Chapter IV: Dryden and His Contemporaries (2)

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

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Footnote 507:

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

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[Sidenote: _His special critical method._]

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

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Footnote 508:

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

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

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Footnote 509:

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

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

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

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

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

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Footnote 510:

A phrase of Blake’s.

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

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Footnote 511:

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

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

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Footnote 512:

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

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

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Footnote 513:

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

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

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

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Footnote 514:

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

Footnote 515:

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

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

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

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

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Footnote 516:

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

Footnote 517:

_Short View_, p. 94.

Footnote 518:

Ibid., p. 144.

Footnote 519:

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

Footnote 520:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Footnote 521:

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

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

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

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Footnote 522:

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

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

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Footnote 523:

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

Footnote 524:

London 12mo.

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

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Footnote 525:

8vo, London, 1686.

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

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Footnote 526:

1691: but pirated earlier.

Footnote 527:

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

Footnote 528:

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

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

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Footnote 529:

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

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

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Footnote 530:

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

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

“To copy Nature is to copy _them_,”

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

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Footnote 531:

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

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

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Footnote 532:

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

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

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Footnote 533:

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

Footnote 534:

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

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

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Footnote 535:

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

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

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Footnote 536:

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

Footnote 537:

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

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INTERCHAPTER V.

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

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