CHAPTER I.
FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.
CRITICISM AT DRYDEN’S DEATH—BYSSHE’S ‘ART OF ENGLISH POETRY’—GILDON—WELSTED—DENNIS—ON RYMER—ON SHAKESPEARE—ON “MACHINES”—HIS GENERAL THEORY OF POETRY—ADDISON—THE ‘ACCOUNT OF THE BEST KNOWN ENGLISH POETS’—THE ‘SPECTATOR’ CRITICISMS—ON TRUE AND FALSE WIT—ON TRAGEDY—ON MILTON—THE “PLEASURES OF THE IMAGINATION”—HIS GENERAL CRITICAL VALUE—STEELE—ATTERBURY—SWIFT—‘THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS’—THE ‘TALE OF A TUB’—MINOR WORKS—POPE—THE ‘LETTERS’—THE SHAKESPEARE PREFACE—SPENCE’S ‘ANECDOTES’—THE ‘ESSAY ON CRITICISM’—THE ‘EPISTLE TO AUGUSTUS’—REMARKS ON POPE AS A CRITIC, AND THE CRITICAL ATTITUDE OF HIS GROUP—PHILOSOPHICAL AND PROFESSIONAL CRITICS—TRAPP—BLAIR—THE ‘LECTURES ON RHETORIC’—THE ‘DISSERTATION ON OSSIAN’—KAMES—THE ‘ELEMENTS OF CRITICISM’—CAMPBELL—THE ‘PHILOSOPHY OF RHETORIC’—HARRIS—THE ‘PHILOLOGICAL ENQUIRIES’—“ESTIMATE” BROWN: HIS ‘HISTORY OF POETRY’—JOHNSON: HIS PREPARATION FOR CRITICISM—‘THE RAMBLER’ ON MILTON—ON SPENSER—ON HISTORY AND LETTER-WRITING—ON TRAGI-COMEDY—“DICK MINIM”—‘RASSELAS’—THE SHAKESPEARE PREFACE—THE ‘LIVES OF THE POETS’—THEIR GENERAL MERITS—THE ‘COWLEY’—THE ‘MILTON’—THE ‘DRYDEN’ AND ‘POPE’—THE ‘COLLINS’ AND ‘GRAY’—THE CRITICAL GREATNESS OF THE ‘LIVES’ AND OF JOHNSON—MINOR CRITICISM: PERIODICAL AND OTHER—GOLDSMITH—VICESIMUS KNOX—SCOTT OF AMWELL.
The death of Dryden punctuates, with an exactness not often attainable in literary history, the division between seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature in England.[552] [Sidenote: _Criticism at Dryden’s death._] In general letters it is succeeded—not at all immediately—by the great school of Queen Anne men. In criticism[553] one of the greatest of these, a special pupil of Dryden, takes up the running at this interval, and others a little later; but the succession is steadily maintained. Dennis, an unhappily belated person, continues his exercitations; but has very much the worse fortune, critical as well as pecuniary, in his later days. And in the very year of the death there appears an egregious work—extremely popular, maleficently powerful beyond all doubt throughout the eighteenth century, and now chiefly known to non-experts in our days by the humorous contradiction which gave its author’s name to Shelley, and by the chance which made a literary connection, towards the very end of its period of influence, between three such extraordinarily assorted persons as Afra Behn, Bysshe himself, and William Blake.[554]
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Footnote 552:
An interesting monograph on our subject, before and after 1700, is Herr Paul Hamelius’s _Die Kritik in der Engl. Literatur des 17 und 18 Jahrhunderts_ (Leipsic, 1897). I was able, as I always prefer to do, to postpone the reading of this till I had finished the English part of this volume, and I do not think I owe Herr Hamelius much. I am all the more glad to find that we agree on the Romantic element in Dryden (though not as to that in Dennis), and as to reducing the importance of French influence in England.
Footnote 553:
The excessively rare _Parliament of Critics_ (London, 1702), a copy of which has been kindly lent me by Mr Gregory Smith, is more of what it calls itself, a “banter,” than of a serious composition. But it connects itself not obscurely with the Collier quarrel.
Footnote 554:
See Mr Swinburne’s _William Blake_, p. 130 note, for the _sortes Bysshianæ_ of Blake and his wife.
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Edward Bysshe’s _Art of English Poetry_[555] puts the eighteenth-century theory of this art with a rigour and completeness which can only be attributed either to something like genius, or to a wonderful and complete absence of it. [Sidenote: _Bysshe’s_ Art of English Poetry.] His _Rules for Making English Verse_ are the first part of the book in order, but much the least in bulk. Then follow, first a collection of “the most natural and sublime thoughts of the best English poets,” or, in other words, an anthology, reasoned under headings, from poets of the seventeenth century, extending to about four hundred and fifty pages; and last a Dictionary of Rhymes. The “best English poets” may be useful to give in a note.[556] The Dictionary is preceded by a few prefatory remarks, including one important historically, “Rhyme is _by all_ allowed to be the chief ornament of versification in the modern languages.” The killing frost which had fallen on the flowers of Elizabethan poetry had killed one weed at any rate—the craze against rhyme.
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Footnote 555:
My copy is the Third Edition, “with large improvements,” London, 1708. Some put the first at 1702, not 1700. Before Bysshe, Joshua Poole, a schoolmaster, had given posthumously (1657: I have ed. 2, London, 1677), with a short dedication and a curious verse proem of his own, and an _Institution_ signed J. D., _The English Parnassus_. This contains a double gradus of epithets and passages (the authors named only in a general list), an “Alphabet of [Rhyming] Monosyllables,” and some “Forms of Compliment,” &c. The _Institution_ stoutly defends “Rhythm” [_i.e._, rhyme], notices Sidney, Daniel, Puttenham, &c., shortly defines Kinds, objects to excessive enjambment (note the time, 1657) and to polysyllables, but is sensible if rather general and scrappy.
Footnote 556:
Addison, Atterbury, Beaumont and Fletcher, Afra Behn, Blackmore, Tom Brown, Buckingham, Cleveland, Congreve, Cowley, Creech, Davenant (2), Denham, Dennis, Dorset, Dryden, Duke, Garth, Halifax, Harvey, Sir R. Howard, _Hudibras_, Jonson, Lee, Milton, Mulgrave, Oldham, Otway, Prior, Ratcliff, Rochester, Roscommon, Rowe, Sedley, Shakespeare, Southern, Sprat, Stafford, Stepney, Suckling, Tate, Walsh, Waller, Wycherley, and Yalden. Observe that no non-dramatic poet earlier than Cowley is admitted.
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The Rules are preceded by a partly apologetic Preface, which disclaims any wish to furnish tools to poetasters, and puts the work “under the awful guard of the immortal Shakespeare, Milton [note that this was before Addison’s critique], Dryden, &c.” The keynote is struck, in the very first sentence of the text, with that uncompromisingness which makes one rather admire Bysshe. “The Structure of our verses, whether blank or in rhyme, consists _in a certain number of syllables; not_ in feet composed of long and short syllables, as the verse of the Greeks and Romans.” And he adds that, though some ingenious persons formerly puzzled themselves in prescribing rules for the quantity of English syllables, and composed verses by the measure of dactyls and spondees, yet that design is now wholly exploded. In other words, he cannot conceive classical feet without classical arrangement of feet.
“Our poetry admits, for the most part, of but three sorts of verses, those of 10, 8, and 7 syllables. Those of 4, 6, 9, 11, 12, and 14 are generally employed in masks and operas.” But 12 and 14 may be used in Heroic verse with grace. Accent must be observed; and the Pause _must be_ at or near the middle, though in Heroics it may be at the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, or 7th syllable, determined by the seat of the accent. Still, pauses at the 3rd and 7th must be used sparingly. The 2nd and 8th “can produce no true harmony”; and he seems to have refused to contemplate anything so awful as a pause at the 1st or 9th. After decasyllables, octosyllables are commonest. As for lines of 9 and 11 syllables, “with the accent on the last [_i.e._, anapæstic measures], the disagreeableness of their measure has wholly excluded them from serious subjects.” The refining effected since the days of Chaucer, Spenser, and other ancient poets consists especially in the avoidance of the concourse of vowels and in the rigid elision of the article, the contraction of preterperfect tenses (“amaz’d,” not “amazed”), the rejection of alliteration (an instance in Dryden is apologised for), of splitting words closely connected at the end of a verse, and of polysyllables.
And a very large number of minute rules follow, the one guiding principle of which is to reduce every line to its syllabic minimum, never allowing trisyllabic substitution.
The book, base and mechanical as it may seem, is of the first historical importance. It will be seen, even from these few extracts, that the excellent Bysshe has no doubts, no half-lights. The idea, which we have seen crystallising for a century and a half, that English poetry is as strictly and inexorably syllabic as French, and much more so than Greek or Latin, is here put in its baldest crudity. Bysshe will have no feet at all: and no other division within the line but at the pause, which is to be as centripetal as possible, like the French cæsura. It follows from this that, except the feminine or double ending, which is allowed ostensibly as a grace to rhymes, though also in blank verse, nothing extra to the ten, the eight, or whatever the line-norm may be, is permitted on any account. Articles, prepositions that will stand it, pronouns, are to be rigidly elided; weak or short syllables in the interior of words must be slurred out. There is (only that Bysshe will not have even the name of foot) no room for a trisyllabic foot anywhere, in what he equally refuses to call iambic or trochaic verse.
But what is more startling still is that trisyllabic feet disappear, not merely from the octosyllable and the heroic, but from English prosody, or are admitted only to “Compositions for Musick and the lowest sort of burlesque.” Dryden might have written, “After the pangs of a desperate lover”; Prior might be writing “Dear Chloe, how blubbered is that pretty face”: but Bysshe sternly averts _his_ face from them.
Now, if this astonishing impoverishment of English poetry had been the isolated crotchet of a pedant or a poetaster, it would at most deserve notice in a note. But it was nothing of the kind. “He,” this insignificant person, “said it”: they went and did it. It expressed the actual poetic practice of serious poets from Pope to Goldsmith: and it expressed the deliberate theoretic creed of such a critic as Johnson. The contrary practice of the great old poets was at best a “licence,” at worst a “fault.” What had actually happened to French—that it had been reduced to the iamb—what Gascoigne had lamented and protested against, long before, was here threatened—or rather, with bland ignoring, even of threat, laid down—as the unquestioned and unquestionable law of English. The whole eighteenth century did not, indeed, go the entire length of Bysshe. Prior—it is his everlasting glory in English poetical history—took care of that, and not only saved anapæstic cadence for us, but made it more popular than ever. But the eighteenth century continued, charmingly as it wrote them, to be a little ashamed of its anapæsts, to write them affectedly as a relaxation, if not even a derogation—to indulge in them (just as it might indulge in leap-frog with wig and long-skirted coat laid aside) avowedly for a frolic. And about the decasyllable—not quite so rigidly about the octosyllable—it accepted Bysshe almost without a protest. All the infinite variety of true English prosody, all the gliding or melting trochees, all the passion and throb which trisyllabic feet give to iambic verse, were sacrificed, all freedom of pause was relinquished, and the decasyllable tramped, the octosyllable tripped, as regularly and as monotonously as a High Dutch grenadier or a Low Dutch clock.
Bysshe had been frankly formal; it is not a small merit in him that he knew what he had to do and did it: but persons who were little if at all above him in taste or in intellect affected to despise him for this, and Mr Charles Gildon in his _Complete Art of Poetry_,[557] published a few years later, is very high and mighty with Bysshe. [Sidenote: _Gildon._] As for himself he does not think that Poetry consists even in “colouring,” but in Design: and he hashes up his French originals into some would-be modish dialogues, in which ladies of fashion attack and defend poetry on the old lines, before he comes to minuter recommendations. These differ chiefly from Bysshe’s in that they are wordier, less peremptory, and given to substitute the vagueness of the journalist for the precision of the schoolmaster. Nor was this by any means Gildon’s only contribution to criticism. Among the others perhaps the most interesting is an anonymous and undated, but apparently not doubtful, _rifacimento_ of Langbaine,[558] which is curious as an example of _peine du talion_. Gildon (who has employed his own or some other “careful hand” to give himself an ingeniously, because not extravagantly, complimentary notice in the Appendix) serves Langbaine in Langbaine’s own fashion; and, not contented with reversing his judgments, indulges freely in such phrases as “Mr Langbain mistakes,” “those scurrilous and digressory remarks with which Mr Langbain has bespattered him [Dryden],” &c. The book is in the main bibliographic and biographic rather than critical.
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Footnote 557:
London, 1718.
Footnote 558:
The _Lives and Characters of the English Dramatic Poets_, &c., _First begun by Mr Langbain, improved and continued down to this time by a Careful Hand_ (London, printed for Tho. Leigh, &c. No date in my copy, but the _Dict. Nat. Biog._ gives 1699).
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A name which has something to do with criticism, and which associates itself naturally with those of Dennis and Gildon in the regiment of Pope’s victims, is that of Leonard Welsted, who in 1712 published a translation of Longinus, “with some remarks on the English Poets.” [Sidenote: _Welsted._] Welsted’s translation, whether made directly from the Greek or not,[559] is readable enough, and his alternative title, “A treatise on _the Sovereign Perfection of Writing_,” is not unhappy. Neither are his Preface and his appended “Remarks” contemptible. He can appreciate not merely Milton but Spenser; is (how unlike Rymer!) transported with _Othello_, and especially with its conclusion; and if he is not superior to others in scorning “Latin rhymes,” at least has sufficient independence to be very irreverent to Buchanan.
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Footnote 559:
I hope the passing suspicion is not illiberal. But why should he call the Palmyrene “Zenobie” in English? _Cela sent furieusement son Français._ (For the critical work of yet another who felt the lash of Pope—James Ralph—_v. inf._, p. 554 note.)
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But there was a contemporary of Bysshe’s, more famous than either Gildon or Welsted, whose soul was equally above mere prosodic precept, and to whom, as it happens, Gildon himself pays a compliment, as to a denizen of Grub Street, of whom Grub Street could not but feel that he did it some honour by herding with its more native and genuine population. Of him we must say something—not, as we might almost have said it, in juxtaposition with the great poet and critic whom he had earlier admired, but before coming to the lesser, but still great, successors of Dryden, with whom he came into collision in his evil days.
If John Dennis had been acquainted with the poetry of Tennyson (at which he would probably have railed in his best manner, in which he would certainly have detected plagiarisms from the classics), he too might have applied to himself the words of Ulysses, “I am become a name.” [Sidenote: _Dennis._] Everybody who has the very slightest knowledge of English literature knows, if only in connection with Dryden, Addison, and Pope, the surly, narrow, but not quite ignorant or incompetent critic, who in his younger and more genial days admired the first, and in his soured old age attacked the second and third. But it may be doubted whether very many persons have an acquaintance, at all extensive, with his works. They were never collected; the _Select Works of John Dennis_[560] mainly consist of his utterly worthless verse. Much of the criticism is hidden away in prefaces which were seldom reprinted, and the original editions of which have become very rare. Even good libraries frequently contain only two or three out of more than a dozen or a score of separate documents: and though the British Museum itself is well furnished, it is necessary to range through a large number of publications to obtain a complete view of Dennis as a critic.
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Footnote 560:
2 vols., London, 1718.
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That view, when obtained, may perhaps differ not a little from those which have, in a certain general way, succeeded each other in current literary judgment. During the reign of Pope and Addison, the scurrilous assailant of the first, and the more courteous but in part severe censor of the second, was naturally regarded as at best a grumbling pedant, at worst a worthless Zoilus. The critics of the Romantic school were not likely to be much attracted by Dennis. More recently, something of a reaction has taken place in his favour; and it has become not unusual to discover in him, if not exactly a Longinus or a Coleridge, yet a serious and well-equipped critic, who actually anticipated not a little that after-criticism has had to say.[561]
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Footnote 561:
See, among others, Herr Hamelius, _op. cit._ Yet it is interesting to find that the passage of Dennis to which his panegyrist gives the single and signal honour of extract in an appendix is purely ethical: it is all on “the previous question.”
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That this more charitable view is not entirely without foundation may be at once admitted. [Sidenote: _On Rymer._] As compared with Rymer, in whose company he too often finds himself in modern appreciation, Dennis shows, indeed, pretty well. He very seldom—perhaps nowhere—exhibits that crass insensibility to poetry which distinguishes “the worst critic who ever lived.” One of his earliest and not his worst pieces, _The Impartial Critic_ of 1693, is an answer to Rymer himself, points out with acuteness and vigour that “Tom the Second” would ruin the English stage if he had his way, and even approaches the sole causeway of criticism across the deep by advancing the argument that the circumstances of the Greek drama were perfectly different from those of the English.[562] Yet already there are danger-signals. That the piece (which includes a Letter to a Friend and some dialogues) contains a great deal of clumsy jocularity, does not much matter. But when we find Dennis devoting some of this jocularity to Antigone’s lamentation over her death unwedded, we feel sadly that the man who can write thus is scarcely to be trusted on the spirit of poetry. And the admission that Rymer’s censures of Shakespeare are “in most of the particulars very sensible and just” is practically ruinous.[563]
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Footnote 562:
Had Dryden let his Cambridge admirer see the _Heads_? (_v. supra_, pp. 373, 397 notes.)
Footnote 563:
Although Dennis’s fun is heavy enough, there are some interesting touches, as this: “Port [then a novelty in England, remember] is not so well tasted as Claret: and intoxicates sooner.”
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Dennis’s answer to Collier is a little later,[564] but still earlier than most of his better known work; and it is very characteristic of his manner, which has not often, I think, been exactly described. As elsewhere, so in this tract, which is entitled _The Usefulness of the Stage to the Happiness of Mankind, to Government and to Religion_, Dennis is uncompromisingly ethical; but he had here the excuse that Collier, to whom he was replying, had taken the same line. There is less, either here or elsewhere, for his method. This is to make a loud clatter of assertions, arranged in a kind of pseudological order, which seems to have really deceived the author, and may possibly have deceived some of his readers, into believing it syllogistic and conclusive. Dennis is very great at the word “must.” “As Poetry is an Art it _must_ be an imitation of nature”[565] and so forth; seldom shall you find so many “musts” anywhere as in Dennis, save perhaps in some of his modern analogues. Like all who argue in this fashion, he becomes unable to distinguish fact and his own opinion. Collier, for instance, had quoted (quite correctly) Seneca’s denunciation of the Stage. To which Dennis replies, “It is not likely that Seneca should condemn the drama, ... since ... he wrote plays himself.” That the identity of the philosopher and the dramatist is not certain does not matter: the characteristic thing is the setting of probability against fact. But with Dennis hectoring assertion is everything. “It cannot possibly be conceived that so reasonable a diversion as the drama can encourage or incline men to so unreasonable a one as gaming or so brutal a one as drunkenness.” With a man who thinks this an argument, argument is impossible.
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Footnote 564:
It appeared in the very year of the _Short View_ (1698). I have a reprint of it, issued many years later (1725), but long before Dennis’s death, together with _The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry_ and the tragedy of _Rinaldo and Armida_, all separately titled, but continuously paged.
Footnote 565:
This is from the _Advancement and Reformation_, which contains its author’s full definition of Poetry itself—not the worst of such definitions. “Poetry is an Imitation of Nature by a pathetic and numerous speech.”
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The fact is that, though he has, as has been admitted, a certain advantage over Rymer, Lord Derby’s observation that “He never knew whether it was John or Thomas who answered the bell” will too often apply here. [Sidenote: _On Shakespeare._] Rymer himself was not ignorant; Dennis, especially in regard to ancient criticism, was still better instructed: and though both were bad dramatists, with, in consequence, a conscious or unconscious bias on dramatic matters, Dennis was not so bad as Rymer. His devotion to Dryden does him credit, though we may suspect that it was not the best part of Dryden that he liked: and, amid the almost frantic spite and scurrility of his later attacks on Pope, he not unfrequently hits a weak place in the “young squab short gentleman’s” bright but not invulnerable armour. Yet Dennis displays, as no really good critic could do, the weaknesses of his time and school both in generals and particulars. It is perfectly fair to compare him (giving weight for genius of course) with Johnson, a critic whose general views (except on port and claret) did not materially differ from his own. And, if we do so, we shall find that while Johnson is generally, if not invariably, “too good for such a breed,” Dennis almost as constantly shows its worst features. He altered _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ into _The Comical Gallant_[566]—a most illaudable action certainly, yet great Dryden’s self had done such things before. But he aggravated the crime by a preface, in which he finds fault with the original as having “no less than three actions” [would there were thirty-three!] by remarking that, in the second part of _Henry the Fourth_, Falstaff “does nothing but talk” [would he had talked so for five hundred acts instead of five!] and by laying down _ex cathedra_ such generalities as that “Humour, not wit, is the business of comedy,” a statement as false as would be its converse. In his _Essay on the Genius of Shakespeare_[567] he is not so very far from Rymer himself in the drivelling arbitrariness of his criticism. Shakespeare has actually made Aufidius, the general of the Volscians, a base and profligate villain! Even Coriolanus himself is allowed to be called a traitor by Aufidius, and nobody contradicts! The rabble in _Julius Cæsar_ and other such things “show want of Art,” and there is a painful disregard of Poetical Justice. The same hopeless wrong-headedness and (if I may so say) wrong-mindedness appear in a very different work, the _Remarks on the Rape of the Lock_.[568] I do not refer to Dennis’s mere scurrilities about “AP—E” and the like. [Sidenote: _On “Machines.”_] But part of the piece is quite serious criticism. Few of us in modern times care much for the “machinery” of this brilliantly artificial poem; but fewer would think of objecting to it on Dennis’s grounds. Machines, it seems, must be—
i. Taken from the religion of the Poet’s country.
ii. Allegorical in their application.
iii. Corresponding though opposed to each other.
iv. Justly subordinated and proportioned.
And Pope’s machines, we are told, fail in all these respects.
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Footnote 566:
London, 1702.
Footnote 567:
London, 1712.
Footnote 568:
London, 1728.
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Now, putting the fourth ground aside as being a mere matter of opinion (and some who are not fervent Papists think the machines of the _Rape_ very prettily and cleverly arranged in their puppet-show way), one may ask Dennis “Who on earth told you so?” in respect of all the others. And if he alleged (as he might) this or that sixteenth or seventeenth century authority, “And who on earth told _him_ so? and what authority had the authority? Why should machines be taken only from the religion of the country? Why should they be allegorical? Why should Machine Dick on the one side invariably nod to Machine Harry on the other?” And even if some sort of answer be forthcoming, “Why should the poet not do as he please if he succeeds thereby in giving the poetic pleasure?” To which last query of course neither Dennis nor any of his school could return any answer, except of the kind that requires bell, book, and candle.
Nor would he have hesitated to use this, for he is a rule-critic of the very straitest kind, a “Tantivy” of poetic Divine Right. [Sidenote: _His general theory of Poetry._] In his three chief books of abstract criticism[569] he endeavours to elaborate, with Longinus in part for code, and with Milton for example, a noble, indeed, and creditable, but utterly arbitrary and hopelessly narrow theory of poetry as _necessarily_ religious, and as having for its sole real end the reformation of the mind, by a sort of enlarged Aristotelian _katharsis_ as to spirit, and by attention to the strict laws of the art in form. Poetical Justice was a sort of mediate divinity to Dennis: as we have seen, he upbraided Shakespeare for the want of it; he remonstrated, in the _Spectator_, No. 548, and elsewhere, with Addison for taking too little account of it; part at least of his enthusiasm for Milton comes from Milton’s avowed intention to make his poem a theodicy.
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Footnote 569:
_The Advancement and Reformation of Poetry_, 1701; _A Large Account of the Taste in Poetry_, next year; and _Grounds of Criticism in Poetry_, 1704.
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A noble error! let it be repeated, with no hint or shadow of sarcasm or of irreverence; but a fatal error as well. That Poetry, like all things human, lives and moves and has its being in God, the present writer believes as fervently and unhesitatingly as any Platonic philosopher or any Patristic theologian; and he would cheerfully incur the wrath of Savonarola by applying the epithet “divine,” in its fullest meaning, not merely to tragedy and epic and hymn, but to song of wine and of love. But this is not what Dennis meant at all. He meant that Poetry is to have a definitely religious, definitely moral _purpose_—not that it is and tends of itself necessarily _ad majorem Dei gloriam_, but that we are to shape it according to what our theological and ethical ideas of the glory of God are. This way easily comes bad poetry, not at all easily good; and it excludes poetic varieties which may be as good as the best written in obedience to it, and better. Moreover, putting Dennis’s notion of the end of Poetry together with his notion of its method or art (which latter is to be adjusted to some at least of the straitest classical precepts), we can easily comprehend, and could easily have anticipated, the narrow intolerance and the hectoring pedantry which he shows towards all who follow not him. In a new sense—not so very different from the old mediæval one, though put with no mediæval glamour, and by an exponent full of eighteenth-century prosaism, yet destitute of eighteenth-century neatness and concinnity—Poetry becomes a part of theology; and the mere irritableness of the man of letters is aggravated into the _odium theologicum_. Bad poets (that is to say, bad according to Dennis) are not merely faulty artists but wicked men; of this Dennis is sure. “And when a man is sure,” as he himself somewhere naïvely observes, “’tis his duty to speak with a modest assurance.” We know, from examples more recent than poor Dennis, that, when a man is thus minded, his assurance is very apt to eat up his modesty, taking his charity, his good manners, and some other things, as condiments to the meal.
Dennis and Addison, though the latter did not escape the absolute impartiality of the former’s carping, were on terms of mutual respect which, considering all things, were creditable to both. [Sidenote: _Addison._] During the latter part of his rather short lifetime Addison, it is hardly necessary to say, enjoyed a sort of mild dictatorship in Criticism as in other departments of literature; and his right to it was scarcely disputed till near the close of the century, though Johnson knew that he was not deep, and tells us that, in his own last days, it was almost a fashion to look down on Addisonian criticism. If, like others, he was displaced by the Romantic revival, he received more lenient treatment than some, in virtue partly of his own general moderation, partly of his championship of Milton. Yet while his original literary gifts recovered high place during the nineteenth century, his criticism has often been considered to possess scarcely more than historic interest, and has sometimes been rather roughly handled—for instance, by Mr Matthew Arnold. But a recent writer,[570] by arguing that Addison’s treatment of the Imagination, as a separate faculty, introduced a new principle into criticism, has at any rate claimed for him a position which, if it could be granted, would seat him among the very greatest masters of the art, with Aristotle and Longinus among his own forerunners. As usual let us, before discussing these various estimates, see what Addison actually did as a critic.[571]
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Footnote 570:
Mr W. Basil Worsfold in his _Principles of Criticism_ (London, 1897). I hope that nothing which, in a politely controversial tone, I may have to say here, will be taken as disparagement of a very interesting and valuable essay.
Footnote 571:
The most convenient edition of Addison’s _Works_ is that of Bohn, with Hurd’s editorial matter and a good deal more (London, 6 vols., 1862).
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His _début_ as such was not fortunate. He was, it is true, only three-and-twenty when at “dearest Harry’s” request (that is to say Mr Harry Sacheverell’s) he undertook an _Account of the greatest English Poets_.[572] [Sidenote: _The_ Account of the Best known English Poets.] In 1694 nobody, except Dryden, could be expected to write very good verse, so that the poetical qualities of this verse-essay need not be hardly dwelt upon, or indeed considered at all. We may take it, as if it were prose, for the matter only. And thus considered, it must surely be thought one of the worst examples of the pert and tasteless ignorance of its school. Before Cowley nobody but Chaucer and Spenser is mentioned at all, and the mentions of these are simply grotesque. The lines convict Addison, almost beyond appeal, of being at the time utterly ignorant of English literary history up to 1600, and of having read Chaucer and Spenser themselves, if he had read them at all, with his eyes shut. The Chaucer section reads as if it were describing _A C. Merry Tales_ or the _Jests of George Peele_. Where Dryden, if he did not understand Chaucer’s versification, and missed some of his poetry, could see much even of that, and almost all the humour, the grace, the sweetness, the “God’s plenty” of life and character that Chaucer has, Addison sees nothing but a merry-andrew of the day before yesterday.[573] So, too, the consummate art of Spenser, his exquisite versification, his great ethical purpose, and yet his voluptuous beauty, are quite hidden from Addison. He sees nothing but a tedious allegory of improbable adventures, and objects to the “dull moral” which “lies too plain below,” much as Temple had done before him.[574] Cowley, Milton, and Waller are mentioned next, in at least asserted chronological order. Cowley is “a mighty genius” full of beauties and faults,
“Who more had pleased us had he pleased us less,”
but who is a perfect “milky way” of brilliancy, and has made Pindar himself “take a nobler flight.” Milton alternately strikes Addison with awe, rapture, and shock at his politics. He
“Betrays a bottom odious to the sight.”
-----
Footnote 572:
It is fair to say that he never published this, and that, as Pope told Spence, he used himself to call it “a poor thing,” and admitted that he spoke of some of the poets only “on hearsay.” Now when Pope speaks to Addison’s credit it is not as “what the soldier said.” It _is_ evidence, and of the strongest.
Footnote 573:
“In vain he jests in his unpolished strain, And tries to make his readers laugh in vain.”
Footnote 574:
“His moral lay so bare that it lost the effect” (_Ess. on Po._, iii. 420, _ed. cit. sup._) Indeed it has been suggested that Addison’s debt to Temple here is not confined to this.
-----
So we turn to Waller, who is not only “courtly” but “moves our passion,” (what a pity that he died too soon to "rehearse Maria’s charms"!) to Roscommon, who “makes even rules a noble poetry,” and Denham, whose Cooper’s Hill “we must,” of course, not “forget.” “Great Dryden” is then, not unhappily, though not quite adequately, celebrated, and the line on his Muse—
“She wears all dresses, and she charms in all,”
is not only neat, but very largely true. When Dryden shall decay, luckily there is harmonious Congreve: and, if Addison were not tired with rhyming, he would praise (he does so at some length) noble Montague, who directs his artful muse to Dorset,
“In numbers such as Dorset’s self might use,”—
as to which all that can be said is that, if so, either the verses of Montague or the verses of Dorset referred to are not those that have come down to us under the names of the respective authors.
To dwell at all severely on this luckless production of a young University wit would be not only unkind but uncritical. It shows that at this time Addison knew next to nothing[575] about the English literature not of his own day, and judged very badly of what he pretended to know.
-----
Footnote 575:
He proposes to give an account of “_all_ the Muse possessed” between Chaucer and Dryden; and, as a matter of fact, mentions nobody but Spenser between Chaucer and Cowley.
-----
The prose works of his middle period, the _Discourse on Medals_ and the _Remarks on Italy_, are very fully illustrated from the Latin poets—the division of literature that Addison knew best—but indulge hardly at all in literary criticism. It was not till the launching of the _Tatler_, by Steele and Swift, provided him with his natural medium of utterance, that Addison became critical. This periodical itself, and the less known ones that followed the _Spectator_, all contain exercises in this character: but it is to the _Spectator_ that men look, and look rightly, for Addison’s credentials in the character of a critic. [Sidenote: _The_ Spectator _criticisms_.] The _Tatler_ Essays, such as the rather well known papers on Tom Folio and Ned Softly, those in the _Guardian_, the good-natured puff of Tom D’Urfey, &c., are not so much serious and deliberate literary criticisms, as applications, to subjects more or less literary, of the peculiar method of gently malicious censorship, of laughing castigation in manners and morals, which Addison carried to such perfection in all the middle relations of life. Not only are the _Spectator_ articles far more numerous and far more weighty, but we have his own authority for regarding them as, in some measure at least, written on a deliberate system, and divisible into three groups. The first of these groups consists of the early papers on True and False Wit, and of essays on the stage. The second contains the famous and elaborate criticism of Milton with other things; and the third, the still later, still more serious, and still more ambitious, series on the Pleasures of the Imagination. Addison is looking back from the beginning of this last when he gives the general description,[576] and it is quite possible that the complete trilogy was not in his mind when he began the first group. But there is regular development in it, and whether we agree or not with Mr Worsfold’s extremely high estimate of the third division, it is quite certain that the whole collection—of some thirty or forty essays—does clearly exhibit that increasing sense of what criticism means, which is to be observed in almost all good critics. For criticism is, on the one hand, an art in which there are so few manuals or trustworthy short summaries—it is one which depends so much more on reading and knowledge than any creative art—and, above all, it is necessary to make so many mistakes in it before one comes right, that, probably, not one single example can be found of a critic of importance who was not a much better critic when he left off than when he began.
-----
Footnote 576:
In the last paragraph of _Sp._ 409. The whole paper has been occupied by thoughts on Taste and Criticism: it contains the excellent comparison of a critic to a tea-taster, and it ends with this retrospect, and the promise of the “Imagination” Essays (_v. ed. cit._, iii. 393).
-----
In Group One[577] Addison is still animated by the slightly desultory spirit of moral satire, which has been referred to above; and, though fifteen or sixteen years have passed since the _Account_, he does not seem to be so entirely free as we might wish from the crude sciolism, if not the sheer ignorance, of the earliest period. [Sidenote: _On True and False Wit._] He is often admirable: his own humour, his taste, almost perfect within its own narrow limits, and his good sense, made that certain beforehand. But he has rather overloaded it with somewhat artificial allegory, the ethical temper rather overpowers the literary, and there is not a little of that arbitrary “blackmarking” of certain literary things which is one of the worst faults of neo-classic criticism. The Temple of Dulness is built (of course) “after the Gothic manner,” and the image of the god is dressed “after the habit of a monk.” Among the idolatrous rites and implements are not merely rebuses, anagrams, verses arranged in artificial forms, and other things a little childish, though perfectly harmless, but acrostics—trifles, perhaps, yet trifles which can be made exquisitely graceful, and satisfying that desire for mixing passion with playfulness which is not the worst affection of the human heart.
-----
Footnote 577:
_Sp._ 58-63.
-----
He had led up to this batch, a few weeks earlier, by some cursory remarks on Comedy, which form the tail of a more elaborate examination of Tragedy, filling four or five numbers.[578] [Sidenote: _On Tragedy._] Readers who have already mastered the general drift of the criticism of the time before him, will scarcely need any long _précis_ of his views, which, moreover, are in everybody’s reach, and could not possibly be put more readably. Modern tragedies, he thinks, excel those of Greece and Rome in the intricacy and disposition of the fable, but fall short in the moral. He objects to rhyme (except an end-couplet or two), and, though he thinks the style of our tragedies superior to the sentiment, finds the former, especially in Shakespeare, defaced by “sounding phrases, hard metaphors, and forced expressions.” This is still more the case in Lee. Otway is very “tender”: but it is a sad thing that the characters in _Venice Preserved_ should be traitors and rebels. Poetic justice (this was what shocked Dennis), as generally understood, is rather absurd, and quite unnecessary. And the tragi-comedy, which is the product of the English theatre, is “one of the most monstrous inventions that ever entered into a poet’s thought.” You “might as well weave the adventures of Æneas and Hudibras into one poem” [and, indeed, one might find some relief in this, as far as the adventures of Æneas are concerned]. Tragedies are not even to have a double plot. Rants, and especially impious rants, are bad. Darkened stages, elaborate scenery and dresses, troops of supers, &c., are as bad: bells, ghosts, thunder, and lightning still worse. “Of all our methods of moving pity and terror, there is none so absurd and barbarous as the dreadful butchering of one another,” though all deaths on the stage are not to be forbidden.
-----
Footnote 578:
_Sp._ 39, 40, 42, 44, 45.
-----
Now, it is not difficult to characterise the criticism which appears in this first group, strengthened, if anybody cares, by a few isolated examples. It contains a great deal of common sense and good ordinary taste; many of the things that it reprehends are really wrong, and most of what it praises is good in a way. But the critic has as yet no guiding theory, except what he thinks he has gathered from Aristotle, and has certainly gathered from Horace, _plus_ Common Sense itself, with, as is the case with all English critics of this age, a good deal from his French predecessors, especially Le Bossu and Bouhours. Which borrowing, while it leads him into numerous minor errors, leads him into two great ones—his denunciations of tragi-comedy, and of the double plot. He is, moreover, essentially arbitrary: his criticism will seldom stand the application of the “Why?” the “_Après?_” and a harsh judge might, in some places, say that it is not more arbitrary than ignorant.
The Second Group,[579] or Miltonic batch, with which may be taken its “moon,” the partly playful but more largely serious _examen_ of _Chevy Chase_, is much the best known, and has been generally ranked as the most important exhibition of Addison’s critical powers. [Sidenote: _On Milton._] It is not, however, out of paradox or desire to be singular that it will be somewhat briefly discussed here. By the student of Addison it cannot be too carefully studied; for the historian of criticism it has indeed high importance, but importance which can be very briefly summed up, and which requires no extensive analysis of the eighteen distinct essays that compose the Miltonic group, or the two on _Chevy Chase_. The critic here takes for granted—and knows or assumes that his readers will grant—two general positions:—
1. The Aristotelian-Horatian view of poetry, with a few of the more commonplace utterances of Longinus, supplies the orthodox theory of Poetics.
2. The ancients, especially Homer and Virgil, supply the most perfect examples of the orthodox practice of poetry.
-----
Footnote 579:
These began in _Sp._ 267, and were the regular Saturday feature of the paper for many weeks. References to Milton outside of them will be found in the excellent index of the ed. cit. or in that of Mr Gregory Smith’s exact and elegant reproduction of the _Spectator_ (8 vols., London, 1897).
-----
These things posed, he proceeds to examine _Chevy Chase_ at some, _Paradise Lost_ at great, length by their aid; and discovers in the ballad not a few, and in the epic very great and very numerous, excellences. As Homer does this, so Milton does that: such a passage in Virgil is a more or less exact analogue to such another in _Paradise Lost_. Aristotle says this, Horace that, Longinus the third thing; and you will find the dicta capitally exemplified in such and such a place of Milton’s works. To men who accepted the principle—as most, if not all, men did—the demonstration was no doubt both interesting and satisfactory; and though it certainly did not start general admiration of Milton, it stamped that admiration with a comfortable seal of official orthodoxy. But it is actually more antiquated than Dryden, in assuming that the question whether Milton wrote according to Aristotle is coextensive with the question whether he wrote good poetry.
The next batch is far more important.
What _are_ the Pleasures of the Imagination? It is of the first moment to observe Addison’s exact definition.[580] [Sidenote: _The “Pleasures of the Imagination.”_] Sight is the “sense which furnishes the imagination with its ideas; so that by the ‘Pleasures of the Imagination’ or Fancy, which I shall use promiscuously, I here mean such as arise from visible objects, either when we have them actually in our view, or when we call up their ideas into our minds by paintings, statues, descriptions, or any the like occasion.” We can have no images not thus furnished, though they may be altered and compounded by imagination itself. To make this quite sure, he repeats that he means _only_ such pleasures as thus arise. He then proceeds, at some length, to argue for the innocence and refinement of such pleasures, their usefulness, and so on; and further, to discuss the causes or origins of pleasure in sight, which he finds to be three—greatness, uncommonness, and beauty. The pleasantness of these is assigned to such and such wise and good purposes of the Creator, with a reference to the great modern discoveries of Mr Locke’s essay.
-----
Footnote 580:
_Sp._ 411, ed. cit., iii. 394.
-----
Addison then goes on to consider the sources of entertainment to the imagination, and decides that, for the purpose, art is very inferior to nature, though both rise in value as each borrows from the other. He adduces, in illustration, an odd rococo mixture of scene-painting and reflection of actual objects which he once saw (p. 404). Italian and French gardens are next praised, in opposition to the old formal English style, and naturally trained trees to the productions of the _ars topiaria_; while a very long digression is made to greatness in Architecture, illustrated by this remark (p. 409), “Let any one reflect on the disposition of mind in which he finds himself at his first entrance into the Pantheon at Rome, ... and consider how little in proportion he is affected with the inside of a Gothic cathedral, though it be five times larger than the other,” the reason being “the greatness of the manner in the one, and the meanness in the other.”
So the “secondary” pleasures of the imagination—_i.e._, those compounded and manufactured by memory—are illustrated by the arts of sculpture and painting, with a good passage on description generally, whence he turns to the Cartesian doctrine of the association of ideas, and shows very ingeniously how the poet may avail himself of this. Next comes a curious and often just analysis of the reasons of pleasure in description—how, for instance, he likes Milton’s Paradise better than his Hell, because brimstone and sulphur are not so refreshing to the imagination as beds of flowers and wildernesses of sweets. Or we may like things because they “raise a secret ferment in the mind,” either directly, or so as to arouse a feeling of relief by comparison, as when we read of tortures, wounds, and deaths. Moreover, the poet may improve Nature. Let oranges grow wild, and roses, woodbines, and jessamines flower at the same time. As for “the fairy way of writing”[581]—that is to say, the supernatural—it requires a very odd turn of mind. We do it better than most other nations, because of our gloominess and melancholy of temper. Shakespeare excels everybody else in touching “this weak superstitious part” of his reader’s imagination. The glorifying of the imagination, however, is by no means confined to the poet. In good historians we “see” everything. None more gratify the imagination than the authors of the new philosophy, astronomers, microscopists. This (No. 420) is one of Addison’s most ambitious passages of writing, and the whole ends (421) with a peroration excellently hit off.
-----
Footnote 581:
This phrase is originally Dryden’s (dedication to _King Arthur_, viii. 136, ed. cit.), who, however, has “kind” for “way”.
-----
It is upon these papers mainly that Mr Worsfold[582] bases his high eulogium of Addison as “the first genuine critic,” the first “who added something to the last word of Hellenism,” the bringer of criticism “into line with modern thought,” the establisher of “a new principle of poetic appeal.” Let us, as uncontroversially as possible, and without laying any undue stress on the fact that Mr Worsfold practically omits Longinus altogether,[583] stick, in our humdrum way, to the facts.
-----
Footnote 582:
_Op. cit._, pp. 93-107, and more largely pp. 55-93.
Footnote 583:
Students of the Stagirite may be almost equally surprised to find Aristotle regarded as mainly, if not wholly, a critic of Form as opposed to Thought.
-----
In the first place, supposing for the moment that Addison uses “imagination” in our full modern sense, and supposing, secondly, for the moment also, that he assigns the appeal to the imagination as the special engine of the poet, is this an original discovery of his? By no means: there are many _loci_ of former writers to negative this—there is one that is fatal. And this is no more recondite a thing than the famous Shakespearian description of
“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,”
as
“Of _imagination_ all compact,”
with what follows. But this is a mere question of property, plagiarism, suggestion; and such questions are at best the exercises of literary holiday-makers, at the worst the business of pedants and of fools.
A more important as well as a more dangerous question is this. _Does_ Addison make “the appeal to the imagination” the test of poetry? It can only be answered that, by his own explicit words, he does nothing of the kind. If he advances anything, it is that the appeal to the imagination is the appeal of art generally—of prose (even of scientific) literary art as well as of poetry, of painting, sculpture, architecture, as well as of literature. In doing this he does a good thing: he does something notable in the history of general æsthetics; but in so far as literature, and especially poetry, is concerned, he scarcely goes as far as Longinus in the well-known passage,[584] though he works out his doctrine at much greater length, and with assistance from Descartes and Locke.
-----
Footnote 584:
See vol. i. p. 165 _sq._
-----
But the most important and the most damaging question of all is this, “Are not Addison and his panegyrist using words in equivocal senses? _Does_ Imagination in Addison’s mouth bear the meaning which we, chiefly since Coleridge’s day, attach to the word? Does it even mean what it meant to Longinus, much more what it meant to Shakespeare?”
I have no hesitation in answering the two latter questions with an absolute and unhesitating “No!”
It seems indeed extraordinary that, in face of Addison’s most careful and explicit limitations, any one should delude himself into thinking that even the Shakespearian and Addisonian Imaginations are identical—much more that Addison’s Imagination is the supreme faculty, creative, transcending Fancy,[585] superior to fact, not merely compounding and refining upon, but altogether superseding and almost scorning, ideas of sensation, which we mean by the word, and which Philostratus or Apollonius[586] partly glimpsed. Addison tells us—tells us over and over again—that _all_ the ideas and pleasures of the imagination are pleasures of sense, and, what is more, that they are all pleasures of one sense—Sight. Why he should have limited himself in this singular manner it is hard to say; except that he was evidently full of Locke when he wrote, and, indeed, almost entirely under the influence of the _Essay_. That he had a contempt for music is elsewhere pretty evident; and this probably explains his otherwise inexplicable omission of the supplies and assistance given to Imagination by Hearing. His morality, as well as old convention, excluded Touch, Taste, and Smell as low and gross, though no candid philosophy could help acknowledging the immense influence exercised upon Imagination by at least the first and the last—Taste, because the most definite, being perhaps the least imaginative of all. But the fact that he does exclude even these senses, and still more rigidly excludes everything but Sense, is insuperable, irremovable, ruthless. Addison may have been the first modern critic to work out the appeal of art to the pleasures and ideas furnished by the sense of sight. He is certainly nothing more.
-----
Footnote 585:
It would be unfair to lay too much stress on his identification of Imagination and Fancy; but there is something tell-tale in it.
Footnote 586:
See vol. i. p. 118 _sq._
-----
But is he therefore to be ignored, or treated lightly, because of this strange overvaluation of him? Certainly not. [Sidenote: _His general critical value._]Though by no means a very great critic, he is a useful, an interesting, and a representative one. He represents the classical attitude tempered, not merely by good sense almost in quintessence, but by a large share of tolerance and positive good taste, by freedom from the more utterly ridiculous pseudo-Aristotelianisms, and by a wish to extend a _concordat_ to everything good even if it be not “faultless.” In his _Account_ he is evidently too crude to be very censurable: in his first group of essays much of his censure is just. The elaborate vindication of Milton, though now and for a long time past merely a curiosity, is again full of good sense, displays (if not altogether according to knowledge) a real liking for real poetic goodness, and had an inestimable effect in keeping at least one poet of the better time privileged and popular with readers throughout the Eighteenth Century. As for the essay on the Pleasures of the Imagination, the fact that it has been wrongly praised need not in the least interfere with a cordial estimate of its real merits. It is not an epoch-making contribution to literary criticism; it is rather one-sided, and strangely limited in range. But it is about the first attempt at a general theory of æsthetics in English; it is a most interesting, and a very early, example of that application of common-sense philosophy to abstract subjects which Locke taught to the English eighteenth century; and many of its remarks are valuable and correct. Moreover, it did actually serve, for those who could not, or who did not, read Longinus, as a corrective to pure form-criticism, to Bysshe with his rigid ten syllables, to bare good sense and conventional rule. Its Imagination was still only that which supplies Images, and was strangely cramped besides; but it was better than mere correctness, mere decency, mere stop-watch.
Between Addison and Pope, Steele, Atterbury, and Swift call for notice. [Sidenote: _Steele._] Steele has little for us.[587] There are few things more curious than the almost entire abstinence from any expression, in the slightest degree really critical, to be found in the eulogy of Spenser, which he generously enough inserted in _Sp._ 540 to express “his passion for that charming author.” The numerous friends whom he has so justly won for himself may perhaps insist that there is criticism of the best in this very phrase; and that the rather rash encomium on the poet’s “old words” as being “all truly English” is balanced by the justice of the reference to his “exquisite numbers.” But the fact is that Steele had neither the knowledge, nor the patience, nor the coolness for critical work.
-----
Footnote 587:
Herr Hamelius, _op. cit. sup._, p. 103, and elsewhere, thinks much more highly of Steele than I do, and even makes him a “Romantic before Romanticism.” Steele’s temperament was undoubtedly Romantic, and both in essays and plays he displayed it; but he was not really critical.
-----
Atterbury gives rather more. He was himself a man of great intellectual power, a scholar, an eloquent and delicate writer, and possessed independent taste enough to admire Milton fervently at a time when Addison had not yet made it wholly orthodox to admire that poet at all, and when most Tories detested him. [Sidenote: _Atterbury._] But his observations on Waller[588] are the very quintessence of pseudodoxy, as to that respectable person; and, by a curious combination, though Waller is a rhymer confirmed and complete, Atterbury joins with his admiration for him an antipathy to rhyme—“this jingling kind of poetry,” “this troublesome bondage, as Mr Milton well calls it.” As for this we need say little; the danger lay not there. But it lay in the direction of such remarks as that “English came into Waller’s hands like a rough diamond; he polished it first,” that, “for aught I know, he stands last as well as first in the list of refiners” [imagine the excellent Waller as be-all and end-all of English!], that “verse before Waller was downright prose tagged with rhyme,” &c., &c. Once more let our impatience of this talk not be ignorant—as is the impatience of those who nowadays cannot see music in Dryden, poetry in Pope, “cry” and clangour now and then even in persons like Langhorne and Mickle. He expressed an opinion; but in expressing it he showed this same ignorance from which we should abstain. Instead of pointing out that Waller introduced a _different_ kind of music, he insisted that Waller substituted music for discord: instead of saying that he introduced a new fashion of cutting the diamond, he would have it that the diamond was merely rough before. This was the _culpa_, the _maxima culpa_ of eighteenth-century criticism, and Atterbury illustrates and shares it.[589]
-----
Footnote 588:
In his Preface to the Second Part of the _Poems_ (1690).
Footnote 589:
Of course he might, to some extent, have sheltered himself under Dryden’s own authority for all this.
-----
The critical work of Swift[590] is much more important, and though a good deal of it is inextricably mixed up with the work of Pope and of Arbuthnot, the lion’s claw is generally perceptible enough. [Sidenote: _Swift._] The famous _Tatler_ of September 28, 1710, on the conceptions of English style and writing, ought to hold place in every history and course of lectures on the subject, next to Sprat’s passage in the _History of the Royal Society_ forty years before, as the manifesto of a fresh stage in English style-criticism; and it practically precedes everything that Addison, Steele, and Pope published on, or in connection with, the subject. But long before this, in the wonderful volume which first (1704) revealed his genius to the world, Swift had shown how critical the Gods had made him.
-----
Footnote 590:
I have thought it useless to give references to particular editions of the better known writings of Swift and Pope, as they are so numerous. Of their whole works there is, in the former case, no real standard, Scott’s being much inferior to his _Dryden_; but in the latter that of the late Mr Elwin and Mr Courthope is not likely soon to be superseded.
-----
_The Battle of the Books_ is one of the most eccentric documents in the whole History of our subject. [Sidenote: The Battle of the Books.] Directly, and on its face, it may be said to be of the first critical importance; because it shows how very little subject, intention, accuracy to fact, verisimilitude, and half-a-dozen other indispensables according to certain theories, have to do with the goodness of a book. The general characteristics of _The Battle of the Books_ in all these named respects, and some of the unnamed ones, are deplorable. In a tedious and idle quarrel which, at least as it was actually debated, never need have been debated at all, Swift takes the side which, if not the intrinsically wrong one, is the wrong one as he takes it. To represent Bentley, or even Wotton, as enemies of the Ancients might seem preposterous, if it were not outdone by the preposterousness of selecting Temple as their champion. The details are often absurd—from that ranking of “Despréaux” side by side with Cowley as a Modern brigadier, which is probably a slip (perhaps for “Desportes”) of pen or press, to the spiteful injustices on Dryden. The idea of the piece was probably taken from Callières.[591] Its composition, from the rigid “Ancient” point of view, is sadly lax; and the two most brilliant episodes—the “Sweetness and Light” quarrel of the Spider and the Bee, and the “machine” of the Goddess of Criticism—have little or nothing to do with the action. But yet it is—and one knows it is—a masterpiece; and it is pretty certain from it that in certain kinds of destructive criticism, and even in certain kinds of what may be called destructive-constructive, the author will be able to accomplish almost anything that he is likely to try.
-----
Footnote 591:
_V. inf._, p. 553 note.
-----
Though the _Tale of the Tub_ is less ostensibly bookish, it shows even greater purely critical power: for the power of the _Battle_ is mainly that of a consummate craftsman, who can accomplish by sheer craftsmanship whatsoever his hand findeth to do. [Sidenote: _The_ Tale of a Tub.]In the _Tale_ the crusade against bad writing and bad writers, which Swift carried on more or less for the whole of his middle and later years, and in which he enlisted Addison and Pope, Arbuthnot and Gay, is all but formally proclaimed, and is most vigorously waged with or without proclamation. In the “Dedication to Somers” the sword is being something more than loosened in the sheath; it flashes out in “The Bookseller to the Reader”; it is doing sanguinary work in the great “Epistle to Prince Posterity;” and it has only momentary rests in the “Preface” and the “Induction”: while there is hardly a section of the main text in which the quarters of Grub Street are not beaten up, and the Conclusion is even as the preludes and the main body.
A shrewd judge could hardly fail to perceive, from these famous twin-books, that a new genius of thoroughly critical character had arisen: but such a judge might well have doubted how far its exercise could be anything but negative. [Sidenote: _Minor works._] His doubts, as we have already hinted, were to be justified. Indirectly, indeed, not merely in the _Tatler_ paper above referred to and elsewhere, but by that almost uncanny influence which he seems to have exerted in so many ways on men only less than himself, Swift had very much to do with the rescuing of Style, by the hands of Addison and the rest, from the vulgarisation which it was undergoing at the close of the seventeenth century, not merely in common writers, not merely in the hands of an eccentric like L’Estrange, but in those of scholars like Collier and Bentley. But even this was a task of destruction rather than of positive construction, and he was always most at home in such tasks. The _Meditation on a Broomstick_ and the _Tritical Essay_, though every good reviewer should know them by heart, and will have but too many opportunities of using his knowledge, are delivered with the backward, not the forward, speech of the critic; the _Proposal for correcting the English Tongue_, which falls in with the _Tatler_ paper, aims at a sort of stationary state of language and literature alike, at proscriptions and ostracisings; the _Letter to a Young Clergyman_ and the _Essay on Modern Education_, though both touch on literature, are exceedingly general in their precepts; and though all persons with a true English appreciation of shameless puns and utter nonsense must delight in _The Antiquity of the English Tongue_, it cannot be called serious criticism. There is more in the _Advice to a Young Poet_: but even here Swift is rather “running humours” on his subject than discussing it in the grave and chaste manner.
We shall therefore hardly be wrong if, after excepting the literary directions of the universal satiric _douche_ in the _Tale of a Tub_, and the useful but somewhat rudimentary warnings of the _Tatler_ paper, we see the most characteristic critical work of Swift in _Martinus Scriblerus_ and the _Peri Bathous_, especially in the latter, which, though it be principally attributed to Arbuthnot and Pope, is as surely Swiftian in suggestion as if the Dean had written and published it alone. Often as it has been imitated, and largely as its methods have been drawn upon, it has never been surpassed as an Art of General and Particular “Slating”: and the sections on the Figures, with the immortal receipt for making an epic poem (the full beauty of which is lost on those who do not know how appallingly close it is to the approved prescriptions of the best neo-classic critics), cannot be too highly praised. But, once more, the critic is here at hangman’s work only: he allows himself neither to admire nor to love.
These principles, put in various ways by writers of more or less genius for half a century, found what seemed to more than two generations (always with a few dissidents) something like consummate expression in certain well-known utterances of Pope. [Sidenote: _Pope._] As expression these utterances may still receive a very high degree of admiration: as anything else it is difficult to believe that any turn of fashion, unless it brings with it oblivion for large districts of noble literature, can restore them to much authority. Pope, though better read than he seems in his poems, was by no means a learned man; and it is now pretty generally admitted that his intellect was acute rather than powerful. The obstinate superficiality—the reduction of everything, even the most recondite problems of philosophy, even the most far-ranging questions of erudition, to a jury of “common-sense” persons, decorated with a little of the fashion of the town—which had set in, found in him an exponent as competent to give it exquisite expression as he was indisposed, and probably incompetent, to deepen or extend its scope. He attained early to nearly his full powers, and it does not much matter whether the _Essay on Criticism_ was written at the age of twenty or at that of twenty-two. He could have improved it a little in form, but would hardly have altered it at all in matter, if he had written it thirty years later. The _Imitation of the Epistle of Horace to Augustus_, which was actually written about that time, is, though superior as verse, almost inferior as criticism, and more “out” in fact. The two together give a sufficient view of Pope as he wished to be taken critically. [Sidenote: _The_ Letters.] But to be perfectly fair we must add the critical utterances in his _Letters_,[592] his Preface to Shakespeare, and (with caution of course) the remarks attributed to him by Spence. The Preface has received much praise; and has deserved some even from those who follow not Pope generally. It would be unfair to blame him for adopting the mixed “beauty and fault” system which had the patronage of great names in antiquity, and found hardly even questioners in his own time. And it is something that he recognises Shakespeare’s power over the passions, the individuality of his characters, his intuitive knowledge of the world and of nature. He is moderate and sensible on the relations of Shakespeare and Jonson; he has practically said all that is to be said, in an endless and tiresome controversy, by writing, [Sidenote: _The Shakespeare Preface._] “To judge Shakespeare by Aristotle’s rules is like trying a man by the laws of one country who acted under those of another.” And for such utterances we may excuse, or at least pass over with little or no comment, the remarks that Shakespeare kept bad company, that he wrote to please the populace, that he resembles “an ancient majestic piece of Gothic architecture [so far, so good], where many of the details are childish, ill-placed, and unequal to its grandeur.” The littleness of this patchy, yea-nay criticism beside the great and everlasting appreciation of his master Dryden speaks for itself; it is only fair to remember that the very existence of Dryden’s for once really marmoreal inscription almost inevitably belittled and hampered Pope. He was obliged to be different; and internal as well as external influences made it certain that if he were different he would be less.
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Footnote 592:
The most important of these is the sentence on Crashaw (with whom Pope has some points of sympathy), that he is wanting in “design, form, fable, which is the soul of poetry,” and “exactness or consent of parts, which is the body,” while he grants him “pretty conceptions, fine metaphors, glittering expressions, and something of a neat cast of verse, which are properly the dress, gems, or loose ornaments” of it. See my friend Mr Courthope (in his _Life_, ed. cit. of the _Works_, v. 63), with whom, for once, I am in irreconcilable disagreement.
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The _Popiana_ of Spence[593] add more to our idea of Pope’s critical faculty, or at least of its exercises; in fact, it is possible to take a much better estimate of Pope’s “literature” from the _Anecdotes_ than from the _Works_. [Sidenote: _Spence’s_ Anecdotes.] Although the Boswellian spirit was, fortunately enough for posterity, very strong in the eighteenth century, there was no particular reason why Spence should toady Pope—especially as he published nothing to obtain pence or popularity from the toadying. That rather remarkable collection, or re-collection, of Italian-Latin poetry of the Renaissance,[594] of which not much notice has been taken by Pope’s biographers, would, of itself, show critical interest in a part, and no unnoteworthy part, of literature: and a few of the Spencean salvages bear directly upon this. He need not have been ashamed of his special liking for Politian’s _Ambra_: and he was right in thinking Bembo “stiff and unpoetical,” though hardly in joining Sadolet with him in this condemnation. We know perfectly well why he did not like Rabelais, for which Swift very properly scolded him: indeed, he tells us himself, twice over, that “there were so many things” in Master Francis, “in which he could not see any manner of meaning driven at,” that he could not read him with any patience. This is really more tale-telling than the constantly quoted passage about Walsh and correctness. For, after all, everybody aspires to be correct: only everybody has his own notions of what is correctness. It is not everybody—and, as we see, it was not the great Mr Pope—who could, or can, appreciate nonsense, and see how much more sensible than sense the best of it is. It would skill but little to go through his isolated judgments: but there are one or two which are eloquent.
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Footnote 593:
Spence (whose _Anecdotes_ were printed partly by Malone, and completely by Singer in 1820, reprinted from the latter edition in 1858, and re-selected by Mr Underhill (London, n. d.) in the last decade of the nineteenth century) has sometimes received praise as a critic himself. His _Polymetis_ usefully brought together classical art and letters, and the _Anecdotes_ themselves are not without taste. But his elaborate criticism of Pope’s _Odyssey_, published in 1726, is of little value, neither praising nor blaming its subject for the right things, and characterised as a whole by a pottering and peddling kind of censorship.
Footnote 594:
_Selecta Poemata Italorum qui Latine Scripserunt. Cura cujusdam Anonymi anno 1684 congesta, iterum in lucem data, una cum aliorum Italorum operibus. Acccurante A. Pope._ 2 vols., London, 1740. The title-page contains absolutely all the ostensible editorial matter, and, as I have not got hold of the work of the Anonymus, I do not know how much Pope added. But his collection, as I can testify from some little knowledge of the subject, is good.
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Still, it is to the _Essay_ and the _Epistle_ that we must turn for his deliberate theory of criticism, announced in youth, indorsed and emphasised in age. [Sidenote: _The_ Essay on Criticism.] And we meet at once with a difficulty. The possessor of such a theory ought, at least, to have something like a connected knowledge, at least a connected view, of literature as a whole, and to be able to square the two. All Pope seems to have done is to take the _Arts_ of Horace, Vida, and Boileau, to adopt as many of their principles as he understood, and as would go into his sharp antithetic couplet, to drag their historical illustrations head and shoulders into his scheme without caring for the facts, and to fill in and embroider with criticisms, observations, and precepts, sometimes very shrewd, almost always perfectly expressed, but far too often arbitrary, conventional, and limited. He is most unfortunate of all in the historical part, where Boileau had been sufficiently unfortunate before him. The Frenchman’s observations on Villon and Ronsard had been ignorant enough, and forced enough: but Pope managed to go a little beyond them in the _Essay_, and a great distance further still in the _Epistle_. The history of the famous passage,
“We conquered France, but felt our captive’s charms,”[595]
is like nothing on earth but the history-poetry of the despised monkish ages, in which Alexander has twelve peers, and Arthur, early in the sixth century, overruns Europe with a British force, and fights with a Roman Emperor named Lucius. And the sketch of European literature in the _Essay_, if it contains no single statement so glaringly absurd, is as much a “tissue of gaps” as the Irishman’s coat.
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Footnote 595:
_Ep. to Aug._, l. 263.
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Attempts have been made (including some by persons deserving all respect, and thoroughly acquainted with the subject) to give Pope a high place, on the score of his charges to “follow nature.” Unfortunately this is mere translation of Boileau, of Vida, and of Horace, in the first place: and, still more unfortunately, the poet’s own arguments on his doctrine show that what _he_ meant by “following nature,” and what _we_ mean by it, are two quite different things. He, usually at least, means “stick to the usual, the ordinary, the commonplace.” Just so the legendary King of Siam, had he written an _Art of Poetry_, would have said “Follow nature, and do not talk about such unnatural things as ice and snow.”
Regarded merely as a manual of the art of Pope’s own poetry, without prejudice to any other, and as a satire on the faults of other kinds, without prejudice to the weaknesses of his own, the _Essay_ is not merely an interesting document, but a really valuable one. Its cautions against desertion of nature in the directions of excess, of the unduly fantastic, are sound to this day: and its eulogies of ancient writers, though perhaps neither based on very extensive and accurate first-hand knowledge, nor specially appropriate to the matter in hand, contain much that is just in itself. One of the weakest parts, as might have been expected, is the treatment of rules, licences, and faults. The poet-critic practically confesses the otiosity of the whole system by admitting that a lucky licence is a rule, and that it is possible, as one of his own most famous and happiest lines says,
“To snatch a grace beyond the reach of art.”
And when he paraphrases Quintilian to the effect that you must criticise
“With the same spirit that the author writ,”
and judge the whole, not the parts, he again goes perilously near to jettison his whole system.
In the same way consistency is the last thing that can be claimed for his chapters, as they may be called, on conceit, on language, “numbers” (the most famous and the most ingenious passage of the _Essay_), extremes, “turns,” the Ancient and Modern quarrel, &c. The passage on Critics is among the best—for here sheer good sense (even in the temporary, much more in the universal, meaning) tells—and the historical sketch of them, though not too accurate, is vigorous.
The much later _Epistle_ is far more desultory, and inevitably tinged by those personal feelings which many years of literary squabble had helped ill-health and natural disposition to arouse in Pope. [Sidenote: _The_ Epistle to Augustus.] But its general critical attitude is not different. He is angry with the revival of old literature which Watson and Allan Ramsay in Scotland, Oldys and others in England, were beginning, hints sneers even at Milton and the “weeds on Avon’s bank,” is at least as hackneyed as he is neat in his individual criticisms on poets nearer his own day, and defends poetry and literature generally in a patronising and half-apologetic strain. In fact, what he has really at heart is to be politely rude to George II.; not to give any critical account of English literature.
But the _Essay on Criticism_ is too important a thing not to require a little more notice here. [Sidenote: _Remarks on Pope as a critic_,] It is extremely desultory; but so is the _Epistola ad Pisones_, and it is by no means certain that Pope was not wise in falling back upon the Roman method, instead of emulating the appearance of system in the _Art Poétique_. This latter emphasises faults; Pope’s _causerie_ veils promiscuousness in the elegant chit-chat of conversation. A bad critic is a more dangerous person than a bad poet; and true taste is as uncommon as true genius. Bad education is responsible for bad taste, and we must be very careful about our own. Nature is the guide; the “rules” are but methodised nature. We derive them, however, not from nature but from the ancient poets, whom we must study. Even in licences we must follow them. Bad critics are made by various causes, from ignorance and party spirit to personal animus. A good critic is candid, modest, well-bred, and sincere. The sort of history of criticism which concludes the piece makes it specially surprising that Johnson should have been so much kinder to Pope’s learning than he was to Dryden’s; but the author of the actual _Essay on Criticism_, and the author of the unhappily but projected _History_ of it, were too thoroughly in agreement about poetry, and even about criticism itself, to make the latter quite an impartial judge of the former.
When we pass from generals to particulars Pope’s cleverness at least appears more than ever. The sharply separated, neatly flying, and neatly ringing couplets deliver “one, two” in the most fascinating cut-and-thrust style, not without a brilliant parry now and then to presumed (and never very formidable) objections. The man’s perfect skill in the execution of his own special style of poetry raises, and in this case not delusively, the expectation that he will know his theory as well as his practice. The “good sense,” the “reason,” are really and not merely nominally present. A great deal of what is said is quite undoubtedly true and very useful, not merely for reproof and correction in point of critical and poetical sin, but actually for instruction in critical and poetical righteousness.
But on further examination there is too often something wanting; nay, there is too often no real root of the matter present. The preliminary flourishes are well enough. And certainly no school will quarrel—though each school may take the privilege of understanding the words in its own way—with the doctrine “Follow Nature.” But
“One science only will one genius fit”
is notoriously false to nature, and if intended as a hint to the critic, can only result in too common mistakes and injustices. So, too, when we pass from the glowing eulogy of Nature, and of her union with Art, to the Rules, there is a most deplorable gap. Those Rules, “discovered not devised,” are “nature methodised.” Very good. This means, if it means anything, a very true thing—that the Rules are extracted from observed works of genius. But how, a most fervent admirer of the Greeks may ask, did it happen that the Greeks discovered _all_ these rules? How, especially, did it happen that they did so, when some kinds of literature itself were notoriously neither discovered nor devised? And when we get a little further, and are bidden to
“Know well each Ancient’s proper character,”
we may, or rather must, reply, “It is most necessary; but you will neglect the Moderns at your peril.”
In short, here as elsewhere, Pope’s dazzling elocution, winged with a distinct if narrow conception of his general purpose, flies right enough in the inane, but makes painfully little progress when it lights on the prosaic ground. The picture of “young Maro,” with a sort of ciphering book before him, “totting up” Homer, Nature, and the Stagirite, and finding them all exactly equivalent, is really far more ludicrous than those flights of metaphysical fancy at which critics of Pope’s school delight to gird; while the very climax of another kind of absurdity is reached by the accordance to the Ancients, not merely of the prerogative of laying down the rule always to be followed, but of the privilege of making the not-to-be-imitated exception. So again, fine as is the Alps passage, the famous doctrine of a “little learning” is an ingenious fallacy. It is not the little learning acquired, but the vast amount of ignorance left, that is dangerous. The admirable couplet,
“True Wit is nature to advantage drest; What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed,”
though in itself the best thing in the whole poem, is unluckily placed, because this sensation of familiarity beneath novelty is constantly given by those very “conceits” which Pope is denouncing. On “Language” and “Numbers” he is too notoriously speaking to a particular brief. And as for his more general cautions throughout, they are excellent sense for the most part, but have very little more to do with criticism than with any other function of life. A banker or a fishmonger, an architect, artist, or plain man, will no doubt be the better for avoiding extremes, partisanship, singularity, fashion, mere jealousy (personal or other), ignorance, pedantry, vice. And if he turns critic he will find these avoidances still useful to him, but not more specially useful than in his former profession.
What then was the critical attitude which was expressed so brilliantly, and which gave Pope a prerogative influence over all the orthodox criticism of his own century in England and even elsewhere? [Sidenote: _and the critical attitude of his group._] It can be sketched very fairly as being a sort of compromise between a supposed following of the ancients, and a real application, to literature in general and to poetry in particular, of the general taste and cast of thought of the time. The following of the Ancients—it has been often pointed out already—was, as the Articles of the Church of England have it, a “corrupt following”: those who said Aristotle meant now nobody more ancient than Boileau, now no one more ancient than Vida, scarcely ever any one more ancient than Horace. The classics as a whole were very little studied, at least by those who busied themselves most with modern literature; and it had entered into the heads of few that, after all, the standards of one literature might, or rather must, require very considerable alteration before they could apply to another.[596] But Greek and Roman literature presented a body of poetry and of most other kinds, considerable, admittedly excellent, and mostly composed under the influence of distinct and identical critical principles. Very few men had a complete knowledge of even a single modern literature; hardly a man in France knew Old French as a whole, hardly a man in England, except mere antiquaries, knew Old English even as a part. There was probably not a man in Europe till Gray (and Gray was still young at Pope’s death) who had any wide reading at once in classical literature and in the mediæval and modern literatures of different countries. Accordingly the principles of ancient criticism, not even in their purity fully adequate to modern works, and usually presented, not in their purity but in garbled and bastardised form, were all that they had to stand by.
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Footnote 596:
Pope, _v. supra_, p. 454, actually admitted this as regards Aristotle and Shakespeare; yet the admission practically revokes most of the _Essay_.
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This classical, or pseudo-classical, doctrine was further affected, in the case of literature generally, by the _ethos_ of the time, and, in the case of poetry, by the curious delusion as to hard and fast syllabic prosody which has been noticed in connection with Bysshe. Classicism, in any pure sense, was certainly not to blame for this, for everybody with the slightest tinge of education knew that the chief Latin metre admitted the substitution of trisyllabic for dissyllabic feet in every place but one, and most knew that this substitution was even more widely permitted by Greek in a standard metre, approaching the English still nearer. But it had, as we have seen, been a gradually growing delusion, for a hundred and fifty years, in almost every kind of non-dramatic poetry.
As for the general tendency, the lines of that are clear—though the arbitrary extension and stiffening of them remain a little incomprehensible. Nature was to be the test; but an artificialised Nature, arranged according to the fashion of a town-haunting society—a Nature which submitted herself to a system of convention and generalisation. In so far as there was any real general principle it was that you were to be like everybody else—that singularity, except in doing the usual thing best, was to be carefully avoided. Pope, being a man of genius, could not help transcending this general conception constantly by his execution, not seldom by his thought, and sometimes in his critical precepts. But it remains the conception of his time and of himself.
The writers whom we have been discussing, since we parted with Dennis, have all been considerable men of letters, who in more or less degree busied themselves with criticism. [Sidenote: _Philosophical and Professional Critics._] We must now pass to those who, without exactly deserving the former description, undertook the subject either, as part of those “philosophical” inquiries which, however loosely understood, were so eagerly and usefully pursued by the eighteenth century, or as direct matter of professional duty. The first division supplies Lord Kames in Scotland and “Hermes” Harris in England. Whether we are right in reserving Shaftesbury, Hume, Adam Smith, &c., from it, so as to deal with them from the Æsthetic side in the next volume, may be matter of opinion.
To the second belong Trapp, Blair, and Campbell. [Sidenote: _Trapp._] Trapp need not detain us very long; but as first occupant of the first literary chair in England, and so the author of a volume of _Prælections_ respectable in themselves, and starting a line of similar work which, to the present day, has contributed admirable critical documents, he cannot be omitted. He was the author of one of the wittiest epigrams[597] on record, but he did not allow himself much sparkle in his lectures.[598] Perhaps, indeed, he was right not to do so.
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Footnote 597:
Individual preference, in the case of the famous pair of epigrams on the books and the troop of horse sent by George I. to Cambridge and to Oxford respectively, may be biassed by academical and by political partisanship. But while it is matter of opinion whether “Tories own no argument but force,” and whether, in certain circumstances, a University may not justifiably “want loyalty,” no one can ever maintain that it is not disgraceful to a university to “want learning.” This it is which gives the superior wing and sting to Trapp’s javelin.
Footnote 598:
_Prælectiones Poeticæ_, London, 3rd ed., 1736. The first of the first batch was printed as early as 1711, and an English translation (not by the author) was published in 1742. I hope to give in the next volume, as a prelude to notice of Mr Arnold’s work in the Oxford Chair, a survey of all the more noteworthy of his predecessors.
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Hugh Blair, half a century later than Trapp, in 1759, started, like him, the teaching of modern literature in his own country. [Sidenote: _Blair._] He had the advantage, as far as securing a popular audience goes, of lecturing in English, and he was undoubtedly a man of talent. The _Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres_,[599] which were delivered with great _éclat_ for nearly a quarter of a century from the Chair of their subject, are very far, indeed, from being devoid of merit. They provide a very solid, if a somewhat mannered and artificial instruction, both by precept and example, in what may be called the “full-dress plain style” which was popular in the eighteenth century. They are as original as could be expected. The critical examination of Addison’s style, if somewhat meticulous, is mostly sound, and has, like Johnson’s criticisms of Dryden and Pope, the advantage of thorough sympathy, of freedom from the drawback—so common in such examinations—that author and critic are standing on different platforms, looking in different directions, speaking, one may almost say, in mutually incomprehensible tongues. The survey of Belles Lettres is, on its own scheme, ingenious and correct: there are everywhere evidences of love of Literature (as the lover understands her), of good education and reading, of sound sense. Blair is to be very particularly commended for accepting to the full the important truth that “Rhetoric” in modern times really means “Criticism”; and for doing all he can to destroy the notion, authorised too far by ancient critics, and encouraged by those of the Renaissance, that Tropes and Figures are not possibly useful classifications and names, but fill a real arsenal of weapons, a real cabinet of reagents, by the employment of which the practitioner can refute, or convince, or delight, as the case may be.
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Footnote 599:
The first ed. is that of Edinburgh, 1783: mine is that of London, 1823.
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But with this, and with the further praise due to judicious borrowings from the ancients, the encomium must cease. [Sidenote: _The_ Lectures on Rhetoric.] In Blair’s general critical view of literature the eighteenth-century blinkers are drawn as close as possible. From no writer, even in French, can more “awful examples” be extracted, not merely of perverse critical assumption, but of positive historical ignorance. Quite early in the second Lecture, and after some remarks (a little arbitrary, but not valueless) on delicacy and correctness in taste, we find, within a short distance of each other, the statements that “in the reign of Charles II. such writers as _Suckling and Etheridge_ were held in esteem for dramatic composition,” and later, “If a man shall assert that Homer has no beauties whatever, that he holds him to be a dull and spiritless writer, and that he _would as soon peruse any legend of old knight-errantry_ as the _Iliad_, then I exclaim that my antagonist is either void of all taste,” &c. Here, on the one hand, the lumping of Suckling and Etherege together, and the implied assumption that not merely Suckling, but Etherege, is a worthless dramatist, gives us one “light,” just as the similar implication that “an old legend of knight-errantry” is necessarily an example of dulness, spiritlessness, and absence of beauty, gives us another. That Blair lays down, even more peremptorily than Johnson, and as peremptorily as Bysshe, that the pause in an English line may fall after the 4th, 5th, 6th, or 7th syllable, and no other, is not surprising; and his observations on Shakespeare are too much in the usual “faults-saved-by-beauties” style to need quotation. But that he cites, with approval, a classification of the great literary periods of the world which excludes the Elizabethan Age altogether, is not to be omitted. It stamps the attitude.
These same qualities appear in the once famous but now little read _Dissertation on Ossian_.[600] [Sidenote: _The_ Dissertation on Ossian.] That, in the sense of the word on which least stress is laid in these volumes, this “Critical Dissertation” is absolutely _un_critical does not much matter. Blair does not even attempt to examine the evidence for and against the genuineness of the work he is discussing. He does not himself know Gaelic; friends (like Hector M’Intyre) have told him that they heard Gaelic songs very like _Ossian_ sung in their youth; there are said to be manuscripts; that is enough for him. Even when he cites and compares parallel passages—the ghost-passage and that from the book of Job, Fingal’s “I have no son” and _Othello_—which derive their whole beauty from exact coincidence with the Bible or Shakespeare, he will allow no kind of suspicion to cross his mind. But this we might let pass. It is in the manner in which he seeks to explain the “amazing degree of regularity and art,” which he amazingly ascribes to Macpherson’s redaction, the “rapid and animated style,” the “strong colouring of imagination,” the “glowing sensibility of heart,” that the most surprising thing appears. His citations are as copious as his praises of them are hard to indorse. But his critical argument rests almost (not quite) wholly on showing that _Fingal_ and _Temora_ are worked out quite properly on Aristotelian principles by way of central action and episode, and that there are constant parallels to Homer, the only poet whom he will allow to be Ossian’s superior. In short, he simply applies to _Ossian_ Addison’s procedure with _Paradise Lost_. The critical piquancy of this is double. For we know that _Ossian_ was powerful—almost incredibly powerful—all over Europe in a sense quite opposite to Blair’s; and we suspect, if we do not know, that Mr James Macpherson was quite clever enough purposely to give it something of the turn which Blair discovers.
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Footnote 600:
I have it with _The Poems of Ossian_, 2 vols., London, 1796. Blair had taken Macpherson under his wing as early as 1760.
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The charge which may justly be brought against Blair—that he is both too exclusively and too purblindly “belletristic”—cannot be extended to Henry Home, Lord Kames. [Sidenote: _Kames._] Johnson, whom Kames disliked violently, and who returned the dislike with rather good-natured if slightly contemptuous patronage, dismissed the _Elements of Criticism_, 1761,[601] as “a pretty Essay, which deserves to be held in some estimation, though much of it is chimerical.”[602] The sting of this lies, as usual, in the fact that it is substantially true, though by no means all the truth. The _Elements of Criticism_ is a pretty book, and an estimable one, and, what is more, one of very considerable originality. Its subtlety and ingenuity are often beyond Johnson’s own reach; it shows a really wide knowledge of literature, modern as well as ancient; and it is surprisingly, though not uniformly, free from the special “classical” purblindness of which Johnson and Blair are opposed, but in their different ways equal, examples. Yet a very great deal of it _is_ “chimerical,” and, what is worse, a very great deal more is, whether chimerical or not in itself, irrelevant. It presents a philosophical treatise, vaguely and tentatively æsthetic rather than critical, yoked in the loosest possible manner to a bundle of quasi-professorial exercises in Lower and Higher Rhetoric. The second part might not improperly be termed “Critical Illustrations of Rhetoric.” The first could only be properly entitled “Literary Illustrations of Morals.”
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Footnote 601:
It had reached its eighth edition in 1807, the date of my copy. Perhaps some may think that Kames, as being mainly an æsthetician, ought to be postponed with Shaftesbury, Hume, &c. My reason for not postponing is the large amount of _positive_ literary criticism in his book.
Footnote 602:
Boswell, Globe ed., p. 132. He was elsewhere more, and less, kind.
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Of course this excellent Scots lawyer and ingenious “Scotch metaphysician” had strong precedents to urge for making a muddle of Moral Philosophy and Literary Criticism. [Sidenote: _The_ Elements of Criticism.] It has been pointed out that Aristotle himself is not a little exposed to the same imputation. But Kames embroils matters to an extent never surpassed, except by those, to be found in every day, who are incapable of taking the literary point of view at all, and who simply treat literature as something expressing agreement or disagreement with their moral, political, religious, or other views. He seems himself to have had, at least once, a slight qualm. “A treatise of ethics is not my province: I carry my view no farther than to the elements of criticism, in order to show that the fine arts are a subject of reasoning as well as of taste.”[603] If this was his rule he certainly gives himself the most liberal indulgence in applying it. His First Chapter is devoted to “Perceptions and Ideas in a Train”; the second (an immensely long one, containing a good third of the first volume) to “Emotions and Passions”; while the whole of the rest till the end of the seventeenth chapter is really occupied by the same class of subject. Kames excels in that constantly ingenious, and often acute, dissection of human nature which was the pride and pleasure of his century and his country, but which is a little apt to pay itself with clever generalisations as if they were _veræ causæ_. In one place we find a distribution of all the pleasures of the senses into pain of want, desire, and satisfaction. In another[604] the philosopher solemnly informs us, “I love my daughter less after she is married, and my mother less after a second marriage; the marriage of my son or my father diminishes not my affection so remarkably.” An almost burlesque illustration of the procedure of the school is given in the dictum,[605] “Where the course of nature is joined with Elevation the effect must be delightful; and hence the singular beauty of smoke ascending in a calm morning.” When one remembers this, and comes later[606] to the admirable remark, “Thus, to account for an effect of which there is no doubt, any cause, however foolish, is made welcome,” it is impossible not to say “Thou sayest it”; as also in another case, where he lays it down that “Were corporeal pleasures dignified over and above [_i.e._, beside the natural propensity which incites us to them] with a place in a high class, they would infallibly disturb the balance of the mind by outweighing the social affections. This is a satisfactory final cause for refusing to these pleasures any degree of dignity.”[607] I am tempted to quote Kames’s philosophy of the use of tobacco[608] also, but the stuff and method of his first volume must be sufficiently intelligible already.
-----
Footnote 603:
Vol. i. chap. iii., on “Beauty”; i. 195 ed. cit.
Footnote 604:
i. 77.
Footnote 605:
i. 26.
Footnote 606:
i. 288, _note_. Kames had just before, in his chapter on “Motion and Force” (i. 250-255), referred complacently to his own indulgence in this foible, and had accumulated others of the same kind.
Footnote 607:
i. 359.
Footnote 608:
i. 405, 410, 411, 416, 417.
-----
The second, much more to the purpose, is considerably less interesting. A very long chapter deals with Beauty of Language with respect to Sound, Signification, Resemblance between Sound and Signification, and Metre. It is abundantly stocked with well-chosen examples from a wide range of literature, and full of remarks, generally ingenious and sometimes both new and bold, as where at the outset Kames has the audacity to contradict Aristotle, by implication at least, and lay it down that “of all the fine arts, painting and sculpture only are in their nature imitative.”[609] But it is not free from the influence of the idols of its time. Of such, in one kind, may be cited the attribution to Milton of “many careless lines”;[610] for if there is one thing certain in the risky and speculative range of literary dogmatism, it is that Milton never wrote a “careless” line in his life. If his lines are ever bad (and perhaps they are sometimes), they are bad deliberately and of malice. In another and more serious kind may be ranged the predominating determination to confuse the sensual with the intellectual side of poetry. This, of course, is Kames’s root-idea; but that it is a root of evil may be shown sufficiently by the following passage in his discussion of the pause—in relation to which subject he is as wrong as nearly all his contemporaries. He is talking of a pause between adjective and substantive.[611] What occurs to him is that “a quality cannot exist independent of a subject, nor are they separable even in imagination, because they make part of the same idea, and for that reason, with respect to melody as well as to sense, it must be disagreeable to bestow upon the adjective a sort of independent existence by interjecting a pause between it and its substantive.” His examples are no doubt vitiated by the obsession of the obligatory “middle” pause, which makes him imagine one between adjective and substantive in
“The rest, his many-coloured robe concealed,”
where the only real pause, poetic as well as grammatical, is at “rest.” But his principle is clear, and it is as clearly a wrong principle. It ignores the great fact glanced at above, that the pleasure of poetry is double—intellectual _and_ sensual—and that the two parts are in a manner independent of each other. And in the second place, even on its own theory, it credits the mere intellect with too sluggish faculties. In the first line which Kames suggests as “harsh and unpleasant” for this reason,
“Of thousand bright inhabitants of air,”
the pause at “bright” is so slight a one that some might deny its existence. But if it be held necessary, can we refuse to the _subtilitas intellectus_ the power of halting, for the second of a second, to conceive the joint idea of number and brightness, before it moves further to enrich this by the notion of “inhabitants of air”? The mere and literal Lockist may do so; but no other will. The Figures enjoy a space which, without being surprised at it, one grudges; and the Unities are handled rather oddly, while a digression of some fifty pages on Gardening and Architecture speaks for itself. The conclusion on the Standard of Taste is singularly inconclusive; and an interesting appendix on “terms defined and explained” presents the singularity that not, I think, one of the terms so dealt with has anything specially to do with literature or art at all.
-----
Footnote 609:
ii. 3.
Footnote 610:
ii. 163.
Footnote 611:
ii. 129.
-----
Nevertheless, though it is easy to be smart upon Kames, and not very difficult to expose serious inadequacies and errors both in the general scheme and the particular execution, the _Elements of Criticism_ is a book of very great interest and importance, and worthy of much more attention than it has for a long time past received. To begin with, his presentation, at the very outset of his book, of Criticism as “the most agreeable of all amusements”[612] was one of those apparently new and pleasant shocks to the general which are, in reality, only the expression of an idea for some time germinating and maturing in the public mind. Even Addison, even Pope, while praising and preaching Criticism, had half-flouted and half-apologised for it. Swift, a great critic on his own day, had flouted it almost or altogether in others. The general idea of the critic had been at worst of a malignant, at best of a harmless, pedant. Kames presented him as something quite different,—as a man no doubt of learning, but also of position and of the world, “amusing,” as well as exercising himself, and bringing the fashionable philosophy to the support of his amusement.
-----
Footnote 612:
i. 33.
-----
But he did more than this. His appreciation of Shakespeare is, taking it together (and his references to the subject are numerous and important), the best of his age. His citations show a remarkable relish for the Shakespearian humour, and though he cannot clear his mind entirely from the “blemish-and-beauty” cant, which is ingrained in the Classical theory, and which, as we saw, infected even such a critic as Longinus, he is far freer from it than either Johnson or Blair. In his chapter on the Unities he comes very near to Hurd[613] (to whom, as the _Elements of Criticism_ preceded the _Letters on Chivalry_ in time, he may have given a hint) in recognising the true Romantic Unity of Action which admits plurality so far as the different interests work together, or contrast advantageously. He has a most lucid and sensible exposure of the difference between the conditions of the Greek theatre and ours. In short, he would stand very high if he were not possessed with the pseudological mania which makes him calmly and gravely write[614]—“Though a cube is more agreeable in itself than a parallelopipedon,[615] yet a large parallelopipedon set on its smaller base is by its elevation more agreeable, and hence the beauty of a Gothic tower.” But this _amabilis insania_ is in itself more amiable than insane. He wants to admit the Gothic tower, and that is the principal thing. Magdalen, and Merton, and Mechlin may well, in consideration of his slighting in their favour the more intrinsic charms of a cube, afford to let a smile flicker round their venerable skylines at his methodical insistence on justifying admiration of them by calling them large parallelopipeda set on their smaller ends. And the cube can console herself with his admission of her superior intrinsic loveliness.
-----
Footnote 613:
Hurd is reserved for the next volume.
Footnote 614:
ii. 457.
Footnote 615:
Kames has this spelling, which is indeed so universal that any other may seem pedantic. Yet it is needless to say that the word so spelt is a _vox nihili_, and should be “parallel_e_pipedon.”
-----
The faults of Blair and of Kames are both, for the most part, absent, while much more than the merit of either, in method and closeness to the aim, is present, in the very remarkable _Philosophy of Rhetoric_[616] which Dr George Campbell began, and, to some extent, composed, as early as 1750; though he did not finish and publish it till nearly thirty years later (1777). [Sidenote: _Campbell._] It may indeed be admitted that this piecemeal composition is not without its effect on the book, which contains some digressions (especially one on Wit, Humour, and Ridicule, and another on the cause of the pleasure received from the exhibition of painful objects) more excrescent than properly episodic. It is, moreover, somewhat weighted by the author’s strictly professional and educational design, in retaining as much of the mere business part of the ancient Rhetoric as would or might be useful to future preachers, advocates, or members of Parliament. Campbell, too, is a less “elegant” writer than Blair; and his acuteness has a less vivacious play than that of Kames. But here concessions are exhausted; and the book, however much we may disagree with occasional expressions in it, remains the most important treatise on the New Rhetoric that the eighteenth century produced. Indeed, strange as it may seem, Whately’s, its principal formal successor in the nineteenth, is distinctly retrograde in comparison.
-----
Footnote 616:
I use the Tegg edition, London, 1850.
-----
The New Rhetoric—the Art of Criticism—this is what Campbell really attempts. [Sidenote: _The_ Philosophy of Rhetoric.] He is rather chary of acknowledging his own position, and, in fact, save in his title, seldom employs the term Rhetoric, no doubt partly from that unlucky contempt of scholastic appellations which shows itself in his well-known attack on Logic. But his definition of “Eloquence”—the term which he employs as a preferred synonym of Rhetoric itself—is very important, and practically novel. The word “Eloquence, in its greatest latitude, denotes that art or talent by which the discourse is adapted to its end.” Now this, though he modestly shelters it under Quintilian’s _scientia bene dicendi_ and _dicere secundum virtutem orationis_, asserting also its exact correspondence with Cicero’s description of the best orator as he who _dicendo animos delectat audientium et docet et permovet_, is manifestly far more extensive than the latter of these, and much less vague than the former. In fact Rhetoric, new dubbed as Eloquence, becomes the Art of Literature, or in other words Criticism.
It has been allowed that this bold and admirable challenge of the whole province—for “discourse” is soon seen to include “writing”—is not always so well supported. After an interesting introduction (vindicating the challenge, and noting Kames more especially as one who, though in a different way, had made it before him), Campbell for a time, either because he is rather afraid of his own boldness, or to conciliate received opinions on the matter (or, it has been suggested, because the book was written at different times, and with perhaps slightly different ends), proceeds to discuss various matters which have very little to do with his general subject. Sometimes, as in the Chapter, before referred to, on “The Nature and Use of the Scholastic Art of Syllogising,” he wrecks himself in a galley which he had not the slightest need to enter. The longer discourse on Evidence which precedes this is, of course, fully justified on the old conception of Rhetoric, but digressory, or at least excursory, on his own. The above-mentioned sections on Ridicule, and on the æsthetic pleasure derivable from painful subjects, are excursions into the debatable kinds between literature and Ethics, though much less extravagant than those of Kames, and perhaps, as excursions, not absolutely to be barred or banned; while chapters vii.-x., which deal with the “Consideration of Hearers,” &c., &c., are once more Aristotelian relapses, pardonable if not strictly necessary. But not quite a third part of the whole treatise is occupied by this First Book of the three into which it is divided; and not a little of this third is, strictly or by a little allowance, to the point. The remaining two-thirds are to that point without exception or digression of any kind, so that the Aristotelian distribution is exactly reversed.
The titles of the two Books, “The Foundations and Essential Properties of Elocution,” and “The Discriminating Properties of Elocution,” must be taken with due regard to Campbell’s use of the last word.[617] But they require hardly any other proviso or allowance. He first, with that mixture of boldness and straight-hitting which is his great merit, attacks the general principles of the use of Language, and proceeds to lay down nine Canons of Verbal Criticism, which are in the main so sound and so acute that they are not obsolete to the present day. There is more that is arbitrary elsewhere, and Campbell seems sometimes to retrograde over the line which separates Rhetoric and Composition. But it must be remembered that this line has never been very exactly drawn, and has, both in Scotland and in America, if not also in England, been often treated as almost non-existent up to the present day. In his subsequent distinction of five rhetorical Qualities of Style—Perspicuity, Vivacity, Elegance, Animation, and Music—Campbell may be thought to be not wholly happy. For the three middle qualities are practically one, and it is even questionable whether Music would not be best included with them in some general term, designating whatever is added by style proper to Perspicuity, or the sufficient but unadorned conveyance of meaning. As, however, is very common, if not universal, with him, his treatment is in advance of his nomenclature, for the rest of the book—nearly a full half of it—is in fact devoted to the _two_ heads of Perspicuity and Vivacity, the latter tacitly subsuming all the three minor qualities. And there is new and good method in the treatment of Vivacity, as shown first by the choice of words, secondly by their number, and thirdly by their arrangement, while a section under the first head on “words considered as sounds” comes very near to the truth. That there should be a considerable section on Tropes was to be expected, and, as Campbell treats it, it is in no way objectionable. His iconoclasm as to logical Forms becomes much more in place, and much more effective, in regard to rhetorical Figures.
-----
Footnote 617:
He had, of course, good authority for it, including that of Dryden; but it is obviously better to limit it in the modern sense than to use it equivocally. Mason (not Gray’s friend, but an interesting and little-known person to whom I hope to recur in the next volume) had already seen this, and expressly referred to it.
-----
One, however, of the best features of the work has hardly yet been noticed; and that is the abundance of examples, and the thorough way in which they are discussed. To a reader turning the book over without much care it may seem inferior as a _thesaurus_ to Kames, because the passages quoted are as a rule embedded in the text, and not given separately, in the fashion which makes of large parts of the _Elements of Criticism_ a sort of anthology, a collection of beauties or deformities, as the case may be. But this is in accordance with the singularly businesslike character of Campbell’s work throughout. And if it also seem that he does not launch out enough in appreciation of books or authors as wholes, let it be remembered that English criticism was still in a rather rudimentary condition, and that the state of taste in academic circles was not very satisfactory. It would not, of course, be impossible to produce from him examples of those obsessions of the time which we have noticed in his two compatriots, as we shall notice them in the far greater Johnson. But he could not well escape these obsessions, and he suffers from them in a very mild form.
James Harris,[618] author of _Hermes_ (and of the house of Malmesbury, which was ennobled in the next generation), is perhaps the chief writer whom England, in the narrower sense, has to set against Blair, Kames, and Campbell in mid-eighteenth century. [Sidenote: _Harris._] But he is disappointing. It would not be reasonable to quarrel with the _Hermes_ itself for not being literary, because it does not pretend to be anything but grammatical; and the _Philosophical Arrangements_, though they do sometimes approach literature, may plead benefit of title for not doing so oftener. But the _Discourse on Music, Painting, and Poetry_, and the _Philological Enquiries_—in which Philology is expressly intimated to mean “love of letters” in the higher sense—hold out some prospects. The performance is but little. Readers of Boswell will remember that Johnson, though the author of _Hermes_ was very polite to him, both personally and with the pen, used, to his henchman’s surprise and grief, to speak very roughly of Harris, applying to him on one occasion the famous and damning phrase, “a prig, and a bad prig,” and elsewhere hinting doubts as to his competency in Greek. That the reproach of priggishness was deserved (whether with the aggravation or not) nobody can read half-a-dozen pages of Harris without allowing,—his would-be complimentary observation on Fielding[619] would determine by itself. But the principal note of Harris, as a critic, is not so much priggishness as confused superficiality. These qualities are less visible in the _Dialogue_ (which is an extremely short, not contemptible, but also not unimportant, exercitation in the direction of Æsthetic proper) than in the _Enquiries_, which were written late in life, and which, no doubt, owe something of their extraordinary garrulity to “the irreparable outrage.”
-----
Footnote 618:
_Works_, Oxford, 1841.
Footnote 619:
Note to Pt. II. chap. vii. of the _Enquiries_, p. 433, ed. cit.
-----
This book begins, with almost the highest possible promise for us, in a Discussion of the Rise of Criticism, its various species, Philosophical, Historical, and Corrective, &c. [Sidenote: _The_ Philological Enquiries.] It goes on hardly less promisingly, if the mere chapter-headings are taken, with discourses on Numbers, Composition, Quantity, Alliteration, &c.; the Drama, its Fable and its Manners, Diction, and, at the end of the second part, an impassioned defence of Rules. But the Third, which promises a discussion of “the taste and literature of the Middle Age,” raises the expectation almost to agony-point. Here is what we have been waiting for so long: here is the great gap going to be filled. At last a critic not merely takes a philosophic-historic view of criticism, but actually proposes to supplement it with an inquiry into those regions of literature on which his predecessors have turned an obstinately blind eye. As is the exaltation of the promise, so is the aggravation of the disappointment. Harris’s first part, though by no means ill-planned, is very insufficiently carried out, and the hope of goodness in the third is cruelly dashed beforehand by the sentence, “At length, after a long and barbarous period, when the shades of monkery began to retire,” &c. The writer’s mere enumeration of Renaissance critics is very haphazard, and his remarks, both on them and their successors, perfunctory in the extreme. He hardly dilates on anybody or anything except—following the tradition from Pope and Swift—on Bentley and his mania for correction and conjecture.
In the second part he gives himself more room, and is better worth reading, but the sense of disappointment continues. In fact, Harris is positively irritating. He lays it down, for instance, that “nothing excellent in a literary way happens merely by chance,” a thesis from the discussion of which much might come. But he simply goes off into a loose discussion of the effects and causes of literary pleasure, with a good many examples in which the excellence of his precept, “seek the cause,” is more apparent than the success of his own researches. The rest is extremely discursive, and seldom very satisfactory, being occupied in great part with such tenth-rate stuff as Lillo’s _Fatal Curiosity_. As for Harris’s defence of the Rules, he does not, in fact, defend them at all; but, as is so common with controversialists, frames an indictment, which no sensible antagonist would ever bring, in order to refute it. He says that “he never knew any genius cramped by rules, and had known great geniuses miserably err by neglecting them.” A single example of this last would have been worth the whole treatise. But Harris does not give it. Finally, “the Taste and Literature of the Middle Age” seem to him to be satisfactorily discussed by ridiculing the Judgment of God, talking at some length about Byzantine writers, giving a rather long account of Greek philosophy in its ancient stages, quoting freely from travellers to Athens and Constantinople, introducing “the Arabians,” with anecdotes of divers caliphs, saying something of the Schoolmen, a little about the Provençal poets, something (to do him justice) of the rise of accentual prosody,[620] and a very, very little about Chaucer, Petrarch, Mandeville, Marco Polo, Sir John Fortescue, and—Sannazar! “And now having done with the Middle Age,” he concludes—having, that is to say, shown that, except a _pot-pourri_ of mainly historical anecdote, he knew nothing whatever about it; or, if this seem harsh, that his knowledge was not of any kind that could possibly condition his judgment of literature favourably. In fact, no one shows that curious eighteenth-century confusion of mind, which we shall notice frequently in other countries, better than Harris. He is, as we have seen, a fervent devotee of the Rules—he believes[621] that, before any examples of poetry, there was an abstract schedule of Epic, Tragedy, and everything else down to Epigram, which you cannot follow but to your good, and cannot neglect but to your peril. Yet, on the one hand, he feels the philosophic impulse, and on the other, the literary and historical curiosity, before which these rules were bound to vanish.
-----
Footnote 620:
Harris deserves a good word for his prosodic studies, which may entitle him to reappear in the next volume.
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[Sidenote: _“Estimate” Brown: his_ History of Poetry.]
A few allusions,[622] in contemporaries of abiding fame, have kept half alive the name—though very few, save specialists, are likely to be otherwise than accidentally acquainted with the work—of John Brown of Newcastle, author of the once famous _Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times_,[623] and afterwards, when he had gained reputation by this, of a _Dissertation on the Rise of Poetry and Music_,[624] later still slightly altered, and re-christened _History of the Rise and Progress of Poetry_.[625] The _Estimate_ itself is one of those possibly half-unconscious pieces of quackery which from time to time put (in a manner which somehow or other tickles the longer ears among their contemporaries) the old cry that _every_thing is rotten in the state of Denmark. There is not much in it that is directly literary; the chief point of the kind is an attack on the Universities: it may be noted that quacks generally do attack Universities. The _Dissertation-History_ is a much less claptrap piece, but far more amusing to read. Brown is one of those rash but frank persons who attempt creation as well as criticism; and those who will may hear how
“Peace on Nature’s lap reposes [why not _vice versa_?] Pleasure strews her guiltless roses,”
and so forth. The difference of the two forms is not important. In the second, Brown simply left out Music, so far as he could, as appealing to a special public only. He believes in _Ossian_, then quite new. He thinks it contains “Pictures which no civilised modern could ever _imbibe_ in their strength, nor consequently could ever _throw out_”—an image so excessively Georgian (putting aside the difficulty of imbibing a picture) that one has to abbreviate comment on it. For the rest, Brown rejoices and wallows in the naturalistic generalisation of his century. He begins, of course, with the Savage State, lays it down that, at religious and other festivals, men danced and sang, that then organised professional effort supplemented unorganised, and so poets arose. Then comes about a sort of Established Choir, whence the various kinds are developed. And we have the Chinese—the inevitable Chinese—Fow-hi, and Chao-hao, and all their trumpery. Negligible as an authority, Brown perhaps deserves to rank as a symptom.
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Footnote 621:
“There never was a time when rules did not exist; they always made a part of that immutable truth,” &c.—P. 450.
Footnote 622:
The best known is Cowper’s, in _Table Talk_, ll. 384, 385—
“The inestimable Estimate of Brown Rose like a paper-kite and charmed the town.”
See also Chesterfield, to the Bishop of Waterford, April 14, 1758. Chesterfield was no Bottom, but, being melancholy at the time, he was tickled.
Footnote 623:
London, 1757, 8vo.
Footnote 624:
London, 1763, 4to.
Footnote 625:
Newcastle, 1764, 8vo.
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But we must leave minorities, and come to him who is here ὁ μέγας.
There is no reason to doubt that Johnson’s critical opinions were formed quite early in life, and by that mixture of natural bent and influence of environment which, as a rule, forms all such opinions. [Sidenote: _Johnson: his preparation for criticism._] There has been a tendency to regard, as the highest mental attitude, that of considering everything as an open question, of being ready to reverse any opinion at a moment’s notice. As a matter of fact, we have record of not many men who have proceeded in this way; and it may be doubted whether among them is a single person of first-rate genius, or even talent. Generally speaking, the men whose genius or talent has a “stalk of carle hemp” in it find, in certain of the great primeval creeds of the world, political, ecclesiastical, literary, or other, something which suits their bent. The bent of their time may assist them in fastening on to this by attraction or repulsion—it really does not much matter which it is. In either case they will insensibly, from an early period, choose their line and shape their course accordingly. They will give a certain independence to it; they will rarely be found merely “swallowing formulas.” It is the _other_ class which does this, with leave reserved to get rid of the said formulas by a mental emetic and swallow another set, which will very likely be subjected to the same fate. But the hero will be in the main _Qualis ab incepto_.
Johnson was in most things a Tory by nature, his Toryism being conditioned, first by that very strong bent towards a sort of transcendental scepticism which many great Tories have shown; secondly, by the usual peculiarities of social circumstance and mental constitution; and lastly, by the state of England in his time—a state to discuss which were here impertinent, but which, it may be humbly suggested, will not be quite appreciated by accepting any, or all, of the more ordinary views of the eighteenth century.
His view of literature was in part determined by these general influences, in part—perhaps chiefly—by special impinging currents. His mere birth-time had not very much to do with it—Thomson, Dyer, Lady Winchelsea, who consciously or unconsciously worked against it, were older, in the lady’s case much older, than he was; Gray and Shenstone, who consciously worked against it in different degrees, were not much younger.[626] The view was determined in his case, mainly no doubt by that natural bent which is quite inexplicable, but also by other things explicable enough. Johnson, partly though probably not wholly in consequence of his near sight, was entirely insensible to the beauties of nature; he made fun of “prospects”; he held that “one blade of grass is like another” (which it most certainly is not, even in itself, let alone its surroundings); he liked human society in its most artificial form—that provided by towns, clubs, parties. In the second place, his ear was only less deficient than his eye. That he did not care for music, in the scientific sense, is not of much importance; but it is quite clear that, in poetry, only an extremely regular and almost mathematical beat of verse had any chance with him. Thirdly, he was widely read in the Latin Classics, less widely in Greek, still more widely in the artificial revived Latin of the Renaissance and the seventeenth century.[627] Fourthly, he was, for a man so much given to reading—for one who ranged from Macrobius in youth to _Parismus and Parismenus_ in age, and from _Travels in Abyssinia_ to _Prince Titi_—not very widely read either in mediæval Latin or in the earlier divisions of the modern languages; indeed, of these last he probably knew little or nothing. Fifthly, the greatest poet in English immediately before his time, and the greatest poet in English during his youth and early manhood, had been exponents, the one mainly, the other wholly, of a certain limited theory of English verse. Sixthly, the critical school in which he had been brought up was strictly neo-classic. Seventhly, and to conclude, such rebels to convention as appeared in his time were chiefly men whom he regarded with unfriendly dislike, or with friendly contempt. Nor can it be said that any one of the contemporary partisans of “the Gothick” was likely to convince a sturdy adversary. Walpole was a spiteful fribble with a thin vein of genius; Gray a sort of Mr Facing-Both-Ways in literature, who had “classical” mannerisms worse than any of Johnson’s own, and whose dilettante shyness and scanty production invited ridicule. Both were Cambridge men (and Johnson did not love Cambridge men, nor they him), and both were Whigs. Percy and Warton were certainly not very strong as originals, and had foibles enough even as scholars. But whether these reasons go far enough, or do not so go, Johnson’s general critical attitude never varies in the least.[628] It was, as has been said, probably formed quite early; it no doubt appeared in those but dimly known contributions to periodical literature which defrayed so ill the expense of his still more dimly known first twenty years in London. We have from him no single treatise, as in the cases of Dante and Longinus, no pair of treatises, as in the case of Aristotle, to go upon. But in the four great documents of _The Rambler_, _Rasselas_, the Shakespeare _Preface_, and the _Lives_, we see it in the two first rigid, peremptory, in the _Preface_, curiously and representatively uncertain, in the last conditioned by differences which allow it somewhat freer play, and at some times making a few concessions, but at others more pugnacious and arbitrary than before.
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Footnote 626:
His birth-year was 1709; Thomson’s 1700; Dyer’s perhaps the same; Shenstone’s 1714; Gray’s 1716. Lady Winchelsea had been born as far back as 1660.
Footnote 627:
He was perhaps the last man of very great power who entertained the Renaissance superstition of Latin. He was horrified at the notion of an English epitaph; and in the first agony of his stroke in 1783 he rallied and racked his half-paralysed brains to make Latin verses as the best test of his sanity.
Footnote 628:
Let it be noted, however, that in Johnson, as in most strong men, there were certain leanings to the other side, certain evidences of the “identity of contradictories.” His sense of mystery, his religiosity, his strong passions, his tendency to violence in taste and opinions—were all rather Romantic than Classical.
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The critical element in _The Rambler_ is necessarily large; but a great deal of it is general and out of our way.[629] [Sidenote: The Rambler _on Milton_.] Directly concerning us are the papers on the aspects (chiefly formal) of Milton’s poetry—especially versification—on which Addison had not spoken, with some smaller papers on lesser subjects. The Miltonic _examen_ begins at No. 86. Johnson is as uncompromising as the great Bysshe himself on the nature of English prosody. “The heroick measures of the English language may be properly considered as pure or mixed.” They are pure when “the accent rests on every second syllable through the whole line.” In other words, “purity” is refused to anything but the strict iambic decasyllable. Nay, he goes further; this is not only “purity” and “the completest harmony possible,” but it ought to be “exactly kept in distichs” and in the last line of a (verse) paragraph.
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Footnote 629:
The Allegory on Criticism (daughter of Labour and Truth, who gives up her task to Time, but is temporarily personated by Flattery and Malevolence) in No. 3 almost speaks itself in the parenthetical description just given. Cf. also 4, on Ancient and Modern Romances; 22, another Allegory on Wit and Learning; 23, on the Contrariety of Criticism; and 36, 37, on “Pastoral Poetry.”
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Nevertheless, for variety’s sake, the “mixed” measure is allowed; “though it always injures the harmony of the line considered by itself,” it makes us appreciate the “harmonious” lines better. And we soon perceive that even this exceedingly grudging, and in strictness illogical, licence is limited merely to substitution of other dissyllabic feet for the pure iamb. In
“Thus at their shady lodge arrived, _both stood, Both turned_,”
the rigid Johnson insists on the spondaic character, “the accent is on two syllables together and both strong”; while he would seem to regard “And when,” in the line
“And when we seek as now the gift of sleep,”
as a pyrrhic (“both syllables are weak”). A trochee (“deviation or inversion of accent”) is allowed as a “mixture” in the first place, but elsewhere is “remarkably inharmonious,” as, for instance, in Cowley’s beautiful line,
“And the soft wings of peace _cover_ him round.”
The next paper (88) passes, after touching other matters, to “elision,” by which he means (evidently not even taking tri-syllabic possibility into consideration) such a case as
“Wisdom to folly as nourishment to wind.”
This licence, he says, is now disused in English poetry; and adds some severe remarks on those who would revive or commend it. He even objects to the redundant ending in heroic poetry.
In the third paper (90) he comes to Pauses; and once more plays the rigour of the game. The English poet, in connecting one line with another, is _never_ to make a full pause at less than three syllables from the beginning or end of a verse; and in all lines pause at the fourth or sixth syllable is best. He gives a whole paper to Milton’s accommodation of the sound to the sense, and winds up his Miltonic exercitations, after a very considerable interval, with a set critique (139) of _Samson Agonistes_, partly on its general character as an Aristotelian tragedy (he decides that it has a beginning and end, but no middle, poor thing!) and partly on details. These papers show no _animus_ against Milton. There are even expressions of admiration for him, which may be called enthusiastic. But they do show that the critic was not in range with his author. Almost every one of his axioms and postulates is questionable.
Of the remaining critical papers in the _Rambler_ it is very important to notice No. 121, “On the Dangers of Imitation, and the Impropriety of imitating Spenser.” [Sidenote: _On Spenser._] Johnson’s acuteness was not at fault in distrusting, from his point of view, the consequences of such things as the _Castle of Indolence_ or even the _Schoolmistress_; and he addresses a direct rebuke to “the men of learning and genius” who have introduced the fashion.[630] In so far as his condemnation of “echoes” goes he is undoubtedly not wrong, and he speaks of the idol of Neo-Classicism, Virgil, with an irreverent _parrhesia_[631] which, like many other things in him, shows his true critical power. But on Spenser himself the other idols—the _idola specus_ rather than _fori_—blind him. In following his namesake in the condemnation of Spenser’s language he is, we may think, wrong; yet this at least is an arguable point. But in regard to the Spenserian stanza things are different. Johnson calls it “at once difficult and unpleasing; tiresome to the ear from its uniformity, and to the attention by its length,” while he subsequently goes off into the usual error about imitating the Italians. No truce is here possible. That the Spenserian is not easy may be granted at once, but Johnson was certainly scholar enough to anticipate the riposte that, not here only, it is “hard to be good.” As for “unpleasing,” so much the worse for the ear which is not pleased by the most exquisite harmonic symphony in the long and glorious list of stanza-combinations. As for monotony, it is just as monotonous as flowing water. While as for the Italian parallel, nothing can probably be more to the glory of Spenser than this; just as nothing can be more different than the pretty, but cloying, rhyme even of Tasso, nay, sometimes even of Ariosto, and the endless unlaboured beauty of Spenser’s rhyme-sound. It is no valid retort that this is simply a difference of taste. If a man, as some men have done, says that Spenser is pleasing and Dryden and Pope are _not_, then the retort is valid. When the position is taken that _both_ rhythms are pleasing, both really poetical, but poetical in a different way, the defender of it may laugh at all assailants.
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Footnote 630:
He was no doubt thinking also of Gilbert West, in his _Life_ of whom he introduces a _caveat_ against West’s Imitations of Spenser as “successful” indeed and “amusing” but “only pretty.”
Footnote 631:
“The warmest admirers of the great Mantuan poet can extol him for little more than the skill with which he has ... united the beauties of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_,” and he adds a longish exposure of the way in which Virgil, determined to imitate at all costs, has put in his borrowed matter without regard to keeping.
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The criticism of the English historians which immediately follows has an interest chiefly of curiosity, because it was written just at the opening of the great age of the department with which it deals. [Sidenote: _On History and Letter-writing._] Prejudices of different kinds would always have prevented Johnson from doing full justice to Robertson, to Hume, and, most of all, to Gibbon; but, as it is, he deals with nobody later than Clarendon, and merely throws back to Raleigh and Knolles. Very much the same drawback attends the criticism on Epistolary writing: for here also it was the lot of Johnson’s own contemporaries, in work mostly not written, and hardly in a single case published, at the date of the _Rambler_, to remove the reproach of England. But the paper on Tragi-Comedy (156) is much more important.
For here, as in other places, we see that Johnson, but for the combination of influences above referred to, might have taken high, if not the highest, degrees in a very different school of criticism. [Sidenote: _On Tragi-comedy._] He puts the great rule _Nec quarta loqui_ into the dustbin, with a nonchalance exhibiting some slight shortness of sight; for the very argument he uses will sweep with this a good many other rules to which he still adheres. “We violate it,” he says coolly, “without scruple and without inconvenience.” He is equally iconoclastic about the Five Acts, about the Unity of Time, while he blows rather hot and cold about tragi-comedy in the sense of the mixing of tragic and comic scenes. But the close of the paper is the most remarkable, for it is in effect the death-knell of the neo-classic system, sounded by its last really great prophet. “_It ought to be the first endeavour of a writer to distinguish nature from custom, or that which is established because it is right from that which is right only because it is established; that he may neither violate essential principles by a desire of novelty, nor debar himself from the attainment of beauties within his view by a needless fear of breaking rules which no literary dictator had authority to enact._”
“Oh! the lands of Milnwood, the bonny lands of Milnwood, that have been in the name of Morton twa hundred years; they are barking and fleeing, infield and outfield, haugh and holme!” With this utterance, this single utterance, all the ruling doctrines of sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century criticism receive notice to quit.[632]
The well-known “Dick Minim” papers in the _Idler_ (60, 61) are excellent fun, and perhaps Johnson’s chief accomplishment in the direction of humour. [Sidenote: “_Dick Minim._”] The growth of criticism in Dick, his gradual proficiency in all the critical commonplaces of his day (it is to be observed that Johnson, like all true humourists, does not spare himself, and makes one of Minim’s _secrets de Polichinelle_ a censure of Spenser’s stanza), his addiction to Johnson’s pet aversion, “suiting the sound to the sense,” and his idolatry of Milton, are all capitally done. Indeed, like all good caricatures, the piece is a standing piece to consult for the fashions and creeds which it caricatures. But it neither contains nor suggests any points of critical doctrine that we cannot find elsewhere, and it is only indirectly serious.[633]
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Footnote 632:
The chief remaining critical _loci_ in the _Rambler_ are the unlucky strictures in No. 168 on “dun,” “knife,” and “blanket” in _Macbeth_ as “low”; and the remarks on unfriendly criticism in 176.
Footnote 633:
There are, of course, other passages in the _Idler_ touching on Criticism,—59 on the Causes of Neglect of Books, 68, 69 on Translation, 77 on “Essay Writing,” 85 on Compilations. But they contain nothing of exceptional importance.
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The Dissertation upon Poetry of Imlac in _Rasselas_ (chap. x.) may be less amusing; but it is of course much more serious. [Sidenote: Rasselas.] There can be no reasonable doubt that Imlac gives as much of Johnson’s self as he chose to put, and could put, in character: while it is at least possible that his sentiments are determined in some degree by the menacing appearances of Romanticism. Imlac finds “with wonder that in almost all countries the most ancient poets are reputed the best”; that “early writers are in possession of nature and their successors of art”; that “no man was ever great by imitation”; that he must observe everything and observe for himself, but that he must do it on the principle of examining, “not the individual, but the species.” He is to remark “general properties and large appearances. He does not number the streaks of the tulip or describe the different shapes in the verdure of the forest,” but must “exhibit prominent and striking features,” neglecting “minuter discriminations.” In the same way his criticism of life must be abstracted and generalised; he must be “a being superior to time and place”; must know many languages and sciences; must by incessant practice of style “familiarise to himself every delicacy of speech and grace of harmony.”
Surely a high calling and election! yet with some questionable points in it. If the poet must not count the streaks of the tulip, if he must merely generalise and sweep; if he must consult the laziness and dulness of his readers by merely portraying prominent and striking features, characteristics alike obvious to vigilance and carelessness—then even Dryden will not do, for he is too recondite and conceited. Pope alone must bear the bell. Lady Winchelsea’s horse in twilight, the best part of a century earlier; Tennyson’s ashbuds in the front of March, the best part of a century later, are equally “streaks of the tulip,” superfluous if not even bad. Habington’s picture of the pitiless northern sunshine on the ice-bound pilot, and Keats’s of the perilous seas through the magic casements, must be rejected, as too unfamiliar and individual. The poetic strangeness and height are barred _en bloc_. Convention, familiarity, generalisation—these are the keys to the poetical kingdom of heaven. The tenant of Milnwood has a fresh enfeoffment!
The Shakespeare Preface is a specially interesting document, because of its illustration, not merely of Johnson’s native critical vigour, not merely of his imbibed eighteenth-century prejudices, but of that peculiar position of compromise and reservation which, as we have said and shall say, is at once the condemnation and the salvation of the English critical position at this time. [Sidenote: _The Shakespeare Preface._] Of the first there are many instances, though perhaps none in the _Preface_ itself quite equal to the famous note on the character of Polonius, which has been generally and justly taken as showing what a triumph this failure of an edition might have been. Yet even here there is not a little which follows in the wake of Dryden’s great eulogy, and some scattered observations of the highest acuteness, more particularly two famous sentences which, though Johnson’s quotation is directed to a minor matter—Shakespeare’s learning—settle beforehand, with the prophetic tendency of genius, the whole monstrous absurdity of the Bacon-Shakespeare theory.[634] The rest, however, is, if not exactly a zigzag of contradiction, at least the contrasted utterance of two distinct voices. Shakespeare has this and that merit of nature, of passion; but “his set speeches are commonly cold and weak.” “What he does best he soon ceases to do.” Johnson, here also, has no superstitious reverence for the Unities, and even speaks slightly of dramatic rules; nay, he suggests “the recall of the principles of the drama to a new examination,” the very examination which Lessing was to give it. But he apologises for the period when “_The Death of Arthur_ was the favourite volume,” and hints a doubt whether much of our and his own praise of Shakespeare is not “given by custom and veneration.” “He has corrupted language by every mode of depravation,” yet Johnson echoes Dryden “when he describes anything you more than see it, you feel it too.” A singular triumph of “depraved language.” In short, throughout the piece it is now Johnson himself who is speaking, now some one with a certain bundle of principles or prejudices which Johnson chooses to adopt for the time.
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Footnote 634:
“Jonson, ... who besides that he had no imaginable temptation to falsehood, wrote at a time when the character and acquisitions of Shakespeare were known to multitudes. His evidence ought therefore to decide the controversy, unless some testimony of equal force could be opposed.”
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It was with these opinions on the formal and substantial nature of poetry and of criticism that Johnson, late in life, sat down to the _Lives of the Poets_,[635] one of the most fortunate books in English literature. [Sidenote: _The_ Lives of the Poets.] In very few cases have task and artist been so happily associated. For almost all his authors, he had biographical knowledge such as no other living man had, and the access to which has long been closed. If, now and then, his criticism was not in touch with his subjects, this was rare: and the fact gave a certain value even to the assertions that result—for _we_, do what we will, cannot see Milton quite as Johnson saw him, and so his view is valuable as a corrective. By far the greater part of these subjects belonged to one school and system of English poetry, a school and system with which the critic was at once thoroughly familiar and thoroughly in sympathy. And, lastly, the form of the work, with its subdivision into a large number of practically independent and not individually burdensome sections, was well suited to coax a man who suffered from constitutional indolence, and who for many years had been relieved from that pressure of necessity which had conquered his indolence occasionally, and only occasionally, earlier. No other man, it is true, has had quite such a chance: but he must indeed have a sublime confidence, both in the strength of his principles and in the competence of his talents, who thinks that, if he had the chance, he could do the task better than Johnson did his.
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Footnote 635:
With Johnson, as with some other writers, I have not thought it necessary to specify editions. I must, however, mention Mr J. H. Millar’s issue of the _Lives_ (London, 1896) for the sake of the excellent _Introduction_ on Johnson’s criticism.
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The work, of course, is by no means equal throughout: and it could not be expected to be. [Sidenote: _Their general merits._] Some was merely old work, dating from a much less mature period of the writer’s genius, and made to serve again. Some was on subjects so trivial that good nature, or simple indolence, or, if any one pleases, an artistic reluctance to break butterflies on so huge a wheel, made the criticisms almost as insignificant as the criticised. Here and there extra-literary prejudice—political-ecclesiastical, as in the case of Milton; partly moral, partly religious, and, it is to be feared, a little personal, as in that of Swift—distorted the presentation. And it is quite possible that a similar distortion, due to the same causes or others, was in the case of Gray intensified by a half-unconscious conviction that Gray’s aims and spirit, if not his actual poetical accomplishments, were fatal to the school of poetry to which the critic himself held.
But make allowance for all this, and with how great a thing do the _Lives_ still provide us! In that combination of biography and criticism, which is so natural that it is wonderful it should be so late,[636] they are all but the originals, and are still almost the standard. They are full of anecdote, agreeably and crisply told, yet they never descend to mere gossip: their criticism of life is almost always just and sound, grave without being precise, animated by the same melancholy as that of the _Vanity of Human Wishes_, but in milder mood and with touches of brightness. Their criticism of literature is all the more valuable for being the criticism of their time. When we read Johnson’s remarks on Milton’s minor poems it is foolish to rave, and it is ignoble to sneer. The wise will rejoice in the opportunity to understand. So when Johnson bestows what seems to us extraordinary and unintelligible praise on John Pomfret’s _Choice_,[637] he is really praising a moral tract couched in verse not unpleasing in itself, and specially pleasing to his ear. When he speaks less favourably of _Grongar Hill_, he is speaking of a piece of nature-poetry, not arranged on his principle of neglecting the streak of the tulip, and availing itself of those Miltonic licences of prosody which he disapproved. But we shall never find that, when the poetry is of the stamp which he recognises, he makes any mistake about its relative excellence: and we shall find that, in not a few cases, he is able to recognise excellence which belongs to classes and schools not exactly such as he approves. And, lastly, it has to be added that for diffused brilliancy of critical expression, subject to the allowances and conditions just given, the _Lives_ are hardly to be excelled in any language. It is not safe to neglect one of them, though no doubt there are some six or seven which, for this reason or that, take precedence of the rest.
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Footnote 636:
There are blind attempts at it even in antiquity; but Dryden’s Lives of Lucian and Plutarch are, like other things of his elsewhere, the real originals here.
Footnote 637:
Let me draw special attention to “John.” I once, unwittingly or carelessly, called him “Thomas,” and I am afraid that I even neglected to correct the error in a second edition of the guilty book. A man who writes “Thomas” for “John,” in the case of a minor poet, can, I am aware, possess no virtues, and must expect no pardon. But I shall always henceforth remember to call him “Pomfret, Mr _John_.” “Let this expiate,” as was remarked in another case of perhaps not less mortal sin.
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The “Cowley” has especial interest, because it is Johnson’s only considerable attempt at that very important part of criticism, the historical summary of the characteristics of a poetical period or school. [Sidenote: _The_ Cowley.] And, though far from faultless, it is so important and so interesting in its kind that it ranks with his greatest Essays. Only that singular impatience of literary history, as such, which characterised the late Mr Matthew Arnold, and which not infrequently marred his own critical work, can have prevented him from including, in his Johnsonian _points de repère_, the Essay which launched, and endeavoured to make watertight, the famous definition of the “Metaphysical” School—of the school represented earlier by Donne, and later by Cowley himself.
The phrase itself[638] has been both too readily adopted and too indiscriminately attacked. Taken with the ordinary meaning of “metaphysical,” it may indeed seem partly meaningless and partly misleading. Taken as Johnson meant it, it has a meaning defensible at least from the point of view of the framer, and very important in critical history. Johnson (it is too often forgotten) was a scholar; and he used “metaphysical” in its proper sense—of that which “comes after” the physical or natural. Now, it was, as we have seen, the whole principle of his school of criticism—their whole critical contention—that _they_ were “following nature.” The main objection to the poetry of what Dryden calls the “last Age”—what we call, loosely but conveniently, “Elizabethan” poetry—was that its ideas, and still more its expressions, went beyond and behind nature, substituted afterthoughts and unreal refinements for fact. It would be delightful to the present writer to defend the Metaphysicals here—but it would not be to the question.
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Footnote 638:
It was of course probably suggested by Dryden (_Essay on Satire_, “Donne ... affects the metaphysics”), but in Johnson’s hands is much altered and extended.
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Political and religious prejudice accounts, as has been said, for much in the _Milton_. [Sidenote: _The_ Milton.] But it will not fully account for the facts. The at first sight astonishing, and already often referred to, criticisms on the minor poems show a perfectly honest and genuine dislike to the form as well as to the matter, to the manner as well as to the man. If Johnson calls _Lycidas_ “harsh,” it is because he simply does not hear its music; he can even call the songs in _Comus_ “not very musical in their numbers.” When of the, no doubt unequal but often splendid, sonnets he can write, “of the best it can only be said that they are not bad,” he gives us the real value of his criticism immediately afterwards by laying it down that “the fabric of a sonnet, however adapted to the Italian language, has _never_ succeeded in ours.” And when he has earlier stated that “all that short compositions can commonly attain is sweetness and elegance,” we see in this the whole thing. Milton is condemned under statute (though the statute is hopelessly unconstitutional and unjust) on certain counts; on others his judge, though capable and perfectly honest, does not know the part of the code which justifies the accused. Johnson is listening for couplet-music or stanzas with regular recurrence of rhyme, for lines constituted entirely on a dissyllabic, or entirely on a trisyllabic, basis. He does not find these things: and he has no organ to judge what he does find.
With the lives of Dryden and Pope we are clear of all difficulties, and the critic is in his element. The poets whom he is criticising occupy the same platform as he does; they have in fact been themselves the architects of that platform. [Sidenote: _The_ Dryden _and_ Pope.] There is no fear of the initial incompatibilities which, when aggravated by accident, lead to the apparent enormities of the _Milton_ Essay, and which, even when not so aggravated, condition the usefulness, though they may positively increase the interest, of the _Cowley_. But there is more than this. In no instance, perhaps, was Johnson so well in case to apply his biographical and critical treatment as in regard to Dryden and Pope. With the latter he had himself been contemporary; and when he first came to London the traditions even of the former were still fresh, while there were many still living (Southerne the chief of them) who had known glorious John well. Further, Johnson’s peculiar habits of living, his delight in conversation and society, his excellent memory, and his propensity to the study of human nature, as well as of letters, furnished him abundantly with opportunities. Yet, again, his sympathy with both, on general literary sides, was not unhappily mixed and tempered by a slight, but not uncharitable or Puritanic, disapproval of their moral characters, by regret at Dryden’s desertion of the Anglican Church, and at the half-Romanist half-freethinking attitude of Pope to religion.
The result of all this is a pair of the best critical Essays in the English language. Individual expressions will of course renew for us the sense of difference in the point of view. We shall not agree that Dryden “found English poetry brick and left it marble,” and we shall be only too apt to take up the challenge, “If Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found?” even if we think the implied denial, to which the challenge was a reply, an absurdity. And we may find special interest as well as special difference in the condemnation even of these masters for attempting Pindarics, because Pindarics “want the essential constituent of metrical compositions, the stated recurrence of settled numbers,” seeing in it a fresh instance of that Procrustean tyranny of suiting the form to the bed, not the bed to the form, which distinguishes all neo-classic criticism. But these points occur rarely. The criticism, as a whole, is not merely perfectly just on its own scheme, but requires very little allowance on others; nor, in the difficult and dangerous art of comparative censorship, will any example be found much surpassing Johnson’s parallel of the two poets.
In the _Milton_ and the _Cowley_ we find Johnson dealing with schools of poetry which he regards as out of date and imperfect; in the _Dryden_ and the _Pope_, with subjects which are not to him subjects of any general controversy, but which he can afford to treat almost entirely on their merits. [Sidenote: _The_ Collins _and_ Gray.] In the _Collins_ and the _Gray_ we find a new relation between poet and critic—the relation of decided, though not yet wholly declared, innovation on the part of the poets, and of conscious, though not yet quite wide-eyed and irreconcilable, hostility on the part of the critic. The expression of this is further differentiated by the fact that Johnson regarded Collins with the affection of a personal friend, and the generous sympathy of one who, with all his roughness, had a mind as nearly touched by mortal sorrows as that of any sentimentalist; while it is pretty clear, though we have no positive evidence for it, that he reciprocated the personal and political dislike which Gray certainly felt for him.
The result was, in the case of Collins, a criticism rather inadequate than unjust, and not seldom acute in its indication of faults, if somewhat blind to merits; in that of Gray, one which cannot be quite so favourably spoken of, though the censure which has been heaped upon it—notably by Lord Macaulay and Mr Arnold—seems to me very far to surpass its own injustice. Johnson’s general summing up—that Gray’s “mind had a large grasp; his curiosity[639] was unlimited, and his judgment cultivated; he was likely to love much where he loved at all, but fastidious and hard to please”—is acute, just, and far from ungenerous. That on the Elegy—“The four stanzas beginning, ‘Yet even these bones,’ are to me original; I have never seen the notions in any other place. Yet he that reads them here persuades himself that he has always felt them. Had Gray written often thus, it had been vain to blame and useless to praise him”—is a magnificent and monumental compliment, said as simply as “Good morning.” He is absolutely right when he says that in all Gray’s Odes “there is a kind of cumbrous splendour that we wish away,” for there never was such an abuser of “poetic diction” (to be a poet) as Gray was. Yet undoubtedly the Essay is not satisfactory; it has not merely, as the _Collins_ has, blindness, but, what the _Collins_ has not, that obvious _denigration_, that determination to pick holes, which always vitiates a critique, no matter what learning and genius be bestowed on it. And the probable reasons of this are interesting. It has been said that they were possibly personal in part. We know that Gray spoke rudely of Johnson; and there were many reasons why Johnson might rather despise Gray, though he certainly should not have called him “dull.”
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Footnote 639:
It must be remembered that this word had no unfavourable connotation with Johnson. It meant intelligent and scholarly interest.
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On the whole, however, I have little doubt—and it is this which gives the essay its real interest for me—that one main reason of Johnson’s antipathy to Gray’s poetry was the same as that for which we like it. He suspected, if he did not fully perceive, the romantic snake in Gray’s classically waving grass. And he had on his own grounds good reason for suspecting it. Gray might use Greek and Latin tags almost extravagantly. But he sedulously eschewed the couplet; and, while preferring lyric, he chose lyrical forms which, though Johnson was too much of a scholar to dare to call them irregular, violated his own theories of the prompt and orderly recurrence of rhyme, and the duty of maintaining a length of line as even as possible. The sense of nature, the love of the despised “prospect,” was everywhere; even the forbidden “streak of the tulip” might be detected. And, lastly, Gray had too obvious leanings to classes of subject and literature which lay outside of the consecrated range—early English and French, Welsh, Norse, and the like. It is no real evidence of critical incapacity, but of something quite the reverse, that Johnson should have disliked Gray. He spied the great Romantic beard under the Pindaric and Horatian muffler—and he did not like it.
On the whole, it may be safely said that, however widely a man may differ from Johnson’s critical theory, he will, provided that he possesses some real tincture of the critical spirit himself, think more and more highly of the _Lives of the Poets_ the more he reads them, and the more he compares them with the greater classics of critical literature. [Sidenote: _The critical greatness of the_ Lives _and of Johnson_.] As a book, they have not missed their due meed of praise; as a critical book, one may think that they have. The peculiarity of their position as a body of direct critical appraisement of the poetical work of England for a long period should escape no one. But the discussion of them, which possesses, and is long likely to possess, prerogative authority as coming from one who was both himself a master of the craft and a master of English, admirable and delightful as it is and always will be, is not, critically speaking, quite satisfactory. Mr Arnold speaks of the Six Lives which he selected in very high terms: but he rather pooh-poohs the others, and, even in regard to the chosen Six, he puts upon himself—and in his amiable, but for all that exceedingly peremptory, way, insists in putting on his readers—a huge pair of blinkers. We are to regard the late seventeenth and the whole of the eighteenth century as an Age of Prose: and we are to regard Johnson, whether he was speaking of the poets of this age or of others, as the spokesman of an age of prose. Far be it from me to deny that there is an element of truth in this: but it is not the whole truth, and the critic must strive, though he may not boast, to “find the whole.”
The whole truth, as it seems to me, about Johnson is that he was very much more than the critic of an age of prose, though he was not (who has been? even Longinus? even Coleridge?)
“The King who ruled, as he thought fit, The universal monarchy of wit”
as regards poetic criticism. He saw far beyond prose, as in those few words of the concluding and reconciling eulogy of Gray which have been quoted above. It is poetry and not prose which has the gift of putting new things so that the man who reads them ingenuously thinks that they are merely a neat statement of what he has always thought. And Johnson was far more than merely a critic of the eighteenth-century Neo-Classic theory, though he was this. A most noteworthy passage in the _Rambler_ (No. 156), which I have purposely kept for comment in this place, though it is delivered on the wrong side, shows us, as the great critics always do show us, what a range of sight the writer had. In this he expresses a doubt whether we ought “to judge genius merely by the event,” and, applying this to Shakespeare, takes the odd, but for an eighteenth-century critic most tell-tale and interesting, line that if genius succeeds by means which are wrong according to rule, we may think higher of the genius but less highly of the work. It is hardly necessary to point out that this is, though in no way a discreditable, a transparent evasion of the difficulty which is pressing on the defenders of the Rules. “Show me,” one may without irreverence retort, “thy genius without thy works; and I will show thee my genius by my works.” If Shakespeare shows genius in neglecting the Rules, the inexorable voice of Logic, greater than Fortune, greater than all other things save Fate, will point out that the Rules are evidently not necessary, and, with something like the Lucretian _Te sequar_, will add, “Then for what _are_ they necessary?” But Johnson’s power is only a little soured and not at all quenched by this. He has seen what others refused—perhaps were unable—to see, and what some flatly denied,—that a process of literary judgment “by the event” is possible, and that its verdicts, in some respects at any rate, cannot be challenged or reversed. These great critical _aperçus_, though sometimes delivered half unwillingly or on the wrong side, establish Johnson’s claim to a place not often to be given to critics; but they do not establish it more certainly than his surveys of his actual subjects. It was an unfortunate consequence of Mr Arnold’s generous impatience of all but “the chief and principal things,” and of his curious dislike to literary history as such, that he should have swept away the minor Lives. One may not care for Stepney or Yalden, Duke or King, much more, or at all more, than he did. But with a really great member of the craft his admissions and omissions, his paradoxes, his extravagances, his very mistakes pure and simple, are all critically edifying. How does he apply his own critical theory? is what we must ask: and, with Johnson, I think we shall never ask it in vain.
His idea of English poetry was the application to certain classes of subjects, not rigidly limited to, but mainly arranged by, the canons of the classical writers—of what seemed to him and his generation the supreme form of English language and metre, brought in by Mr Waller and perfected by Mr Pope, yet not so as to exclude from admiration the _Allegro_ of Milton and the _Elegy_ of Gray. We may trace his applications of this, if we have a real love of literature and a real sense of criticism, nearly as profitably and pleasantly in relation to John Pomfret as in relation to Alexander Pope. We may trace his failures (as we are pleased, quite rightly in a way, to call them), the failures arising from the inadequacy, not of his genius, but of his scheme, not less agreeably in relation to Dyer than in relation to Dryden. We are not less informed by his passing the _Castle of Indolence_ almost _sub silentio_ than we are by that at first sight astounding criticism of _Lycidas_. This Cæsar never does wrong but with just cause—to use the phrase which was too much for the equanimity or the intelligence of his great namesake Ben, in the work of one whom both admired yet could not quite stomach.
Now, this it is which makes the greatness of a critic. That Johnson might have been greater still at other times need not necessarily be denied; though it is at least open to doubt whether any other time would have suited his whole disposition better. But, as he is, he is great. The critics who deserve that name are not those who, like, for instance, Christopher North and Mr Ruskin, are at the mercy of different kinds of caprice—with whom you must be always on the _qui vive_ to be certain what particular watchword they have adopted, what special side they are taking. It may even be doubted whether such a critic as Lamb, though infinitely delightful, is exactly “great” because of the singular gaps and arbitrariness of his likes and dislikes. Nay, Hazlitt, one of the greatest critics of the world on the whole, goes near to forfeit his right to the title by the occasional outbursts of almost insane prejudice that cloud his vision. Johnson is quite as prejudiced; but his prejudice is not in the least insane. His critical calculus is perfectly sound on its own postulates and axioms; and you have only to apply checks and correctives (which are easily ascertained, and kept ready) to adjust it to absolute critical truth. And, what is more, he has not merely flourished and vapoured critical abstractions, but has left us a solid reasoned body of critical judgment; he has not judged literature in the exhausted receiver of mere art, and yet has never neglected the artistic criterion; he has kept in constant touch with life, and yet has never descended to mere gossip. We may freely disagree with his judgments, but we can never justly disable his judgment; and this is the real criterion of a great critic.
Johnson is so much the eighteenth-century orthodox critic in quintessence (though, as I have tried to show, in transcendence also) that he will dispense us from saying very much more about the rank and file, the ordinary or inferior examples, of the kind. [Sidenote: _Minor Criticism: Periodical and other._] If we were able to devote this Book, or even this volume, to the subject of the present chapter, there would be no lack of material. Critical exercitations of a kind formed now, of course, a regular part of the work of literature, and a very large part of its hack-work. The _Gentleman’s Magazine_ devoted much attention to the subject; and for a great part of the century two regular _Reviews_, the _Critical_ and the _Monthly_,[640] were recognised organs of literary censorship, and employed some really eminent hands, notably Smollett and Goldsmith. The periodicals which, now in single spies, now (about the middle of the century) in battalions, endeavoured to renew the success of the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_, were critical by kind; and dozens, scores, hundreds probably, of separate critical publications, large and small, issued from the press.[641] But, with the rarest exceptions, they must take the _non_-benefit of the warning which was laid down in the Preface to the First Volume. Something we must say of Goldsmith; then we may take two contrasted examples, Knox and Scott of Amwell, of the critic in Johnson’s last days who inclined undoubtingly to the classical, and of the critic of the same time who had qualms and stirrings of Romanticism, but was hardly yet a heretic. And then, reserving summary, we may close the record.
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Footnote 640:
Johnson’s relative estimates of the two (_Boswell_, Globe ed., pp. 186, 364) are well known; as is his apology for the _Critical_ Reviewers’ habit [he had been one himself] of not reading the books through, as the “duller” _Monthly_ fellows were glad to do. Later generations have perhaps contrived to be dull _and_ not to read.
Footnote 641:
For instance, here is one which I have hunted for years—_Essay on the New Species of Writing founded by Fielding, with a word or two on Modern Criticism_ (London? 1751). The better-known _Canons of Criticism_ of Thomas Edwards (4th ed., London, 1750) may serve as a specimen of another kind. It is an attack on Warburton’s _Shakespeare_, uncommonly shrewd in all senses of the word, but, as Johnson (_Boswell_, Globe ed., p. 87 note) justly enough said, of the gad-fly kind mainly. A curious little book, which I do not remember to have seen cited anywhere, is the _Essay upon Poetry and Painting_ of Charles Lamotte (Du_d_lin (_sic_), 1742). La Motte, who was an F.S.A., a D.D., and chaplain to the Duke of Montagu, and who has the still rarer honour of not appearing in the _Dict. Nat. Biog._, never, I think, refers to his namesake, but quotes Voltaire and Du Bos frequently. He is very anxious for “propriety” in all senses, and seems a little more interested in Painting than in Poetry. As to the latter, he is a good example of the devouring appetite for sense and fact which had seized on the critics of this time (save a few rebels) throughout Europe. The improbabilities of Tasso and of “Camoenus, the Homer and Virgil of the Portuguese,” afflict him more, because they amuse him less, than they do in Voltaire’s own case, and to any liberty with real or supposed history he is simply Rhadamanthine. “That which jars with probability—that which shocks Sense and Reason—can never be excused in Poetry.” Mrs Barbauld and _The Ancient Mariner_ sixty years before date!
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Of Goldsmith as a critic little need be said, though his pen was not much less prolific in this than in other departments. But the angel is too often absent, and Poor Poll distressingly in evidence. [Sidenote: _Goldsmith._] The _Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe_ is simply “prodigious.” It is admirably written—Macaulay owes something to its style, which he only hardened and brazened. The author apes the fashionable philosophastering of the time, and throws in cheap sciolism like the prince of journalists that he was. It is almost always interesting; it is, where it touches life, not literature, sometimes excellently acute; but there is scarcely a critical dictum in it which is other than ridiculous. So in the _Citizen of the World_ the Author’s Club is of course delightful; but why should a sneer at Drayton have been put in the mouth of Lien Chi Altangi? And the miscellaneous Essays, including the _Bee_, which contain so much of Goldsmith’s best work, are perhaps the best evidences of his nullity here. When one thinks how little it would cost anybody of Goldsmith’s genius (to find such an one I confess would cost more) to write a literary parallel to the magnificent _Reverie_, which would be even finer, it is enough to draw iron tears down the critic’s cheek. Goldsmith on Taste, Poetry, Metaphor, &c.,[642] is still the Goldsmith of the _Inquiry_. His “Account of the Augustan Age,”[643] though much better, and (unless I mistake) resorted to by some recent critics as a source of criticism different from that mostly prevalent in the nineteenth century, has all the limitations of its own period. And the Essay on Versification,[644] though it contains expressions which, taken by themselves, might seem to show that Goldsmith had actually emancipated himself from the tyranny of the fixed number of syllables, contains others totally irreconcilable with these, supports English hexameters and sapphics,[645] and as a whole forces on us once more the reluctant belief that he simply had no clear ideas, no accurate knowledge, on the subject.
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Footnote 642:
Essays, xii.-xvii.
Footnote 643:
_The Bee_, viii.
Footnote 644:
Essay xviii.
Footnote 645:
It is perhaps only fair to hope that this fancy, as later with Southey and others, was a blind motion for freedom. Yet Goldsmith commits himself to the hemistich theory of decasyllables.
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Vicesimus Knox[646] is a useful figure in this critical Transition Period. [Sidenote: _Vicesimus Knox._] A scholar and a schoolmaster, he had some of the advantages of the first state and some of the defects of the less gracious second, accentuated in both cases by the dying influences of a “classical” tradition which had not the slightest idea that it was moribund. He carries his admiration for Pope to such a point as to assure us somewhere that Pope was a man of exemplary piety and goodness, while Gay was “uncontaminated with the vices of the world,” which is really more than somewhat blind, and more than a little kind, even if we admit that it is wrong to call Pope a bad man, and that Gay had only tolerable vices. He thinks, in his Fourteenth Essay on the “Fluctuations of Taste,” that the Augustans “arrived at that standard of perfection which,” &c.; that the imitators of Ariosto, Spenser, and the smaller poems of Milton are “pleasingly uncouth” [compare Scott, _infra_, on the metrical renaissance of Dyer], depreciates Gray, and dismisses the Elegy as “a confused heap of splendid ideas”; is certain that Milton’s sonnets “bear no mark of his genius,” and in discussing the versions of “the sensible[647] Sappho” decides that Catullus is much inferior to—Philips! “The Old English Poets [Essay Thirty-Nine] are deservedly forgotten.” Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Occleve “seem to have thought that rhyme was poetry, and even this constituent they applied with extreme negligence”—the one charge which is unfair against even Occleve, and which, in reference to Chaucer, is proof of utter ignorance. Patriotism probably made him more favourable to Dunbar, Douglas, and Lyndsay, though he groans over the necessity of a glossary in their case also. In fact, Knox is but a Johnson without the genius. Let it, however, be counted to him for righteousness that he defended classical education, including verse-writing, against its enemies, who even then imagined vain things.
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Footnote 646:
_Essays, Moral and Literary_, 2nd ed., London, 1774, 8vo.
Footnote 647:
This is perhaps the most delightful instance in (English) existence of the change which has come over the meaning of the word.
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John Scott of Amwell, once praised by good wits, now much forgotten, was a very respectable critic and a poet of “glimmerings.” [Sidenote: _Scott of Amwell._] In fact, I am not at all sure that he does not deserve to be promoted and postponed to the next volume, as a representative of the rising, not the falling, tide. His Essays on poetry[648] exhibit in a most interesting way the “know-not-what-to-think-of-it” state of public opinion about the later years of Johnson. He defends _Lycidas_ against the Dictator; yet he finds fault with the “daystar” for acting both as a person and an orb of radiance, and admits the “incorrectness” of the poem, without giving us a hint of the nature or authority of “correctness.” He boldly attacks the consecrated _Cooper’s Hill_, and sets the rival eminence of Grongar against it, pronouncing Dyer “a sublime but strangely neglected poet,” yet picking very niggling holes in this poet himself. He often anticipates, and oftener seems to be going to anticipate, Wordsworth, who no doubt owed him a good deal; yet he thinks Pope’s famous epigram on Wit “the most concise and just definition of Poetry.” In _Grongar Hill_ itself he thinks the “admixture of metre [its second, certainly, if not its first great charm] rather displeasing to a nice ear”; and though he defends Gray against Knox, he is altogether yea-nay about _Windsor Forest_, and attacks Thomson’s personifications, without remembering that Gray is at least an equal sinner, and without giving the author of the _Seasons_, and still more of the _Castle of Indolence_, any just compensation for his enthusiasm of nature. In fact, Scott is a man walking in twilight, who actually sees the line of dawn, but dares not step out into it.
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Footnote 648:
_Critical Essays_, London, 1785, 8vo.
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