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Title: English literary criticism

Author:  Various

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ENGLISH LITERARY CRITICISM



C. E. VAUGHAN

Edited by C H. HERFORD, Litt. D



WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY C. E. VAUGHAN





PREFACE.


In the following pages my aim has been to sketch the development of
criticism, and particularly of critical method, in England; and to
illustrate each phase of its growth by one or two samples taken from
the most typical writers. I have in no way attempted to make a full
collection of what might be thought the most striking pieces of
criticism to be found in our literature.

Owing to the great wealth of such writing produced during the last
sixty years, it is clearly impossible to give so complete a picture
of what has been done in this period as in others. I am obliged to
content myself with one specimen of one writer. But that is the writer
who, in the opinion of many, is the most remarkable of all English
critics. For the permission, so kindly granted, to include the Essay
on Sandro Botticelli I desire to offer my sincerest thanks to Messrs.
Macmillan and to the other representatives of the late Mr. Pater.

It may seem strange to close a volume of literary criticism with a
study on the work and temperament of a painter. I have been led to do
so for more than one reason. A noticeable tendency of modern criticism,
from the time of Burke and Lessing, has been to break down the barrier
between poetry and the kindred arts; and it is perhaps well that this
tendency should find expression in the following selection. But a
further reason is that Mr. Pater was never so much himself, was never
so entirely master of his craft, as when interpreting the secrets of
form and colour. Most of all was this the case when he had chosen for
his theme one who, like Botticelli, "is before all things a poetical
painter".

C. E. VAUGHAN.




CONTENTS.


INTRODUCTION

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY--

I. An Apology for Poetry

JOHN DRYDEN--

II. Preface to the Fables

SAMUEL JOHNSON--

III. On the Metaphysical Poets

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE--

IV. On Poetic Genius and Poetic Diction

WILLIAM HAZLITT--

V. On Poetry in General

CHARLES LAMB--

VI. On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century VII. On Webster's
_Duchess of Malfi_ VIII. On Ford's _Broken Heart_

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY--

IX. A Defence of Poetry

THOMAS CARLYLE--

X. Goethe

WALTER PATER--

XI. Sandro Botticelli




INTRODUCTION.


In England, as elsewhere, criticism was a late birth of the literary
spirit. English poets had sung and literary prose been written for
centuries before it struck men to ask themselves, What is the secret
of the power that these things have on our mind, and by what principles
are they to be judged? And it could hardly have been otherwise.
Criticism is a self-conscious art, and could not have arisen in an age
of intellectual childhood. It is a derivative art, and could scarcely
have come into being without a large body of literature to suggest
canons of judgment, and to furnish instances of their application.

The age of Chaucer might have been expected to bring with it a new
departure. It was an age of self-scrutiny and of bold experiment. A
new world of thought and imagination had dawned upon it; and a new
literature, that of Italy, was spread before it. Yet who shall say
that the facts answer to these expectations? In the writings of Chaucer
himself a keen eye, it is true, may discern the faint beginnings of
the critical spirit. No poet has written with more nicely calculated
art; none has passed a cooler judgment upon the popular taste of his
generation. We know that Chaucer despised the "false gallop" of
chivalrous verse; we know that he had small respect for the marvels
of Arthurian romance. And his admiration is at least as frank as his
contempt. What poet has felt and avowed a deeper reverence for the
great Latins? What poet has been so alert to recognize the
master-spirits of his own time and his father's? De Meung and Granson
among the French--Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio of the Italians--each
comes in for his share of praise from Chaucer, or of the princely
borrowings which are still more eloquent than praise.

Yet, for all this, Chaucer is far indeed from founding the art of
criticism. His business was to create, and not to criticise. And, had
he set himself to do so, there is no warrant that his success would
have been great. In many ways he was still in bondage to the mediaval,
and wholly uncritical, tradition. One classic, we may almost say, was
as good to him as another. He seems to have placed Ovid on a line with
Virgil; and the company in his House of Fame is undeniably mixed. His
judgments have the healthy instinct of the consummate artist. They do
not show, as those of his master, Petrarch, unquestionably do, the
discrimination and the tact of the born critic.

For this, or for any approach to it, English literature had to wait
for yet two centuries more. In the strict sense, criticism did not
begin till the age of Elizabeth; and, like much else in our literature,
it was largely due to the passion for classical study, so strongly
marked in the poets and dramatists of Shakespeare's youth, and
inaugurated by Surrey and others in the previous generation. These
conditions are in themselves significant. They serve to explain much
both of the strength and the weakness of criticism, as it has grown
up on English soil. From the Elizabethans to Milton, from Milton to
Johnson, English criticism was dominated by constant reference to
classical models. In the latter half of this period the influence of
these models, on the whole, was harmful. It acted as a curb rather
than as a spur to the imagination of poets; it tended to cripple rather
than give energy to the judgment of critics. But in earlier days it
was not so. For nearly a century the influence of classical masterpieces
was altogether for good. It was not the regularity but the richness,
not the self-restraint but the freedom, of the ancients that came home
to poets such as Marlowe, or even to critics such as Meres. And if
adventurous spirits, like Spenser and Sidney, were for a time misled
into the vain attempt to graft exotic forms upon the homely growths
of native poetry, they soon saw their mistake and revolted in silence
against the ridiculous pedant who preferred the limping hexameters of
the _Arcadia_ to Sidney's sonnets, and the spavined iambics of Spenser
to the _Faerie Queene_.

In the main, the worship of the classics seems to have counted at this
time rather for freedom than restraint. And it is well that it was so.
Yet restraint too was necessary; and, like freedom, it was found--
though in less ample measure--through devotion to the classics. There
can be little doubt that, consciously or no, the Elizabethans, with
their quick eye for beauty of every kind, were swayed, as men in all
ages have been swayed, by the finely chiselled forms of classical art.
The besetting sin of their imagination was the tendency to run riot;
and it may well be that, save for the restraining influence of ancient
poetry, they would have sinned in this matter still more boldly than
they did. Yet the chastening power of classical models may be easily
overrated. And we cannot but notice that it was precisely where the
classical influence was strongest that the force of imagination was
the least under control. Jonson apart, there were no more ardent
disciples of the ancients than Marlowe and Chapman. And no poets of
that age are so open to the charge of extravagance as they.  It is
with Milton that the chastening influence of the ancients first makes
itself definitely felt. But Milton was no less alive to the fervour
than to the self-mastery of his classical models. And it was not till
the Restoration that "correctness" was recognized as the highest, if
not the only, quality of the ancients, or accepted as the one worthy
object of poetic effort. For more than a century correctness remained
the idol both of poetry and of criticism in England; and nothing less
than the furious onslaught of the Lyrical Ballads was needed to
overthrow it. Then the floodgates were opened. A new era both of poetic
and critical energy had dawned.

Thus the history of English criticism, like that of English literature,
divides itself roughly into three periods. The first is the period of
the Elizabethans and of Milton; the second is from the Restoration to
the French Revolution; the third from the Revolution to the present
day. The typical critic of the first period is Sidney; Dryden opens
and Johnson closes the second; the third, a period of far more varied
tendencies than either of the others, is perhaps most fitly represented
by Lamb, Hazlitt, and Carlyle. It will be the aim of the following
pages to sketch the broader outlines of the course that critical inquiry
has taken in each.

I. The first thing that strikes us in the early attempts of criticism
is that its problems are to a large extent remote from those which
have engrossed critics of more recent times. There is little attempt
to appraise accurately the worth of individual authors; still less,
to find out the secret of their power, or to lay bare the hidden lines
of thought on which their imagination had set itself to work. The first
aim both of Puttenham and of Webbe, the pioneers of Elizabethan
criticism, was either to classify writers according to the subjects
they treated and the literary form that each had made his own, or to
analyse the metre and other more technical elements of their poetry.

But this, after all, was the natural course in the infancy of the
study. All science begins with classification; and all classification
with the external and the obvious. The Greek critics could take no
step forward until they had classified all poems as either lyric, epic,
or dramatic. And how necessary that division was may be seen from the
length at which Plato discusses the nature of the distinction in the
second book of the Republic. Even Aristotle, in this as in other things
the 'master of those who know', devotes no inconsiderable space of the
Poetics to technical matters such as the analysis of vocal sounds, and
the aptness of different metres to different forms of poetic thought.

There is another matter in which the methods of Elizabethan critics
run side by side with those of the early Greeks. In Plato and Aristotle
we are not seldom startled by the sudden transition from questions of
form to the deepest problems suggested by imaginative art. The same
is true of the Elizabethan critics. It is doubtless true that the
latter give a proportionally larger space to the more technical sides
of the subject than their Greek forerunners. They could not reasonably
be expected to write with the width of view that all the world has
admired in Aristotle and Plato. Moreover, they were from the first
confronted with a practical difficulty from which the Greek critics
were so fortunate as to be free. Was rhyme a "brutish" form of verse?
and, if so, was its place to be taken by the alliterative rhythm, so
dear to the older poets, or by an importation of classical metres,
such as was attempted by Sidney and Spenser, and enforced by the
unwearied lectures of Harvey and of Webbe? This, however technical,
was a fundamental question; and, until it was settled, there was but
little use in debating the weightier matters of the law.

The discussion, which might have raged for ever among the critics, was
happily cut short by the healthy instinct of the poets. Against
alliteration the question had already been given by default. Revived,
after long disuse, by Langland and other poets of the West Midlands
in the fourteenth century, it had soon again been swept out of fashion
by the irresistible charm of the genius of Chaucer. The _Tale of
Gamelyn_, dating apparently from the first quarter of the fifteenth
century, is probably the last poem of note in which the once universal
metre is even partially employed. And what could prove more clearly
that the old metrical form was dead? The rough rhythm of early English
poetry, it is true, is kept; but alliteration is dropped, and its place
is taken by rhyme.

Nor were the efforts to impose classical measures on English poetry
more blest in their results. The very men on whom the literary
Romanizers had fixed their hopes were the first to abandon the
enterprise in despair. If any genius was equal to the task of
naturalizing hexameters in a language where strict quantity is unknown,
it was the genius of Spenser. But Spenser soon ranged himself heart
and soul with the champions of rhyme; his very name has passed down
to us as a synonym for the most elaborate of all rhyming stanzas that
have taken root in our verse. For the moment, rhyme had fairly driven
all rivals from the field. Over the lyric its sway was undisputed. In
narrative poetry, where its fitness was far more disputable, it
maintained its hold till the closing years of Milton. In the drama
itself, where its triumph would have been fatal, it disputed the ground
inch by inch against the magnificent instrument devised by Surrey and
perfected by Marlowe.

It was during the ten years preceding the publication of Webbe's
_Discourse_ (1586) that this controversy seems to have been hottest.
From the first, perhaps, it bulked more largely with the critics than
with the poets themselves. Certainly it allowed both poets and critics
sufficient leisure for the far more important controversy which has
left an enduring monument in Sidney's _Apologie for Poetrie_. [Footnote:
The most important pieces of Elizabethan criticism are:--

  Gosson's _School of Abuse_, 1579.
  Lodge's _Defence of Poetry, Musick, and Stage Plays_, 1579(?).
  Sidney's _Apologie for Poetrie_, 1580(?).
  Webbe's _Discourse of English Poetrie_, 1586.
  Puttenham's _Arte of English Poesie_, 1589.
  Harington's _Apologie of Poetrie_, 1591.
  Meres' _Palladis Tamia_, 1598.
  Campion's _Observations in the Arte of English Poesie_, 1602.
  Daniel's _Defence of Ryme_, 1603.]

The historical bearing of Sidney's treatise has been too commonly
overlooked. It forms, in truth, one move in the long struggle which
ended only with the restoration of Charles II.; or, to speak more
accurately, which has lasted, in a milder form, to the present day.
In its immediate object it was a reply to the Puritan assaults upon
the theatre; in its ultimate scope, a defence of imaginative art against
the suspicions with which men of high but narrow purpose have always,
consciously or unconsciously, tended to regard it. It is a noble plea
for liberty, directed no less against the unwilling scruples of
idealists, such as Plato or Rousseau, than against the ruthless bigotry
of practical moralists and religious partisans.

From the first dawn of the Elizabethan drama, the stricter Protestants
had declared war upon the stage. Intrenched within the city they were
at once able to drive the theatres beyond the walls (1575); just as
seventy years later, when it had seized the reins of central government,
the same party, embittered by a thousand insults and brutalities,
hastened to close the theatres altogether. It would be an evident
mistake to suppose that this was merely a municipal prejudice, or to
forget that the city council was backed by a large body of serious
opinion throughout the country. A proof of this, if proof were needed,
is to be found in the circumstances that gave rise to the _Apologie_
of Sidney.

The attack on the stage had been opened by the corporation and the
clergy. It was soon joined by the men of letters. And the essay of
Sidney was an answer neither to a town councillor, nor to a preacher,
but to a former dramatist and actor. This was Stephen Gosson, author
of the _School of Abuse_. The style of Gosson's pamphlet is nothing
if not literary. It is full of the glittering conceits and the fluent
rhetoric which the ready talent of Lyly had just brought into currency.
It is euphuism of the purest water, with all the merits and all the
drawbacks of the euphuistic manner. For that very reason the blow was
felt the more keenly. It was violently resented as treason by the
playwrights and journalists who still professed to reckon Gosson among
their ranks. [Footnote: Lodge writes, "I should blush from a Player
to become an enviouse Preacher".--_Ancient Critical Essays_, ed.
Haslewood, ii. 7.]

A war of pamphlets followed, conducted with the usual fury of literary
men. Gosson on the one side, Lodge, the dramatist, upon the other,
exchanged compliments with an energy which showed that one at least
of them had not in vain graduated in "the school of abuse". "Raw
devises", "hudder mudder", "guts and garbage", such are the phrases
hurled by Gosson at the arguments and style of his opponents; "bawdy
charms", "the very butchery of Christian souls", are samples of the
names fastened by him upon the cause which they defended. [Footnote:
Lodge, in his _Defence of Poetry, Musick, and Stage Plays_ (1579 or
1580), is hardly less scurrilous. "There came into my hand lately a
little (would God a wittye) pamphelet.... Being by me advisedly wayed,
I find it the oftscome of imperfections, the writer fuller of words
than judgement, the matter certainely as ridiculus as serius."--In
_Ancient Critical Essays_, ii. 5.]

From this war of words Sidney turned loftily aside. Pointedly challenged
at the outset--for the first and second pamphlets of Gosson had, without
permission, been dedicated to "the right noble gentleman, Maister
Philip Sidney"--he seldom alludes to the arguments, and never once
mentions the name of Gosson. He wrote to satisfy his own mind, and not
to win glory in the world of letters. And thus his _Apologie_, though
it seems to have been composed while the controversy was still fresh
in men's memory, was not published until nearly ten years after his
death (1595). It was not written for controversy, but for truth. From
the first page it rises into the atmosphere of calm, in which alone
great questions can be profitably discussed.

The _Apologie_ of Sidney is, in truth, what would now be called a
Philosophy of Poetry. It is philosophy taken from the side of the
moralist; for that was the side to which the disputants had confined
themselves, and in which--altogether apart from the example of
others--the interest of Sidney, as man of action, inevitably lay. It
is philosophy as conceived by the mind of a poet. But, none the less,
it pierces to the eternal problems which underlie the workings of all
creative art, and presents them with a force, for the like of which
we must go back to Plato and Aristotle, or look forward to the
philosophers and inspired critics of a time nearer our own. It recalls
the _Phadrus_ and the _Ion_; it anticipates the utterance of a still
more kindred spirit, the _Defence of Poetry_ by Shelley.

Philosopher as he was, Sidney arranges his thoughts in the loose order
of the poet or the orator. It may be well, therefore, to give a brief
sketch of his argument; and to do so without much regard to the
arrangement of the _Apologie_ itself.

The main argument of the _Apologie_ may indeed be called a commentary
on the saying of Aristotle, cited by Sidney himself, that "Poetry is
more philosophical and more studiously serious than History"--that is,
as Sidney interprets it, than the scientific fact of any kind; or
again, on that yet more pregnant saying of Shelley, that "poets are
the unacknowledged legislators of the world". Gosson had denounced
poetry as "the vizard of vanity, wantonness, and folly"; or, in Sidney's
paraphrase, as "the mother of lies and the nurse of abuse". Sidney
replies by urging that of all arts poetry is the most true and the
most necessary to men.

All learning, he pleads, and all culture begin with poetry. Philosophy,
religion, and history herself, speak through the lips of poetry. There
is indeed a sense in which poetry stands on higher ground than any
science. There is no science, not even metaphysics, the queen of all
sciences, that does not "build upon nature", and that is not, so far,
limited by the facts of nature. The poet alone is "not tied to any
such subjection"; he alone "freely ranges within the zodiac of his own
wit".

This, no doubt, is dangerous ground, and it is enforced by still more
dangerous illustrations. But Sidney at once guards himself by insisting,
as Plato had done before him, that the poet too is bound by laws which
he finds but does not make; they are, however, laws not of fact but
of thought, the laws of the idea--that is, of the inmost truth of
things, and of God. Hence it is that the works of the poet seem to
come from God, rather than from man. They stand rather on a level with
nature, the material of all sciences, than with the sciences themselves,
which are nothing more than man's interpretation of nature. In some
sense, indeed, they are above nature; they stand midway between nature
and him who created nature. They are a first nature, "beyond and over
the works of that second nature". For they are the self-revelation of
that which is the noblest work of God, and which in them finds utterance
at its best and brightest.

Thus, so far from being the "mother of lies", poetry is the highest
form of truth. Avowedly so, in what men have always recognized to be
the noblest poetry, the psalms and parables and other writings that
"do imitate the inconceivable excellences of God". To a less degree,
but still avowedly, in that poetry whose theme is philosophy or history.
And so essentially, however men may overlook it, in that poetry which,
professedly dealing with human life as we know it, does not content
itself with reproducing the character of this man or that, but "reined
only with learned discretion, ranges into the divine consideration of
what may be and should be"--of the universal and complete rather than
the individual and imperfect.

But, if truth be the essence of the poet's work, "the right describing
note to know a poet by", it would seem that the outward form of it,
the metre and the ornament, are of little moment. "There have been
many most excellent poets that never versified." And verse is nothing
more than a means, and not the only means, of securing a "fitting
raiment" for their matter and suiting their manner "according to the
dignity of their subject". In this suggestion--that harmonious prose
may, for certain forms of poetic thought, be hardly less suitable than
verse--Sidney is at one with Shelley. And neither critic must be taken
to disparage verse, or to mean more than that the matter, the
conception, is the soul of poetry, and that the form is only of moment
so far as it aids--as undoubtedly it does aid--to "reveal the soul
within". It is rather as a witness to the whole scope of their argument
than as a particular doctrine, to be left or taken, that the suggestion
is most profitably regarded.

Having settled the speculative base of poetry, Sidney turns to a yet
more cherished theme, its influence upon character and action. The
"highest end" of all knowledge, he urges, is "the knowledge of a man's
self, with the end of well doing and not of well knowing only". Now
by no artist is this end served so perfectly as by the poet. His only
serious rivals are the moral philosopher and the historian. But neither
of these flies so straight to his mark as the poet. The one gives
precepts that fire no heart to action; the other gives examples without
the precepts that should interpret and control them. The one lives in
the world of ideas, the other in the world of hard and literal fact.
Neither, therefore, has power to bridge the gulf that parts thought
from action; neither can hope to take hold of beings in whose life,
by its very nature, thought and action are indissolubly interwoven.
"Now doth the peerless poet perform both. For whatsoever the philosopher
saith should be done, he giveth a perfect picture of it in some one,
by whom he presupposeth it was done. So as he coupleth the general
notion with the particular example .... Therein of all sciences is our
poet the monarch."

Once more we feel that Sidney is treading upon dangerous ground. But
once more he saves himself by giving a wider definition both to thought
and action, both to "well knowing and to well doing", than is common
with moralists. By the former most moralists are apt to understand the
bare "precept", thought as crystallized in its immediate bearing upon
action. By the latter they commonly mean the passive rather than the
active virtues, temperance and self-restraint rather than energy and
resolve. From both these limitations Sidney, on the whole, is nobly
free.

To him the "delight which is all the good fellow poet seemeth to
promise", "the words set in delightful proportion and prepared for the
well enchanting skill of music", "the tale which holdeth children from
play and old men from the chimney corner"--all these, its indefinable
and purely artistic elements, are an inseparable part of the "wisdom"
which poetry has to offer. In other words, it is the frame of mind
produced by poetry, the "thought hardly to be packed into the narrow
act", no less than the prompting to this action or to that, which
Sidney values in the work of the poet. And if this be true, none but
the most fanatical champion of "art for art's sake" will dispute the
justice of his demands on poetry. None but such will deny that, whether
by attuning the mind to beauty and nobleness, or by means yet more
direct and obvious, art must have some bearing upon the life of man
and on the habitual temper of his soul. No doubt, we might have wished
that, in widening the scope of poetry as a moral influence, Sidney had
been yet more explicit than in fact he is. We cannot but regret that,
however unjustly, he should have laid himself open to the charge of
desiring to turn poetry into sermons. But it is bare justice to point
out that such a charge cannot fairly be brought against him; or that
it can only be brought with such qualifications as rob it of its sting.

On the other matter the record of Sidney is yet clearer. By "well
doing" he does not mean, as is too often meant, mere abstinence from
evil, but the active pursuit of whatsoever things are manly, noble,
and of good report. It is not only the "temperance of Diomedes"--
though temperance too may be conceived as an active virtue--but the
wisdom of Ulysses, the patriotism of Aneas, "the soon repenting pride
of Agamemnon", the valour of Achilles--it is courage, above all courage,
that stirs his soul in the great works of ancient poetry. It is the
same quality that moves him in the ballads and romances of the moderns.
"Certainly I must confess my own barbarousness; I never heard the old
song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than
with a trumpet." And again: "Truly I have known men that, even with
reading _Amadis de Gaule_ (which, God knoweth, wanteth much of a perfect
poesy), have found their hearts moved to the exercise of courtesy,
liberality, and especially courage." The man who wrote these words had
no starved conception of what poetry should be.

Once again. Sidney has small patience with those who would limit art
by the banishment of all that recalls the baser side of life. "Now,
as in geometry, the oblique must be known as well as the right. So in
the actions of our life, who seeth not the filthiness of evil, wanteth
a great foil to perceive the beauty of virtue. This doth the comedy
handle so ... as with hearing it we get, as it were, an experience....
So that the right use of comedy will, I think, by no body be blamed."
No doubt, the moral aspect of comedy is here marked with what must be
called immoderate stress. Here, too, as when he deals with the kindred
side of tragedy, Sidney demands that the poet shall, in his villains,
"show you nothing that is not to be shunned"; in other words, that,
so far as it paints evil, comedy shall take the form of satire.

But, even with this restriction, it must be allowed that Sidney takes
a wider view than might appear at a hasty reading; wider, it is
probable, than was at all common among the men of his generation. No
Shakespeare had yet arisen to touch the baser qualities of men with
a gleam of heroism or to humanize the most stoical endurance with a
strain of weakness. And even Shakespeare, in turning from the practice
to the theory of his art, could find no words very different from those
of Sidney. To him, as to Sidney, the aim of the drama is "to show
virtue her own image and scorn her own feature"; though by a saving
clause, which Sidney perhaps would hardly have accepted, it is further
defined as being to show "the very age and body of the time his form
and pressure". Yet it must be remembered that Sidney is loud in praise
of so unflinching a portraiture of life, base and noble, as Chaucer's
_Troilus and Cressida_. And on the whole it remains true that the
limitations of Sidney are the limitations of his age, while his
generosity is his own.

The remainder of the _Apologie_ is necessarily of slighter texture.
Apart from the examination of Plato's banishment of the poets--a theme
on which Harington also discourses, though with less weight than
Sidney--it is concerned mainly with two subjects: an assertion that
each form of poetry has its peculiar moral import, and a lament over
the decay into which English poetry had fallen in the sixteenth century.

Such a lament sounds strangely to us, accustomed as we are to regard
the age of Elizabeth, already half ended when Sidney wrote, as the
most fruitful period of our literature. But, when the _Apologie_ was
composed, no one of the authors by whose fame the Elizabethan age is
now commonly known--Sidney himself and Spenser alone excepted--had
begun to write. English poetry was about to wake from the long night
that lies between the age of Chaucer and the age of Shakespeare. But
it was not yet fully awakened. And the want of a full and free life
in creative art goes far to account for the shortcomings of Elizabethan
criticism.

Vague the Elizabethan critics undeniably are; they tend to lose
themselves either in far-fetched analogies or in generalities that
have but a slight bearing upon the distinctive problems of literary
appreciation. When not vague, they are apt to fritter their strength
on technical details which, important to them, have long lost their
significance for the student of literature. But both technicalities
and vagueness may be largely traced to the uncertain practice of the
poets upon whom, in the first instance, their criticism was based. The
work of Surrey and of Sackville was tentative; that of Webbe and
Puttenham was necessarily the same. It is the more honour to Sidney
that, shackled as he was by conditions from which no man could escape
altogether, he should have struck a note at once so deep and so strong
as is sounded in the _Apologie_.

II. In turning from Sidney to Dryden we pass into a different world.
The philosophy, the moral fervour, the prophetic strain of the
Elizabethan critic have vanished. Their place is taken by qualities
less stirring in themselves, but more akin to those that modern times
have been apt to associate with criticism. In fact, whatever qualities
we now demand from a critic may be found at least foreshadowed, and
commonly much more than foreshadowed, in Dryden. Dryden is master of
comparative criticism: he has something of the historical method; he
is unrivalled in the art of seizing the distinctive qualities of his
author and of setting them before us with the lightest touch. His very
style, so pointed yet so easy, is enough in itself to mark the gulf
that lies between the age of Elizabeth and the age of the Restoration.
All the Elizabethan critics, Sidney himself hardly excepted, bore some
trace of the schoolmaster. Dryden was the first to meet his readers
entirely as an equal, and talk to them as a friend with friends. It
is Dryden, and not Sainte-Beuve, who is the true father of the literary
_causerie_; and he still remains its unequalled master. There may be
other methods of striking the right note in literary criticism. Lamb
showed that there may be; so did Mr. Pater. But few indeed are the
critics who have known how to attune the mind of the reader to a
subject, which beyond all others cries out for harmonious treatment,
so skilfully as Dryden.

That the first great critic should come with the Restoration, was only
to be expected. The age of Elizabeth was essentially a creative age.
The imagination of men was too busy to leave room for self-scrutiny.
Their thoughts took shape so rapidly that there was no time to think
about the manner of their coming. Not indeed that there is, as has
sometimes been urged, any inherent strife between the creative and the
critical spirit. A great poet, we can learn from Goethe and Coleridge,
may also be a great critic. More than that: without some touch of
poetry in himself, no man can hope to do more than hack-work as a
critic of others. Yet it may safely be said that, if no critical
tradition exists in a nation, it is not an age of passionate creation,
such as was that of Marlowe and Shakespeare, that will found it. With
all their alertness, with all their wide outlook, with all their zeal
for classical models, the men of that time were too much of children,
too much beneath the spell of their own genius, to be critics. Compare
them with the great writers of other ages; and we feel instinctively
that, in spite of their surroundings, they have far more of vital
kindred with Homer or the creators of the mediaval epic, than with the
Greek dramatists--Aschylus excepted--or with Dante or with Goethe. The
"freshness of the early world" is still upon them; neither they nor
their contemporaries were born to the task of weighing and pondering,
which is the birthright of the critic.

It was far otherwise with the men of the Restoration. The creative
impulse of a century had at length spent its force. For the first time
since Wyatt and Surrey, England deserted the great themes of literature,
the heroic passions of Tamburlaine and Faustus, of Lear and Othello,
for the trivial round of social portraiture and didactic discourse;
for _Essays on Satire_ and _on Translated Verse_, for the Tea-Table
of the _Spectator_, for dreary exercises on the _Pleasures of the
Imagination_ and the _Art of Preserving Health_. A new era had opened.
It was the day of small things.

Yet it would be wrong to regard the new movement as merely negative.
Had that been all, it would be impossible to account for the passionate
enthusiasm it aroused in those who came beneath its spell; an enthusiasm
which lived long after the movement itself was spent, and which--except
in so far as it led to absurd comparisons with the Elizabethans--was
abundantly justified by the genius of Butler and Dryden, of Congreve
and Swift and Pope. Negative, on one side, the ideal of Restoration
and Augustan poetry undoubtedly was. It was a reaction against the
"unchartered freedom", the real or fancied extravagances, of the
Elizabethan poets. But, on the higher side, it was no less positive,
though doubtless far less noble, than the ideal it displaced.

The great writers of the eighty years following the Restoration were
consumed by a passion for observation--observation of the men and
things that lay immediately around them. They may have seen but little;
but what they did see, they grasped with surprising force and clearness.
They may not have gone far beneath the surface; but, so far as they
went, their work was a model of acuteness and precision. This was the
secret of their power. To this may be traced their victory in the
various tasks that they undertook.

Hence, on the one hand, their success in painting the manners of their
own day--a task from which, with some notable exceptions, the greatest
of the Elizabethans had been apt to shrink, as from something alien
to their genius; and, on the other hand, the range and keenness of
their satire. Hence, finally, the originality of their work in
criticism, and their new departure in philosophy. The energies of these
men were diverse: but all sprang from the same root--from their
invincible resolve to see and understand their world; to probe life,
as they knew it, to the bottom.

Thus the new turn given to criticism by Dryden was part of a far-
reaching intellectual movement; a movement no less positive and self-
contained than, in another aspect, it was negative and reactionary.
And it is only when taken as part of that movement, as side by side
with the philosophy of Locke and the satire of Swift or Pope, that its
true meaning can be understood. Nor is it the least important or the
least attractive of Dryden's qualities, as a critic, that both the
positive and the negative elements of the prevailing tendency--both
the determination to understand and the wish to bring all things under
rule--should make themselves felt so strongly and, on the whole, so
harmoniously in his Essays. No man could have felt more keenly the
shortcomings of the Elizabethan writers. No man could have set greater
store by that "art of writing easily" which was the chief pride of the
Restoration poets. Yet no man has ever felt a juster admiration for
the great writers of the opposite school; and no man has expressed his
reverence for them in more glowing words. The highest eulogy that has
yet been passed on Milton, the most discriminating but at the same
time the most generous tribute that has ever been offered to
Shakespeare--both these are to be found in Dryden. And they are to be
found in company with a perception, at once reasoned and instinctive,
of what criticism means, that was altogether new to English literature.

The finest and most characteristic of Dryden's critical writings--but
it is unfortunately also the longest--is without doubt the _Essay of
Dramatic Poesy_. The subject was one peculiarly well suited to Dryden's
genius. It touched a burning question of the day, and it opened the
door for a discussion of the deeper principles of the drama. The _Essay_
itself forms part of a long controversy between Dryden and his
brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard. The dispute was opened by Dryden's
preface to his tragi-comedy, _The Rival Ladies_, published probably,
as it was certainly first acted, in 1664; and in the beginning Dryden,
then first rising [Footnote: "To a play at the King's house, _The Rival
Ladies_, a very innocent and most pretty witty play"--is Pepys' entry
for August 4, 1664: _Diary_, ii. 155. Contrast his contemptuous
description of Dryden's first comedy, _The Wild Gallant_, in the
preceding year (Feb. 23)--"So poor a thing as I never saw in my life
almost".--_Ib_., i. 390.] into fame as a dramatist, confines himself
to pleading the cause of rhyme against blank verse in dramatic writing.
[Footnote: Tragedy alone is mentioned by name [_English Garner_, in.
490, 491]. But, from the general drift of the argument, it seems
probable that Dryden was speaking of the drama in general. At a later
stage of the dispute, however, he distinguishes between tragedy and
comedy, and allows that the arguments in favour of rhyme apply only
to the former--a curious inversion of the truth, as it would appear
to the modern mind.--_Ib_., pp. 561, 566.] Howard--who, it may
reasonably be guessed, had had some brushes with Dryden over their
joint tragedy, _The Indian Queen_--at once took up the cudgels. He had
written rhymed plays himself, it is true; the four plays, to which his
attack on rhyme was prefixed, were such; but he saw a chance of paying
off old scores against his brother-in-law, and he could not resist it.
Dryden began his reply at once; but three years passed before it was
published. And the world has no reason to regret his tardiness. There
are few writings of which we can say with greater certainty, as Dryden
himself said of a more questionable achievement,

  'T is not the hasty product of a day,
  But the well-ripened fruit of wise delay.

The very form of the _Essay_ bears witness to the spirit in which it
is written. It is cast as a dialogue, "related"--as Dryden truly
says--"without passion or interest, and leaving the reader to decide
in favour of which part he shall judge most reasonable". The balance
between opposing views is held as evenly as may be. It is a search for
truth, carried out in the "rude and undigested manner" of a friendly
conversation. Roughly speaking, the subjects of the _Essay_ are two.
The first, and the more slightly treated, is the quarrel of rhyme
against blank verse. The second is the far more important question,
How far is the dramatist bound by conventional restrictions? The
former--a revival under a new form of a dispute already waged by the
Elizabethans--leads Dryden to sift the claims of the "heroic drama";
and his treatment of it has the special charm belonging to an author's
defence of his artistic hearth and home. The latter is a theme which,
under some shape or other, will be with us wherever the stage itself
has a place in our life.

This is not the place to discuss at length the origin or the historical
justification of the Heroic Drama. There is perhaps no form of art
that so clearly marks the transition from the Elizabethan age to that
of the Restoration. Transitional it must certainly be called; for, in
all vital points, it stands curiously apart from the other forms of
Restoration literature. It has nothing either of the negative or the
positive qualities, nothing of the close observation and nothing of
the measure and self-restraint, that all feel to be the distinctive
marks of the Restoration temper. On the other hand the heroic drama,
of which Dryden's _Conquest of Granada_ and _Tyrannic Love_ may be
taken as fair samples, has obvious affinities with the more questionable
side of the Elizabethan stage. It may be defined as wanting in all the
virtues and as exaggerating all the vices of the Elizabethan dramatists.
Whatever was most wild in the wildest of the Elizabethan plays--the
involved plots, the extravagant incidents, the swelling metaphors and
similes--all this reappears in the heroic drama. And it reappears
without any of the dramatic force or of the splendid poetry which are
seldom entirely absent from the work of the Elizabethan and Jacobean
dramatists. The term "heroic drama" is, in fact, a fraud. The plays
of Dryden and his school are at best but moc-heroic; and they are
essentially undramatic. The truth is that these plays take something
of the same place in the history of the English drama that is held by
the verse of Donne and Cowley in the history of the English lyric. The
extravagant incidents correspond to the far-fetched conceits which,
unjustly enough, made the name of Donne a by-word with the critics
of the last century. The metaphors and similes are as abundant and
overcharged, though assuredly not so rich in imagination, as those of
the "metaphysical" poets. And Dryden, if we may accept the admission
of Bayes, "loved argument in verse"; a confession that Donne and Cowley
would heartily have echoed. The exaggerations of the heroic drama are
the exaggerations of the metaphysical poets transferred from the study
to the stage; with the extravagance deepened, as was natural, by the
glare of their new surroundings. And, just as the extravagance of the
"metaphysicians" led to the reaction that for a hundred years stifled
the lyric note in English song, so the extravagance of the heroic drama
gave the death-blow to English tragedy.

Against this parallel the objection may be raised that it takes no
reckoning of the enormous gulf that, when all is said, separates even
the weakest of the Elizabethan plays from the rant and fustian of
Dryden: a gulf wider, it must be admitted, than that which parts the
metaphysical poets from the "singing birds" of the Elizabethan era.
And, so far as we have yet gone, the objection undoubtedly has force.
It is only to be met if we can find some connecting link; if we can
point to some author who, on the one hand, retains something of the
dramatic instinct, the grace and flexibility of the Elizabethans; and,
on the other hand, anticipates the metallic ring, the declamation and
the theatrical conventions of Dryden. Such an author is to be found
in Shirley; in Shirley, as he became in his later years; at the time,
for instance, when he wrote _The Cardinal_ (1641). _The Cardinal_ is,
in many respects, a powerful play. It is unmistakably written under
the influence of Webster; and of Webster at his most sombre and his
best--the Webster of the _Duchess of Malfi_. But it is no less
unmistakably wanting in the subtle strength, the dramatic grip and
profound poetry, of its model. The villainy of the Cardinal is mere
mechanism beside the satanic, yet horribly human, iniquity of Ferdinand
and Bosolo. And, at least in one scene, Shirley sinks--it is true, in
the person of a subordinate character--to a foul-mouthed vulgarity
which recalls the shameless bombast of the heroes and heroines of
Dryden. [Footnote:

  I would this soldier had the Cardinal
  Upon a promontory; with what a spring
  The churchman would leap down! It were a spectacle
  Most rare to see him topple from the precipice,
  And souse in the salt water with a noise
  To stun the fishes. And if he fell into
  A net, what wonder would the simple sea-gulls
  Have to draw up the o'ergrown lobster,
  So ready boiled! He shall have my good wishes.
                     --_The Cardinal_, act v. sc, 2.]

Yet, with all his shortcomings, Shirley preserves in the main the great
tradition of the Elizabethans. A further step downwards, a more deadly
stage in the history of decadence, is marked by Sir William Davenant.
That arch-impostor, as is well known, had the effrontery to call himself
the "son of Shakespeare": a phrase which the unwary have taken in the
physical sense, but which was undoubtedly intended to mark his literary
kinship with the Elizabethans in general and with the greatest of
Elizabethan dramatists in particular.

So far as dates go, indeed, the work of Davenant may be admitted to
fall within what we loosely call the Elizabethan period; or, more
strictly, within the last stage of the period that began with Elizabeth
and continued throughout the reigns of her two successors. His first
tragedy, _Albovine, King of the Lombards_, was brought out in 1629;
and his earlier work was therefore contemporary with that of Massinger
and Ford. But much beyond this his relation to the Elizabethans can
hardly claim to go. Charity may allow him some faint and occasional
traces of the dramatic power which is their peculiar glory; and this
is perhaps more strongly marked in his earliest play than in any of
its successors. What strikes us most forcibly, however--and that, even
in his more youthful work--is the obvious anticipation of much that
we associate only with the Restoration period. The historical plot,
the metallic ring of the verse,

[Footnote: I take two instances from _Albovine_.--

    (1) Let all glad hymns in one mix'd concord sound,
        And make the echoing heavens your mirth rebound.--Act i.

    (2) I am the broom of heaven; when the world grows foul,
        I'll sweep the nations into the sea, like dust.--Act ii.

It is noticeable that both passages are spoken by Albovine himself,
a very creditable elder brother of Dryden's Maximin and Almanzor. One
more passage may be quoted, from the _Just Italian_ (1630):--

    The sacred noise attend that, whilst we hear,
    Our souls may dance into each others' ear.--Act v.

It will be observed that two out of the above passages, coming at the
end of scenes, are actually in rhyme, and rhyme which is hardly
distinguishable from that of Dryden.] the fustian and the bombast--
we have here every mark, save one, of what afterwards came to be known
as the heroic drama. The rhymed couplet alone is wanting. And that was
added by Davenant himself at a later stage of his career. It was in
_The Siege of Rhodes_, of which the first part was published in 1656,
that the heroic couplet, after an interval of about sixty years, made
its first reappearance on the English stage. It was garnished, no
doubt, with much of what then passed for Pindaric lyric; it was eked
out with music. But the fashion was set; and within ten years the
heroic couplet and the heroic drama had swept everything before them.
[Footnote: A few lines may be quoted to make good the above description
of _The Siege of Rhodes_:--

  What various voices do mine ears invade
  And have a concert of confusion made?
  The shriller trumpet and tempestuous drum,
  The deafening clamour from the cannon's womb.
                     --Part i. First _Entry_.

The following lines from part ii. (published in 1662) might have been
signed by Dryden:--

  No arguments by forms of senate made
  Can magisterial jealousy persuade;
  It takes no counsel, nor will be in awe
  Of reason's force, necessity, or law.

Or, again,

  Honour's the soul which nought but guilt can wound,
  Fame is the trumpet which the people sound.]

The above dates are enough to disprove the common belief that the
heroic drama, rhymed couplet and all, was imported from France.
_Albovine_, as we have seen, has every mark of the heroic drama, except
the couplet; and _Albovine_ was written seven years before the first
masterpiece of Corneille, one year before his first attempt at tragedy.
A superficial likeness to the drama of Corneille and, subsequently,
of Racine may doubtless have given wings to the popularity of the new
style both with Davenant and his admirers. But the heroic drama is,
in truth, a native growth: for good or for evil, to England alone must
be given the credit of its birth. Dryden, no doubt, more than once
claims French descent for the literary form with which his fame was
then bound up. [Footnote: He is, however, as explicit as could be
wished in tracing the descent _through_ Davenant. "For Heroick Plays
... the first light we had of them on the English theatre was from the
late Sir W. Davenant. He heightened his characters, as I may probably
imagine, from the example of Corneille and some French Poets."--_Of
Heroic Plays_, printed as preface to _The Conquest of Granada, Dramatic
Works_ (fol.), i. 381. It was for this reason that Davenant was taken
as the original hero of that burlesque masterpiece, _The Rehearsal_
(1671); and even when the part of Bayes was transferred to Dryden, the
make-up still remained largely that of Davenant.] In a well-known
prologue he describes his tragic-comedy, _The Maiden Queen_, as

    a mingled chime
    Of Jonson's humour and
    Corneille's rhyme.
[Footnote: The greater part of _The Maiden Queen_, however, is
written either in prose or in blank verse.]

But the fact is that of Corneille there is no more trace in Dryden's
tragedy than there is of Jonson in his comedy; that is, just none at
all. The heroic temper, which was at once the essence of Corneille's
plays and true to the very soul of the man, was mere affectation and
_mise-en-scene_ with Dryden. The heroes of Corneille reflect that
nobility of spirit which never entirely forsook France till the days
of the Regency; those of Dryden give utterance to nothing better than
the insolent swagger of the Restoration.

To the peculiar spirit of the heroic drama--to its strength as well
as to its weakness--no metrical form could have been more closely
adapted than the heroic couplet. It was neither flexible nor delicate;
but in the hands of Dryden, even more than in those of Davenant, it
became an incomparably vigorous and effective weapon of declamation.
As the most unmistakable and the most glaring mark of the new method
it was naturally placed in the forefront of the battle waged by Dryden
in defence of the heroic drama. It seems, indeed, to have struck him
as the strongest advantage possessed by the Restoration drama over the
Elizabethan, and as that which alone was wanting to place the
Elizabethan drama far ahead both of the Greek and of the French.

The claims of rhyme to Dryden's regard would seem to have been twofold.
On the one hand, he thought that it served to "bound and circumscribe"
the luxuriance of the poet's fancy. [Footnote: Dedication to _The Rival
Ladies_: _English Garner_, iii. 492.] On the other hand, it went to
"heighten" the purely dramatic element and to "move that admiration
which is the delight of serious plays" and to which "a bare imitation"
will not suffice. [Footnote: _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_: ib. 582] Both
grounds of defence will seem to the modern reader questionable enough.
Howard at once laid his finger upon the weak spot of the first. "It
is", he said, "no argument for the matter in hand. For the dispute is
not what way a man may write best in; but which is most proper for the
subject he writes upon. And, if this were let pass, the argument is
yet unsolved in itself; for he that wants judgment in the liberty of
his fancy may as well shew the want of it in its confinement."
[Footnote: _Preface to Four New Plays_: ib. 498.] Besides, he adds in
effect on the next page, so far from "confining the fancy" rhyme is
apt to lead to turgid and stilted writing.

The second argument stands on higher ground. It amounts to a plea for
the need of idealization; and, so far, may serve to remind us that the
extravagances of the heroic drama had their stronger, as well as their
weaker, side. No one, however, will now be willing to admit that the
cause of dramatic idealization is indeed bound up with the heroic
couplet; and a moment's thought will show the fallacy of Dryden's
assumption that it is. In the first place, he takes for granted that,
the further the language of the drama is removed from that of actual
life, the nearer the spirit of it will approach to the ideal. An
unwarrantable assumption, if there ever was one; and an assumption,
as will be seen, that contains the seeds of the whole eighteenth-century
theory of poetic diction. In the second place--but this is, in truth,
only the deeper aspect of the former plea--Dryden comes perilously
near to an acceptance of the doctrine that idealization in a work of
art depends purely on the outward form and has little or nothing to
do with the conception or the spirit. The bond between form and matter
would, according to this view, be purely arbitrary. By a mere turn of
the hand, by the substitution of rhyme for prose--or for blank verse,
which is on more than "measured" or harmonious prose--the baldest
presentment of life could be converted into a dramatic poem. From the
grosser forms of this fallacy Dryden's fine sense was enough to save
him. Indeed, in the remarks on Jonson's comedies that immediately
follow, he expressly rejects them; and seldom does he show a more
nicely balanced judgment than in what he there says on the limits of
imitation in the field of art. But in the passage before us--in his
assertion that "the converse must be heightened with all the arts and
ornaments of poetry"--it is hard to resist a vision of the dramatist
first writing his dialogue in bald and skimble-skamble prose, and then
wringing his brains to adorn it "with all the arts" of the dramatic
_gradus_. Here again we have the seeds of the fatal theory which
dominated the criticism and perverted the art of the eighteenth century;
the theory which, finding in outward form the only distinction between
prose and poetry, was logically led to look for the special themes of
poetic art in the dissecting-room or the pulpit, and was driven to
mark the difference by an outrageous diction that could only be called
poetry on the principle that it certainly was not prose; the theory
which at length received its death-blow from the joint attack of
Wordsworth and Coleridge.

It remains only to note the practical issue of the battle of the metres.
In the drama the triumph of the heroic couplet was for the moment
complete; but it was short-lived. By 1675, the date of _Aurungzebe_,
Dryden proclaimed himself already about to "weary of his long-loved
mistress, Rhyme"; and his subsequent plays were all written in blank
verse or prose. But the desertion of "his mistress" brought him little
luck; and the rest of his tragedies show a marked falling off in that
splendid vigour which went far to redeem even the grossest absurdities
of his heroic plays. A more sensitive, though a weaker, genius joined
him in the rejection of rhyme; and the example of Otway--whose two
crucial plays belong to 1680 and 1682--did perhaps more than that of
Dryden himself, more even than the assaults of _The Rehearsal_, to
discredit the heroic drama. With the appearance of _Venice Preserved_,
rhyme ceased to play any part in English tragedy. But at the same time,
it must be noted, tragedy itself began to drop from the place which
for the last century it had held in English life. From that day to
this no acting tragedy, worth serious attention, has been written for
the English stage.

The reaction against rhyme was not confined to the drama. The epic,
indeed--or what in those days passed for such--can hardly be said to
have come within its scope. In the _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_ Dryden--and
this is one of the few judgments in which Howard heartily agrees with
him--had denounced rhyme as "too low for a poem"; [Footnote: _English
Garner_, iii. p. 567.] by which, as the context shows, is meant an
epic. This was written the very year in which _Paradise Lost_, with
its laconic sneer at rhyme as a device "to set off wretched matter and
lame metre", was given to the world. That, however, did not prevent
Dryden from asking, and obtaining, leave to "tag its verses" into an
opera; [Footnote: The following will serve as a sample of Dryden's
improvements on his model:--

  Seraph and Cherub, careless of their charge
  And wanton in full ease, now live at large,
  Unguarded leave the passes of the sky,
  And all dissolved in Hallelujahs lie.
              --_Dramatic Works_, i. p. 596.]

nor did it deter Blackmore--and, at a much later time, Wilkie [Footnote:
Blackmore's _King Arthur_ was published in 1695; Wilkie's
_Epigoniad_--the subject of a patriotic puff from Hume--in 1757.]--from
reverting to the metre that Milton had scorned to touch. It is not
till the present century that blank verse can be said to have fairly
taken seisin of the epic; one of the many services that English poetry
owes to the genius of Keats.

In the more nondescript kinds of poetry, however, the revolt against
rhyme spread faster than in the epic. In descriptive and didactic
poetry, if anywhere, rhyme might reasonably claim to hold its place.
There is much to be said for the opinion that, in such subjects, rhyme
is necessary to fix the wandering attention of the reader. Yet, for
all that, the great efforts of the reflective muse during the next
century were, with hardly an exception, in blank verse. It is enough
to recall the _Seasons_ of Thomson, the discourses of Akenside and
Armstrong, and the _Night Thoughts_ of the arch-moralist Young.
[Footnote: It may be noted that Young's blank verse has constantly the
run of the heroic couplet.] In the case of Young--as later in that of
Cowper--this is the more remarkable, because his Satires show him to
have had complete command of the mechanism of the heroic couplet. That
he should have deliberately chosen the rival metre is proof--a proof
which even the exquisite work of Goldsmith is not sufficient to
gainsay--that, by the middle of the eighteenth century the heroic
couplet had been virtually driven from every field of poetry, save
that of satire.

We may now turn to the second of the two themes with which Dryden is
mainly occupied in the _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_. What are the
conventional restrictions that surround the dramatist, and how far are
they of binding force?

That the drama is by nature a convention--more than this, a convention
accepted largely with a view to the need of idealization--the men of
Dryden's day were in no danger of forgetting. The peril with them was
all the other way. The fashion of that age was to treat the arbitrary
usages of the classical theatre as though they were binding for all
time. Thus, of the four men who take part in the dialogue of the
_Essay_, three are emphatically agreed in bowing down before the three
unities as laws of nature. Dryden himself (Neander) is alone in
questioning their divinity: a memorable proof of his critical
independence; but one in which, as he maliciously points out, he was
supported by the greatest of living dramatists. Corneille could not
be suspected of any personal motive for undertaking the defence of
dramatic license. Yet he closed his _Discourse of the Three Unities_
with the admission that he had "learnt by experience how much the
French stage was constrained and bound up by the observance of these
rules, and how many beauties it had sacrificed". [Footnote: Il est
facile aux speculatifs d'etre severes; mais, s'ils voulaient donner
dix ou douze poemes de cette nature au public, ils elargiraient
peut-etre les regles encore plus que je ne sais, si tot qu'ils auraient
reconnu par l'experience quelle contrainte apporte leur exactitude et
combien de belles choses elle bannit de notre theatre--_Troisieme
Discours Euvres_, xii. 326. See Dryden's Essay _English Garner_, iii
546. On the next page is a happy hit at the shifts to which dramatists
were driven in their efforts to keep up the appearance of obedience
to the Unity of Place: "The street, the window, the two houses and the
closet are made to walk about, and the persons to stand still."] When
the two leading masters of the 'Classical Drama', the French and the
English, joined hands to cast doubt upon the sacred unities, its
opponents might well feel easy as to the ultimate issue of the dispute.

Dryden was not the man to bound his argument by any technical question,
even when it touched a point so fundamental as the unities. Nothing
is more remarkable in the _Essay_, as indeed in all his critical work,
than the wide range which he gives to the discussion. And never has
the case against--we can hardly add, for--the French drama been stated
more pointedly than by him. His main charge, as was to be expected,
is against its monotony, and, in close connection with that, against
its neglect of action and its preference for declamation.

Having defined the drama as "a just and lively image of human nature,
in its actions, passions and traverses of fortune", [Footnote: _English
Garner_, iii 513, ib. 567] he proceeds to test the claims of the French
stage by that standard. Its characters, he finds, are wanting in variety
and nature. Its range of passion and humour is lamentably narrow.
[Footnote: Ib. 542-4.] Its declamations "tire us with their length;
so that, instead of grieving for their imaginary heroes, we are
concerned for our own trouble, as we are in the tedious visits of bad
company; we are in pain till they are gone". [Footnote: English Garner,
iil 542.] The best tragedies of the French--_Cinna and Pompey_--"are
not so properly to be called Plays as long discourses of Reason of
State". [Footnote: Ib. 543.] Upon their avoidance of action he is
hardly less severe. "If we are to be blamed for showing too much of
the action"--one is involuntarily reminded of the closing scene of
_Tyrannic Love_ and of the gibes in _The Rehearsal_--"the French are
as faulty for discovering too little of it ". [Footnote: Ib. 545.]
Finally, on a comparison between the French dramatists and the
Elizabethans, Dryden concludes that "in most of the irregular Plays
of Shakespeare or Fletcher ... there is a more masculine fancy, and
greater spirit in all the writing, than there is in any of the French".
[Footnote: Ib. 548.]

Given the definition with which he starts--but it is a definition that
no Frenchman of the seventeenth or eighteenth century would have
admitted--it is hard to see how Dryden could have reached a
substantially different result. Nor, if comparisons of this sort are
to be made at all, is there much--so far, at least, as Shakespeare is
concerned--to find fault with in the verdict with which he closes. Yet
it is impossible not to regret that Dryden should have failed to
recognize the finer spirit and essence of French tragedy, as conceived
by Corneille: the strong-tempered heroism of soul, the keen sense of
honour, the consuming fire of religion, to which it gives utterance.

The truth is that Dryden stood at once too near, and too far from, the
ideals of Corneille to appreciate them altogether at their just value.
Too near because he instinctively associated them with the heroic
drama, which at the bottom of his heart he knew to be no better than
an organized trick, done daily with a view to "elevate and surprise".
Too far, because, in spite of his own candid and generous temper, it
was well-nigh impossible for the Laureate of the Restoration to
comprehend the highly strung nature of a man like Corneille, and his
intense realization of the ideal.

But, if Dryden is blind to the essential qualities of Corneille, he
is at least keenly alive to those of Shakespeare. It is a memorable
thing that the most splendid tribute ever offered to the prince of
Elizabethans should have come from the leading spirit of the
Restoration. It has often been quoted, but it will bear quoting once
again.

"Shakespeare was the man who, of all modern and perhaps ancient poets,
had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature
were still present to him; and he drew them not laboriously, but
luckily. When he describes anything, you more than see it, you feel
it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning give him the great
commendation. He was naturally learned. He needed not the spectacles
of books to read nature; he looked inwards and found her there. I
cannot say he is everywhere alike. Were he so, I should do him injury
to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat,
insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling
into bombast. But he is always great when some great occasion is
presented to him. No man can say, he ever had a fit subject for his
wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets,

    Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi."
[Footnote: _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_. _English Garner_, iii. 549.]

The same keenness of appreciation is found in Dryden's estimate of
other writers who might have seemed to lie beyond the field of his
immediate vision. Of Milton he is recorded to have said: "He cuts us
all out, and the ancients too". [Footnote: The anecdote is recorded
by Richardson, who says the above words were written on the copy of
_Paradise Lost_ sent by Dorset to Milton. Dryden, _Poetic Works_, p.
161. Comp. _Dramatic Works_, i. 590; _Discourse on Satire_, p. 386.]
On Chaucer he is yet more explicit. "As he is the father of English
poetry, so I hold him in the same degree of veneration as the Grecians
held Homer, or the Romans Virgil. He is a perpetual fountain of good
sense; learned in all sciences, and therefore speaks properly on all
subjects. As he knew what to say, so he knows also when to leave off,
a continence which is practised by few writers, and scarcely by any
of the ancients, excepting Virgil and Horace ... Chaucer followed
nature everywhere, but was never so bold to go beyond her." [Footnote:
See _Preface to Fables_, below.]

This points to what was undoubtedly the most shining quality of Dryden,
as a critic: his absolute freedom from preconceived notions, his
readiness to "follow nature" and to welcome nature in whatever form
she might appear. That was the more remarkable because it ran directly
counter both to the general spirit of the period to which he belonged
and to the prevailing practice of the critics who surrounded him. The
spirit of the Restoration age was critical in the invidious, no less
than in the nobler, sense of the word. It was an age of narrow ideals
and of little ability to look beyond them. In particular, it was an
age of carping and of fault-finding; an age within measurable distance
of the pedantic system perfected in France by Boileau, [Footnote:
Boileau's _Art Poetique_ was published in 1674. A translation made by
Soame, with the aid of Dryden, was published in 1683.] and warmly
adopted by a long line of English critics from Roscoromon and
Buckinghamshire to the Monthly Reviewers and to Johnson. Such writers
might always have "nature" on their lips; but it was nature seen through
the windows of the lecture room or down the vista of a street.

With Dryden it was not so. With him we never fail to get an unbiassed
judgment; the judgment of one who did not crave for nature "to advantage
dressed", but trusted to the instinctive freshness of a mind, one of
the most alert and open that ever gave themselves to literature. It
is this that puts an impassable barrier between Dryden and the men of
his own day, or for a century to come. It is this that gives him a
place among the great critics of modern literature, and makes the
passage from him to the schoolmen of the next century so dreary a
descent.

Dryden's openness of mind was his own secret. The comparative method
was, in some measure, the common property of his generation. This, in
fact, was the chief conquest of the Restoration and Augustan critics.
It is the mark that serves to distinguish them most clearly from those
of the Elizabethan age. Not that the Elizabethans are without
comparisons; but that the parallels they saw were commonly of the
simplest, not to say of the most childish, cast. Every sentence of
Meres' critical effort--or, to be rigorously exact, every sentence but
one--is built on "as" and "so"; but it reads like a parody--a
schoolmaster's parody--of Touchstone's improvement on Orlando's verses
in praise of Rosalind. Shakespeare is brought into line with Ovid,
Elizabeth with Achilles, and Homer with William Warner. This, no doubt,
is an extreme instance; but it is typical of the artless methods dear
to the infancy of criticism. In Jonson's _Discoveries_, such comparisons
as there are have indisputable point; but they are few, and, for the
most part, they are limited to the minuter matters of style.

It is with the Restoration that the comparative method first made its
way into English criticism; and that both in its lawful and less lawful
use. The distinction must be jealously made; for there are few matters
that lend themselves so readily to confusion and misapprehension as
this. Between two men, or two forms of art, a comparison may be run
either for the sake of placing the one above the head of the other,
or for the sake of drawing out the essential differences between the
one and the other. The latter method is indispensable to the work of
the critic. Without reference, express or implied, to other types of
genius or to other ways of treatment it is impossible for criticism
to take a single step in definition either of an author, or a movement,
or a form of art. In a vague and haphazard fashion, even the
Elizabethans were comparative. Meres was so in his endless stream of
classical parallels; Sidney, after a loftier strain, in his defence
of harmonious prose as a form of poetry. And it is the highest
achievement of modern criticism to have brought science and order into
the comparative method, and largely to have widened its scope. In this
sense, comparison _is_ criticism; and to compare with increased
intelligence, with a clearer consciousness of the end in view, is to
reform criticism itself, to make it a keener weapon and more effective
for its purpose.

A comparison of qualities, however, is one thing, and a comparison
between different degrees of merit is quite another. The former is the
essence of criticism; the latter, one of the most futile pastimes that
can readily be imagined. That each man should have his own preferences
is right enough. It would be a nerveless and unprofitable mind to which
such preferences were unknown. More than that, some rough
classification, some understanding with oneself as to what authors are
to be reckoned supreme masters of their craft, is hardly to be avoided.
The mere fact that the critic lays stress on certain writers and
dismisses others with scant notice or none at all, implies that in
some sense he has formed an estimate of their relative merits. But to
drag this process from the background--if we ought not rather to say,
from behind the scenes--to the very foot-lights, to publish it, to
insist upon it, is as irrelevant as it would be for the historian--
and he, too, must make his own perspective--to explain why he has
recorded some events and left others altogether unnoticed. All this
is work for the dark room; it should leave no trace, or as little as
may be, upon the finished picture. Criticism has suffered from few
things so much as from its incurable habit of granting degrees in
poetry with honours. "The highest art", it has been well said, "is the
region of equals."

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 at _The 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's _Art Poetique_, no one can compare it with
the corresponding _Essay_ of 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's _Remarks on the Tragedies of the Former Age_ are 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. The _Dunciad_, the most marked critical
work of the period, may be defended on the ground that it _is_ the
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. And _The 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 the _Elegy_ [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 the _Bard_ and the _Progress 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's _Life_, 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 Lost_ seems 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. On
_Paradise Regained_ he is more guarded; on _Samson_, more guarded yet.
[Footnote: The two papers devoted to _Samson_ in the _Rambler_ are
"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.] Of _Lycidas_ "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 written _When
the assault was intended to the City_, and _On 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 at _Chevy Chase_ [Footnote: Ib. x. 139.]--a "dull
and lifeless imbecility"--at the _Nonne Prestes Tale_, and at the
_Knightes 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's _Life_, 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 the _Rambler_ was 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 of _Paradise
Lost_ so 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's _Life_, 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's _Rowley Poems_ written
in 1769; MacPherson's _Ossian_ (first instalment) in 1760; Mallet's
_Northern Antiquities_ in 1755; and Warton's _History 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's _Chaucer_ (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 treatise _On 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 the _mind_, 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 call
_Aesthetik_ This 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 The _Laocoon_ of 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 the _Reflections_ or the _Appeal 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 dismal _Pleasures 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 his
_Aesthetik_--have laboured with incomparably more effect than his own
countrymen, Mr. Ruskin excepted, upon the foundations that he laid.

IV. Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_ was 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; anarchy _plus_ the policeman's truncheon of the _Edinburgh_
and the _Quarterly_. [Footnote: The first number of the _Edinburgh_
appeared in 1802; the _Quarterly_ was 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
the _Edinburgh_ may be taken as the substantial truth also about Gifford
and the _Quarterly_, 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:
'Do _you_ like it?' '_Don't_ you 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, _Reminiscences_
n 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 famous _Edinburgh 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's _Life_, 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 the _Edinburgh_ lays this down as
an article of faith. Taking post on the recent appearance of _Thalaba_,
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 no _good works_
to 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, the _Edinburgh_ takes
up the work of the _Anti-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 the _Edinburgh_, 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 the _Edinburgh_ upon 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 the _Hours of Idleness_. It is significant
that the best pieces are those in the heroic couplet; an indication--to
be confirmed by _English Bards_--of Byron's leaning towards the past.]
The answer to the sneer, as all the world knows, was _English 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 the
_Edinburgh_ was among the warmest champions of the "English Bard".
[Footnote: See the article on _The Corsair_ and _Bride 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." The _amende honorable_ with a vengeance. The review
of _The Giaour_, Byron thought, was "so very mild and sentimental that
it must be written by Jeffrey in _love_".--Moore's _Life_, p. 191.]
It was reserved for Southey, a pillar of the _Quarterly_, to rank him
as the "Goliath" of the "Satanic school".

Let us now turn to the _Quarterly_ upon Keats. _Endymion_, in spite
of the noble self-criticism of its preface, is denounced as "Cockney
poetry" [Footnote: The phrase was also employed by _Blackwood_, 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
by _Blackwood_, to "go back to the shop, Mr. John; back to the plasters,
pills, and ointment-boxes". [Footnote: _Quarterly Review_, xix. 204.
See _Blackwood_, vol. iii. 524; where the Reviewer sneers at "the calm,
settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy of _Endymion_".]

With this insolence it is satisfactory to contrast the verdict of the
_Edinburgh_: "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."
Of _Hyperion_ the 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 the _Edinburgh_ always 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 the _Edinburgh_; the first prompted by the Poems of
1807, the second by the _Excursion_.

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 of _Resolution and Independence_ he
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 Fell_ is
"trash"; _Yarrow Unvisited_, "tedious and affected". The lines from
the _Ode 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 the _Cuckoo_ is "absurd".
The _Ode on Immortality_ is "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 the
_Excursion_ a 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 the _Quarterly_ in 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 the _Revolt of Islam_, the
_corpus delicti_ at 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 the _Quarterly_,]

  Non ragioniam di _lui_, ma guarda e passa.

[Footnote: against the character of Currer Bell. See also the scurrilous
attack on the character of Leigh Hunt in _Blackwood_, vol III 453]

Apart from their truculence, the early numbers of the _Edinburgh_ and
_Quarterly_ are 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's _Specimens of English
Dramatic Poets_ was published in 1808, his _Essays of Elia_ began to
appear in the _London Magazine_, 1820, Coleridge's first Course of
Lectures (on English poets) was delivered in 1808, his second Course,
in 1811-12, his _Biographia Literana_ in 1817  Hazlitt's _Characters
of Shakespeare's Plays_ was published in 1817, his _Lectures on the
English Poets_ in 1818, and on _The English Comic Writers_ in 1819
Carlyle's Essays began to appear (in the _Edinburgh_ and 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 the _Edinburgh_ and the
_Quarterly_. 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 the _Edinburgh_ and the
_Quarterly_ had 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. The _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly_ plunge
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 the _Edinburgh_ and
_Quarterly_, 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, w