Chapter I: From Addison to Johnson (1)

CRITICISM AT DRYDEN’S DEATH—BYSSHE’S ‘ART OF ENGLISH
POETRY’—GILDON—WELSTED—DENNIS—ON RYMER—ON SHAKESPEARE—ON
“MACHINES”—HIS GENERAL THEORY OF POETRY—ADDISON—THE ‘ACCOUNT OF THE
BEST KNOWN ENGLISH POETS’—THE ‘SPECTATOR’ CRITICISMS—ON TRUE AND
FALSE WIT—ON TRAGEDY—ON MILTON—THE “PLEASURES OF THE
IMAGINATION”—HIS GENERAL CRITICAL VALUE—STEELE—ATTERBURY—SWIFT—‘THE
BATTLE OF THE BOOKS’—THE ‘TALE OF A TUB’—MINOR WORKS—POPE—THE
‘LETTERS’—THE SHAKESPEARE PREFACE—SPENCE’S ‘ANECDOTES’—THE ‘ESSAY ON
CRITICISM’—THE ‘EPISTLE TO AUGUSTUS’—REMARKS ON POPE AS A CRITIC,
AND THE CRITICAL ATTITUDE OF HIS GROUP—PHILOSOPHICAL
AND PROFESSIONAL CRITICS—TRAPP—BLAIR—THE ‘LECTURES ON
RHETORIC’—THE ‘DISSERTATION ON OSSIAN’—KAMES—THE ‘ELEMENTS OF
CRITICISM’—CAMPBELL—THE ‘PHILOSOPHY OF RHETORIC’—HARRIS—THE
‘PHILOLOGICAL ENQUIRIES’—“ESTIMATE” BROWN: HIS ‘HISTORY OF
POETRY’—JOHNSON: HIS PREPARATION FOR CRITICISM—‘THE RAMBLER’
ON MILTON—ON SPENSER—ON HISTORY AND LETTER-WRITING—ON
TRAGI-COMEDY—“DICK MINIM”—‘RASSELAS’—THE SHAKESPEARE PREFACE—THE
‘LIVES OF THE POETS’—THEIR GENERAL MERITS—THE ‘COWLEY’—THE
‘MILTON’—THE ‘DRYDEN’ AND ‘POPE’—THE ‘COLLINS’ AND ‘GRAY’—THE
CRITICAL GREATNESS OF THE ‘LIVES’ AND OF JOHNSON—MINOR CRITICISM:
PERIODICAL AND OTHER—GOLDSMITH—VICESIMUS KNOX—SCOTT OF AMWELL.

The death of Dryden punctuates, with an exactness not often attainable in literary history, the division between seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature in England.[552] [Sidenote: _Criticism at Dryden’s death._] In general letters it is succeeded—not at all immediately—by the great school of Queen Anne men. In criticism[553] one of the greatest of these, a special pupil of Dryden, takes up the running at this interval, and others a little later; but the succession is steadily maintained. Dennis, an unhappily belated person, continues his exercitations; but has very much the worse fortune, critical as well as pecuniary, in his later days. And in the very year of the death there appears an egregious work—extremely popular, maleficently powerful beyond all doubt throughout the eighteenth century, and now chiefly known to non-experts in our days by the humorous contradiction which gave its author’s name to Shelley, and by the chance which made a literary connection, towards the very end of its period of influence, between three such extraordinarily assorted persons as Afra Behn, Bysshe himself, and William Blake.[554]

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Footnote 552:

An interesting monograph on our subject, before and after 1700, is
Herr Paul Hamelius’s _Die Kritik in der Engl. Literatur des 17 und 18
Jahrhunderts_ (Leipsic, 1897). I was able, as I always prefer to do,
to postpone the reading of this till I had finished the English part
of this volume, and I do not think I owe Herr Hamelius much. I am all
the more glad to find that we agree on the Romantic element in Dryden
(though not as to that in Dennis), and as to reducing the importance
of French influence in England.

Footnote 553:

The excessively rare _Parliament of Critics_ (London, 1702), a copy of
which has been kindly lent me by Mr Gregory Smith, is more of what it
calls itself, a “banter,” than of a serious composition. But it
connects itself not obscurely with the Collier quarrel.

Footnote 554:

See Mr Swinburne’s _William Blake_, p. 130 note, for the _sortes
Bysshianæ_ of Blake and his wife.

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Edward Bysshe’s _Art of English Poetry_[555] puts the eighteenth-century theory of this art with a rigour and completeness which can only be attributed either to something like genius, or to a wonderful and complete absence of it. [Sidenote: _Bysshe’s_ Art of English Poetry.] His _Rules for Making English Verse_ are the first part of the book in order, but much the least in bulk. Then follow, first a collection of “the most natural and sublime thoughts of the best English poets,” or, in other words, an anthology, reasoned under headings, from poets of the seventeenth century, extending to about four hundred and fifty pages; and last a Dictionary of Rhymes. The “best English poets” may be useful to give in a note.[556] The Dictionary is preceded by a few prefatory remarks, including one important historically, “Rhyme is _by all_ allowed to be the chief ornament of versification in the modern languages.” The killing frost which had fallen on the flowers of Elizabethan poetry had killed one weed at any rate—the craze against rhyme.

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Footnote 555:

My copy is the Third Edition, “with large improvements,” London, 1708.
Some put the first at 1702, not 1700. Before Bysshe, Joshua Poole, a
schoolmaster, had given posthumously (1657: I have ed. 2, London,
1677), with a short dedication and a curious verse proem of his own,
and an _Institution_ signed J. D., _The English Parnassus_. This
contains a double gradus of epithets and passages (the authors named
only in a general list), an “Alphabet of [Rhyming] Monosyllables,” and
some “Forms of Compliment,” &c. The _Institution_ stoutly defends
“Rhythm” [_i.e._, rhyme], notices Sidney, Daniel, Puttenham, &c.,
shortly defines Kinds, objects to excessive enjambment (note the time,
1657) and to polysyllables, but is sensible if rather general and
scrappy.

Footnote 556:

Addison, Atterbury, Beaumont and Fletcher, Afra Behn, Blackmore, Tom
Brown, Buckingham, Cleveland, Congreve, Cowley, Creech, Davenant (2),
Denham, Dennis, Dorset, Dryden, Duke, Garth, Halifax, Harvey, Sir R.
Howard, _Hudibras_, Jonson, Lee, Milton, Mulgrave, Oldham, Otway,
Prior, Ratcliff, Rochester, Roscommon, Rowe, Sedley, Shakespeare,
Southern, Sprat, Stafford, Stepney, Suckling, Tate, Walsh, Waller,
Wycherley, and Yalden. Observe that no non-dramatic poet earlier than
Cowley is admitted.

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The Rules are preceded by a partly apologetic Preface, which disclaims any wish to furnish tools to poetasters, and puts the work “under the awful guard of the immortal Shakespeare, Milton [note that this was before Addison’s critique], Dryden, &c.” The keynote is struck, in the very first sentence of the text, with that uncompromisingness which makes one rather admire Bysshe. “The Structure of our verses, whether blank or in rhyme, consists _in a certain number of syllables; not_ in feet composed of long and short syllables, as the verse of the Greeks and Romans.” And he adds that, though some ingenious persons formerly puzzled themselves in prescribing rules for the quantity of English syllables, and composed verses by the measure of dactyls and spondees, yet that design is now wholly exploded. In other words, he cannot conceive classical feet without classical arrangement of feet.

“Our poetry admits, for the most part, of but three sorts of verses, those of 10, 8, and 7 syllables. Those of 4, 6, 9, 11, 12, and 14 are generally employed in masks and operas.” But 12 and 14 may be used in Heroic verse with grace. Accent must be observed; and the Pause _must be_ at or near the middle, though in Heroics it may be at the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, or 7th syllable, determined by the seat of the accent. Still, pauses at the 3rd and 7th must be used sparingly. The 2nd and 8th “can produce no true harmony”; and he seems to have refused to contemplate anything so awful as a pause at the 1st or 9th. After decasyllables, octosyllables are commonest. As for lines of 9 and 11 syllables, “with the accent on the last [_i.e._, anapæstic measures], the disagreeableness of their measure has wholly excluded them from serious subjects.” The refining effected since the days of Chaucer, Spenser, and other ancient poets consists especially in the avoidance of the concourse of vowels and in the rigid elision of the article, the contraction of preterperfect tenses (“amaz’d,” not “amazed”), the rejection of alliteration (an instance in Dryden is apologised for), of splitting words closely connected at the end of a verse, and of polysyllables.

And a very large number of minute rules follow, the one guiding principle of which is to reduce every line to its syllabic minimum, never allowing trisyllabic substitution.

The book, base and mechanical as it may seem, is of the first historical importance. It will be seen, even from these few extracts, that the excellent Bysshe has no doubts, no half-lights. The idea, which we have seen crystallising for a century and a half, that English poetry is as strictly and inexorably syllabic as French, and much more so than Greek or Latin, is here put in its baldest crudity. Bysshe will have no feet at all: and no other division within the line but at the pause, which is to be as centripetal as possible, like the French cæsura. It follows from this that, except the feminine or double ending, which is allowed ostensibly as a grace to rhymes, though also in blank verse, nothing extra to the ten, the eight, or whatever the line-norm may be, is permitted on any account. Articles, prepositions that will stand it, pronouns, are to be rigidly elided; weak or short syllables in the interior of words must be slurred out. There is (only that Bysshe will not have even the name of foot) no room for a trisyllabic foot anywhere, in what he equally refuses to call iambic or trochaic verse.

But what is more startling still is that trisyllabic feet disappear, not merely from the octosyllable and the heroic, but from English prosody, or are admitted only to “Compositions for Musick and the lowest sort of burlesque.” Dryden might have written, “After the pangs of a desperate lover”; Prior might be writing “Dear Chloe, how blubbered is that pretty face”: but Bysshe sternly averts _his_ face from them.

Now, if this astonishing impoverishment of English poetry had been the isolated crotchet of a pedant or a poetaster, it would at most deserve notice in a note. But it was nothing of the kind. “He,” this insignificant person, “said it”: they went and did it. It expressed the actual poetic practice of serious poets from Pope to Goldsmith: and it expressed the deliberate theoretic creed of such a critic as Johnson. The contrary practice of the great old poets was at best a “licence,” at worst a “fault.” What had actually happened to French—that it had been reduced to the iamb—what Gascoigne had lamented and protested against, long before, was here threatened—or rather, with bland ignoring, even of threat, laid down—as the unquestioned and unquestionable law of English. The whole eighteenth century did not, indeed, go the entire length of Bysshe. Prior—it is his everlasting glory in English poetical history—took care of that, and not only saved anapæstic cadence for us, but made it more popular than ever. But the eighteenth century continued, charmingly as it wrote them, to be a little ashamed of its anapæsts, to write them affectedly as a relaxation, if not even a derogation—to indulge in them (just as it might indulge in leap-frog with wig and long-skirted coat laid aside) avowedly for a frolic. And about the decasyllable—not quite so rigidly about the octosyllable—it accepted Bysshe almost without a protest. All the infinite variety of true English prosody, all the gliding or melting trochees, all the passion and throb which trisyllabic feet give to iambic verse, were sacrificed, all freedom of pause was relinquished, and the decasyllable tramped, the octosyllable tripped, as regularly and as monotonously as a High Dutch grenadier or a Low Dutch clock.

Bysshe had been frankly formal; it is not a small merit in him that he knew what he had to do and did it: but persons who were little if at all above him in taste or in intellect affected to despise him for this, and Mr Charles Gildon in his _Complete Art of Poetry_,[557] published a few years later, is very high and mighty with Bysshe. [Sidenote: _Gildon._] As for himself he does not think that Poetry consists even in “colouring,” but in Design: and he hashes up his French originals into some would-be modish dialogues, in which ladies of fashion attack and defend poetry on the old lines, before he comes to minuter recommendations. These differ chiefly from Bysshe’s in that they are wordier, less peremptory, and given to substitute the vagueness of the journalist for the precision of the schoolmaster. Nor was this by any means Gildon’s only contribution to criticism. Among the others perhaps the most interesting is an anonymous and undated, but apparently not doubtful, _rifacimento_ of Langbaine,[558] which is curious as an example of _peine du talion_. Gildon (who has employed his own or some other “careful hand” to give himself an ingeniously, because not extravagantly, complimentary notice in the Appendix) serves Langbaine in Langbaine’s own fashion; and, not contented with reversing his judgments, indulges freely in such phrases as “Mr Langbain mistakes,” “those scurrilous and digressory remarks with which Mr Langbain has bespattered him [Dryden],” &c. The book is in the main bibliographic and biographic rather than critical.

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Footnote 557:

London, 1718.

Footnote 558:

The _Lives and Characters of the English Dramatic Poets_, &c., _First
begun by Mr Langbain, improved and continued down to this time by a
Careful Hand_ (London, printed for Tho. Leigh, &c. No date in my copy,
but the _Dict. Nat. Biog._ gives 1699).

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A name which has something to do with criticism, and which associates itself naturally with those of Dennis and Gildon in the regiment of Pope’s victims, is that of Leonard Welsted, who in 1712 published a translation of Longinus, “with some remarks on the English Poets.” [Sidenote: _Welsted._] Welsted’s translation, whether made directly from the Greek or not,[559] is readable enough, and his alternative title, “A treatise on _the Sovereign Perfection of Writing_,” is not unhappy. Neither are his Preface and his appended “Remarks” contemptible. He can appreciate not merely Milton but Spenser; is (how unlike Rymer!) transported with _Othello_, and especially with its conclusion; and if he is not superior to others in scorning “Latin rhymes,” at least has sufficient independence to be very irreverent to Buchanan.

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Footnote 559:

I hope the passing suspicion is not illiberal. But why should he call
the Palmyrene “Zenobie” in English? _Cela sent furieusement son
Français._ (For the critical work of yet another who felt the lash of
Pope—James Ralph—_v. inf._, p. 554 note.)

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But there was a contemporary of Bysshe’s, more famous than either Gildon or Welsted, whose soul was equally above mere prosodic precept, and to whom, as it happens, Gildon himself pays a compliment, as to a denizen of Grub Street, of whom Grub Street could not but feel that he did it some honour by herding with its more native and genuine population. Of him we must say something—not, as we might almost have said it, in juxtaposition with the great poet and critic whom he had earlier admired, but before coming to the lesser, but still great, successors of Dryden, with whom he came into collision in his evil days.

If John Dennis had been acquainted with the poetry of Tennyson (at which he would probably have railed in his best manner, in which he would certainly have detected plagiarisms from the classics), he too might have applied to himself the words of Ulysses, “I am become a name.” [Sidenote: _Dennis._] Everybody who has the very slightest knowledge of English literature knows, if only in connection with Dryden, Addison, and Pope, the surly, narrow, but not quite ignorant or incompetent critic, who in his younger and more genial days admired the first, and in his soured old age attacked the second and third. But it may be doubted whether very many persons have an acquaintance, at all extensive, with his works. They were never collected; the _Select Works of John Dennis_[560] mainly consist of his utterly worthless verse. Much of the criticism is hidden away in prefaces which were seldom reprinted, and the original editions of which have become very rare. Even good libraries frequently contain only two or three out of more than a dozen or a score of separate documents: and though the British Museum itself is well furnished, it is necessary to range through a large number of publications to obtain a complete view of Dennis as a critic.

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Footnote 560:

2 vols., London, 1718.

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That view, when obtained, may perhaps differ not a little from those which have, in a certain general way, succeeded each other in current literary judgment. During the reign of Pope and Addison, the scurrilous assailant of the first, and the more courteous but in part severe censor of the second, was naturally regarded as at best a grumbling pedant, at worst a worthless Zoilus. The critics of the Romantic school were not likely to be much attracted by Dennis. More recently, something of a reaction has taken place in his favour; and it has become not unusual to discover in him, if not exactly a Longinus or a Coleridge, yet a serious and well-equipped critic, who actually anticipated not a little that after-criticism has had to say.[561]

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Footnote 561:

See, among others, Herr Hamelius, _op. cit._ Yet it is interesting to
find that the passage of Dennis to which his panegyrist gives the
single and signal honour of extract in an appendix is purely ethical:
it is all on “the previous question.”

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That this more charitable view is not entirely without foundation may be at once admitted. [Sidenote: _On Rymer._] As compared with Rymer, in whose company he too often finds himself in modern appreciation, Dennis shows, indeed, pretty well. He very seldom—perhaps nowhere—exhibits that crass insensibility to poetry which distinguishes “the worst critic who ever lived.” One of his earliest and not his worst pieces, _The Impartial Critic_ of 1693, is an answer to Rymer himself, points out with acuteness and vigour that “Tom the Second” would ruin the English stage if he had his way, and even approaches the sole causeway of criticism across the deep by advancing the argument that the circumstances of the Greek drama were perfectly different from those of the English.[562] Yet already there are danger-signals. That the piece (which includes a Letter to a Friend and some dialogues) contains a great deal of clumsy jocularity, does not much matter. But when we find Dennis devoting some of this jocularity to Antigone’s lamentation over her death unwedded, we feel sadly that the man who can write thus is scarcely to be trusted on the spirit of poetry. And the admission that Rymer’s censures of Shakespeare are “in most of the particulars very sensible and just” is practically ruinous.[563]

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Footnote 562:

Had Dryden let his Cambridge admirer see the _Heads_? (_v. supra_, pp.
373, 397 notes.)

Footnote 563:

Although Dennis’s fun is heavy enough, there are some interesting
touches, as this: “Port [then a novelty in England, remember] is not
so well tasted as Claret: and intoxicates sooner.”

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Dennis’s answer to Collier is a little later,[564] but still earlier than most of his better known work; and it is very characteristic of his manner, which has not often, I think, been exactly described. As elsewhere, so in this tract, which is entitled _The Usefulness of the Stage to the Happiness of Mankind, to Government and to Religion_, Dennis is uncompromisingly ethical; but he had here the excuse that Collier, to whom he was replying, had taken the same line. There is less, either here or elsewhere, for his method. This is to make a loud clatter of assertions, arranged in a kind of pseudological order, which seems to have really deceived the author, and may possibly have deceived some of his readers, into believing it syllogistic and conclusive. Dennis is very great at the word “must.” “As Poetry is an Art it _must_ be an imitation of nature”[565] and so forth; seldom shall you find so many “musts” anywhere as in Dennis, save perhaps in some of his modern analogues. Like all who argue in this fashion, he becomes unable to distinguish fact and his own opinion. Collier, for instance, had quoted (quite correctly) Seneca’s denunciation of the Stage. To which Dennis replies, “It is not likely that Seneca should condemn the drama, ... since ... he wrote plays himself.” That the identity of the philosopher and the dramatist is not certain does not matter: the characteristic thing is the setting of probability against fact. But with Dennis hectoring assertion is everything. “It cannot possibly be conceived that so reasonable a diversion as the drama can encourage or incline men to so unreasonable a one as gaming or so brutal a one as drunkenness.” With a man who thinks this an argument, argument is impossible.

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Footnote 564:

It appeared in the very year of the _Short View_ (1698). I have a
reprint of it, issued many years later (1725), but long before
Dennis’s death, together with _The Advancement and Reformation of
Modern Poetry_ and the tragedy of _Rinaldo and Armida_, all separately
titled, but continuously paged.

Footnote 565:

This is from the _Advancement and Reformation_, which contains its
author’s full definition of Poetry itself—not the worst of such
definitions. “Poetry is an Imitation of Nature by a pathetic and
numerous speech.”

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The fact is that, though he has, as has been admitted, a certain advantage over Rymer, Lord Derby’s observation that “He never knew whether it was John or Thomas who answered the bell” will too often apply here. [Sidenote: _On Shakespeare._] Rymer himself was not ignorant; Dennis, especially in regard to ancient criticism, was still better instructed: and though both were bad dramatists, with, in consequence, a conscious or unconscious bias on dramatic matters, Dennis was not so bad as Rymer. His devotion to Dryden does him credit, though we may suspect that it was not the best part of Dryden that he liked: and, amid the almost frantic spite and scurrility of his later attacks on Pope, he not unfrequently hits a weak place in the “young squab short gentleman’s” bright but not invulnerable armour. Yet Dennis displays, as no really good critic could do, the weaknesses of his time and school both in generals and particulars. It is perfectly fair to compare him (giving weight for genius of course) with Johnson, a critic whose general views (except on port and claret) did not materially differ from his own. And, if we do so, we shall find that while Johnson is generally, if not invariably, “too good for such a breed,” Dennis almost as constantly shows its worst features. He altered _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ into _The Comical Gallant_[566]—a most illaudable action certainly, yet great Dryden’s self had done such things before. But he aggravated the crime by a preface, in which he finds fault with the original as having “no less than three actions” [would there were thirty-three!] by remarking that, in the second part of _Henry the Fourth_, Falstaff “does nothing but talk” [would he had talked so for five hundred acts instead of five!] and by laying down _ex cathedra_ such generalities as that “Humour, not wit, is the business of comedy,” a statement as false as would be its converse. In his _Essay on the Genius of Shakespeare_[567] he is not so very far from Rymer himself in the drivelling arbitrariness of his criticism. Shakespeare has actually made Aufidius, the general of the Volscians, a base and profligate villain! Even Coriolanus himself is allowed to be called a traitor by Aufidius, and nobody contradicts! The rabble in _Julius Cæsar_ and other such things “show want of Art,” and there is a painful disregard of Poetical Justice. The same hopeless wrong-headedness and (if I may so say) wrong-mindedness appear in a very different work, the _Remarks on the Rape of the Lock_.[568] I do not refer to Dennis’s mere scurrilities about “AP—E” and the like. [Sidenote: _On “Machines.”_] But part of the piece is quite serious criticism. Few of us in modern times care much for the “machinery” of this brilliantly artificial poem; but fewer would think of objecting to it on Dennis’s grounds. Machines, it seems, must be—

i. Taken from the religion of the Poet’s
country.

ii. Allegorical in their application.

iii. Corresponding though opposed to each other.

iv. Justly subordinated and proportioned.

And Pope’s machines, we are told, fail in all these respects.

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Footnote 566:

London, 1702.

Footnote 567:

London, 1712.

Footnote 568:

London, 1728.

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Now, putting the fourth ground aside as being a mere matter of opinion (and some who are not fervent Papists think the machines of the _Rape_ very prettily and cleverly arranged in their puppet-show way), one may ask Dennis “Who on earth told you so?” in respect of all the others. And if he alleged (as he might) this or that sixteenth or seventeenth century authority, “And who on earth told _him_ so? and what authority had the authority? Why should machines be taken only from the religion of the country? Why should they be allegorical? Why should Machine Dick on the one side invariably nod to Machine Harry on the other?” And even if some sort of answer be forthcoming, “Why should the poet not do as he please if he succeeds thereby in giving the poetic pleasure?” To which last query of course neither Dennis nor any of his school could return any answer, except of the kind that requires bell, book, and candle.

Nor would he have hesitated to use this, for he is a rule-critic of the very straitest kind, a “Tantivy” of poetic Divine Right. [Sidenote: _His general theory of Poetry._] In his three chief books of abstract criticism[569] he endeavours to elaborate, with Longinus in part for code, and with Milton for example, a noble, indeed, and creditable, but utterly arbitrary and hopelessly narrow theory of poetry as _necessarily_ religious, and as having for its sole real end the reformation of the mind, by a sort of enlarged Aristotelian _katharsis_ as to spirit, and by attention to the strict laws of the art in form. Poetical Justice was a sort of mediate divinity to Dennis: as we have seen, he upbraided Shakespeare for the want of it; he remonstrated, in the _Spectator_, No. 548, and elsewhere, with Addison for taking too little account of it; part at least of his enthusiasm for Milton comes from Milton’s avowed intention to make his poem a theodicy.

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Footnote 569:

_The Advancement and Reformation of Poetry_, 1701; _A Large Account of
the Taste in Poetry_, next year; and _Grounds of Criticism in Poetry_,
1704.

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A noble error! let it be repeated, with no hint or shadow of sarcasm or of irreverence; but a fatal error as well. That Poetry, like all things human, lives and moves and has its being in God, the present writer believes as fervently and unhesitatingly as any Platonic philosopher or any Patristic theologian; and he would cheerfully incur the wrath of Savonarola by applying the epithet “divine,” in its fullest meaning, not merely to tragedy and epic and hymn, but to song of wine and of love. But this is not what Dennis meant at all. He meant that Poetry is to have a definitely religious, definitely moral _purpose_—not that it is and tends of itself necessarily _ad majorem Dei gloriam_, but that we are to shape it according to what our theological and ethical ideas of the glory of God are. This way easily comes bad poetry, not at all easily good; and it excludes poetic varieties which may be as good as the best written in obedience to it, and better. Moreover, putting Dennis’s notion of the end of Poetry together with his notion of its method or art (which latter is to be adjusted to some at least of the straitest classical precepts), we can easily comprehend, and could easily have anticipated, the narrow intolerance and the hectoring pedantry which he shows towards all who follow not him. In a new sense—not so very different from the old mediæval one, though put with no mediæval glamour, and by an exponent full of eighteenth-century prosaism, yet destitute of eighteenth-century neatness and concinnity—Poetry becomes a part of theology; and the mere irritableness of the man of letters is aggravated into the _odium theologicum_. Bad poets (that is to say, bad according to Dennis) are not merely faulty artists but wicked men; of this Dennis is sure. “And when a man is sure,” as he himself somewhere naïvely observes, “’tis his duty to speak with a modest assurance.” We know, from examples more recent than poor Dennis, that, when a man is thus minded, his assurance is very apt to eat up his modesty, taking his charity, his good manners, and some other things, as condiments to the meal.

Dennis and Addison, though the latter did not escape the absolute impartiality of the former’s carping, were on terms of mutual respect which, considering all things, were creditable to both. [Sidenote: _Addison._] During the latter part of his rather short lifetime Addison, it is hardly necessary to say, enjoyed a sort of mild dictatorship in Criticism as in other departments of literature; and his right to it was scarcely disputed till near the close of the century, though Johnson knew that he was not deep, and tells us that, in his own last days, it was almost a fashion to look down on Addisonian criticism. If, like others, he was displaced by the Romantic revival, he received more lenient treatment than some, in virtue partly of his own general moderation, partly of his championship of Milton. Yet while his original literary gifts recovered high place during the nineteenth century, his criticism has often been considered to possess scarcely more than historic interest, and has sometimes been rather roughly handled—for instance, by Mr Matthew Arnold. But a recent writer,[570] by arguing that Addison’s treatment of the Imagination, as a separate faculty, introduced a new principle into criticism, has at any rate claimed for him a position which, if it could be granted, would seat him among the very greatest masters of the art, with Aristotle and Longinus among his own forerunners. As usual let us, before discussing these various estimates, see what Addison actually did as a critic.[571]

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Footnote 570:

Mr W. Basil Worsfold in his _Principles of Criticism_ (London, 1897).
I hope that nothing which, in a politely controversial tone, I may
have to say here, will be taken as disparagement of a very interesting
and valuable essay.

Footnote 571:

The most convenient edition of Addison’s _Works_ is that of Bohn, with
Hurd’s editorial matter and a good deal more (London, 6 vols., 1862).

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His _début_ as such was not fortunate. He was, it is true, only three-and-twenty when at “dearest Harry’s” request (that is to say Mr Harry Sacheverell’s) he undertook an _Account of the greatest English Poets_.[572] [Sidenote: _The_ Account of the Best known English Poets.] In 1694 nobody, except Dryden, could be expected to write very good verse, so that the poetical qualities of this verse-essay need not be hardly dwelt upon, or indeed considered at all. We may take it, as if it were prose, for the matter only. And thus considered, it must surely be thought one of the worst examples of the pert and tasteless ignorance of its school. Before Cowley nobody but Chaucer and Spenser is mentioned at all, and the mentions of these are simply grotesque. The lines convict Addison, almost beyond appeal, of being at the time utterly ignorant of English literary history up to 1600, and of having read Chaucer and Spenser themselves, if he had read them at all, with his eyes shut. The Chaucer section reads as if it were describing _A C. Merry Tales_ or the _Jests of George Peele_. Where Dryden, if he did not understand Chaucer’s versification, and missed some of his poetry, could see much even of that, and almost all the humour, the grace, the sweetness, the “God’s plenty” of life and character that Chaucer has, Addison sees nothing but a merry-andrew of the day before yesterday.[573] So, too, the consummate art of Spenser, his exquisite versification, his great ethical purpose, and yet his voluptuous beauty, are quite hidden from Addison. He sees nothing but a tedious allegory of improbable adventures, and objects to the “dull moral” which “lies too plain below,” much as Temple had done before him.[574] Cowley, Milton, and Waller are mentioned next, in at least asserted chronological order. Cowley is “a mighty genius” full of beauties and faults,

“Who more had pleased us had he pleased us less,”

but who is a perfect “milky way” of brilliancy, and has made Pindar himself “take a nobler flight.” Milton alternately strikes Addison with awe, rapture, and shock at his politics. He

“Betrays a bottom odious to the sight.”

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Footnote 572:

It is fair to say that he never published this, and that, as Pope told
Spence, he used himself to call it “a poor thing,” and admitted that
he spoke of some of the poets only “on hearsay.” Now when Pope speaks
to Addison’s credit it is not as “what the soldier said.” It _is_
evidence, and of the strongest.

Footnote 573:

“In vain he jests in his unpolished strain,
And tries to make his readers laugh in vain.”

Footnote 574:

“His moral lay so bare that it lost the effect” (_Ess. on Po._, iii.
420, _ed. cit. sup._) Indeed it has been suggested that Addison’s debt
to Temple here is not confined to this.

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So we turn to Waller, who is not only “courtly” but “moves our passion,” (what a pity that he died too soon to "rehearse Maria’s charms"!) to Roscommon, who “makes even rules a noble poetry,” and Denham, whose Cooper’s Hill “we must,” of course, not “forget.” “Great Dryden” is then, not unhappily, though not quite adequately, celebrated, and the line on his Muse—

“She wears all dresses, and she charms in all,”

is not only neat, but very largely true. When Dryden shall decay, luckily there is harmonious Congreve: and, if Addison were not tired with rhyming, he would praise (he does so at some length) noble Montague, who directs his artful muse to Dorset,

“In numbers such as Dorset’s self might use,”—

as to which all that can be said is that, if so, either the verses of Montague or the verses of Dorset referred to are not those that have come down to us under the names of the respective authors.

To dwell at all severely on this luckless production of a young University wit would be not only unkind but uncritical. It shows that at this time Addison knew next to nothing[575] about the English literature not of his own day, and judged very badly of what he pretended to know.

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Footnote 575:

He proposes to give an account of “_all_ the Muse possessed” between
Chaucer and Dryden; and, as a matter of fact, mentions nobody but
Spenser between Chaucer and Cowley.

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The prose works of his middle period, the _Discourse on Medals_ and the _Remarks on Italy_, are very fully illustrated from the Latin poets—the division of literature that Addison knew best—but indulge hardly at all in literary criticism. It was not till the launching of the _Tatler_, by Steele and Swift, provided him with his natural medium of utterance, that Addison became critical. This periodical itself, and the less known ones that followed the _Spectator_, all contain exercises in this character: but it is to the _Spectator_ that men look, and look rightly, for Addison’s credentials in the character of a critic. [Sidenote: _The_ Spectator _criticisms_.] The _Tatler_ Essays, such as the rather well known papers on Tom Folio and Ned Softly, those in the _Guardian_, the good-natured puff of Tom D’Urfey, &c., are not so much serious and deliberate literary criticisms, as applications, to subjects more or less literary, of the peculiar method of gently malicious censorship, of laughing castigation in manners and morals, which Addison carried to such perfection in all the middle relations of life. Not only are the _Spectator_ articles far more numerous and far more weighty, but we have his own authority for regarding them as, in some measure at least, written on a deliberate system, and divisible into three groups. The first of these groups consists of the early papers on True and False Wit, and of essays on the stage. The second contains the famous and elaborate criticism of Milton with other things; and the third, the still later, still more serious, and still more ambitious, series on the Pleasures of the Imagination. Addison is looking back from the beginning of this last when he gives the general description,[576] and it is quite possible that the complete trilogy was not in his mind when he began the first group. But there is regular development in it, and whether we agree or not with Mr Worsfold’s extremely high estimate of the third division, it is quite certain that the whole collection—of some thirty or forty essays—does clearly exhibit that increasing sense of what criticism means, which is to be observed in almost all good critics. For criticism is, on the one hand, an art in which there are so few manuals or trustworthy short summaries—it is one which depends so much more on reading and knowledge than any creative art—and, above all, it is necessary to make so many mistakes in it before one comes right, that, probably, not one single example can be found of a critic of importance who was not a much better critic when he left off than when he began.

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Footnote 576:

In the last paragraph of _Sp._ 409. The whole paper has been occupied
by thoughts on Taste and Criticism: it contains the excellent
comparison of a critic to a tea-taster, and it ends with this
retrospect, and the promise of the “Imagination” Essays (_v. ed.
cit._, iii. 393).

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In Group One[577] Addison is still animated by the slightly desultory spirit of moral satire, which has been referred to above; and, though fifteen or sixteen years have passed since the _Account_, he does not seem to be so entirely free as we might wish from the crude sciolism, if not the sheer ignorance, of the earliest period. [Sidenote: _On True and False Wit._] He is often admirable: his own humour, his taste, almost perfect within its own narrow limits, and his good sense, made that certain beforehand. But he has rather overloaded it with somewhat artificial allegory, the ethical temper rather overpowers the literary, and there is not a little of that arbitrary “blackmarking” of certain literary things which is one of the worst faults of neo-classic criticism. The Temple of Dulness is built (of course) “after the Gothic manner,” and the image of the god is dressed “after the habit of a monk.” Among the idolatrous rites and implements are not merely rebuses, anagrams, verses arranged in artificial forms, and other things a little childish, though perfectly harmless, but acrostics—trifles, perhaps, yet trifles which can be made exquisitely graceful, and satisfying that desire for mixing passion with playfulness which is not the worst affection of the human heart.

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Footnote 577:

_Sp._ 58-63.

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He had led up to this batch, a few weeks earlier, by some cursory remarks on Comedy, which form the tail of a more elaborate examination of Tragedy, filling four or five numbers.[578] [Sidenote: _On Tragedy._] Readers who have already mastered the general drift of the criticism of the time before him, will scarcely need any long _précis_ of his views, which, moreover, are in everybody’s reach, and could not possibly be put more readably. Modern tragedies, he thinks, excel those of Greece and Rome in the intricacy and disposition of the fable, but fall short in the moral. He objects to rhyme (except an end-couplet or two), and, though he thinks the style of our tragedies superior to the sentiment, finds the former, especially in Shakespeare, defaced by “sounding phrases, hard metaphors, and forced expressions.” This is still more the case in Lee. Otway is very “tender”: but it is a sad thing that the characters in _Venice Preserved_ should be traitors and rebels. Poetic justice (this was what shocked Dennis), as generally understood, is rather absurd, and quite unnecessary. And the tragi-comedy, which is the product of the English theatre, is “one of the most monstrous inventions that ever entered into a poet’s thought.” You “might as well weave the adventures of Æneas and Hudibras into one poem” [and, indeed, one might find some relief in this, as far as the adventures of Æneas are concerned]. Tragedies are not even to have a double plot. Rants, and especially impious rants, are bad. Darkened stages, elaborate scenery and dresses, troops of supers, &c., are as bad: bells, ghosts, thunder, and lightning still worse. “Of all our methods of moving pity and terror, there is none so absurd and barbarous as the dreadful butchering of one another,” though all deaths on the stage are not to be forbidden.

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Footnote 578:

_Sp._ 39, 40, 42, 44, 45.

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Now, it is not difficult to characterise the criticism which appears in this first group, strengthened, if anybody cares, by a few isolated examples. It contains a great deal of common sense and good ordinary taste; many of the things that it reprehends are really wrong, and most of what it praises is good in a way. But the critic has as yet no guiding theory, except what he thinks he has gathered from Aristotle, and has certainly gathered from Horace, _plus_ Common Sense itself, with, as is the case with all English critics of this age, a good deal from his French predecessors, especially Le Bossu and Bouhours. Which borrowing, while it leads him into numerous minor errors, leads him into two great ones—his denunciations of tragi-comedy, and of the double plot. He is, moreover, essentially arbitrary: his criticism will seldom stand the application of the “Why?” the “_Après?_” and a harsh judge might, in some places, say that it is not more arbitrary than ignorant.

The Second Group,[579] or Miltonic batch, with which may be taken its “moon,” the partly playful but more largely serious _examen_ of _Chevy Chase_, is much the best known, and has been generally ranked as the most important exhibition of Addison’s critical powers. [Sidenote: _On Milton._] It is not, however, out of paradox or desire to be singular that it will be somewhat briefly discussed here. By the student of Addison it cannot be too carefully studied; for the historian of criticism it has indeed high importance, but importance which can be very briefly summed up, and which requires no extensive analysis of the eighteen distinct essays that compose the Miltonic group, or the two on _Chevy Chase_. The critic here takes for granted—and knows or assumes that his readers will grant—two general positions:—

1. The Aristotelian-Horatian view of poetry, with a few of the more commonplace utterances of Longinus, supplies the orthodox theory of Poetics.

2. The ancients, especially Homer and Virgil, supply the most perfect examples of the orthodox practice of poetry.

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Footnote 579:

These began in _Sp._ 267, and were the regular Saturday feature of the
paper for many weeks. References to Milton outside of them will be
found in the excellent index of the ed. cit. or in that of Mr Gregory
Smith’s exact and elegant reproduction of the _Spectator_ (8 vols.,
London, 1897).

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These things posed, he proceeds to examine _Chevy Chase_ at some, _Paradise Lost_ at great, length by their aid; and discovers in the ballad not a few, and in the epic very great and very numerous, excellences. As Homer does this, so Milton does that: such a passage in Virgil is a more or less exact analogue to such another in _Paradise Lost_. Aristotle says this, Horace that, Longinus the third thing; and you will find the dicta capitally exemplified in such and such a place of Milton’s works. To men who accepted the principle—as most, if not all, men did—the demonstration was no doubt both interesting and satisfactory; and though it certainly did not start general admiration of Milton, it stamped that admiration with a comfortable seal of official orthodoxy. But it is actually more antiquated than Dryden, in assuming that the question whether Milton wrote according to Aristotle is coextensive with the question whether he wrote good poetry.

The next batch is far more important.

What _are_ the Pleasures of the Imagination? It is of the first moment to observe Addison’s exact definition.[580] [Sidenote: _The “Pleasures of the Imagination.”_] Sight is the “sense which furnishes the imagination with its ideas; so that by the ‘Pleasures of the Imagination’ or Fancy, which I shall use promiscuously, I here mean such as arise from visible objects, either when we have them actually in our view, or when we call up their ideas into our minds by paintings, statues, descriptions, or any the like occasion.” We can have no images not thus furnished, though they may be altered and compounded by imagination itself. To make this quite sure, he repeats that he means _only_ such pleasures as thus arise. He then proceeds, at some length, to argue for the innocence and refinement of such pleasures, their usefulness, and so on; and further, to discuss the causes or origins of pleasure in sight, which he finds to be three—greatness, uncommonness, and beauty. The pleasantness of these is assigned to such and such wise and good purposes of the Creator, with a reference to the great modern discoveries of Mr Locke’s essay.

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Footnote 580:

_Sp._ 411, ed. cit., iii. 394.

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Addison then goes on to consider the sources of entertainment to the imagination, and decides that, for the purpose, art is very inferior to nature, though both rise in value as each borrows from the other. He adduces, in illustration, an odd rococo mixture of scene-painting and reflection of actual objects which he once saw (p. 404). Italian and French gardens are next praised, in opposition to the old formal English style, and naturally trained trees to the productions of the _ars topiaria_; while a very long digression is made to greatness in Architecture, illustrated by this remark (p. 409), “Let any one reflect on the disposition of mind in which he finds himself at his first entrance into the Pantheon at Rome, ... and consider how little in proportion he is affected with the inside of a Gothic cathedral, though it be five times larger than the other,” the reason being “the greatness of the manner in the one, and the meanness in the other.”

So the “secondary” pleasures of the imagination—_i.e._, those compounded and manufactured by memory—are illustrated by the arts of sculpture and painting, with a good passage on description generally, whence he turns to the Cartesian doctrine of the association of ideas, and shows very ingeniously how the poet may avail himself of this. Next comes a curious and often just analysis of the reasons of pleasure in description—how, for instance, he likes Milton’s Paradise better than his Hell, because brimstone and sulphur are not so refreshing to the imagination as beds of flowers and wildernesses of sweets. Or we may like things because they “raise a secret ferment in the mind,” either directly, or so as to arouse a feeling of relief by comparison, as when we read of tortures, wounds, and deaths. Moreover, the poet may improve Nature. Let oranges grow wild, and roses, woodbines, and jessamines flower at the same time. As for “the fairy way of writing”[581]—that is to say, the supernatural—it requires a very odd turn of mind. We do it better than most other nations, because of our gloominess and melancholy of temper. Shakespeare excels everybody else in touching “this weak superstitious part” of his reader’s imagination. The glorifying of the imagination, however, is by no means confined to the poet. In good historians we “see” everything. None more gratify the imagination than the authors of the new philosophy, astronomers, microscopists. This (No. 420) is one of Addison’s most ambitious passages of writing, and the whole ends (421) with a peroration excellently hit off.

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Footnote 581:

This phrase is originally Dryden’s (dedication to _King Arthur_, viii.
136, ed. cit.), who, however, has “kind” for “way”.

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It is upon these papers mainly that Mr Worsfold[582] bases his high eulogium of Addison as “the first genuine critic,” the first “who added something to the last word of Hellenism,” the bringer of criticism “into line with modern thought,” the establisher of “a new principle of poetic appeal.” Let us, as uncontroversially as possible, and without laying any undue stress on the fact that Mr Worsfold practically omits Longinus altogether,[583] stick, in our humdrum way, to the facts.

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Footnote 582:

_Op. cit._, pp. 93-107, and more largely pp. 55-93.

Footnote 583:

Students of the Stagirite may be almost equally surprised to find
Aristotle regarded as mainly, if not wholly, a critic of Form as
opposed to Thought.

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In the first place, supposing for the moment that Addison uses “imagination” in our full modern sense, and supposing, secondly, for the moment also, that he assigns the appeal to the imagination as the special engine of the poet, is this an original discovery of his? By no means: there are many _loci_ of former writers to negative this—there is one that is fatal. And this is no more recondite a thing than the famous Shakespearian description of

“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,”

as

“Of _imagination_ all compact,”

with what follows. But this is a mere question of property, plagiarism, suggestion; and such questions are at best the exercises of literary holiday-makers, at the worst the business of pedants and of fools.

A more important as well as a more dangerous question is this. _Does_ Addison make “the appeal to the imagination” the test of poetry? It can only be answered that, by his own explicit words, he does nothing of the kind. If he advances anything, it is that the appeal to the imagination is the appeal of art generally—of prose (even of scientific) literary art as well as of poetry, of painting, sculpture, architecture, as well as of literature. In doing this he does a good thing: he does something notable in the history of general æsthetics; but in so far as literature, and especially poetry, is concerned, he scarcely goes as far as Longinus in the well-known passage,[584] though he works out his doctrine at much greater length, and with assistance from Descartes and Locke.

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Footnote 584:

See vol. i. p. 165 _sq._

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But the most important and the most damaging question of all is this, “Are not Addison and his panegyrist using words in equivocal senses? _Does_ Imagination in Addison’s mouth bear the meaning which we, chiefly since Coleridge’s day, attach to the word? Does it even mean what it meant to Longinus, much more what it meant to Shakespeare?”

I have no hesitation in answering the two latter questions with an absolute and unhesitating “No!”

It seems indeed extraordinary that, in face of Addison’s most careful and explicit limitations, any one should delude himself into thinking that even the Shakespearian and Addisonian Imaginations are identical—much more that Addison’s Imagination is the supreme faculty, creative, transcending Fancy,[585] superior to fact, not merely compounding and refining upon, but altogether superseding and almost scorning, ideas of sensation, which we mean by the word, and which Philostratus or Apollonius[586] partly glimpsed. Addison tells us—tells us over and over again—that _all_ the ideas and pleasures of the imagination are pleasures of sense, and, what is more, that they are all pleasures of one sense—Sight. Why he should have limited himself in this singular manner it is hard to say; except that he was evidently full of Locke when he wrote, and, indeed, almost entirely under the influence of the _Essay_. That he had a contempt for music is elsewhere pretty evident; and this probably explains his otherwise inexplicable omission of the supplies and assistance given to Imagination by Hearing. His morality, as well as old convention, excluded Touch, Taste, and Smell as low and gross, though no candid philosophy could help acknowledging the immense influence exercised upon Imagination by at least the first and the last—Taste, because the most definite, being perhaps the least imaginative of all. But the fact that he does exclude even these senses, and still more rigidly excludes everything but Sense, is insuperable, irremovable, ruthless. Addison may have been the first modern critic to work out the appeal of art to the pleasures and ideas furnished by the sense of sight. He is certainly nothing more.

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Footnote 585:

It would be unfair to lay too much stress on his identification of
Imagination and Fancy; but there is something tell-tale in it.

Footnote 586:

See vol. i. p. 118 _sq._

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