It must be admitted that the Restoration critics had an immoderate passion for classing authors according to their supposed rank in the scale of literary desert. A glance atThe Battle of the Books—a faint reflection of the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns—is enough to place this beyond dispute. Dryden himself is probably as guilty as any in this matter. His parallel between Juvenal and Horace, his comparison of Homer with Virgil, are largely of the nature of an attempt to show each poet to his proper place, to determine their due order of precedence in the House of Fame. In the early days of criticism this was perhaps to be expected. Men were feeling their way to the principles; and the shortest road might naturally seem to lie through a comparative table of the men. They were right in thinking that the first step was to ascertain what qualities, and what modes of treatment, give lasting pleasure in poetry; and, to do this, they could not but turn to compare the works of individual poets. But they were wrong in supposing that they could learn anything by striking the balance between the merits of one poet, as a sum total, and the merits of another.
The fault was, no doubt, largely in the Restoration critics themselves; and it is a fault which, so long as the competitive instinct holds sway with men, will never be entirely unknown. But its hold on the men of Dryden's day was in great measure due to the influence of the French critics, and to the narrow lines which criticism had taken in France. No one can read Boileau'sArt Poetique, no one can compare it with the correspondingEssayof Pope, without feeling that the purely personal element had eaten into the heart of French criticism to a degree which could never have been natural in England, and which, even in the darkest days of English literature, has seldom been approached. But at the same time it will be felt that never has England come nearer to a merely personal treatment of artistic questions than in the century between Dryden and Johnson; and that it was here, rather than in the adoption of any specific form of literature—rather, for instance, than in the growth of the heroic drama—that the influence of France is to be traced.
Side by side, however, with the baser sort of comparisons, we find in the Restoration critics no small use of the kind that profits and delights. Rymer'sRemarks on the Tragedies of the Former Ageare an instance of the comparative method, in its just sense, as employed by a man of talent. The essays of Dryden abound in passages of this nature, that could only have been written by a man of genius. They may have a touch of the desire to set one form of art, or one particular poet, in array against another. But, when all abatements have been made, they remain unrivalled samples of the manner in which the comparative vein can be worked by a master spirit. To the student of English literature they have a further interest—notably, perhaps, the comparison between Juvenal and Horace and the eulogy of Shakespeare—as being among the most striking examples of that change from the Latinized style of the early Stuart writers to the short, pointed sentence commonly associated with French; the change that was inaugurated by Hobbes, but only brought to completion by Dryden.
Once again. As Dryden was among the earliest to give the comparative method its due place in English criticism, so he was the first to make systematic use of the historical method. Daniel, indeed, in a remarkable essay belonging to the early years of the century, had employed that method in a vague and partial manner. [Footnote:A Defence of Ryme(1603). It was written in answer to a pamphlet by Campion (1602), of which the second chapter "declares the unaptness of Rime in Poesie".—Ancient Critical Essays, ii. t64, &c.] He had defended rhyme on the score of its popularity with all ages and all nations. Celts, Slavs, and Huns—Parthians and Medes and Elamites—are all pressed into the service. [Footnote: "The Turks, Slavonians, Arabians, Muscovites, Polacks, Hungarians … use no other harmony of words. The Irish, Britons, Scots, Danes, Saxons, English, and all the inhabiters of this island either have hither brought, or here found the same in use."—Ib. p. 198.] That is, perhaps, the first instance in which English criticism can be said to have attempted tracing a literary form through the various stages of its growth. But Daniel wrote without system and without accuracy. It was reserved for Dryden—avowedly following in the steps of the French critic Dacier—to introduce the order and the fulness of knowledge—in Dryden's case, it must be admitted, a knowledge at second hand—which are indispensable to a fruitful use of the historical method. In this sense, too—as in his use of the comparative method, as in the singular grace and aptness of his style—Dryden was a pioneer in the field of English criticism.
III. Over the century that parts Dryden from Johnson it is not well to linger. During that time criticism must be said, on the whole, to have gone back rather than to have advanced. With some reservations to be noticed later, the critics of the eighteenth century are a depressing study. Their conception of the art they professed was barren; their judgments of men and things were lamentably narrow. The more valuable elements traceable in the work of Dryden—the comparative and the historical treatment—disappear or fall into the background. We are left with little but the futile exaltation of one poet at the expense of his rivals, or the still more futile insistence upon faults, shortcomings, and absurdities. TheDunciad, the most marked critical work of the period, may be defended on the ground that itisthe Dunciad; a war waged by genius upon the fool, the pedant, and the fribble. But, none the less, it had a disastrous influence upon English criticism and English taste. It gave sanction to the habit of indiscriminate abuse; it encouraged the purely personal treatment of critical discussions. Its effects may be traced on writers even of such force as Smollett; of such genius and natural kindliness as Goldsmith. But it was on Johnson that Pope's influence made itself most keenly felt. AndThe Lives of the Poets, though not written till the movement that gave it birth had spent its force, is the most complete and the most typical record of the tendencies that shaped English literature and gave the law to English taste from the Restoration to the French Revolution: a notable instance of the fact so often observed, and by some raised to the dignity of a general law, that both in philosophy and in art, the work of the critic does not commonly begin till the creative impulse of a given period is exhausted.
What, then, was Johnson's method? and what its practical application? The method is nothing if not magisterial. It takes for granted certain fixed laws—whether the laws formulated by Aristotle, or by Horace, or the French critics, is for the moment beside the question—and passes sentence on every work of art according as it conforms to the critical decalogue or transgresses it. The fault of this method is not, as is sometimes supposed, that it assumes principles in a subject where none are to be sought; but that its principles are built on a miserably narrow and perverted basis. That there are principles of criticism, that the artist's search for beauty must be guided by some idea, is obvious enough. It can be questioned only by those who are prepared to deny the very possibility of criticism; who would reduce the task both of critic and of artist to a mere record of individual impressions. It need hardly be said that the very men who are most ready to profess such a doctrine with their lips, persistently, and rightly, give the lie to it in their deeds. No creative work, no critical judgment, either is or can be put forward as a mere impression; it is the impression of a trained mind—that is, of a mind which, instinctively or as a conscious process, is guided by principles or ideas.
So far, then, as he may be held to have borne witness to the need of ideas, Johnson was clearly in the right. It was when he came to ask, What is the nature of those ideas, and how does the artist or the critic arrive at them? that he began to go astray. Throughout he assumes that the principles of art—and that, not only in their general bearing (proportion, harmony, and the like), but in their minuter details-are fixed and invariable. To him they form a kind of case-law, which is to be extracted by the learned from the works of a certain number of "correct writers", ancient and modern; and which, once established, is binding for all time both on the critic and on those he summons to his bar. In effect, this was to declare that beauty can be conceived in no other way than as it presented itself, say, to Virgil or to Pope. It was to lay the dead hand of the past upon the present and the future.
More than this. The models that lent themselves to be models, after the kind desired by Johnson, were inevitably just those it was most cramping and least inspiring to follow. They were the men who themselves wrote, to some degree, by rule; in whom "correctness" was stronger than inspiration; who, however admirable in their own achievement, were lacking in the nobler and subtler qualities of the poet. They were not the Greeks; not even, at first hand, the Latins; though the names both of Greek and Latin were often on Johnson's lips. They were rather the Latins as filtered through the English poets of the preceding century; the Latins in so far as they had appealed to the writers of the "Augustan age", but no further; the Latins, as masters of satire, of declamation, and of the lighter kinds of verse. It was Latin poetry without Lucretius and Catullus, without the odes of Horace, without the higher strain of the genius of Virgil. In other words, it was poetry as conceived by Boileau or Addison-or Mr. Smith. [Footnote: See Johnson's extravagant eulogy of this obscure writer in the Lives of the Poets. Works, x. i.]
Yet again. In the hands of Johnson—and it was a necessary consequence of his critical method—poetry becomes more and more a mere matter of mechanism. Once admit that the greatness of a poet depends upon his success in following certain models, and it is but a short step—if indeed it be a step—further to say that he must attempt no task that has not been set him by the example of his forerunners. It is doubtless true that Johnson did not, in so many words, commit himself to this absurdity. But it is equally true that any poet, who overstepped the bounds laid down by previous writers, was likely to meet with but little mercy at his hands. Milton, Cowley, Gray—for all had the audacity to take an untrodden path in poetry-one after another are dragged up for execution. It is clear that by example, if not by precept, Johnson was prepared to "make poetry a mere mechanic art"; and Cowper was right in saying that it had become so with Pope's successors. Indeed John—son himself, in closing his estimate of Pope, seems half regretfully to anticipate Cowper's verdict. "By perusing the works of Dryden, he discovered the most perfect fabrick of English verse, and habituated himself to that only which he found the best. … New sentiments and new images others may produce; but to attempt any further improvement of versification will be dangerous. Art and diligence have now done their best, and what shall be added will be the effort of tedious toil and needless curiosity". [Footnote:Life of Pope. Johnson's Works, xi. pp 194, 195.] But Johnson failed to see that his own view of poetry led inevitably to this lame and impotent conclusion.
To adopt Johnson's method is, in truth, to misconceive the whole nature of poetry and of poetic imagination. The ideas that have shaped the work of one poet may act as guide and spur, but can never be a rule—far less a law—to the imagination of another. The idea, as it comes to an artist, is not a law imposing itself from without; it is a seed of life and energy springing from within. This, however, was a truth entirely hidden from the eyes of Johnson and the Augustan critics. To assert it both by word and deed, both as critics and as poets, was the task of Coleridge, and of those who joined hands with Coleridge, in the succeeding generation. Apart from the undying beauty of their work as artists, this was the memorable service they rendered to poetry in England.
It remains to illustrate the method of Johnson by its practical application. As has already been said, Johnson is nothing if not a hanging judge; and it is just where originality is most striking that his sentences are the most severe. If there was one writer who might have been expected to win his favour, it was Pope; and if there is any work that bears witness to the originality of Pope's genius, it is the imitations of Horace. These are dismissed in a disparaging sentence. There is no adequate recognition of Congreve's brilliance as a dramatist; none of Swift's amazing powers as a satirist. Yet all these were men who lived more or less within the range of ideas and tendencies by which Johnson's own mind was moulded and inspired.
The case is still worse when we turn to writers of a different school. Take the poets from the Restoration to the closing years of the American war; and it is not too much to say that, with the exception of Thomson—saved perhaps by his "glossy, unfeeling diction"—there is not one of them who overstepped the bounds marked out for literary effort by the prevailing taste of the Augustan age, in its narrowest sense, without paying the price for his temerity in the sneers or reprobation of Johnson. Collins, it is true, escapes more lightly than the rest; but that is probably due to the affection and pity of his critic. Yet even Collins, perhaps the most truly poetic spirit of the century between Milton and Burns, is blamed for a "diction often harsh, unskillfully laboured, and injudiciously selected"; for "lines commonly of slow motion"; for "poetry that may sometimes extort praise, when it gives little pleasure". [Footnote: Johnson's Works, xi. 270.]The poems of Gray—an exception must be made, to Johnson's honour, in favour of theElegy[Footnote: In the bosom of "the Club" the exception dwindled to two stanzas (Boswell's Life, ii. 300).] are slaughtered in detail; [Footnote: Johnson's Works, xi. 372-378. Johnson is peculiarly sarcastic on theBardand theProgress of Poetry.] the man himself is given dog's burial with the compendious epitaph: "A dull fellow, sir; dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere". [Footnote: Boswell'sLife, ii. 300. Comp. in. 435.]
But most astonishing of all, as is well known, is the treatment bestowed on Milton. Of all Milton's works,Paradise Lostseems to have been the only one that Johnson genuinely admired. That he praises with as little of reservation as was in the nature of so stern a critic. OnParadise Regainedhe is more guarded; onSamson, more guarded yet. [Footnote: The two papers devoted toSamsonin theRamblerare "not entitled even to this slender commendation". "This is the tragedy that ignorance has admired and bigotry applauded" (Johnson's Works, v. 436).] But it is in speaking of the earlier poems that Johnson shows his hand most plainly.Comus"is a drama in the epic style, inelegantly splendid and tediously instructive". [Footnote: Johnson's Works, ix. 153.] OfLycidas"the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers un-pleasing" [Footnote: Ib. 159.] As for the sonnets, "they deserve not any particular criticism. For of the best it can only be said that they are not bad; and perhaps only the eighth and twenty-first are truly entitled to this slender commendation…. These little pieces may be dismissed without much anxiety". [Footnote: Ib. 160. The two sonnets are those writtenWhen the assault was intended to the City, andOn his Blindness.]
It would be hardly worth while to record these ill-tempered judgments if they were not the natural outcome of a method which held unquestioned sway over English taste for a full century—in France for nearly two—and which, during that time, if we except Gray and his friends, was not seriously disputed by a single man of mark. The one author in whose favour the rules of "correct writing" were commonly set aside was Shakespeare; and perhaps there is no testimony to his greatness so convincing as the unwilling homage it extorted from the contemporaries of Pope, of Johnson, and of Hume. Johnson's own notes and introductions to the separate plays are at times trifling enough; [Footnote: Compare the assault on the "mean expressions" of Shakespeare (Rambler, No. 168).] but his general preface is a solid and manly piece of work. It contrasts strangely not only with the verdicts given above, but with his jeers atChevy Chase[Footnote: Ib. x. 139.]—a "dull and lifeless imbecility"—at theNonne Prestes Tale, and at theKnightes Tale[Footnote: Ib. ix. 432.]
One more instance, and we may leave this depressing study in critical perversity. Among the great writers of Johnson's day there was none who showed a truer originality than Fielding; no man who broke more markedly with the literary superstitions of the time; none who took his own road with more sturdiness and self-reliance. This was enough for Johnson, who persistently depreciated both the man and his work. Something of this should doubtless be set down to disapproval of the free speech and readiness to allow for human frailty, which could not but give offence to a moralist so unbending as Johnson. But that will hardly account for the assertion that "Harry Fielding knew nothing but the outer shell of life"; still less for the petulant ruling that he "was a barren rascal". [Footnote: Boswell'sLife, ii. 169. Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay, i. 91] The truth is—and Johnson felt it instinctively—that the novel, as conceived by Fielding—the novel that gloried in painting all sides of life, and above all in drawing out the humour of its "lower spheres"—dealt a fatal blow not only at the pompous canons which theRamblerwas pleased to call "the indispensable laws of Aristotelian criticism", [Footnote: Johnson's Works, v. 431.] but also at the view which found "human life to be a state where much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed". It would be hard to say whether Johnson found more in Fielding to affront him, as pessimist or as critic. And it would be equally hard to say in which of the two characters lay the greater barrier to literary insight. Even Richardson—no less revolutionary, though in a different way, than Fielding—was only saved so as by fire; by the undying hatred which he shared with Johnson for his terrible rival. It was rather as moralist than as artist, rather for "the sentiment" than for the tragic force of his work, that Richardson seems to have won his way to Johnson's heart. [Footnote: See the passage referred to in the preceding note.]
Is not the evidence conclusive? Is it a harsh judgment to say that no critic so narrow, so mechanical, so hostile to originality as Johnson has ever achieved the dictatorship of English letters?
The supremacy of Johnson would have been impossible, had not the way been smoothed for it by a long succession of critics like-minded with himself. Such a succession may be traced from Swift to Addison, from Addison to Pope, and—with marked reservations—from Pope to Goldsmith. It would be unjust to charge all, or indeed any, of these with the narrowness of view betrayed in Johnson's verdicts on individual writers. To arrive at this perfection of sourness was a work of time; and the nature of Addison and Goldsmith at least was too genial to allow of any approach to it. But, with all their difference of temperament, the method of the earlier critics is hardly to be distinguished from that of Johnson. There is the same orderliness of treatment—first the fable, then the characters, lastly the sentiment and the diction; the same persistency in applying general rules to a matter which, above all others, is a law to itself; the same invincible faith in "the indispensable laws of Aristotelian criticism". It is this that, in spite of its readiness to admire, makes Addison's criticism ofParadise Lostso dreary a study; and this that, in an evil hour, prompted Goldsmith to treat the soliloquy of Hamlet as though it were a schoolboy's exercise in rhetoric and logic. [Footnote: Goldsmith, Essay xvi. The next essay contains a like attack on Mercutio's description of Queen Mab.]
And yet it is with Goldsmith that we come to the first dawn of better things. The carping strain and the stiffness of method, that we cannot overlook in him, were the note of his generation. The openness to new ideas, the sense of nature, the fruitful use of the historical method, are entirely his own. There had been nothing like them in our literature since Dryden. In criticism, as in creative work, Goldsmith marks the transition from the old order to the new.
Perhaps the clearest indication of this is to be found in his constant appeal to nature. In itself, as we have seen, this may mean much or little. "Nature" is a vague word; it was the battle-cry of Wordsworth, but it was also the battle-cry of Boileau. And, at first sight, it might seem to be used by Goldsmith in the narrower rather than in the wider sense. "It is the business of art", he writes, "to imitate nature, but not with a servile pencil; and to choose those attitudes and dispositions only which are beautiful and engaging." [Footnote: Goldsmith, Essay xiii.] But a glance at the context will show that what Goldsmith had in mind was not "nature to advantage dressed", not nature with any adornments added by man; but nature stripped of all that to man has degrading associations; nature, to adopt the words used by Wordsworth on a kindred subject, "purified from all lasting or rational causes of dislike or disgust". It may well be that Goldsmith gave undue weight to this reservation. It may well be that he did not throw himself on nature with the unwavering constancy of Wordsworth. But, none the less, we have here—and we have it worked out in detail [Footnote: As to oratory, poetry, the drama, and acting, Ib., Essays iv., xii., xiii.;The Bee, no. ii.]—the germ of the principle which, in bolder hands, gave England the Lyrical Ballads and the Essays of Lamb.
In an essay not commonly reprinted, Goldsmith, laying his finger on the one weak spot in the genius of Gray, gives the poet the memorable advice—to "study the people". And throughout his own critical work, as in his novel, his comedies, and his poems, there is an abiding sense that, without this, there is no salvation for poetry. That in itself is enough to fix an impassable barrier between Goldsmith and the official criticism of his day.
The other main service rendered by Goldsmith was his return to the historical method. It is true that his knowledge is no more at first hand, and is set out with still less system than that of Dryden a century before. But it is also true that he has a far keener sense of the strength which art may draw from history than his great forerunner. Dryden confines himself to the history of certain forms of art; Goldsmith includes the history of nations also in his view. With Dryden the past is little more than an antiquarian study; with Goldsmith it is a living fountain of inspiration for the present. The art of the past—the poetry, say, of Teutonic or Celtic antiquity—is to him an undying record of the days when man still walked hand in hand with nature. The history of the past is at once a storehouse of stirring themes ready to the hand of the artist, and the surest safeguard against both flatness and exaggeration in his work. [Footnote: See Essays xiii., xiv., xx.;Present State of Polite Learning, in particular, chap. xi.] It offers, moreover, the truest schooling of the heart, and insensibly "enlists the passions on the side of humanity". "Poetry", Byron said, "is the feeling of a former world, and future"; [Footnote: Moore'sLife, p. 483] and to the first half of the statement Goldsmith would have heartily subscribed. For the historical method in his hands is but another aspect of the counsel he gave to Gray: "Study the people". It is an anticipation—vague, no doubt, but still unmistakable—of the spirit which, both in France and England, gave birth to the romantic movement a generation or two later.
That zeal for the literature of the past was in the air when Goldsmith wrote is proved by works so different as those of Gray and Percy, of Chatterton and MacPherson, of Mallet and Warton. [Footnote: Percy's Reliques were published in 1765; Chatterton'sRowley Poemswritten in 1769; MacPherson'sOssian(first instalment) in 1760; Mallet'sNorthern Antiquitiesin 1755; and Warton'sHistory of English Poetry—a book to the learning and importance of which scant justice has been done—from 1772 to 1778. To these should be added a work, whose fine scholarship and profound learning is now universally admitted, Tyrwhitt'sChaucer(1775-78). It will be noticed that all these works fall within the space of twenty years, 1755-1775] But it may be doubted whether any one of them, Gray excepted, saw the true bearing of the movement more clearly than Goldsmith, or did more to open fresh springs of thought and beauty for the poetry of the next age, if not of his own. It would be unpardonable to turn from the writers of the eighteenth century with no notice of a book which, seldom now read, is nevertheless perhaps the most solid piece of work that modern Europe had as yet to show in any branch of literary criticism. This is Burke's treatiseOn the Sublime and the Beautiful. Few will now be prepared to accept the material basis which Burke finds for the ideas of the imagination. [Footnote: Burke traces our ideas of the sublime to the sense of physical pain; our ideas of the beautiful to that of physical pleasure; identifying the former with a contraction or tension, and the latter with a relaxation of the muscles. Against this theory two main objections may be urged: (1) As, on Burke's own showing, the objects of the imagination, at least as far as poetry is concerned, are, and must be, presented first to themind, it is (in the strictest sense of the term) preposterous to attribute their power over us to a purely muscular operation (2) The argument, taken by itself, is barely relevant to the matter in hand. Even where a physical basis can be proved—as it can in the case of music, painting, and sculpture (and of poetry, so far as rhythm and harmony are an essential element of it) it is extravagant to maintain that the physiologist or the "psycho physicist" can explain the whole, or even the greater part, of what has to be explained Beyond the fraction of information that purely physical facts can give us, a vast field must be left to intellectual and imaginative association. And that is the province not of physiology but of psychology, and of what the Germans callAesthetikThis province, however, is but seldom entered by Burke.
What, then, was it that drove Burke to a position so markedly at variance with the idealism of his later years? In all probability it was his rooted suspicion of reasoning as a deliberate and conscious process. Other writers of the century—Addison, for instance—had spoken as if men reasoned from certain abstract ideas (proportion, fitness, and the like) to individual instances of beauty, deciding a thing to have beauty or no, according as it squared or failed to square with the general notion This, as Burke points out, is more than questionable in itself, and it was certain to affront a man who, even thus early, had shown an almost morbid hatred of abstractions. In his later years, as is well known, he sought refuge from them in instinct, in "prejudice", in the unconscious working of the "permanent reason of man". In earlier days—he was still well under thirty—he found escape by the grosser aid of a materialist explanation (Burke's treatise was published in 1756 TheLaocoonof Lessing, a work which may be compared with that of Burke and which was very probably suggested by it, appeared in 1766.)] But none can deny the skill with which he works out his theory, nor the easy mastery with which each part is fitted into its place. The speculative power of the book and the light it throws on the deeper springs of the imagination are alike memorable. The first is not unworthy of theReflectionsor theAppeal from the New to the Old Whigs; the second shows that fruitful study of the Bible and the poets, English and classical, to which his later writings and speeches bear witness on every page.
If the originality and depth of Burke's treatise is to be justly measured, it should be set side by side with those papers of Addison which Akenside expanded in his dismalPleasures of the Imagination. The performance of Addison, grateful though one must be to him for attempting it, is thin and lifeless. That of Burke is massive and full of suggestion. At every turn it betrays the hand of the craftsman who works with his eye upon his tools. The speculative side of criticism has never been a popular study with Englishmen, and it is no accident that one of the few attempts to deal seriously with it should have been made at the only time when philosophy was a living power among us, and when the desire to get behind the outward shows of things was keener than it has ever been before or since. But for Burke's treatise, a wide gap would have been left both in the philosophy and the criticism of the eighteenth century; and it is to be wished that later times had done more to work the vein which he so skilfully explored. As it is, the writers both of France and Germany—above all, Hegel in hisAesthetik—have laboured with incomparably more effect than his own countrymen, Mr. Ruskin excepted, upon the foundations that he laid.
IV. Johnson'sLives of the Poetswas the last word of the school which the Restoration had enthroned; the final verdict of the supreme court which gave the law to English letters from the accession of Anne to the French Revolution. Save in the splenetic outbursts of Byron—and they are not to be taken too seriously—the indispensable laws of Aristotelian criticism fell silent at Johnson's death. A time of anarchy followed; anarchyplusthe policeman's truncheon of theEdinburghand theQuarterly. [Footnote: The first number of theEdinburghappeared in 1802; theQuarterlywas started in a counterblast in 1809.]
The ill-fame of these Reviews, as they were in their pride of youth, is now so great that doubts may sometimes suggest themselves whether it can possibly be deserved. No one who feels such doubts can do better than turn to the earlier numbers; he will be forced to the conclusion that, whatever their services as the journeymen of letters and of party politics, few critics could have been so incompetent to judge of genius as the men who enlisted under the standard of Jeffrey or of Gifford. There is not, doubtless, in either Review the same iron wall of reasoned prejudice that has been noted in Johnson, but there is a plentiful lack of the clear vision and the openness to new impressions which are the first necessity of the critic. What Carlyle says of Jeffrey and theEdinburghmay be taken as the substantial truth also about Gifford and theQuarterly, and it is the most pregnant judgment that has yet been passed upon them.
"Jeffrey may be said to have begun the rash, reckless style of criticising everything in heaven and earth by appeal to Moliere's maid: 'Doyoulike it?' 'Don'tyou like it?' a style which, in hands more and more inferior to that sound-hearted old lady and him, has since grown gradually to such immeasurable length among us; and he himself is one of the first that suffers by it. If praise and blame are to be perfected, not in the mouth of Moliere's maid only but in that of mischievous, precocious babes and sucklings, you will arrive at singular judgments by degrees." [Footnote: Carlyle,Reminiscencesn 63, 64 ]
Carlyle has much here to say of Jeffrey's "recklessness", his defiance of all rules, his appeal to the chance taste of the man in the crowd. He has much also to say of his acuteness, and the unrivalled authority of his decrees. [Footnote: "Jeffrey was by no means the supreme in criticism or in anything else, but it is certain there has no critic appeared among us since who was worth naming beside him and his influence for good and for evil in literature and otherwise has been very great. Nothing in my time has so forwarded all this—the 'gradual uprise and rule in all things of roaring, million headed &c Demos'— "as Jeffrey and his once famousEdinburgh Review'—Ib ] But he is discreetly silent on their severity and short-sightedness. [Footnote: "You know", Byron wrote in 1808 "the system of the Edinburgh gentlemen is universal attack. They praise none, and neither the public nor the author expects praise from them."—Moore'sLife, p 67.]
Yet this is the unpardonable sin of both Reviews: that mediocrity was applauded, but that, whenever a man of genius came before them, the chances were ten to one that he would be held up to ridicule and contempt. The very first number of theEdinburghlays this down as an article of faith. Taking post on the recent appearance ofThalaba, the reviewer opens fire by a laboured parallel between poetry and religion. [Footnote:Edinburgh Review, No. 1, pp 63, &c ] With an alteration of names it might have been written by a member of the English Church Union, or of the Holy Inquisition.
"The standards of poetry have been fixed long ago by certain inspired writers, whose authority it is no longer lawful to call in question. Many profess to be entirely devoted to poetry, who have nogood worksto produce in support of their pretensions. The Catholic poetical Church too . . . has given birth to an infinite variety of heresies and errors, the followers of which have hated and persecuted each other as heartily as other bigots."
Then, turning to business, the writer proceeds to apply his creed to Southey and all his works, not forgetting the works also of his friends. "The author belongs to a sect of poets that has established itself in this country within these ten or twelve years"—it would be hard to say for whose benefit in particular this date was taken—"and is looked upon as one of its chief champions and apostles". "The doctrines of this sect"—the Reviewer continues, with an eye upon the Alien Act—"are of German origin, or borrowed from the great apostle of Geneva". Rousseau is then "named" for expulsion, together with a miscellaneous selection of his following: Schiller and Kotzebue (the next number includes Kant under the anathema), Quarles and Donne, Ambrose Phillips and Cowper—perhaps the most motley crew that was ever brought together for excommunication. It is not, however, till the end of the essay that the true root of bitterness between the critic and his victims is suffered fully to appear. "A splenetic and idle discontent with the existing institutions of society seems to be at the bottom of all their serious and peculiar sentiments." In other words, theEdinburghtakes up the work of theAnti-Jacobin; with no very good grace Jeffrey affects to sit in the seat of Canning and of Frere.
So much for the "principles" of the new venture; principles, it will be seen, which appear to rest rather upon a hatred of innovation in general than upon any reasoned code, such as that of Johnson or the "Aristotelian laws", in particular. On that point, it must be clearly realized, Carlyle was in the right. It is that which marks the essential difference of the Reviewers—we can hardly say their advance—as against Johnson.
We may now turn to watch the Reviewers, knife in hand, at the dissecting-table. For the twenty-five years that followed the foundation of theEdinburgh, England was more full of literary genius than it had been at any time since the age of Elizabeth. And it is not too much to say that during that period there was not one of the men, now accepted as among the chief glories of English literature, who did not fall under the lash of one, or both, of the Reviews. The leading cases will suffice.
And first, the famous attack—not altogether undeserved, it must be allowed—of theEdinburghupon Byron. "The poetry of this young lord belongs to the class which neither gods nor men are said to permit", and so on for two or three pages of rather vulgar and heartless merriment at the young lord's expense. [Footnote:Edinburgh Review, xi. 285. It is uncommonly hard to find any trace of poetic power, even of the imitative kind, in theHours of Idleness. It is significant that the best pieces are those in the heroic couplet; an indication—to be confirmed byEnglish Bards—of Byron's leaning towards the past.] The answer to the sneer, as all the world knows, wasEnglish Bards and Scotch Reviewers. The author of the article had reason to be proud of his feat. Never before did pertness succeed in striking such unexpected fire from genius. And it is only fair to say that the Review took its beating like a gentleman. A few years later, and theEdinburghwas among the warmest champions of the "English Bard". [Footnote: See the article onThe CorsairandBride of Abydos, Ib. xxiii. 198. After speaking of the "beauty of his diction and versification, and the splendour of his description", the reviewer continues: "But it is to his pictures of the stronger passions that he is indebted for the fulness of his fame. He has delineated with unequalled force and fidelity the workings of those deep and powerful emotions…. We would humbly suggest to him to do away with the reproach of the age by producing a tragic drama of the old English school of poetry and pathos." Theamende honorablewith a vengeance. The review ofThe Giaour, Byron thought, was "so very mild and sentimental that it must be written by Jeffrey inlove".—Moore'sLife, p. 191.] It was reserved for Southey, a pillar of theQuarterly, to rank him as the "Goliath" of the "Satanic school".
Let us now turn to theQuarterlyupon Keats.Endymion, in spite of the noble self-criticism of its preface, is denounced as "Cockney poetry" [Footnote: The phrase was also employed byBlackwood, vol. iii. 519-524.]—a stupid and pointless vulgarism—and is branded as clothing "the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language". The author is dismissed with the following amenities: "Being bitten by Leigh Hunt's insane criticism, he more than rivals the insanity of his poetry"; and we are half-surprised not to find him told, as he was byBlackwood, to "go back to the shop, Mr. John; back to the plasters, pills, and ointment-boxes". [Footnote:Quarterly Review, xix. 204. SeeBlackwood, vol. iii. 524; where the Reviewer sneers at "the calm, settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy ofEndymion".]
With this insolence it is satisfactory to contrast the verdict of theEdinburgh: "We have been exceedingly struck with the genius these poems—Endymion,Lamia,Isabella,The Eve of St. Agnes, &c.—display, and the spirit of poetry which breathes through all their extravagance. . . . They are at least as full of genius as absurdity." OfHyperionthe Reviewer says: "An original character and distinct individuality is bestowed upon the poet's mythological persons. . . . We cannot advise its completion. For, though there are passages of some force and grandeur, it is sufficiently obvious that the subject is too far removed from all the sources of human interest to be successfully treated by any modern author". [Footnote: Edinburgh Review, xxxiv. 203.] A blundering criticism, which, however, may be pardoned in virtue of the discernment, not to say the generosity, of the foregoing estimate.
It would have been well had theEdinburghalways written in this vein. But Wordsworth was a sure stumbling-block to the sagacity of his critics, and he certainly never failed to call forth the insolence and flippancy of Jeffrey. Two articles upon him remain as monuments to the incompetence of theEdinburgh; the first prompted by the Poems of 1807, the second by theExcursion.
The former pronounces sentence roundly at the very start: "Mr. Wordsworth's diction has nowhere any pretence to elegance or dignity, and he has scarcely ever condescended to give the grace of correctness or dignity to his versification". From this sweeping condemnation four poems—Brougham Castle, and the sonnets on Venice, Milton, and Bonaparte—are generously excepted. But, as though astonished at his own moderation, the reviewer quickly proceeds to deal slaughter among the rest. Of the closing lines ofResolution and Independencehe writes: "We defy Mr. Wordsworth's bitterest enemy to produce anything at all parallel to this from any collection of English poetry, or even from the specimens of his friend, Mr. Southey". Of the stanzas to the sons of Burns, "never was anything more miserable".Alice Fellis "trash";Yarrow Unvisited, "tedious and affected". The lines from theOde to Duty.
"Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong,"
are "utterly without meaning". The poem on theCuckoois "absurd". TheOde on Immortalityis "the most illegible and unintelligible part of the whole publication". "We venture to hope that there is now an end of this folly." [Footnote:Edinburgh Review, xi. 217, &c.]
But the hope is doomed to disappointment. The publication of theExcursiona few years later finds the reviewer still equal to his task. "This will never do", he begins in a fury; "the case of Mr. Wordsworth is now manifestly hopeless. We give him up as altogether incurable and beyond the power of criticism." The story of Margaret, indeed, though "it abounds, of course, with mawkish sentiment and details of preposterous minuteness, has considerable pathos". But the other passage which one would have thought must have gone home to every heart—that which describes the communing of the wanderer with nature [Footnote:Excursion, book i.]—is singled out for ridicule; while the whole poem is judged to display "a puerile ambition of singularity, grafted on an unlucky predilection for truisms". [Footnote:Edinburgh Review, xxiv. I, &c. It is but just to add that in the remainder of the essay the Reviewer takes back—so far as such things can ever be taken back—a considerable part of his abuse.]
It would be idle to maintain that in some of these slashing verdicts— criticisms they cannot be called—the reviewer does not fairly hit the mark. But these are chance strokes; and they are dealt, as the whole attack is conceived, in the worst style of the professional swash- buckler. Yet, low as is the deep they sound, a lower deep is opened by theQuarterlyin its article on Shelley; an article which bears unmistakable marks of having been written under the inspiration, if not by the hand, of Southey.
It is impossible to know anything about Southey without feeling that, both in character and in intellect, he had many of the qualities that go to make an enlightened critic. But his fine nature was warped by a strain of bigotry; and he had what, even in a man who otherwise gave conclusive proof of sincerity and whole-heartedness, must be set down as a strong touch of the Pharisee. After every allowance has been made, no feeling other than indignation is possible at the tone which he thought fit to adopt towards Shelley.
He opens the assault, and it is well that he does so, by an acknowledgment that the versification of theRevolt of Islam, thecorpus delictiat that moment under the scalpel, is "smooth and harmonious", and that the poem is "not without beautiful passages, free from errors of taste". But the "voice of warning", as he himself would too generously have called it, is not long in making itself heard. "Mr. Shelley, with perfect deliberation and the steadiest perseverance, perverts all the gifts of his nature, and does all the injury, both public and private, which his faculties enable him to perpetrate. . . .He draws largely on the rich stores of another mountain poet, to whose religious mind it must be matter of perpetual sorrow to see the philosophy, which comes pure and holy from his pen, degraded and perverted by this miserable crew of atheists and pantheists."
So far, perhaps, the writer may claim not to have outstepped the traditional limits of theological hatred. For what follows there is not even that poor excuse. "If we might withdraw the veil of his private life and tell what we now know about him, it would be indeed a disgusting picture that we should exhibit, but it would be an unanswerable comment on our text. . .Mr. Shelley is too young, too ignorant, too inexperienced, and too vicious to undertake the task of reforming any world but the little world within his own breast." [Footnote: Quarterly Review, xxi. 460, &c.] For the credit of both Reviews it must be said that it would be difficult to find another instance of so foul a blow as this: [Footnote: Except in the infamous insinuations, also a crime of theQuarterly,]
Non ragioniam dilui, ma guarda e passa.
[Footnote: against the character of Currer Bell. See also the scurrilous attack on the character of Leigh Hunt inBlackwood, vol III 453]
Apart from their truculence, the early numbers of theEdinburghandQuarterlyare memorable for two reasons in the history of English literature. They mark the downfall of the absolute standard assumed by Johnson and others to hold good in criticism. And they led the way, slowly indeed but surely, to the formation of a general interest in literature, which, sooner or later, could not but be fatal to their own haphazard dogmatism. By their very nature they were an appeal to the people; and, like other appeals of the kind, they ended in a revolution.
Of the men who fixed the lines on which this revolution was to run, four stand out taller from the shoulders upwards than their fellows. These are Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and Carlyle. The critical work of all four belongs to the first thirty years or so of the present century; [Footnote: Some of the dates are as follows Lamb'sSpecimens of English Dramatic Poetswas published in 1808, hisEssays of Eliabegan to appear in theLondon Magazine, 1820, Coleridge's first Course of Lectures (on English poets) was delivered in 1808, his second Course, in 1811-12, hisBiographia Literanain 1817 Hazlitt'sCharacters of Shakespeare's Playswas published in 1817, hisLectures on the English Poetsin 1818, and onThe English Comic Writersin 1819 Carlyle's Essays began to appear (in theEdinburghand other Reviews) in 1827, that on Diderot—the last notable essay of a literary cast—in 1833 Hazlitt died in 1830, Coleridge and Lamb in 1834 By that time Carlyle had turned to history and kindred subjects] and of the four it is probable that Carlyle, by nature certainly the least critical, had the greatest influence in changing the current of critical ideas. Space forbids any attempt to treat their work in detail. All that can be done is to indicate what were the shortcomings of English criticism as it came into their hands, and how far and in what manner they modified its methods and its aims.
Till the beginning of the present century, criticism in England had remained a very simple thing. When judgment had once been passed, for good or evil, on an individual work or an individual writer, the critic was apt to suppose that nothing further could reasonably be expected of him. The comparative method, foreshadowed but only foreshadowed by Dryden, had not been carried perceptibly further by Dryden's successors. The historical method was still more clearly in its infancy. The connection between the two, the unity of purpose which alone gives significance to either, was hardly as yet suspected.
It may be said—an English critic of the eighteenth century would undoubtedly have said—that these, after all, are but methods; better, possibly, than other methods; but still no more than means to an end— the eternal end of criticism, which is to appraise and to classify. The view is disputable enough. It leaves out of sight all that criticism—the criticism of literature and art—has done to throw light upon the dark places of human thought and history, upon the growth and subtle transformations of spiritual belief, upon the power of reason and imagination to mould the shape of outward institutions. All these things are included in the scope of the historical and comparative methods; and all of them stand entirely apart from the need to judge or classify the works of individual poets.
But, for the moment, such wider considerations may be put aside, and the objection weighed on its own merits. It must then be answered that, without comparison and without the appeal to history, even to judge and classify reasonably would be impossible; and hence that, however much we narrow the scope of criticism, these two methods—or rather, two aspects of the same method—must still find place within its range. For, failing them, the critic in search of a standard—and without some standard or criterion there can be no such thing as criticism—is left with but two possible alternatives. He must either appeal to some absolute standard—the rules drawn from the "classical writers", in a sense wider or narrower, as the case may be; or he must decide everything by his own impression of the moment, eked out by the "appeal to Moliere's maid". The latter is the negation of all criticism. The former, spite of itself, is the historical method, but the historical method applied in an utterly arbitrary and irrational way. The former was the method of Johnson; the latter, of theEdinburghand theQuarterly. Each in turn, as we have seen, had ludicrously broken down.
In the light of recent inventions, it might have been expected that some attempt would be made to limit the task of the critic to a mere record of his individual impressions. This, in fact, would only have been to avow, and to give the theory of what theEdinburghand theQuarterlyhad already reduced to practice. But the truth is that the men of that day were not strong in such fine-spun speculations. It was a refinement from which even Lamb, who loved a paradox as well as any man, would have shrunk with playful indignation.
It was in another direction that Coleridge and his contemporaries sought escape from the discredit with which criticism was threatened. This was by changing the issue on which the discussion was to be fought. In its most general form, the problem of criticism amounts to this: What is the nature of the standard to be employed in literary judgments? Hitherto—at least to the Reviewers—the question may be said to have presented itself in the following shape: Is the standard to be sought within or without the mind of the critic? Is it by his own impression, or by the code handed down from previous critics, that in the last resort the critic should be guided? In the hands of Coleridge and others, this was replaced by the question: Is the touchstone of excellence to be found within the work of the poet, or outside of it? Are we to judge of a given work merely by asking: Is it clearly conceived and consistently carried out? Or are we bound to consider the further question: Is the original conception just, and capable of artistic treatment; and is the workmanship true to the vital principles of poetry? The change is significant. It makes the poet, not the critic, master of the situation. It implies that the critic is no longer to give the law to the poet; but that, in some sense more or less complete, he must begin, if not by putting himself in the place of the individual writer as he was when at work on the individual poem, at least by taking upon himself—by making his own, as far as may be—what he may conceive to be the essential temperament of the poet.
This, indeed, is one of the first things to strike us in passing from the old criticism to the new. TheEdinburghandQuarterlyplunge straight into the business of the moment. From the first instant—with "This will never do"—the Reviewer poses as the critic, or rather as the accuser. Not so Coleridge and Hazlitt. Like theEdinburghandQuarterly, they undertake to discourse on individual poets. Unlike them, each opens his enquiry with the previous question-a question that seems to have found no lodgment in the mind of the Reviewers—What is poetry? Further than this. Hazlitt, in a passage of incomparably greater force than any recorded utterance of Coleridge, makes it his task to trace poetry to the deepest and most universal springs of human nature; asserts boldly that it is poetry which, in the strictest sense, is "the life of all of us"; and calls on each one of us to assert his birthright by enjoying it. It is in virtue of the poet latent in him, that the plain man has the power to become a critic.
Starting then from the question as just stated: Is it within the mind of the individual poet, or without it, that the standard of judgment should be sought?—neither Coleridge nor Hazlitt could have any doubt as to the answer. It is not, they would tell us, in the individual work but in the nature of poetry—of poetry as written large in the common instincts of all men no less than in the particular achievement of exceptional artists—that the test of poetic beauty must be discovered. The opposite view, doubtless, finds some countenance in the precepts, if not the example, of Goethe. But, when pressed to extremes, it is neither more nor less than the impressionist conception of criticism transferred to the creative faculty; and, like its counterpart, is liable to the objection that the impression of one poet, so long as it is sincerely rendered, is as good as the impression of another. It is the abdication of art, as the other is the abdication of criticism.
Yet Hazlitt also—for, leaving Coleridge, we may now confine ourselves to him—is open to attack. His fine critical powers were marred by the strain of bitterness in his nature. And the result is that his judgment on many poets, and notably the poets of his own day, too often sounds like an intelligent version of theEdinburghor theQuarterly. Or, to speak more accurately, he betrays some tendency to return to principles which, though assuredly applied in a more generous spirit, are at bottom hardly to be distinguished from the principles of Johnson. He too has his "indispensable laws", or something very like them. He too has his bills of exclusion and his list of proscriptions. The poetry of earth, he more than suspects, is for ever dead; after Milton, no claimant is admitted to anything more substantial than a courtesy title. This, no doubt, was in part due to his morose temper; but it was partly also the result of the imperfect method with which he started.
The fault of his conception—and it was that which determined his method—is to be too absolute. It allows too much room to poetry in the abstract; too little to the ever-varying temperament of the individual poet. And even that is perhaps too favourable a statement of the case. His idea of poetry may in part be drawn—and its strength is to have been partly drawn—direct from life and nature. But it is also taken, as from the nature of the case it must be with all of us, from the works of particular poets. And, in spite of his appeal to Dante and the Bible, it is clear that, in framing it, he was guided too exclusively by his loving study of the earlier English writers, from Chaucer to Milton. The model, so framed, is laid with heavy hand upon all other writers, who naturally fare ill in the comparison. Is it possible to account otherwise for his disparagement of Moliere, or his grudging praise of Wordsworth and of Coleridge?
It was here that Carlyle came in to redress the balance. From interests, in their origin perhaps less purely literary than have moved any man who has exercised a profound influence on literature, Carlyle was led to quicken the sense of poetic beauty, and by consequence to widen the scope of criticism, more than any writer of his day. He may have sought German literature more for its matter than for its artistic beauty—here, too, he brought a new, if in some ways a dangerous, element into criticism—but neither he nor his readers could study it, least of all could they study the work of Goethe, without awakening to a whole world of imagination and beauty, to which England had hitherto been dead. With all its shortcomings, the discovery of German literature was a greater revelation than any made to Europe since the classical Renaissance.
The shock—for it was nothing less—came at a singularly happy moment. The blow, given by Carlyle as critic, was closely followed up by the FrenchRomantiques, as creative artists. Nothing could well have been more alien to English taste, as understood by theEdinburghandQuarterly, than the early works, or indeed any works, of Hugo and those who owned him for chief—if it were not the works of Goethe and the countrymen of Goethe. Different as these were from each other, they held common ground in uniting the most opposite prejudices of Englishmen against them. The sarcasms of Thackeray on the French writers speak to this no less eloquently than the fluent flippancies of De Quincey upon the Germans. [Footnote: See Thackeray'sParis Sketch Book, especially the chapters onMadame Sand and the New ApocalypseandFrench Dramas and Melodramas. See also De Quincey's Review of Carlyle's translation ofWilhelm Meister. Works, vol. xii.] Yet, in the one case as in the other—thanks, in no small measure, to Matthew Arnold and Mr. Swinburne—genius, in the long run, carried the day. And the same history has been repeated, as the literatures of Russia and of Scandinavia have each in turn been brought within our ken.
These discoveries have all fallen within little more than half a century since Carlyle, by the irony of fate, reviewed Richter and theState of German Literaturein the pages of theEdinburgh. And their result has been to modify the standards of taste and criticism in a thousand ways. They have opened our eyes to aspects of poetry that we should never otherwise have suspected, and unveiled to us fields of thought, as well as methods of artistic treatment which, save by our own fault, must both have widened and deepened our conception of poetry. That is the true meaning of the historical method. The more we broaden our vision, the less is our danger of confounding poetry, which is the divine genius of the whole world, with the imperfect, if not misshapen idols of the tribe, the market-place and the cave.
Of this conquest Carlyle must in justice be reckoned as the pioneer. For many years he stood almost single-handed as the champion of German thought and German art against the scorn or neglect of his countrymen. But he knew that he was right, and was fully conscious whither the path he had chosen was to lead. Aware that much in the work of Goethe would seem "faulty" to many, he forestalls the objection at the outset.
"To see rightly into this matter, to determine with any infallibility whether what we call a faultisin very deed a fault, we must previously have settled two points, neither of which may be so readily settled. First, we must have made plain to ourselves what the poet's aim really and truly was, how the task he had to do stood before his own eye, and how far, with such means as it afforded him, he has fulfilled it. Secondly, we must have decided whether and how far this aim, this task of his accorded—not withusand our individual crotchets, and the crotchets of our little senate where we give or take the law—but with human nature and the nature of things at large; with the universal principles of poetic beauty, not as they stand written in our text-books, but in the hearts and imaginations of all men. Does the answer in either case come out unfavourable; was there an inconsistency between the means and the end, a discordance between the end and the truth, there is a fault; was there not, there is no fault." [Footnote: Carlyle on Goethe:Miscellanies, i. 295]
Nothing could ring clearer than this. No man could draw the line more accurately between the tendency to dispense with principles and the tendency to stereotype them, which are the twin dangers of the critic. But it is specially important to note Carlyle's relation, in this matter, to Hazlitt He insists with as much force as Hazlitt upon the need of basing all poetry on "human nature and the nature of things at large"; upon the fact that its principles are written "in the hearts and imaginations of all men". But, unlike Hazlitt, he bids us also consider what the aim of the individual poet was, and how far he has taken the most fitting means to reach it. In other words, he allows, as Hazlitt did not allow, for the many-sidedness of poetry, and the infinite variety of poetic genius. And, just because he does so, he is able to give a deeper meaning to "nature" and the universal principles of imagination than Hazlitt, with all his critical and reflective brilliance, was in a position to do. Hazlitt is too apt to confine "nature" to the nature of Englishmen in general and, in his weaker moments, of Hazlitt in particular. Carlyle makes an honest attempt to bound it only by the universal instincts of man, and the "everlasting reason" of the world. Thus, in Carlyle's conception, "it is the essence of the poet to be new"; it is his mission "to wrench us from our old fixtures"; [Footnote: Carlyle on Goethe:Miscellanies, i. 291.] for it is only by so doing that he can show us some aspect of nature or of man's heart that was hidden from us before. The originality of the poet, the impossibility of binding him by the example of his forerunners, is the necessary consequence of the infinity of truth.
That Carlyle saw this, and saw it so clearly, is no doubt partly due to a cause, of which more must be said directly; to his craving for ideas. [Footnote: See p. xciv.] But it was in part owing to his hearty acceptance of the historical method. Both as critic and as historian, he knew—at that time, no man so well—that each nation has its own genius; and justly pronounced the conduct of that nation which "isolates itself from foreign influence, regards its own modes as so many laws of nature, and rejects all that is different as unworthy even of examination", to be "pedantry". [Footnote:Miscellanies, i. 37, 38.] This was the first, and perhaps the most fruitful consequence that he drew from the application of historical ideas to literature. They enlarged his field of comparison; and, by so doing, they gave both width and precision to his definition of criticism.
But there is another—and a more usual, if a narrower—sense of the historical method; and here, too, Carlyle was a pioneer. He was among the first in our country to grasp the importance of studying the literature of a nation, as a whole, and from its earliest monuments, its mythological and heroic legends, downwards to the present. The year 1831—a turning-point in the mental history of Carlyle, for it was also the year in whichSartor Resartustook shape "among the mountain solitudes"—was largely devoted to Essays on the history of German literature, of which one, that on theNibelungenlied, is specially memorable. And some ten years later (1840) he again took up the theme in the first of his lectures on Heroes, which still remains the most enlightening, because the most poetic, account of the primitive Norse faith, or rather successive layers of faith, in our language. [Footnote: SeeLectures on Heroes, p. 20; compareCorpus Poeticum Borealt, i. p. ci. ] But what mainly concerns us here is that Carlyle, in this matter as in others, had clearly realized and as clearly defines the goal which the student, in this case the student of literary history, should set before his eyes.
"A History … of any national Poetry would form, taken in its complete sense, one of the most arduous enterprises any writer could engage in. Poetry, were it the rudest, so it be sincere, is the attempt which man makes to render his existence harmonious, the utmost he can do for that end; it springs, therefore, from his whole feelings, opinions, activity, and takes its character from these. It may be called the music of his whole manner of being; and, historically considered, is the test how far Music, or Freedom, existed therein; how the feeling of Love, of Beauty, and Dignity, could be elicited from that peculiar situation of his, and from the views he there had of Life and Nature, of the Universe, internal and external. Hence, in any measure to understand the Poetry, to estimate its worth and historical meaning, we ask, as a quite fundamental inquiry: What that situation was? Thus the History of a nation's Poetry is the essence of its History, political, economic, scientific, religious. With all these the complete Historian of a national Poetry will be familiar; the national physiognomy, in its finest traits and through its successive stages of growth, will be dear to him: he will discern the grand spiritual Tendency of each period, what was the highest Aim and Enthusiasm of mankind in each, and how one epoch naturally evolved itself from the other. He has to record the highest Aim of a nation, in its successive directions and developments; for by this the Poetry of the nation modulates itself; thisisthe Poetry of the nation." [Footnote: Carlyle,Miscellanies, iii. 292, 293.]
Never has the task of the literary historian been more accurately defined than in this passage; and never do we feel so bitterly the gulf between the ideal and the actual performance, at which more than one man of talent has since tried his hand, as when we read it. It strikes perhaps the first note of Carlyle's lifelong war against "Dryasdust". But it contains at least two other points on which it is well for us to pause.
The first is the inseparable bond which Carlyle saw to exist between the poetry of a nation and its history; the connection which inevitably follows from the fact that both one and the other are the expression of its character. This is a vein of thought that was first struck by Vico and by Montesquieu; but it was left for the German philosophers, in particular Fichte and Hegel, to see its full significance; and Carlyle was the earliest writer in this country to make it his own. It is manifest that the connection between the literature and the history of a nation may be taken from either side. We may illustrate its literature from its history, or its history from its literature. It is on the necessity of the former study that Carlyle dwells in the above. And in the light of later exaggerations, notably those of Taine, it is well to remember, what Carlyle himself would have been the last man to forget, that no man of genius is the creature of his time or his surroundings; and, consequently, that when we have mastered all the circumstances, in Carlyle's phrase the whole "situation", of the poet, we are still only at the beginning of our task. We have still to learn what his genius made out of its surroundings, and what the eye of the poet discovered in the world of traditional belief; in other words, what it was that made him a poet, what it was that he saw and to which all the rest were blind. We have studied the soil; we have yet to study the tree that grew from it and overshadows it. [Footnote: Perhaps the most striking instances of this kind of criticism, both on its strong and its weak side, are to be found in the writings of Mazzini. SeeOpere, ii. and iv.]
In reversing the relation, in reading history by the light of literature, the danger is not so great. The man of genius may, and does, see deeper than his contemporaries; but, for that very reason, he is a surer guide to the tendencies of his time than they. He is above and beyond his time; but, just in so far as he is so, he sees over it and through it. As Shakespeare defined it, his "end, both at the first and now, was and is… to show the very age and body of the time his form and pressure". Some allowance must doubtless be made for the individuality of the poet; for the qualities in which he stands aloof from his time, and in which, therefore, he must not be taken to reflect it. But to make such allowance is a task not beyond the skill of the practised critic; and many instances suggest themselves in which it has, more or less successfully, been done. Witness not a few passages in Michelet'sHistoire de France, and some to be found in the various works of Ranke. [Footnote: As instances may be cited, Michelet's remarks on Rabelais (tome viii. 428-440) and on Moliere (tome xiii. 51-85): or again Ranke'sPapste, i. 486-503 (on Tasso and the artistic tendencies of the middle of the sixteenth century):Franzosische Geschichte, iii. 345-368 (the age of Louis XIV.).] Witness, again, Hegel's illustration of the Greek conception of the family from theAntigoneand theOedipusof Sophocles; or, if we may pass to a somewhat different field, his "construction" of the French Revolution from the religious and metaphysical ideas of Rousseau. [Footnote: Hegel,Phanomenologie des Geistes, pp. 323-348, and pp. 426-436.]
So far as it employs literature to give the key to the outward history of a nation or to the growth of its spiritual faith, it is clear that the historical method ceases to be, in the strict sense of the word, a literary instrument. It implies certainly that a literary judgment has been passed; but, once passed, that judgment is used for ends that lie altogether apart from the interests of literature. But it is idle to consider that literature loses caste by lending itself to such a purpose. It would be wiser to say that it gains by anything that may add to its fruitfulness and instructiveness. In any case, and whether it pleases us or no, this is one of the things that the historical method has done for literature; and neither Carlyle, nor any other thinker of the century, would have been minded to disavow it.
This brings us to the second point that calls for remark in the foregoing quotation from Carlyle. Throughout he assumes that the matter of the poet is no less important than his manner. And here again he dwells on an aspect of literature that previous, and later, critics have tended to throw into the shade. That Carlyle should have been led to assert, and even at times to exaggerate, the claims of thought in imaginative work was inevitable; and that, not only from his temperament, but from those principles of his teaching that we have already noticed. If the poetry of a nation be indeed the expression of its spiritual aims, then it is clear that among those aims must be numbered its craving to make the world intelligible to itself, and to comprehend the working of God both within man and around him. Not that Carlyle shows any disposition to limit "thought" to its more abstract forms; on the contrary, it is on the sense of "music, love, and beauty" that he specially insists. What he does demand is that these shall be not merely outward adornments, but the instinctive utterance of a deeper harmony within; that they shall be such as not merely to "furnish a languid mind with fantastic shows and indolent emotions, but to incorporate the everlasting reason of man in forms visible to his sense, and suitable to it". [Footnote: Miscellanies, i. 297.] The "reason" is no less necessary to poetry than its sensible form; and whether its utterance be direct or indirect, that is a matter for the genius of the individual poet to decide.Gott und Welt, we may be sure Carlyle would have said, is poetry as legitimate asDer Erlkonigor the songs of Mignon.
In this connection he more than once appeals to the doctrine of Fichte, one of the few writers whom he was willing to recognize as his teachers. "According to Fichte, there is a 'divine idea' pervading the visible universe; which visible universe is indeed but its symbol and sensible manifestation, having in itself no meaning, or even true existence independent of it. To the mass of men this divine idea of the world lies hidden; yet to discern it, to seize it, and live wholly in it, is the condition of all genuine virtue, knowledge, freedom; and the end, therefore, of all spiritual effort in every age. Literary men are the appointed interpreters of this divine idea; a perpetual priesthood, we might say, standing forth, generation after generation, as the dispensers and living types of God's everlasting wisdom, to show it in their writings and actions, in such particular form as their own particular times require it in. For each age, by the law of its nature, is different from every other age, and demands a different representation of the divine idea, the essence of which is the same in all; so that the literary man of one century is only by mediation and reinterpretation applicable to the wants of another." [Footnote: Ib., p. 69. There is a similar passage in theLectures on Heroes(Lec. v.), p. 145. In each case the reference is to Fichte's LecturesUeber das Wesen des Gelehrten(1805), especially to lectures i., ii., and x,; Fichte's Werke, vi. 350-371, 439-447.]
The particular form of Fichte's teaching may still sound unfamiliar enough. But in substance it has had the deepest influence on the aims and methods of criticism; and, so far as England is concerned, this is mainly due to the genius of Carlyle. Compare the criticism of the last century with that of the present, and we at once see the change that has come over the temper and instincts of Englishmen in this matter.
When Johnson, or the reviewers of the next generation, quitted—as they seldom did quit—the ground of external form and regularity and logical coherence, it was only to ask: Is this work, this poem or this novel, in conformity with the traditional conventions of respectability, is it such as can be put into the hands of boys and girls? To them this was the one ground on which the matter of literature, as apart from the beggarly elements of its form, could come under the cognizance of the critic. And this narrowness, a narrowness which belonged at least in equal measure to the official criticism of the French, naturally begot a reaction almost as narrow as itself. The cry of "art for art's sake", a cry raised in France at the moment when Carlyle was beginning his work in England, must be regarded as a protest against the moralizing bigotry of the classical school no less than against its antiquated formalities. The men who raised it were themselves not free from the charge of formalism; but the forms they worshipped were at least those inspired by the spontaneous genius of the artist, not the mechanical rules inherited from the traditions of the past. Nor, whatever may be the case with those who have taken it up in our own day, must the cry be pressed too rigorously against the men of 1830. The very man, on whom it was commonly fathered, was known to disavow it; and certainly in his own works, in their burning humanity and their "passion for reforming the world", was the first to set it at defiance. [Footnote: See Hugo'sWilliam Shakespeare, p. 288.]
The moralist and the formalist still make their voice heard, and will always do so. But since Carlyle wrote, it is certain that a wider, a more fruitful, view of criticism has gained ground among us. And, if it be asked where lies the precise difference between such a view and that which satisfied the critics of an earlier day, the answer must be, that we are no longer contented to rest upon the outward form of a work of art, still less upon its conventional morality. We demand to learn what is the idea, of which the outward form is the harmonious utterance; and which, just because the form is individual, must itself too have more or less of originality and power. We are resolved to know what is the artist's peculiar fashion of conceiving life, what is his insight, that which he has to teach us of God and man and nature. "Poetry", said Wordsworth, "is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science." [Footnote: Preface toLyrical Balladsby Wordsworth: Works, vi. 328.] And Wordsworth is echoed by Shelley. [Footnote: "Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred."—Shelley,Defence of Poetry, p. 33.] But it is again to Carlyle that we must turn for the explicit application of these ideas to criticism:—