away of the noise; and Crites observes (in character) that he should like this victory better if he did not know how many bad verses he should have to read on it. Lisideius adds that he knows some poets who have got _epinikia_ and funeral elegies all ready for either event, and the dialogue proceeds for some time in the same way of literary banter, especial set being made at two poets (one of whom is certainly Wild, while the other _may_ be Flecknoe) with incidental sneers at Wither(s) and Cleveland. At last Crites brings it to something like the quarrel of Ancient _v._ Modern. Eugenius picks up the glove, but consents, at Crites’ suggestion, to limit the discussion to dramatic poetry,[501] and so the “dependence” is settled.

-----

Footnote 501:

One of the very earliest evidences of the interest in dramatic criticism felt in England, immediately after the Restoration, must be Pepys’ note that on September 1, 1660, when he was dining at the Bullhead, there “rose ... a dispute between Mr Moore and Dr Clerke—the former affirming that it was essential to a tragedy to have the argument of it true, which the Doctor denied.” The question, on the very English terms of another dinner and a bet, was to be settled by Pepys himself three days later. He does not tell us whether he read up for it; but on the 4th he decided for the Doctor (_Diary_, ed. Wheatley, i. 233).

-----

Eugenius thinks that though modern plays are better than Greek or Roman, yet those of “the last age” (1600-1660) are better than “ours.” [Sidenote: _Crites for the Ancients._] As for epic and lyric, the last age must yield. And all the quartette agree that “the sweetness of English verse was never understanded or practised” by our fathers, and that some writers yet living first taught us to mould our thoughts into easy and significant words, to retrench the superfluities of expression, and to make our rhyme so properly a part of the verse that it should never mislead the sense. Lisideius having (with the consent of the company, subject to a slight scholastic objection from Crites) defined or described a play as “A just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind,” Crites takes up his brief for the ancients. His speech is a set one, extolling the classical conception of drama, and especially the modern-classical Unities,

but rather a panegyric than an argument, and particularly weak in this—that it takes no critical account of the modern drama at all. Except Ben Jonson, “the greatest man of the last age,” not a single modern dramatic writer of any country is so much as named.

Eugenius, though his discourse is livelier, falls into something the same fault, or at least the counterpart of it. [Sidenote: _Eugenius for the “last age.”_] He rallies the ancients unmercifully, and has very good game of the stock plots and characters in Terence; but his commendation of the moderns has a disappointing generality, and he lays himself rather open to the good-humoured but forcible interruption of Crites that he and Eugenius are never likely to come to an agreement, because the one regards change as in itself an improvement, and the other does not.

Still, Lisideius gives a new turn to the discussion by asking Eugenius why he puts English plays above those of other nations, and whether we ought not to submit our stage to the exactness of our next neighbours. [Sidenote: _Lisideius for the French._] Eugenius in reply commits the further and especial defence of the English to Neander, and Lisideius begins his part as eulogist of the French. For some forty years, he says, we have not had leisure to be good poets. The French have: and, by Richelieu’s patronage and Corneille’s example, have raised their theatre till it now surpasses ours, and the rest of Europe. Who have kept the Unities so well? Who have avoided “that absurd thing,” the English tragi-comedy, so completely? In tragedy they take well-known stories, and only manageable parts of them, while Shakespeare crams the business of thirty or forty years into two hours and a half. They make only one person prominent, they do as much as possible behind the scenes, keep dying off the stage altogether, and never end their plays with a conversion, or simple change of will. Nobody, with them, appears on the stage, unless he has some business there: and as for the beauty of their rhyme, why, that is “already partly received by us,” and it will, no doubt, when we write better plays, “exceedingly beautify them.”

To him, Neander—that is to say—Dryden himself.

There is a reminder (though the matter is quite different) of Daniel, and a comforting augury for English criticism, in the swift directness with which “the new critic” (as a Webbe of his own day might have called him) strikes at the heart of the question. [Sidenote: _Dryden for England and Liberty._] The French are more regular, he grants, and our irregularities are, in some cases, justly taxed. But, nevertheless, he is of opinion that neither our faults nor their virtues are sufficient to place them above us. For Lisideius himself has defined a play as a lively imitation _of nature_. And these beauties of the French stage are beauties, not natural, but thoroughly artificial. Before Molière, where are the humours of French comedy, save, perhaps, in _Le Menteur_ and a few others? Elsewhere they work in comedy only by the old way of quarrels and reconciliations, or by the conventions of Spanish intrigue-drama. “On which lines there is not above one play to be writ: they are too much alike to please often.”

Then, as to tragi-comedy. What is the harm of this? why should Lisideius “imagine the soul of man more heavy than his senses?” The eye can pass, and pass with relief, from an unpleasant to a pleasant object, in far less time than is required on the stage. He must have stronger arguments before he concludes that compassion and mirth destroy each other: and in the meantime he will hold that tragi-comedy is a more pleasant way than was known to the ancients, or any moderns who have eschewed it.

Next, and closely connected, as to single-plot _v._ plot + underplot. Why is the former to be preferred to the latter? Because it gives a greater advantage to the expression of passion? Dryden can only say that he thinks “their” verse the “coldest” he has ever read, and he supports this by a close and pleasant beating-up-the-quarters of _Cinna_ and _Pompey_, “not so properly to be called plays as long discourses on reason of state”; of _Polyeucte_, “as solemn as the long stops on an organ,” of their mighty tirades and _récits_. “Whereas in tragedy it is unnatural for any one either to speak or listen long, and in comedy quick repartee is the chiefest grace.” Yet again “they” are praised for making only one person considerable. Why? If variety is not mere confusion, is it not always pleasing?[502]

The question of narrative against represented action is treated with less boldness, and, therefore, with less success: but he comes to the sound, if not very improving, conclusion that, if we show too much action, the French show too little. He has an interesting rebuke, however, here to Ben Jonson, for reprehending “the incomparable Shakespeare.”[503] And he rises again, and makes a capital point, by citing Corneille’s own confession of the cramping effect of the Unities, enlarging whereon himself, he has an admirable exposure of the utterly unnatural conditions which observance of these Unities brings about. Then, after some remarks on prosody and the earlier use of rhyme in English—remarks partly true, partly vitiated by imperfect knowledge—he undertakes to produce plays as regular as theirs and with more variety, instancing _The Silent Woman_. Of this he is proceeding to a regular _examen_ when Eugenius requests a character of the author: and Neander, after a little mannerly excuse, not only complies with this request, but prefixes similar characters of Shakespeare and Fletcher.

-----

Footnote 502:

Here, to glance at the matter of Dryden and the Spaniards (_v. sup._, p. 332, and _inf._, on Spence), is a _possible_ reminiscence of Lope’s _Arte Nuevo_, 178-180—

_Que aquesta variedad deleyta mucho: Buen exemplo nos da naturaleza, Que por tal variedad tiene belleza._

Footnote 503:

Scott, xv. 337; Ker, i. 75.

-----

The first of these is universally, the second and third should be pretty well known. [Sidenote: Coda _on rhymed plays, and conclusion_.] It must be sufficient to say here that nothing like even the worst of the three (that of Beaumont and Fletcher, which wants the adequacy and close grip of the other two) had previously been seen in English, and not many things in any other language, while to this day, with all faults, the character of Shakespeare is one of the _apices_ of universal criticism. The characters are followed by the _examen_—also admirable and quite new in English, though with more pattern elsewhere. And he ends with a short peroration, the keynote of which is, “I ask no favour from the French.” Lisideius is going to reply; but Crites interrupting, diverts the discussion to a particular point already glanced at—the use of rhyme in plays. He (sensibly enough) declines to investigate very carefully whether this was a revival of the old English custom or an imitation of the French, but attacks its legitimacy with the usual, obvious, and fairly sound argument that since no man without premeditation speaks in rhyme, he ought not to do it on the stage, anticipating the retort, “neither does he speak blank verse” by urging that this at any rate is “nearest nature” or less _un_natural. Neander, taking up the glove for “his _new_-loved mistress,” practically admits the weakness of his case by first advancing the very argument as to blank verse which Crites has disallowed by anticipation. The rest of his answer is a mixture of true and not so true, of imperfect knowledge and ingenious argument, constantly open to reply, but always interesting as a specimen of critical advocacy. He represents himself as pursuing the discourse so eagerly that Eugenius had to remind him that “the boat stood still,” and that they had come to their destination at Somerset stairs. And with a pleasant final patch of description the dialogue closes.

In reading it we should keep in mind what he says a quarter of a century later to the same correspondent,[504] that he was at this time seeking his way “in a vast ocean” of criticism without other help than the pole-star of the ancients and the rules of the French stage amongst the moderns. [Sidenote: _Conspicuous merits of the piece._] He has given the reading of the pole-star to Crites, and has pointed out the dangers of mere dead-reckoning by it. He has put into the mouth of Sedley (with a touch of malice which that ingenious good-for-nothing must have noticed, and which it is to his credit that he did not resent) a similar reading of the bearings of the different French lights, and has shown how little they assisted the English mariner—indeed, how some of them actually led to rocks and quicksands, instead of warning off from them. In the mouth of Buckhurst, and in his own, he has put the patriotic apology, inclining it in the former case towards laudation of the past, and in the latter to defence of the present: and he has allowed divers excursions from the immediate subject—especially that on “verse,” or rhymed heroics, as a dramatic medium. One of the chief of the many merits of the piece is precisely this, that at the time Dryden had read less than at a later, and was less tempted to add quotations or comments. He was following chiefly a very safe guide—Corneille—and he bettered his guide’s instruction. It may be said boldly that, up to the date, nothing in the way of set appreciation—no, not in Longinus himself—had appeared equal to the three characters of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher; while almost greater still is the constant application of the “leaden rule,” the taking of book, author, kind, _as it is_, and judging it accordingly, instead of attempting to force everything into agreement or disagreement with a prearranged schedule of rules.

-----

Footnote 504:

In the _Discourse on Satire_. Scott, xiii. 3; Ker, ii. 17.

-----

After the publication of the _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_, Dryden (English literature can hardly give too many thanks for it) had more than thirty well-filled years of life allowed him; and to the very last, and at the very last, criticism had its full share of his labours. [Sidenote: _The Middle Prefaces._] The “Prefaces of Dryden” never fail to give valuable matter; and we shall have to notice most, if not all of them, though the notices may be of varying length. The immediate successor and, in fact, appendix to the _Essay_, the _Defence_ thereof, was only printed in one edition, the second, of _The Indian Emperor_, and is very far from being of the best. Sir Robert Howard was, as has been said, a man conceited and testy, as Shadwell’s nickname for him in _The Sullen Lovers_, Sir Positive Atall, hints. He seems to have been nettled by his part of Crites, and replied with some heat in a Preface to his own play, _The Duke of Lerma_. Dryden, who never quite learned the wisdom of Bacon’s _dictum_, “Qui replicat multiplicat,” and who at this time had not yet learnt the easy disdain of his later manner, riposted (1668) with more sense but with not much more temper. The piece (which was practically withdrawn later) contained, besides not too liberal asperities on Sir Robert’s own work, a further “defence of Rhyme,” not like Daniel’s, where it should be, but where it should not. It is redeemed by an occasional admission, in Dryden’s usual and invaluable manner, that he is quite aware of the other side, and by an unhesitating assertion of the primacy of Delight among the Objects of Poetry.

In none of the next three or four of the pieces do we find him quite at his best. For some few years, indeed, the popularity of his splendid, if sometimes a little fustianish, heroics, the profits of his connection with the theatre (which, added to other sources of revenue, made him almost a rich man in his way), and his association with the best society, seem to have slightly intoxicated him. He saw his error, like other wise men, all in good time, and even the error itself was not more than human and pardonable.

The Preface to _An Evening’s Love_ promises, but for the time postpones, an extension of the criticism of “the last age,” and intersperses some valuable remarks on the difference between Comedy and Farce, between Wit and Humour, with a good deal of egotism and some downright arrogance.[505] The _Essay of Heroic Plays_ prefixed to _The Conquest of Granada_ (1672) is as yet unconverted as to rhyme on the stage; but contains some interesting criticism of Davenant’s essays in the kind, and a curious defence (recurred to later) of supernatural “machinery.” The main gist of the Preface, besides its defence of the extravagances of Almanzor, is an elaborate adjustment of the Heroic Play to the rules of the much-talked-of Heroic Poem. But though there is a good deal of self-sufficiency here, it is as nothing to the drift of the Epilogue to the second part of the play, and of an elaborate Prose “Defence” of this Epilogue. Here Dryden takes up the position that in “the last age,” when men were dull and conversation low, Shakespeare and Fletcher had not, while Jonson did not avail himself of, access to that higher society which delighted to honour him, Dryden. Divers flings at the “solecisms,” “flaws in sense,” “mean writing,” “lame plots,” “carelessness,” “luxuriance,” “pedantry” of these poor creatures lead up to a statement that “_Gentlemen_ will now be entertained with the foibles _of each other_.” Never again do we find Dryden writing like this; and for his having done it at all Rochester’s “Black Will with a cudgel” exacted sufficient, as suitable, atonement in the Rose Alley ambuscade, even from the lowest point of view. From a higher, he himself made an ample apology to Shakespeare in the Prologue to _Aurungzebe_, and practically never repeated the offence.

-----

Footnote 505:

“I have further to add that I seldom use the wit and language of any romance or play which I undertake to alter; because my own invention, as bad as it is, can furnish me with nothing so dull as what is there.” These invocations of Nemesis are seldom unheard by the acute ears of that satiric Goddess.

-----

The curious _State of Innocence_ (1677) (a much better thing than rigid Miltonists admit) is preceded by an equally curious _Apology of Heroic Poetry_, in which, yet once more, we find the insufficient sense in which Imagination (here expressly limited to “Imaging”) was used; while the Preface to _All for Love_ (1678) is a very little ill-tempered towards an anonymous lampooner, who was, in fact, Rochester. _Troilus and Cressida_ (1679) was ushered by a set preliminary _Discourse on the Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy_. No piece illustrates more remarkably that mixed mode of criticism in Dryden, to bring out which is our chief design. On a canvas, not it must be confessed of much interest, woven out of critical commonplaces from Aristotle and Longinus down to Rymer and Le Bossu, he has embroidered a great number of most valuable observations of his own, chiefly on Shakespeare and Fletcher, which culminate in a set description of Fletcher as “a limb of Shakespeare”—a thing happy in itself and productive of happy imitations since. The Preface to the translation of Ovid’s _Epistles_ (1680) chiefly consists of a fresh defence of that ingenious writer (for whom Dryden had no small fancy), and the Dedication to Lord Haughton of _The Spanish Friar_ (1681) is mainly notable for an interesting confession of Dryden’s changes of opinion about Chapman and Du Bartas (Sylvester rather), and a sort of apology for his own dallying with these Delilahs of the theatre in the rants of Almanzor and Maximin.

But that to the _Second Miscellany_, five years later, after a period chiefly occupied with the great political satires, ranges with the _Essay_, and not far below the _Fables_ Preface, among Dryden’s critical masterpieces. The thing is not long—less than twenty pages. But it gives a coherent and defensible, if also disputable, theory of translation, a singularly acute, and, it would appear, original contrast of the _faire_ of Ovid and of Claudian, more detailed studies of Virgil, Lucretius (singularly good), Horace, and Theocritus, and the best critical stricture in English on “Pindaric” verse. After it the note of the same year on Opera, which ushered _Albion and Albanius_, is of slight importance.

The Dedication of the Third Miscellany (specially named _Examen Poeticum_, as the second had been sub-titled _Sylvæ_) contains some interesting protests against indiscriminate critical abuse, the final formulation of a saying sketched before (“the corruption of a poet is the generation of a critic”), illustrated from Scaliger in the past and (not obscurely though not _nominatim_) from Rymer in the present; and, among other things, some remarks on prosody which might well have been fuller.

Between this and the Fables, besides some lesser things,[506] there appeared two of the longest and most ambitious in appearance of Dryden’s critical writings, the _Essay_ [strictly _Discourse_] _on Satire_ prefixed to the _Juvenal_, and the _Dedication of the Æneis_, with, between them, the first writing at any length by a very distinguished Englishman of letters, on the subject of pictorial art, in the shape of the _Parallel of Poetry and Painting_ prefixed to the translation of Du Fresnoy _De Arte Graphica_. [Sidenote: _The_ Essay on Satire _and the_ Dedication of the Æneis.] All, being Dryden’s, are, and could not but be, admirably written and full of interest. But the _Juvenal_ and _Virgil_ Prefaces are, in respect of permanent value, both intrinsically and representively injured by an excess of critical erudition. The time was perhaps not yet ripe for an honest and candid address straight to the English reader. The translator was bound to recommend himself to classical scholars by attention to the paraphernalia of what then regarded itself as scholarship (“other brides, other paraphernalia” no doubt), and to propitiate wits, and Templars, and the gentlemen of the Universities, with original or borrowed discourses on literary history and principle. Dryden fell in with the practice, and obliged his readers with large decoctions of Rigaltius and Casaubon, Dacier and Segrais, which are at any rate more palatable than the learned originals, but which make us feel, rather ruefully, that boiling down such things was not the work for which the author of _Absalom and Achitophel_ and of _The Essay on Dramatic Poesy_ was born.

-----

Footnote 506:

Lesser, but far from negligible; for the _Character of Saint-Evremond_ is both personally and critically interesting, and the critical biographies of Lucian and Plutarch lead straight to Johnson.

-----

As for the _Parallel_, it is of course interesting as being nearly our first Essay, and that by a master hand, in a kind of criticism which has later given excellent results. [Sidenote: _The Parallel of Poetry and Painting._] But Dryden, as he most frankly admits, did not know very much about the matter, and his work resolves itself very mainly into a discussion of the principles of Imitation in general, applied in an idealist manner to the two arts in particular. Again we may say, “Not here, O Apollo!”

We have nothing left but the _Preface to the Fables_, the extraordinary merit of which has been missed by no competent critic from Johnson to Mr Ker. [Sidenote: _The_ Preface to the Fables.] The wonderful ease and urbanity of it, the artfully varied forms of reply to the onslaughts of Collier and others, are not more generally agreeable than are, in a special division, the enthusiastic eulogy of Chaucer (all the more entertaining because of its lack of mere pedantic accuracy in places), and the interesting, if again not always rigidly accurate, scraps of literary history. It winds up, as the _Essay_ had practically begun, a volume of critical writing which, if not for pure, yet for applied, mixed, and sweetened criticism, deserves to be put on the shelf—no capacious one—reserved for the best criticism of the world.

We have seen, over and over again, in individual example; have already partially summed more than once; and shall have to re-sum with more extensive view later, the character and the faults of the critical method which had been forming itself for some hundred and fifty years when Dryden began his critical work. [Sidenote: _Dryden’s general critical position._] It would be absurd to pretend that he was entirely superior to this “Spirit of the Age”—which was also that of the age behind him, and (with rare exceptions) of the age to come for nearly a hundred years. But, although it may be paradoxical, it is not absurd at all, to express satisfaction that he was not so entirely superior. He was enabled by his partial—and, in so far as his consciousness went, quite sincere—orthodoxy, to obtain an access to the general hearing in England, and even to influence, long after his death, important literary authorities, as he never could have done if he had set up for an iconoclast. Furthermore, it was not yet time to break these idols. Apollo winked at the neo-classical ignorance and heresy because it was useful. We are so apt—so generously and excusably apt—to look at the Miltons without considering the Clevelands, that we forget how absolutely ungoverned, and in some cases how near to puerility, the latest Elizabethan school was. We forget the slough of shambling verse in which true poets, men like Suckling in drama, men like Lovelace in lyric, complacently wallowed. The strait waistcoat was almost necessary, even after the fine madness, much more after the madness not so fine, of mid-seventeenth-century verse, and, in a less degree, prose. And so, when we find Dryden belittling the rhymes of _Comus_ and _Lycidas_,[507] shaking his head over Shakespeare’s carelessness, unable with Chapman, as Ben had been with Marlowe, to see the fire for the smoke, we need not in the least excite ourselves, any more than when we find him dallying with the Dowsabels of Renaissance school-criticism. In the first place, the thing had to be done; and in the second place, his manner of doing it went very far to supply antidote to all the bane, as well as to administer the “corsives,” as they said then, in the mildest and most innocuous way possible.

-----

Footnote 507:

“In his _Juvenilia_ ... his rhyme is _always_ constrained or forced.”—_Discourse on Satire._

-----

[Sidenote: _His special critical method._]

Dryden’s moly, an herb so powerful that—herein excelling its original—it not only prevented men like Addison from becoming beasts like Rymer, but had the virtue of turning beasts into men,—of replacing the neo-classic jargon by the pure language of criticism,—was that plan of actual comparison and examination of actual literature which is not merely the _via prima_ but the _via sola_ of safety for the critic. By his time there was assembled a really magnificent body of modern letters, in addition to classical and mediæval. But nobody in the late seventeenth century, except Dryden, really utilised it. Italy and Spain were sinking into premature senility. The French[508] despised or ignored all modern literatures but their own, and despised and ignored almost equally their own rich and splendid mediæval stores.

-----

Footnote 508:

Chapelain might like the early romances (_v. supra_, p. 260). But here Boileau was the spokesman of France.

-----

Dryden’s freedom from this worst and most hopeless vice is all the more interesting because, from some of his utterances, we might have expected him not to be free from it.[509] That theory of his as to Mr Waller; that disastrous idea that Shakespeare and Fletcher were low people who had not the felicity to associate with gentlemen,—might seem likely to produce the most fatal results. But not so. He accepts Chaucer at once, rejoices in him, extols him, just as if Chaucer had taken lessons from Mr Waller, and had been familiar with my Lord Dorset. Back his own side as he may in the duel of the theatres, he speaks of the great lights of the last age in such a fashion that no one has outgone him since. He cannot really take an author in hand, be he Greek or Latin, Italian or French or English, without his superiority to rules and systems and classifications appearing at once, however he may, to please fashion and fools, drag these in as an afterthought, or rather (for Dryden never “drags” in anything save the indecency in his comedies) draw them into the conversation with his usual adroitness. And he is constantly taking authors in hand in this way,—we are as certain that this, and not twaddling about unities and machines, was what he liked doing, as we are that he wrote comedies for money, and satires and criticism itself for love. Now this,—the critical reading without theory, or with theory postponed, of masses of different literatures, and the formation and expression of genuine judgment as to what the critic liked and disliked in them, not what he thought he ought to like and dislike,—this was what was wanted, and what nobody had yet done. Dryden did it—did it with such mastery of expression as would almost have commended a Rymer, but with such genuine critical power and sympathy as would almost have carried off the absence of merits of expression altogether. He established (let us hope for all time) the English fashion of criticising, as Shakespeare did the English fashion of dramatising,—the fashion of aiming at delight, at truth, at justice, at nature, at poetry, and letting the rules take care of themselves.

-----

Footnote 509:

They have deceived the very elect, _e.g._, M. Rigault, who in not altogether unnatural amazement at the dictum, “Spenser wanted only to have read the rules of Bossu,” classes (_Q. des A. et des M._, p. 311) Dryden as an _ancien enragé_. But M. Rigault is at a wrong angle in most of the English part of his book,—so much so as to strike a chill into any one who has to criticise a foreign literature, lest, lacking the grace of the Muses, he too go astray.

-----

Perhaps in no single instance of critical authorship and authority does the great method of comparison assist us so well as in the case of Dryden and Boileau. [Sidenote: _Dryden and Boileau._] This comparison is absolutely fair. The two were almost exact contemporaries; they represented—so far at least as their expressed and, in both cases, no doubt conscientious, literary creed went—the same sect. _Enfin Malherbe vint_ is an exact parallel, whether as a wonderful discovery or a partly mischievous delusion, to the exploits on our numbers by Mr Waller. Both were extremely powerful satirists. Both, though not comparable in intrinsic merit, were among the chief men of letters of their respective countries. Both had a real, and not merely a professional or affected, devotion to literature. Both applied, with whatever difference of exclusiveness and _animus_, a peculiar literary discipline, new to the country of each. And in the case of both—it has been decided by a consensus of the best judges, with all the facts before them up to the present time—there was an insufficient looking before and after, a pretension to limit literature to certain special developments.

We have seen what, in carrying out the scheme which was in effect the scheme of both, were the defects of Boileau. Let us see what, in contra-position to them, are the merits of Dryden.

That, though he makes mistakes enough in literary history, these mistakes are slight in comparison with Boileau’s, matters not very much; that, though his satiric touch was more withering even than the Frenchman’s, he has no love of lashing merely for the sport, and never indulges in insolent flings at harmless dulness, suffering poverty, or irregular genius; that, though quite prone enough to flatter, he declined to bow the knee to William of Orange, while Boileau persistently grovelled at the feet of William’s enemy,—these things matter even less to us. The fact, the critical fact, remains that the faults of his time and his theory did the least harm to Dryden of all men whom we know, while they did the most to Boileau. And the reason of the fact is more valuable than the fact itself. Boileau, as we have seen, has not left us a single impartial and appreciative criticism of a single author, ancient or modern. Dryden simply cannot find himself in presence of a man of real genius, whether he belongs to his own school or another, without having his critical lips at once touched by Apollo and Pallas. He was sadly ignorant about Chaucer,—a board-school child might take him to task; but he has written about Chaucer with far more real light and sympathy than some at least of the authors of the books from which the board-school child derives its knowledge have shown. His theory about Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Jonson was defective; but he has left us criticisms of all three than which we have, and are likely to have, no better. About the ancients he borrows from both ancients and moderns; but it is remarkable that while Boileau’s borrowings are his best, Dryden’s are infinitely his worst part. So the consequence is that while Boileau is merely a _point de repère_, a historical document which men simply strive to bring to some relation with the present and the future, Dryden is and will remain at once a source and a model for ever. And he is these because he had the wisdom to ask himself the question, “Do I think this good or bad?” and the wit to answer it, instead of asking and answering the other, “Is it good or bad according to this or that scheme and schedule?”

We have, in short, in Dryden the first very considerable example in England, if not anywhere, of the critic who, while possessing fairly wide knowledge of literature, attributes no arbitrary or conventional eminence to certain parts of it, but at least endeavours to consider it as a whole; of the critic who is never afraid to say “Why?”; of the critic who asks, not whether he ought to like such and such a thing, but whether he does like it, and why he likes it, and whether there is any real reason why he should not like it; of the critic, finally, who tries, without prepossession or convention, to get a general grasp of the book or author, and then to set forth that grasp in luminous language, and with a fair display of supporting analysis and argument. Dryden, of course, is far—very far—from being a faultless monster of criticism. The application of his own process to his own theory will discover in it many mistakes, independent of the imperfect knowledge which has been already admitted, of the inconsistencies which are more of a virtue than of a defect, and of the concessions to tradition and fashion which are almost wholly unfortunate. Nay, more, it may be granted that Dryden did not escape the dangers of the process itself, the dangers of vagueness, of desultoriness, of dilettantism. But he has the root of the matter in him. He knows that art exists to give pleasure, and when he says “I am pleased with this,” he insists on strong reasons being given to show that he ought not to be so. He admits also—nay, insists on—nature, variety, individuality. He will “connoisseur no man out of his senses,”[510] and refuses to be so connoisseured by any, while he will give good reasons for his own and others’ pleasure. These are the marks of the true and catholic criticism; and Dryden has them.

-----

Footnote 510:

A phrase of Blake’s.

-----

Let us pass from him directly to one who has them not. There are few English critics who require to be dealt with at once more carefully and more faithfully than does Thomas Rymer. [Sidenote: _Rymer._] He has become a name, and to become a name is to be at least on the way to becoming a legend, if not a myth. Moreover, as his legend is (for good reasons) far from a favourable one, it has been made more legendary by those generous or wayward revolts against it which are not uncommon. It has even been held proper, for some time, to shake the head of deprecation over Macaulay’s “the worst critic that ever lived.” Moreover, Rymer is by no means very accessible—in his critical works, of course, for we speak not here of the _Fœdera_. Whether these were originally published in very small numbers; whether the common-sense of mankind rose against them and subjected them in unusual proportions to the “martyrdom of pies”; or whether (by one of Time’s humorous revenges) the copies have been absorbed into special collections relating to that _altissimo poeta_ whom Rymer blasphemed, I cannot say. But it is certain that very good libraries often possess either none or only a part of them, and that on the rare occasions on which they appear in catalogues they are priced at about as many pounds as they are intrinsically worth farthings. I think I have seen notices of Rymer which evidently confused _The Tragedies of the Last Age_ (1678) with _A Short View of Tragedy_ (1693).[511] Besides these two, Rymer, independently of smaller things and reissues, had produced, earlier than the earlier, in 1674, a preface to his own translation of Rapin’s _Reflections_, which completes the trinity of his important criticism. No one of the three is long; in fact, _The Tragedies of the Last Age_ is a very tiny book, which, short as it is, seems to have exhausted the author before he could carry out half his scheme.

-----

Footnote 511:

The fact is that the two are parts of the same book; and that a _second_ edition of the first appeared in 1692, just before the _first_ of the second next year.

-----

A careful and comparative reading of all three has given me a settled, and I think a just, conception of Rymer as of a man of remarkable learning for his age and country, but intensely stupid to begin with, and Puck-led by the _Zeitgeist_ into a charcoal-burner’s faith in “the rules.” [Sidenote: _The_ Preface to Rapin.] In the _Preface_[512] he is less crabbed than in the two booklets; and, though he already uses the would-be humorous hail-fellow-well-met colloquialism characteristic of the lower Restoration style, and employed even by such a man of letters as L’Estrange and such scholars as Collier and Bentley, he does not push it to the same lengths of clumsy ass-play as later. He thinks that “poets would grow negligent if Critics had not a strict eye on their miscarriages,” yet he admits that this eye sometimes squints, and compares some critics to “Wasps that rather annoy the Bees than terrify the drones.” Then he skims the past, noticing Castelvetro, Malherbe, and others, but thinks that till lately “England was as free from Critics as from Wolves,” Ben Jonson having all the critical learning to himself. After praise of Aristotle and a short notice of his actual author, he then proceeds to consider the history of English poetry independently. As for Chaucer, “our language was not then capable of any heroic character,” nor indeed was the most polite wit of Europe “sufficient for a great design.” Spenser had “a large spirit, a sharp judgment, and a genius for Heroic poetry perhaps above any that ever wrote since Virgil,” but “wanted a true idea,” and was misled by Ariosto. “They who can love Ariosto will be ravished with Spenser, but men of juster thoughts,” &c. His stanza is “nowise proper for our language.”

-----

Footnote 512:

Vol. ii. pp. 107-130 of the 1706 edition of Rapin in English. At p. 113 Rymer says that he will not here examine the various qualities which make English fit above all other languages for Heroic Poesy, “the world expecting these matters learnedly and largely discussed in a particular treatise on that subject.” This apparently important announcement is marginally annotated “Sheringham.” I suppose this was Robert S., a Norfolk man (as his name imports), of Caius College, and Proctor at Cambridge just before the Commonwealth ejection. He is described (see _Dict. Nat. Biog._) as an “excellent linguist,” but seems to have been more of an antiquary than of a man of letters. As the _D. N. B._ says nothing of any such work as Rymer glances at, I suppose the world was disappointed of it by his sudden death in May 1678, four years after Rymer wrote.

-----

Davenant and Cowley are criticised with politeness, but not very favourably; the faults of both, as well as their designs, were what Rymer was capable of understanding, and neither provokes him to any rudeness on the one hand or stupidity on the other, though there is an occasional ripple betraying an undercurrent of asperity. Then, after some more general remarks, he takes the accepted test of the Description of Night, and applies it with mixed commendation to Apollonius Rhodius, with rather independent criticism to Virgil, slightingly to Ariosto, and rather cavillingly to Tasso, with a good deal of censure to Marino, and with more to Chapelain, with about as much to Père Le Moyne, and then with very considerable praise to that passage of Dryden’s in the _Conquest of Mexico_ to which Wordsworth was afterwards nearly as unjust as Rymer himself to far greater things.[513] And with this rather patronising “Well done our side!” he stops.

-----

Footnote 513:

I do not think that Rymer ever _intended_ to be rude to Dryden, though his clumsy allusions to “Bays” in the _Short View_ naturally rubbed the discrowned Laureate the wrong way for a time.

-----

Had Rymer done nothing more than this in criticism it would indeed be absurd to call him our best critic, but it would be still more absurd to call him our worst. There is fair knowledge, there is fair common-sense judgment; the remarks on Chaucer are merely what might be expected, and on Spenser rather better than might be expected; the detailed censure is correct enough; and though there cannot be said to be any great appreciation of poetry, there is interest in it. Above all, if the piece stood alone, we should hardly think of detecting in it even a murmur of the pedantic snarl which is the one unpardonable sin of a critic.

In _The Tragedies of the Last Age_ Rymer _ruit in pejus_. [Sidenote: _The_ Tragedies of the Last Age.] He had in the interval received some praise, which is always bad for an ill-conditioned man and dangerous for a stupid one; he had conceived the idea of being bee as well as wasp; and he undertook to show Beaumont and Fletcher, Shakespeare and Jonson, their errors, though as matter of fact he lost his wind in belabouring the twins, and had to leave the others till he had taken fifteen years’ breath. He shows himself at once in a mood of facetious truculence and self-importance. _He_ is not going to emulate “the _Remarks_ and eternal triflings of French Grammaticasters.” But he is going to set the “quibble-catching” of his countrymen right, and to put an end to “the Stage-quacks and Empirics in poetry” who despise the rules. “Fancy leaps and frisks, and away she’s gone; while Reason rattles the chain, and follows after,” in which flight Rymer, as often, does not seem to perceive that he is not exactly giving Reason and himself the _beau rôle_. Then he sets to work on three plays of Beaumont and Fletcher. In _Rollo_ there is nothing to move pity and terror, nothing to delight, nothing to instruct.[514] In _A King and No King_ Panthea actually suggests kissing![515] Arbaces is so bad that he really made Rymer think of Cassius—a withering observation which foretells what the critic was going to say about Shakespeare, though on this occasion he was too exhausted to say it.

-----

Footnote 514:

Rymer’s elaborate directions for removing the Romantic offence of this play, and adjusting it to Classical correctness and decorum, are among the most involuntarily funny things in criticism (pp. 19-24).

Footnote 515:

Rymer knew something of Old French. How horrified he would have been if he had come across the lines in _Floriant et Florete_ (2904, 2905)—

“Si samble qu' enfes voit disant 'Baise, baise, je voil baisier!”

-----

He said it fifteen years later with no uncertain voice. The one redeeming feature of the _Short View_ is its remarkable, if not quite impeccable, learning. [Sidenote: _The_ Short View of Tragedy.] Rymer really knows something about “Provencial” poetry, though he confuses it (and thereby made Dryden confuse it) with old French, and actually regards Philippe Mouskès—not even a Frenchman but a Fleming—as a “troubadour.” Still, his knowledge is to be praised, and his ignorance forgiven. Less forgivable, but still not fatal, are the singular want of method with which he flings the result of his learning, pell-mell with his own remarks, on the reader, and (in a yet further degree of culpability) the vulgar jeering of his style. But all this might still pass. His mistakes are much less, and his knowledge much greater, than those of any critic of his age. Others have lacked method; and Bentley was quite, Collier very nearly, as coarsely rude. On some general points, such as the utility of the chorus in keeping playwrights to the rules, he is not unintelligent. He is a great admirer of dumb-show, and thinks that many of the tragical scenes, not merely in Shakespeare, but in Jonson, would go better without words.

More than half the little book[516] is occupied with a display of his learning—first in some general remarks on the drama, and then in a history of it which is, with all its mistakes, better informed than anything of the kind earlier. And then Rymer falls on _Othello_. He grants it “a phantom of a fable.” But it is a very bad phantom. Ridiculous that Desdemona should love a blackamoor at all; more ridiculous that she should be attracted by his stories of adventure; most that Othello should be made a Venetian general—and so on throughout. But the characters are worse. Rymer simply cannot away with Iago; and this on grounds exquisitely characteristic, not merely of him but of the whole system, of which he is the _reductio ad absurdum_. It is not nearly so much Iago’s _theriotes_ by which Rymer is shocked, as his violation of the type and the general law. “He would pass upon us a close, dissembling, false, insinuating rascal instead of an open-hearted, frank, plain-dealing soldier—a character constantly worn by them for some thousand years in the world.”[517] Again, “Philosophy tells us it is a principle in the nature of Man to be grateful.... Philosophy must be [the poet’s] guide,”[518] therefore Iago is a poetical impossibility. Rymer knows that historically all men are _not_ grateful: but never mind. The Type! the Type! the Type![519] One need hardly go farther, but in going we cannot, in one sense, fare worse.[520] “Godlike Romans” (as Mr Dryden had already called them) are, in _Julius Cæsar_, “put in fools’ coats and made jack-puddings of,” which, says Tom justly, “is a sacriledge.” Brutus and Cassius “play a prize, a tryal of skill in huffing and swaggering like two drunken Hectors.” In Tragedy Shakespeare “appears quite out of his element; his brains are turned; he raves and rambles without any coherence, any spark of reason, or any rule to control him, and set bounds to his frenzy.” Nor does Ben fare much better. He indeed “knew to distinguish men and manners at another rate.” In _Catiline_ “we find ourselves in Europe, we are no longer in the land of Savages,” sighs Rymer with relief. Still Ben, too, “gropes in the dark, and jumbles things together without head and tail;” he, though not “in the gang of the strolling fraternity,” like Shakespeare, “must lie a miserable heap of ruins for want of architecture;” he “sins against the clearest light and conviction” by “interlarding fiddle-faddle comedy and apocryphal matters.” And so forth.

-----

Footnote 516:

It has (excluding an appended extract from the Registers of the Parliament of Paris about Mysteries) only 168 pages of perhaps 200 words each; and much of it is quotation. But it is far longer than _The Tragedies of the Last Age_.

Footnote 517:

_Short View_, p. 94.

Footnote 518:

Ibid., p. 144.

Footnote 519:

It is curious to read the deliberately stupid misunderstanding of Aristotle by which this is justified.

Footnote 520:

It may be not unamusing to give an instance or two of the way in which Nemesis has made poor Tom speak truth unconsciously,—

“They who like this author’s writing will not be offended to find so much repeated from him” [Shakespeare].—P. 108.

“Never in the world had any pagan Poet his brains turned at this monstrous rate.”—P. 111.

“No Pagan poet but would have found some machine for her deliverance.”—P. 134.

“Portia is ... scarce one remove from a _Natural_. She is the own cousin-german ... with Desdemona.”—P. 156.

-----

That Rymer was utterly deaf to the poetry of _Othello_ and of _Julius Cæsar_, that he thinks “the neighing of a horse or the howling of a mastiff possesses more meaning” than Shakespeare’s verse, merely demonstrates that he understood the language of the beasts and did not understand that of the man. [Sidenote: _The Rule of Tom the Second._] It disqualifies him for his business, no doubt, hopelessly and of itself. But in the nature of the case we cannot quarrel with him for this Judgment of God; and, on his own theory, mere poetry is of so little consequence that it does not much matter. But where he is cast hopelessly on his own pleadings, where he shows himself (as he has been called) utterly stupid, is in his inability to understand the fable, the characters themselves. He cannot see that the very points which he blunderingly picks out are the _adunata pithana_ of his own law-giver—the improbabilities or impossibilities made plausible by the poet’s art; and that the excess of this or that quality in Iago, in Desdemona, in Othello, is utterly lost in, or is unerringly adjusted to, their perfect humanity. He is not bound to feel “the pity of it”—which he quotes, much as the pig might grunt at the pearl. But he is bound, on Aristotelian, no less than on the most extreme Romantic, principles, to feel that universality which Dryden had ascribed a quarter of a century before, and for all time to come. Therefore, for once, though no Macaulayan, I venture to indorse my unimportant name on a dictum of Macaulay’s. I have read several critics—I trust this book may show sufficiently that this is no idle boast. I have known several bad critics from Fulgentius to the Abbé d’Aubignac, and from Zoilus to persons of our own day, whom it is unnecessary to mention. But I never came across a worse critic than Thomas Rymer.[521]

-----

Footnote 521:

His best deed was to elicit from Dryden, in _Heads of an Answer to Rymer_ (_Works_, xv. 390), the memorable observation that "if Aristotle had seen ours [_i.e._, "our plays"] he might have changed his mind." One may add that, if Dryden had worked these “Heads” out, he might have solved the whole mystery of criticism as far as in all probability it ever can be solved, or at the very least as far as it could be solved with the knowledge of literature at his disposal.

-----

Between its King and its Helot, our Sparta of the last forty years of the seventeenth century does not offer many persons for exornation, with crown or with stripe, as the case may be. Sprat in the famous passage of his _History of the Royal Society_; Phillips and Winstanley and Langbaine in their attempts at literary history; Sir Thomas Pope Blount in his other attempt at a critical summary of literature; Collier in his moral _chevauchées_ against the ethical corruption of the Drama,—these we may legitimately notice, but at no great length. Dennis, Gildon, and Bysshe will come better in the next Book; and it is hoped that no reader will be so insatiable as to demand the inclusion of Milbourn or of Hickeringill.

The Sprat passage[522] is of the very first importance in the History of English Literature, and has at last been recognised as being so. [Sidenote: _Sprat._] In it the gorgeous, floriated, conceited style of the earlier century is solemnly denounced, and a “naked natural style of writing” enjoined. But Sprat is careful to point out that this was for the purposes of the Society—for the improvement not of literature but of science; and he does not attempt to argue it out at all from the literary side. The pronouncement expresses the whole sense of the time; it is epoch-making in the history of literary taste; but it does not give itself out as literary criticism, though the spirit of it may be seen in half the literary criticism that follows for nearly a hundred and fifty years.

-----

Footnote 522:

History of the Royal Society, 4to, London, 1667, p. 111 _sq._ It may be found conveniently extracted at vol. iii. pp. 271, 272 of Sir Henry Craik’s _English Prose Selections_ (London, 1894).

-----

The infant historians[523] also may be pretty briefly despatched. [Sidenote: _Edward Phillips._] Edward Phillips, Milton’s nephew, was by all accounts a most respectable person; and considering the prevalence of Royalist opinions (especially as he shared them), he says quite as much about his uncle as could be expected. Besides, it is just possible that Milton was no more engaging as an uncle and schoolmaster than he was as a husband and father. He was not alive when _Theatrum Poetarum_[524] appeared in the winter of 1674-75, but the dignity of the opening “Discourse of the Poets and Poetry in general” has made some think that he had had a hand in it. I am not so sure of this. That it is addressed to Thomas Stanley and Sir Edward Sherburne (each, for all the learning of the former and the literary merits of both, among those “rhyming amorists” and Cavaliers whom Milton certainly disliked, and at least affected to disdain) need not much matter. But the style, though often ambitious, does not seem to me above the reach of a man of some learning and moderate ability, who had been about Milton in his youth for years, and at intervals afterwards. Such a man would naturally take the noble-sentiment view of Poetry, talk of the _melior natura_ and “that noble thing education,” and the like; nor would he be at a loss for Miltonic precedents of another kind when he felt inclined to speak of “every single-sheeted pie-corner poet who comes squirting out an Elegy.” [Sidenote: _His_ Theatrum Poetarum.] The piece is creditable as a whole, and ends with a hesitating attribution of poetic merit to Spenser and Shakespeare, in spite of the “rustic obsolete words,” the “rough-hewn clowterly verse” of the one, and the “unfiled expressions, the rambling and undigested fancies” of the other. The body of the book—an alphabetical dictionary, first of ancient then of modern poets, and lastly of poetesses, alphabetically arranged in a singularly awkward fashion by their _prænomina_ or Christian names when Phillips knows these, and by others when he does not—is much less important. Here again the nephew has been robbed to give to the uncle the notices of Marlowe and Shakespeare, in both of which the most noticeable expressions, “Clean and unsophisticated wit” and “unvulgar style,” apply to Shakespeare himself. Phillips has undoubted credit for appreciation of Drummond (whom he had partially edited from the papers of Scot of Scotstarvit many years earlier) and for singling out from the work of Wither (which was then a by-word with Cavalier critics) _The Shepherd’s Hunting_ for admiration. But he is much more of a list-maker than of a critic.

-----

Footnote 523:

It is well known that Thomas Heywood, the dramatist, had planned, if he did not actually execute, a _Lives of the Poets_ very much earlier, and some sanguine souls have hoped that it may yet turn up. But the famous passage about poets’ nicknames, as well as the whole cast of Heywood’s work, suggests that, though biography may have lost something, criticism has not lost much.

Footnote 524:

London 12mo.

-----

William Winstanley (who brought out his _Lives of the Most Famous English Poets_[525] some dozen years later, and levied contributions on Phillips himself in the most nonchalant manner) was a mere bookmaker, to whom is assigned the post of manufacturer for years of “Poor Robin’s Almanack,” and who did other hack-work. [Sidenote: _Winstanley’s_ Lives.] His book is chiefly an unmethodical compilation of anecdotes; and as the lives of men of letters have always had more attraction than their works, Winstanley has been found readable. His place here is simply due to the fact that, putting archaics like Bale and Pits aside, he is the second English Historian of Poets, if not of Poetry.

-----

Footnote 525:

8vo, London, 1686.

-----

In connection with Phillips and Winstanley (whom he avowedly follows and acridly comments, accusing them at the same time of having stolen his thunder from a previously published _Catalogue_) it may be well to notice Gerard Langbaine, the somewhat famous author of the _Account of the English Dramatic Poets_.[526] [Sidenote: _Langbaine’s_ Dramatic Poets.] Of real criticism there is hardly even as much in Langbaine as in his two Esaus or Jacobs, taking it which way you please. But he is the spiritual ancestor of too many later critics; and there are still too many people who confuse his method with that of criticism for him to be quite left out. That he had a particular animosity to Dryden[527] is less to his discredit than to that of the class to which he belongs. This kind of parasite usually fastens on the fattest and fairest bodies presented to it. Langbaine is first of all a _Quellenforscher_. Having some reading and a good memory, he discovers that poets do not as a rule invent their matter, and it seems to him a kind of victory over them to point out where they got it. As a mere point of literary history there is of course nothing to object to in this: it is sometimes interesting, and need never be offensive. But, as a matter of fact, it too often is made so, and is always made so in Langbaine. “I must take the freedom to tell our author that most part of the language is stolen.” “Had Mr W. put on his spectacles he would have found it printed thus,” &c., &c. This hole-picking generally turns to hole-forging; and one is not surprised to find Langbaine, after quoting at great length Dryden’s cavillings at the men of the last age, huddling off as “some praises” the magnificent and immortal eulogies[528] which atone for them. I am afraid that Dante, if he had known Langbaine, would have arranged a special _bolgia_ for him; and it would not have lacked later inhabitants.

-----

Footnote 526:

1691: but pirated earlier.

Footnote 527:

I do not know whether this was cause or consequence of his being a friend of Shadwell. But I am bound to note, though with much surprise, that my friend Mr Sidney Lee finds (_D. N. B._) “no malice” in Langbaine.

Footnote 528:

This is the odder, and the more discreditable, because one of the few things to be counted to Langbaine for righteousness is a distinct admiration of Shakespeare.

-----

The only too notable quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns produced some deservedly famous literature of the critical kind in England, but its greatest result in that way, _The Battle of the Books_, will be best noticed, together with its author’s other works, and in the order rather of its own publication than of its composition. [Sidenote: _Temple._] Nor need the earlier protagonists, Temple and Bentley, occupy us much; though the latter will give an opportunity of paying at least respects to a kind of Criticism of which we have perforce said little. Temple, a charming writer, and the author, at the close of his critical _Essay on Poetry_, of one of the most exquisite sentences in English, is simply a critic _pour rire_. The hundred pages of his _Works_[529] which are devoted to literature, invited the exercise of Macaulay’s favourite methods by the enormity of their ignorance, the complacency of their dogmatism, and the blandness of their superficiality. Temple has glimmerings—he intimates pretty plainly some contempt of at least the French “rules”; but he will still be talking of what he has given himself hardly the slightest pains to know.

-----

Footnote 529:

Ed. 1757, vol. iii., pp. 394-501, containing the _Poetry_, the _Ancient and Modern Learning_, and the _Thoughts upon Reviewing that Essay_. Some have charitably found in Temple better knowledge of the Moderns, whom he scorned, than of the Ancients, whom he championed, on the strength of his references to “Runes” and “Gothic Dithyrambics.” I cannot be so amiable. It is all a mere parade of pretentious sciolism varnished by style.

-----

This could not be said of Bentley, and the _Phalaris_ Dissertation has been not undeservedly ranked as one of the representative pieces of critical literature. [Sidenote: _Bentley._] It is only unfortunate that Bentley has meddled so little with the purely literary side of the matter; and the sense of this misfortune may be tempered by remembrance of his dealings with Milton. He is, however, perfectly right in at least hinting[530] that the Pseudo-Phalaris might have been convicted on literary counts, as well as on linguistic and chronological, and that, on grounds of style, the theory of those half-sceptics who attributed the _Letters_ to Lucian was almost worse than the error of the true believers. That Lucian could have written a line of this skimble-skamble stuff is simply impossible; and it must always remain an instance of the slight sense of style possessed by the Humanists that a really great man of letters, like Politian, should have given countenance to the absurdity.

-----

Footnote 530:

_Diss._, § xvi. My copy is the London ed. of 1817.

-----

From any point of critical consideration Collier’s famous book[531] must be a most important document in the History of Criticism; and though from some such points it may be of even greater importance than it is to us, we can in no wise omit it. [Sidenote: _Collier’s_ Short View.] For it is probably the earliest instance in our history where a piece of criticism has apparently changed, to a very great extent, the face of an important department of literature, and has really had no small part in bringing about this change. It is, however, indirectly rather than directly that it concerns us; for it is only here and there that Collier takes the literary way of attack, and in that way he is not always, though he is sometimes, happy. Curiously enough, one of his felicities in this kind has been imputed to him for foolishness by his great panegyrist. It is not necessary to feel that sympathy with his opinions on ecclesiastical and political affairs which Macaulay naturally disclaimed, and which some others may cheerfully avow, in order to see that the Tory critic was quite right, and the Whig critic quite wrong, in regard to the dissertations on the Greek and Latin Drama. What may be thought of their technical scholarship does not matter. But Macaulay’s undoubted familiarity with the classics must have had a gap in it, and his wide knowledge of modern literature several much greater gaps, if he did not know—first, that Collier _had_ ancient criticism on his side, and secondly, that the allegation of ancient authority and practice where favourable, the arguing-off of it where inconvenient, were exactly the things to influence his generation. When everybody was looking back on the Vossian precept, “Imitate the Ancients, but imitate them only in what is good,” and drawing forward to the Popian axiom,

“To copy Nature is to copy _them_,”

“dissertations on the Greek and Latin Drama” were not otiose at all, they were absolutely necessary.

-----

Footnote 531:

_A Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage._ London, 1698. The great popularity of the book caused it to be quickly reprinted: my copy, though of the first year, is the third edition. Collier’s rejoinder to his victims next year contains good things, but is of less importance. And it does not matter much to us whether he originally drew anything from the Prince de Conti’s pietist _Traité Sur la Comédie_ (1667). The Ancients, and the Fathers, and the Puritans were in any case quite sufficient sources.

-----

But for the most part, as is notorious, Collier is as ethical as Plutarch or Plato. It was desirable that he should be so, and nobody but a paradoxer will ever defend the style of play-writing which produced such things as _Limberham_, and _The Old Bachelor_, and even _The Relapse_—though the first be Dryden’s, and contain some good things in the characters of Prudence and Brainsick, though the second show us the dawn of Congreve’s wit, and though the third contain handfuls of the sprightliest things in the English language. It is in reference to this last, by the way, that Collier chiefly quits the path of ethical criticism, and takes to that of literary, or at least dramatic. There is hardly a sharper and more well-deserved beating-up of the quarters of a ragged dramatic regiment anywhere than that (at p. 212 _sq._) on the glaring improbabilities of Vanbrugh’s plot, the absolute want of connection between the title part of it and the real fable—Tom Fashion’s cheating his brother of Hoyden—and the way in which the characters are constantly out of character in order that the author may say clever things. But Collier has serious matters on his mind too much to give us a great deal of this; and the other definitely literary points which I have noted, in a very careful re-reading of the piece for this book, are not numerous. I wish he had not called _Love’s Labour’s Lost_ (p. 125) “a very silly play”; but how many people were there then living who would have thought differently? I wish he had worked out his statement (rather rash from his own point of view) at p. 148, “Poets are not always exactly in rule.” He might have developed his views on the Chorus (p. 150) interestingly. I have some other places; but they are not important. The sum is, that though Collier evidently knew most critical authorities, from Aristotle and Horace, through Heinsius and Jonson, to Rapin, and Rymer, and Dryden himself, very well; though he could (pp. 228, 229) state the Unities, and even argue for them—this was not his present purpose, which was simply to cleanse the stage. His interest in other matters in fact blunted what might have been a keen interest in literature proper. And this is thoroughly confirmed by study of his interesting and characteristic _Essays_,[532] where, out of more than five hundred pages, exactly four are devoted to literature, and these give us nothing but generalities.

-----

Footnote 532:

_Essays upon Several Moral Subjects_ (3rd ed., 2 vols., London, 1698). Nor can one make out an entirely good case (though something may be done) for Collier in the matter of that description of Shakespeare, which Mr Browning has maliciously chosen, as a motto for _Ferishtah’s Fancies_, from the _Historical Dictionary_: “His genius was jocular, but, when disposed, he could be very serious.”

-----

That Collier’s victory was very mainly due to the fact that he struck in at the right moment, as spokesman of an already formed popular opinion, would be a matter of reasonable certainty in any case; but the certainty is here historical. [Sidenote: _Sir T. P. Blount._] One of many proofs at hand is in the curious lighterfull of critical lumber which Sir Thomas Pope Blount launched four (or eight?) years before Collier let his fireship drive into the fleet of the naughty playwrights. In this book,[533] dedicated to Mulgrave, that noble poet himself, Roscommon, Cowley, and the lately published and immensely influential _Whole Duty of Man_, are quoted to support the argument that “A poet may write upon the subject of Love, but he must avoid obscenity.”[534]

-----

Footnote 533:

_De Re Poetica_, or _Remarks upon Poetry_, &c., 4to, London, 1694. It is even said to have first appeared in 1690.

Footnote 534:

Both Roscommon and Mulgrave were critics in their way, and the former’s _Essay on Translated Verse_ is one of those numerous documents which would have been of the utmost service to us in the last volume, but which cannot receive detailed treatment in this.

-----

Sir Thomas, however, comes within the inner, and not merely the outer, circle of criticism for his aims and his collections, though certainly not for any critical genius that he displays. His “Remarks upon Poetry,” no less than the “Characters and Censures” which make up the other part of his work, are the purest compilation: and though we are certainly not without compilers in these days (what indeed can a Historian of Criticism do but compile to a great extent?), there are very few of us who are at once honest enough and artless enough to follow the method of Blount. Whether he is arguing that good humour is essentially necessary to a poet (how about the _genus irritabile_?) or that a poet should not be addicted to flattery, or discussing the “Eglogue, Bucholic [sic], or Pastoral,” whether he is following Phillips and Winstanley and borrowing from both, in compiling a dictionary of poets, he simply empties out his common place-book. “Dryden remarks,” “Rapin observes,” “Mr Cowley tells us,” “Mr Rymer can nowise allow” (this is happy, for it was habitual with Mr Rymer “nowise to allow”), such are the usherings of his paragraphs. He is not uninteresting when he is original (_cf._ his remarks on Waller); but one is almost more grateful to him for his collections, which put briefly, and together, the critical dicta of a vast number of people. Here we may read, with minimum of trouble, how Julius Scaliger could not see anything in Catullus but what is common and ordinary; how Dr Sprat said that till the time of Henry the Eighth there was nothing wrote in the English language except Chaucer that a man would care to read twice; how Scaliger once more, and Petrus Crinitus, and Johannes Ludovicus Vives, and Eustatius Swartius, thought Claudian quite in the first rank of poets; how Tanneguy le Fèvre shook his head over Pindar as having “something too much the air of the Dithyrambick”; and how Cœlius Rhodiginus was good enough to find that same Dantes Aligerus, who displeased others, a “poet not contemptible.”[535] These things are infinitely pleasant to read, and give one a positive affection for Sir Thomas Pope Blount as one turns them in the big black print of his handy quarto; yet perhaps it would be excessive to call him a great critic. What he does, besides providing this _gazophylacium_ for the connoisseur, is to show how wide the interest in criticism was.

-----

Footnote 535:

The remark may with more proportion be made of Cœlius himself, a very worthy Humanist, whom Lilius Giraldus pronounces to be _multifariam eruditus, parum tamen in pangendis versibus versatus_.

-----

A further turn, and the last in this walk, may be furnished to us by one of his own quotations (p. 137 of the _Characters and Censures_) of an answer to the question, “Whether Milton and Waller were not the best English poets, and which was the better of the two?” from _The Athenian Mercury_, vol. v., No. 4. [Sidenote: _Periodicals_: The Athenian Mercury, _&c._] For this curious and interesting medley of Dunton’s, and Samuel Wesley’s, and others’, was almost the first to provide something in English answering, or that might have answered, to the _Journal des Savants_ and the _Mercure Galant_. Actually, the Mercury was not very literary. I do not pretend to have examined the original volumes with any very great care. But in the three copious books which were either directly compiled out of it, or composed in imitation—_the Athenian Oracle_,[536] _Athenian Sport_, and _The British Apollo_—literature holds no very large place. The _Oracle_ does indeed give at p. 438 a very elaborate answer to the question, “Whether the Dramatic Poets of the Last Age exceeded those of this?” and the _Apollo_, besides a versification of the identical query and answer which Blount had quoted, contains a long descant on the Origin of Poetry, and a remarkably shrewd answer to the question, “Which is the best poet—Boileau, Molière, or La Fontaine?” But the time of literary periodicals in England was not yet, though this was the very eve of it: and they must therefore be postponed.[537]

-----

Footnote 536:

The _Athenian Mercury_ (1690-97) ran to twenty volumes. The _Oracle_, from which the late Mr Underhill made his interesting selection (London, n. d.), was issued in _four_. I have _one_ (London, 1703), which calls itself an “Entire Collection,” as well as _Athenian Sport_ (London, 1707), and _The British Apollo_, (3rd ed., London, 1718).

Footnote 537:

An exception may perhaps be made in favour of J. [Cornand] de La Croze’s _Works of the Learned_, which, translated wholly or mainly by its author from the French, began to appear monthly in August 1691, and was collected before long in a thin quarto volume. Its contents are real reviews in almost every point—down to some sharp remarks by the editor-reviewer on plagiarisms by the _Athenian Mercury_, and complaints of the absence of indices to lessen the labour of reviewing. The books reviewed are, as a rule, of no great interest; but the summaries of their contents are generally good, and the views advanced are at least sometimes made the subject of passably argumentative discussion.

-----

INTERCHAPTER V.

In the present Interchapter we come to a sort of Omphalos of the whole projected History. Here and here only, up to the present day, do we find a Catholic Faith of criticism, not merely at last constituted, but practically accepted over the whole literary world. In ancient times, though it is not difficult to discern a creed of a not wholly dissimilar character, yet that creed was arrived at in roundabout fashion, and was never applied universally to poetry and prose as literature. In the Middle Ages there was no such creed at all. In the century which—or rather a certain aspect of it—will furnish us with the subject of the last Book of the present volume, the catholic faith still maintains, and even, as is the wont of such things, rather tightens, its hold as received orthodoxy; but there are grumblings, and threatenings, and upheavals on the one hand, and on the other the tendency to a dangerous latitudinarianism. In that which, with the permission of the fates, will, with the Dissidents of the Eighteenth, give the subject of the next volume, there is no parallel consensus even of a prevailing party. Take a dozen critics of any distinction, at different times and in different countries of the seventeenth century in Europe, and ask them to enunciate some general laws and principles of literary criticism. The results, if not slavishly identical, would be practically the same, putting aside particular and half unreal squabbles of Ancient and Modern and the like. Do the same at any time for the last hundred—certainly for the last seventy or eighty—years, and the result would be a Babel. If any two of the utterances did not betray direct contradiction, it would probably be because the speakers began at entirely different facets of the subject.

Whether this literary unanimity—which resembles the ecclesiastical unanimity, on the ruins of which it grew, not least in being a little unreal—was a good thing or a bad thing in itself, is one of those larger questions which we do not purpose to argue out here. The point for us is that it existed. It was compatible, as in the other case, with a good deal of minor difference: there might be literary Scotists and Thomists; there might even (as in the Ancient and Modern case) be a Great Schism of the most apparently important kind. But this was as a rule mere jangling; and the more serious of the Moderns generally tried to make out little more than that their favourites could claim as much, or more, of the graces which both esteemed, as the other people’s favourites possessed.

We have seen in the last Interchapter how something like this creed had been achieved—though not without a good deal of opposition, and hardly, in any case, with the result of authoritative and complete statement—in Italy, and to some extent borrowed thence, in other countries, before the end of the sixteenth century itself. The seventeenth did little more than crystallise it, lay stress on particular points, fill up some gaps, arrange, codify, illustrate. The absence of dissidence, except on the minor points, is most remarkable. In regard to Aristotle, in particular, there are no Patrizzis and hardly any Castelvetros. Men tack on a considerable body of Apocrypha to the canonical books of the Stagirite, and misinterpret not a little that he actually said. But they never take his general authority in question, seldom the authority of any ancient, and that of Horace least of all. The two great artificial conceptions of the elaborate “Unities” drama, with Acts and Scenes taking the place of the choric divisions, and of the still more artificial “Heroic Poem,” with its Fable, its Epic Unity, its Machines, and so forth, acquire in theory—if luckily, as, for instance, in England, by no means in practice—greater and greater dignity. It becomes a sort of truism that the drama is the most beautiful and ingenious, the heroic poem the noblest, thing on which the human mind can exercise itself. But they are difficult things, sir! very difficult things. Each is sharply isolated as a Kind: and the other Kinds are ranged around and below them. You never criticise any thing first in itself, but with immediate reference to its Kind. If it does not fulfil the specifications of that Kind, it is either cast out at once or regarded with the deepest suspicion.

Further, all the Kinds in particular, as well as Poetry itself in general, possess, and are distinguished by, Qualities which are, in the same way, rigidly demanded and inquired into. It is generally, if not quite universally, admitted that a poem must please: though critics are not quite agreed whether you are bound to please only so as to instruct. But you must please in the Kind, by the Quality, according to the Rule. There is no room for nondescripts; or, if they are admitted at all, they must cease to be nondescripts, and become Heroi-comic, Heroi-satiric, “Tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,”[538] or what not.

-----

Footnote 538:

It may be doubted whether there is anything more wonderful in Shakespeare than the way in which this Polonian speech, at one slight side-blow, impales sixteenth-seventeenth-century criticism, with the due pin, on the due piece of cork, for ever.

-----

This general view may seem unorthodox to those who put faith in the notion—to be found in some books of worth, as well as of worship—that there was a “Romantic revolt” in the beginning of the seventeenth century—that there was even a kind of irruption or recrudescence of mediæval barbarism, and that the pronounced and hardened classicism of the later century was a fresh reaction—a case of _Boileau à la rescousse_! The texts, and the facts, and the dates, do not, to my thinking, justify this view of history, in so far, at least, as criticism is concerned. The crystallising of the classical creed goes on regardless of Euphuism, earlier and later, in England, of Marinism in Italy, of Culteranism and Conceptism in Spain, of the irregular outburst of similar tastes in France, which marks the reign of Louis XIII. As we have seen, Ogier, in the last named country, at the very moment of striking a blow for Romantic drama, admits that the critics are against him; and we have also seen how they were. In England, Sidney, at the beginning of the great Elizabethan period, holds out hands to Jonson at the end. The very Spanish Romantics, when they come to consider the matter critically, make an unblushing transaction between conscientious theory and popular practice: and such an Italian iconoclast as Beni is classical, in the very act and process of belittling the classics.

At the same time, this accepted faith of Criticism, when we come to examine it, is a very peculiar Catholicity. Uncompromisingly Aristotelian in profession, its Aristotelianism, as has been recognised by an increasing number of experts from the time of Lessing downwards, is hopelessly adulterated. Many of the insertions and accretions are purely arbitrary: others come from a combination of inability to forget, and obstinate refusal frankly to recognise, the fact that the case is quite a different case from that which Aristotle was diagnosing. But, by the time at least when the creed became triumphant, a new Pope, a new Court of Appeal, has been foisted in, styling itself Good Sense, Reason, or even (though quite Antiphysic) Nature. That this anti-Pope, this Antiphysis, was partly created by the excesses of the Euphuist-Gongorist movements, need not be denied; but this is comparatively irrelevant. We have traced above, in almost all their principal exponents, the curious, and sometimes very ludicrous, attempt to conciliate that _furor poeticus_ which the ancients had never denied, with those dictates of good sense which the ancients were presumed to have accepted and embodied. A professed satirist could evolve, in his happiest moments, nothing more comic than the eirenicon of Mambrun,[539] or, rather, than his clinical examination of the poet in fury, and his observation of the poet in his right mind.

-----

Footnote 539:

_V. supra_, p. 268.

-----

The survey of the development of this phenomenon, or group of phenomena, in different countries, requires less minuteness than was needed in the last Interchapter, because the central stage of the movement is both of less importance and of less complexity than the beginnings of it: but it is essential to the scheme of these Interchapters, and to that of the whole book, that some such survey should be given.

In Italy, as we have seen, the results of the period were almost insignificant—a fact no doubt connected with, though in no sense necessarily caused by, the declension of the Italian creative genius after Tasso. We have, it may be hoped, established, by the slow but irresistible process of reciting the actual history, the truth that no constant ratio exists between periods of creation and periods of criticism—that they may go hand in hand, or that one may follow the other, or that both may fail to put in any important appearance, as Fate and metaphysical aid may determine. This, for Italy, was a period of the last kind, though not one of its very worst examples. The Italians continued both to play at criticism in their Academies, and to accumulate solid though second-hand work in such laboratories as those of Aromatari. They fought out the half-mock battle of the Ancients and Moderns, as became them, before other nations meddled with it: and they still maintained, for long, though not for the whole time, that position of supremacy, as masters in title to Europe, which the great achievements of the preceding century had given them. But they added nothing to their claims, and by degrees the supremacy passed from them.[540]

-----

Footnote 540:

The attitude of Milton and Dryden respectively illustrates this well. There was scarcely more than twenty years between the two poets. But Milton looks to the Italians first, if not also last, among the moderns, for criticism. Dryden, though he knows and cites them, does not.

-----

That it passed to France is an accepted truth, and like most, though not all, accepted truths, this has so much of the real quality that it is idle to cavil at it. That it has been abused there can be little doubt—or could be little if people would take the small trouble necessary to ascertain the facts. I do not know who first invented the term “Gallo-Classic,” which, to judge by those Röntgen rays which the reader of examination-papers can apply, has sunk deep into the youthful mind of this country. It is a bad word. I have taken leave to call it “question-begging, clumsy, and incomplete,” before now; and I repeat those epithets with a fresh emphasis here. It begs the question whether “Italo-Classic” would not, in its own kind, be the properer term: it is clumsy because the two parts of it are not used in the same sense; and it is incomplete because it does not intimate that much beside French influence, and that a very peculiar and sophisticated kind of Classical influence, went to the making of the thing. But there _was_ French influence: and for some three-quarters of a century France was the head manufactory in which Italian, Classical, and other ideas were torn up and remade into a sort of critical shoddy with which (as with other French shoddy in that and other times) Europe was rather too eager to clothe itself. Some pains have been taken in the foregoing Book to put the reader in a position to appreciate the real rise, progress, and history of French criticism of the Neo-classic[541] type. The survey, whatever difference may exist as to its justice in matter of opinion, will not, I think, be found erring in matters of fact: and it will show that the position usually accorded to Boileau requires some reconsideration. But Boileau was undoubtedly the greatest man of letters who, holding these views, devoted himself specially and definitely to the expression of them; and, for good or for ill, his name is associated with the movement. I agree with Keats,[542] who here, as in so many other matters, came right by genius. Those of us who do not possess this royal key can, at any rate, if we choose to take the trouble, come right by knowledge.

-----

Footnote 541:

“Neo-classic” itself is not a very “blessed” word; but it has been long recognised, and the objections to it are mainly formal.

Footnote 542:

In the well-known and early lines on “Sleep and Poetry.”

-----

The Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns—though we have spoken hard words of it—might look like revolt against the tyranny of Despréaux, and it undoubtedly spread seeds of the more successful revolution which followed; but the more one studies it, the more one sees that the revolt was in the main unconscious. As we have partly shown, and as might be shown much more fully, the Moderns were, as a rule, just as “classical” in their ideas as the Ancients. They were as incapable of catholic judgment; they were even more ignorant of literature as a whole: they were at least as apt to introduce non-literary criteria; they were as much under the obsession of the Kind, the Rule (cast-iron, not leaden), the sweeping generalisation. Too commonly the thing comes to this—that the man who can conjugate _tupto_ will not hear of anything which lessens the importance of that gift, and that the man who cannot conjugate _tupto_ will not hear of any virtue attaching to it.

Most other countries require little notice here. The Germans make practically no figure; the Dutch confine themselves to classical study and the popularisation of reviewing; and the Spaniards, with characteristic indolence, refuse to work out the interesting problem presented to them by the recalcitrance of their national drama to the consecrated ideas of the general creed. England is of more importance. I have tried to show that it is of very much more; but this importance belongs entirely to one man. This one man in his time played many parts: and as the main aim of literature is to give pleasure, and to produce original sources thereof, we cannot perhaps say that his critical part was the greatest. But we may almost say that it was the most important. We can imagine English literature without the poetry of Dryden: it would be wofully impoverished, but somebody would take up the burden, probably before Pope. Certainly Pope would take it up, though with much more to do. But English criticism, and, what is more, European criticism of the best and most fruitful kind, would have had, if Dryden had been absent, to seek some totally new source: and it is impossible to tell where that source would have been found. There is no precedent—Lilius Giraldus and Patrizzi between them might have produced one in Italy, but it is of the highest significance that they did not—for Dryden’s peculiar way of shaking different literatures and different examples of literature together, of indicating the things that please him in all, and of at least attempting to find out why they please him. It is this, not his parade of Rules, and his gleanings from the books, that makes his critical glory: and it is this in which, among critics up to his own time, he is alone.

Yet even he does parade “rules”; even he does belaud Rapin, and Le Bossu, and even Rymer; even he would have been, no doubt, quite as ready to take the oath to Boileau as he was nobly determined not to take it to William. His genius is recalcitrant to the orthodoxy of the time; but something else in him accepts it. It is not for nothing that he never _published_ that word of power which dissolves all the spells of Duessa—“Had Aristotle seen our plays he might have changed his mind.”

That, however, there was, at any rate in the earlier part of the time, much blind, and even a little conscious revolt against classicism, independent of the Ancient and Modern quarrel, is not to be wholly denied. I have hinted doubts as to the correctness of regarding the Euphuist-Metaphysical extravagances in England, Marinism in Italy, Gongorism in Spain, and the fantastic and “precious” fancies which mark the reign of Louis XIII. and the Fronde in France, as either deliberate reactions against classicism, or abortive births and false dawns of Romance. They are in almost every case direct results of the Romantic or mediæval side of the earlier Renaissance—last things, not first. But, by the end of the century, they were almost everywhere got well under; though in Spain, their greatest stronghold, it was not till the eighteenth century itself was some way advanced that Luzán administered the critical _miséricorde_, or, if we must use the language of the country, played _despeñador_ to them. Any other interpretation of the phenomena seems to me to distort them and make them unintelligible, while the procession of the Metaphysical from the Spenserian stage, of Marinism from Tasso, of Gongorism from the great Spanish age, and of the French extravagants from the Spaniards and Marino, working not a little on the Pléiade itself, is natural, historical, and consistent with logic. But these very facts prepare and lead up to the triumph of Neo-Classicism.

By dint, however, of these actions and interactions, there was actually evolved, towards the end of the century, a sort of false Florimel or Duessa, who was called Taste. She was rather a Protean Goddess, and reflected the knowledge or the want of it, the real taste or the want of it, possessed by her priests and worshippers. The Taste of Dryden and the Taste of Rymer are two totally different things; there is even a very considerable difference between the taste of Hédelin and the taste of Bouhours. But in all save the very happiest minds the Taste of this time, as far as Poetry is concerned almost wholly, and to a great extent as regards prose, is vitiated by all manner of mistaken assumptions, polluted by all manner of foolish and hurtful idolatries. There is the Idol of the Kind which has been noticed; the Idol of the Quality; the Idol of Good Sense, the most devouring of all.[543] It is agreed, and agreed very pardonably, that it is not well to write

“And periwig with snow the baldpate woods.”

But the baser folk go on from this—and all but the very noblest have some difficulty in preventing themselves from going on—to think that a man should not write

“The multitudinous seas incarnadine.”

There is a sense, and a very proper sense, that, in a certain general way, style must suit subjects: that you ought not to write to a Child of Quality, aged five, as you would do to Queen Anne, aged fifty.[544] But this topples over into the most absurd limitations, so that, a little later than our actual time, we shall find Pope taking modest credit to himself with Spence for that, though Virgil in his Pastorals “has sometimes six or eight lines together _that are epic_,” he had been so scrupulous as “scarce ever to have two together, even in the _Messiah_.” Indeed it is hardly possible to find a better _reductio ad absurdum_ of Neo-Classicism than this. You lay down (as we saw long ago that Servius did lay it down), from a general induction of the practice of a particular poet, such and such a rule about Virgil’s styles in his various works. Then you turn this individual observation into a general rule. And then you go near to find fault with the very poet from whom you have derived it because he does not always observe it—as if his unquestionable exceptions had not as much authority as his supposed rules. Nor is there any doubt that this fallacy derives colour and support from the false Good Sense, the Pseudo-Reason. The induction from practice is hitched on to Reason so as to become a deduction and a demonstration, and once established as that, you deduce from it anything you like. Meanwhile Good Sense, as complaisant to the critic as stern to the victim of his criticism, will approve or disapprove anything that you choose to approve or disapprove, will set her seal to any arbitrary decision, any unjust or purblind whim, and can only be trusted with certainty to set her face invariably against the highest poetry, and often against certain kinds not so high.[545]

-----

Footnote 543:

Perhaps there is not a more unhappy gibe in literature (which has many such) than that in _The Rehearsal_ on Bayes, who is made to say that “Spirits must not be confined to talk sense.” They certainly must not; even Addison (_Sp._, 419) admits that “their sense ought to be a little _discoloured_.” There is much virtue in this “discolour.”

Footnote 544:

It may be said that this was later. But Prior was a man of thirty-six in 1700.

Footnote 545:

Yet it is not for the twentieth century to throw stones at the seventeenth, till we leave off laying down rules of our own manufacture for still earlier ages, and reproving Marlowe and the youthful Shakespeare for being “too lyrical” in tragedy.

-----

The result of all this is that, with the exception of Dryden and somewhat later Fontenelle (see next Book), hardly any critics of the time achieve, with any success, the highest function of the true critic of literature, the discovery and celebration of beautiful literary things. It is not their business, or their wish, to set free the “lovely prisoned soul of Eucharis.” If Eucharis will get a ticket from the patronesses of the contemporary Almack’s, and dress herself in the prescribed uniform, and come up for judgment with the proper courtesy, they will do her such justice as Minerva has enabled them to do; but if not, not. Sometimes (as in the case of the immortal Person of Quality who took the trouble to get Spenser into order[546]) they will good-naturedly endeavour to give her a better chance, poor thing! But they will never kiss the Daughter of Hippocrates on the mouth, and receive the reward thereto appropriated.[547]

-----

Footnote 546:

See _Spenser Redivivus_. London, 1686-87. The Person of Quality “delivers” Spenser “in Heroick numbers,” as per sample—

“Then to the lady gallant Arthur said, All grief repeated is more grievous made.”

This is “what Spenser ought to have been instead of what is to be found in himself.”

Footnote 547:

Dryden and Fontenelle themselves are of course not quite sinless. The latter (v. _infra_, p. 505) proposes emendations in the magnificent couplet which he cites from _Saint-Louis_; and Dryden, let us say, does not improve Shakespeare and Chaucer. But it was on Shakespeare and Chaucer as they were, not as he travestied them for popular use, that Dryden passed the immortal eulogies; and Fontenelle thought that the couplet even as it stood “might easily _not_ have been found by distinguished poets,” which is from him equivalent to a blare of superlatives from our modern critics.

-----

That, on the other hand, there is observable, throughout the century, a certain interpenetration of the older and more Romantic spirit—in the creative work chiefly, but even there dying down, in the critical overmastered from the first, and less and less perceptible,—this opinion will meet with no contradiction here, but, on the contrary, with the strongest support. All the eccentric phenomena, as they may be called, which have been noticed from Euphuism to Gongorism, are symptoms of this on the larger scale; and other things—the fancy of Chapelain himself for the Romances, the lingering attraction which Gongorism exercises even on such a man as Bouhours—confirm it. Yet even this was, as has been said, steadily dying down; and by the end of the century the old Phœnix was nearly in ashes, though the new bird was to take slow rebirth from them. I am myself inclined to think that the signs of Romantic leaning in Dryden belong to the new, not to the old, chapter of symptoms; and that in this way England, the last, save perhaps Spain, to give up, was the first to feel again for, the standard of Romanticism. But in this Dryden was in advance, not merely of all his countrymen, but of all Europe; and he did not himself definitely raise any flag of revolt. On the contrary, he always supposed himself to be, and sometimes was, arguing for a reasonable and liberal Classicism.

It was not in flippancy, but in logical connection with the present subject, that attention was drawn above[548] to a certain _aporia_ of Tassoni’s on the admitted lovesomeness, body and soul, of _le donne brutte_, and on the tricks which _bruttezza_ and _bellezza_ play to each other. If that ingenious poet and polemic had but pushed his inquiries a little further, and extended them in purview as well as lineally, he might have come to great things in criticism. It might, for instance, have struck him whether the accepted notions of literary beauty were not peculiarly like those of physical beauty, which were also those of his century. These laws laid it down that “from the chin to the pit betwixt the collar-bones there must be two lengths of the nose,” that the whole figure must be “ten faces high,” and that “the inside of the arm, from the place where the muscle disappears to the middle, is four noses”; while the careful calculators noted all the while with dismay that both the Apollo Belvidere and the Medicean Venus set these proportions at the most godlike defiance.[549] He would (or he might) have observed that, just as when you have settled exactly what a _bella donna_ must not have, there is apt to sail, or slip, into the room somebody with that particular characteristic to whom you become a hopeless slave, so, when you have settled the qualifications of the drama with the infallibility of Hédelin, and those of the Epic with the finality of Le Bossu, there comes you out some impudent production which is an admirable poem, while the obedient begettings of your rules are worthless rubbish. Tassoni, I say, might have done this; he seems to have had quite the temper to do it; but he did it not. It was doubtless with him, as with others, a case of _Di terrent et Jupiter hostis_—the gods of their world and their time forbade them.

-----

Footnote 548:

P. 325.

Footnote 549:

See the whole absurd scheme in the appendix-matter to Dryden’s Translation of Du Fresnoy (_ed. cit. sup._, xvii. 429).

-----

But the angry gods were not wholly able to maintain their anger; and at the other end of the century, in that Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns which, for all its irritating _ignorationes elenchi_, did certainly assist in the discussion of general æsthetic problems, we find, among other glimpses, an advance, though only a partial advance, on this suggestion of the _Pensieri_. Perrault, who doubtless knew Tassoni (one of his brothers had translated the _Secchia_), has a curious passage on the diversity of the forms of feminine beauty. He had,[550] he says, visited the gallery of a connoisseur who had collected portraits of the most famous beauties of Europe for a century past. There were not two of the same type of loveliness; and of the spectators there were not two who fixed on the same portrait as the most beautiful. But Perrault, though he has had this glimpse of the true path opened up to him, does not dare pursue it. He is as convinced as the rest of them that you can reduce ideas of beauty to a minimum which is always invariable, though you may add others which vary; and he is perfectly arbitrary in his admissions and exclusions of these latter. He hates Gothic architecture; it may be strongly suspected that he would fall far short of Chapelain in appreciating Romance, for all his fairy tales. His criticisms of the Ancients belie his theory itself; for he will not open his eyes to see the beauty of their peculiarity. His remarks on Homer are pitiable. My always estimable and not seldom admirable predecessor, Blair, was no doubt sadly “left to himself” when he selected,[551] as the awful example of a man of bad taste, the person who said that Homer was no better than “some old tale of chivalry.” But Perrault, I fear, is a more terrible spectacle when he says that none of the Three Tragedians will bear comparison with Corneille (and I think I may claim the merit of not undervaluing Corneille), that nobody but professed scholars can read Aristophanes, and that Ovid is the inferior of Benserade. When we read these things—and except in Fontenelle, the eternal exception, they are to be found in every espouser of the Modern side, just as the corresponding absurdities are to be found in every defender of the Ancients—there is nothing to say but “This is all out of focus. Both of you see men as trees walking.”

-----

Footnote 550:

_Parallèle_, ii. 45; cf. Rigault, p. 187.

Footnote 551:

_V. infra_, p. 463.

-----

A summary of the whole merits and defects of neo-classicism must again be postponed; though with no further prorogation than to the end of the next Book and the present volume. As for the special defects of this special period we have said enough; and we may conclude this Interchapter with a glance at its special merits. They are partly of a negative kind, but they certainly exist. In the Middle Ages, as we have seen, there was no code of criticism at all; in the sixteenth century only a growing approach to one, though the approach had become very near at the last. Some outbreaks of heterodoxy—the last stand of Romance for the time—had, as usually happens, drawn the orthodox together, had made them sign a definite, or almost definite, instrument or confession. Just or unjust, adequate or inadequate, even consistent or inconsistent, as it may be, from the point of view of a very searching and all-inspecting logic, the neo-classicism of the late seventeenth century was a thing about which there could be no mistake. It knew its own mind about everything which it chose to consider, and valiantly shut its eyes to everything which it chose to ignore. For a time—a short time only, of course, for the triumph of a religion is always the signal for the appearance of a heresy—the majority of people had not much more doubt about what was the proper thing to believe in and admire in literature, than they had about the multiplication table. It became possible—and it was done, as we shall see, first in Italy, then elsewhere—to write real literary histories: it became still more easily possible to criticise new books on a certain basis of accepted postulates. And it is by no means certain that this provisional orthodoxy was not a necessary condition of the growth of the new study of Æsthetic, which, though it has done criticism harm as well as good, has certainly done it good as well as harm.

Nor is it possible to deny that there was something to admire in the creed itself. It was weakest—it was in fact exceedingly weak—on the poetical side; but the world happened to have accumulated a remarkably good stock of poetry in the last two centuries or so, and a fallow, or a cessation of manufacture, was not undesirable. Prose, on the other hand, had never been got into proper order in the vernaculars; and it was urgently desirable that it should be so got. The very precepts of the classical creed which were most mischievous in poetry were sovereign for prose. Here also they might hinder the development of eccentric excellence; but it was not eccentric excellence that was wanted. Unjust things have been said about the poetry of the Augustan ages; just things may be said against the criticism which mainly controlled that poetry. But it is hardly excessive to say that every precept—not purely metrical—contained in the _Arts_ of Boileau and of Pope, is just and true for Prose. You may fly in the face of almost every one of these precepts and be the better poet for it; fly in the face of almost any one of them in prose, and you must have extraordinary genius if you do not rue it.

Even as to poetry itself some defence may be made. This poetry needed these rules; or rather, to speak more critically, these rules expressed the spirit of this poetry. The later and weaker metaphysicals in England, and fantasts in France, the Marinists and Gongorists in Spain and Italy, had shown what happens when _Furor [vere] Poeticus_ ceases to ply the oars, and Good Sense has not come to take the helm. It is pretty certain that if this criticism had not ruled we should not have had good or great Romantic poetry; we should at best have had (to take England) a few more Dyers and Lady Winchelseas. But if it had not ruled we should have had a less perfect Pope and less presentable minorities of this kind, and have been by no means consoled by a supply of eighteenth-century Clevelands. Once more, the period has the criticism that it wants, the criticism that will enable it to give us its own good things at their own best, and to keep off things which must almost certainly have been bad.

BOOK VI

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ORTHODOXY

“_Voilà un tableau poétique aussi neuf, et produit par un enthousiasme aussi vif qu’il soit possible.... Il étoit bien aisé, même à de grands poëtes, de ne le pas trouver._”—FONTENELLE.