Chapter III: The English Precursors (1)

THE FIRST GROUP—MEDIÆVAL REACTION—GRAY—PECULIARITY OF HIS CRITICAL
POSITION—THE LETTERS—THE ‘OBSERVATIONS’ ON ARISTOPHANES AND PLATO—
THE ‘METRUM’—THE LYDGATE NOTES—SHENSTONE—PERCY—THE WARTONS—JOSEPH’S
‘ESSAY ON POPE’—THE ‘ADVENTURER’ ESSAYS—THOMAS WARTON ON SPENSER—HIS
‘HISTORY OF ENGLISH POETRY’—HURD: HIS COMMENTARY ON ADDISON—THE
HORACE—THE DISSERTATIONS—OTHER WORKS—THE 'LETTERS ON CHIVALRY AND
ROMANCE’—THEIR DOCTRINE—HIS REAL IMPORTANCE—ALLEGED IMPERFECTIONS OF
THE GROUP—STUDIES IN PROSODY—JOHN MASON: HIS ‘POWER OF NUMBERS’ IN
PROSE AND POETRY—MITFORD: HIS ‘HARMONY OF LANGUAGE’—IMPORTANCE OF
PROSODIC INQUIRY—STERNE AND THE STOP-WATCH.

We have already, in the last volume, seen that in England, about the middle of the eighteenth century, the tables of criticism turned, and that a company of critics, not large, not as a rule very great men of letters, began slowly, tentatively, with a great deal of rawness, and blindness, and even backsliding, to grope for a catholic and free theory of literature, and especially of poetry. We are now to examine this group[96] more narrowly. With the not quite certainly to be allowed exception of Gray, no one of them could pretend to the first rank in the literature of the time; and most of them (Hurd and Percy were the chief exceptions) did not live to see, even at the extreme verge of life, the advent of the champions who were to carry their principles into practice. But they were the harbingers of the dawn, little as in some cases (perhaps in all) they comprehended the light that faintly and fitfully illuminated them beforehand.

[Sidenote: _The first group._]

Three of the writers of this class whom it is necessary to name here have been alluded to already; the others were Shenstone and the Wartons. As so often happens in similar cases, it is exceedingly difficult to assign exact priority, for mere dates of publication are always misleading; and in this case, from their close juxtaposition, they almost of themselves give the warning that they are not to be trusted. How early, in his indolent industry at Cambridge, Gray had come to a Pisgah-sight of the true course of English poetry; Shenstone, in pottering and maundering at the Leasowes, to glimpses of the same; Percy and Shenstone again to their design, afterwards executed by Percy alone, of publishing the _Reliques_; the Wartons to their revolutionary views of Pope on the one side and Spenser on the other; Hurd to his curious mixture of true and false _aperçus_;—it is really impossible to say. The last-named, judging all his work together, may seem the least likely, early as some of that work is, to have struck out a distinctly original way for himself; but all, no doubt, were really driven, _nolentes volentes_, conscious or unconscious, by the Time-Spirit.

[Sidenote: _Mediæval reaction._]

The process which the Spirit employed for effecting this great change was a simple one; indeed, we have almost summed up his inspiration in the oracular admonition, _Antiquam exquirite matrem_. For more than two hundred years literary criticism had been insolently or ignorantly neglecting its mother, the Middle Age—now with a tacit assumption that this period _ought_ to be neglected, now with an open and expressed scorn of it. But, as usually happens, a return had begun to be made just when the opposite progress seemed to have reached its highest point. Dryden himself had “translated” and warmly praised Chaucer; Addison had patronised _Chevy Chase_. But before the death of Pope much larger and more audacious explorations had been attempted. In Scotland—whether consciously stung or not by the disgrace of a century almost barren of literature—Watson the printer[97] and Allan Ramsay[98] had, in 1706-11 and 1724-40, unearthed a good deal of old poetry. In England the anonymous compiler[99] of the _Ballads_ of 1723 had done something, and Oldys the antiquary, under the shelter of “Mrs Cooper’s” petticoat, had done more with the _Muses’ Library_ of 1737. These examples[100] were followed out, not without a little cheap contempt from those who would be in the fashion, and knew not that this fashion had received warning. But they _were_ followed, and their most remarkable result, in criticism and creation combined, is the work of Gray.

[Sidenote: _Gray _]

We have not so very many fairer figures in our “fair” herd than Gray, though the fairness may be somewhat like that of Crispa,[101] visible chiefly to a lover of criticism itself. His actual critical performance is, in proportion, scantier even than his poetical; and the scantiness may at first sight seem even stranger, since a man can but poetise when he can, but may, if he has the critical faculty, criticise almost when he will and has the opportunity. That opportunity (again at first sight) Gray may seem to have had, as scarcely another man in our whole long history has had it. He had nothing else to do, and was not inclined to do anything else. He had sufficient means, no professional avocations, the knowledge, the circumstances, the _locale_, the wits, the taste, even the velleity—everything but, in the full sense, the will. This indeed he might, in all circumstances and at all times, have lacked, for Mr Arnold showed himself no philosophic student of humanity when he said that at the date of Milton, or at the date of Keats, Gray would have been a different man. His _work_ would doubtless have been a different work; but that is another matter. At all times, probably, Gray would have had the same fastidiousness, the same liability to be “put off”; and if his preliminary difficulties had been lightened by the provision, in times nearer our own, of the necessary rough-hewing and first research by others, yet this very provision would probably have prevented him from pursuing what he would have disdainfully regarded as a second-hand business. We may—we must—regret that he never finished that _History of English Poetry_ which he hardly began, that he never attempted the half-dozen other things of the kind, which he was better equipped for doing than any man then living, and than all but three or four men who have lived since. But the regret must be tempered by a secret consciousness that on the whole he probably would _not_ have done them, let time and chance and circumstance have favoured him never so lavishly.

[Sidenote: _Peculiarity of his critical position._]

Yet this very idiosyncrasy of limitation and hamper in him made, in a sense, for criticism; inasmuch as there are two kinds of critical temperament, neither of which could be spared. There is the eager, strenuous, almost headlong critical disposition of a Dryden, which races like a conflagration[102] over all the field it can cover; and there is the hesitating, ephectic, intermittent temperament of a Gray, which directs an intense and all-dissolving, but ill-maintained heat at this and that special part of the subject. In what is called, and sometimes is, “originality,” this latter temperament is perhaps the more fertile of the two, and Gray has it in an almost astounding measure. Great as was his own reading, a man might, I think, be as well read as himself without discovering any real indebtedness of his, except to a certain general influence of literary study in many times and tongues. He knew indeed, directly or indirectly, most of the other agents in the quiet and gradual revolution which was coming on English poetic and literary taste; but he was much in advance of all of them in time. Well as he was read in Italian, he nowhere, I think, cites Gravina, in whom there was something to put him on new tracks; and though he was at least equally well read in French, and does cite Fontenelle, it is not for any of the critical germs which we have discovered in that elusive oracle. The one modern language to which he seems to have paid little or no attention was German,[103] where the half-blind strugglings of the Zürich school might have had some stimulus for him. Whatever he did, alone he did it; and though the volume of his strictly critical observations (not directed to mere common tutorial scholarship) would, if printed consecutively, perhaps not fill twenty—certainly not fifty—pages of this book, its virtue, intrinsic and suggestive, surpasses that of libraries full of Rapins and even of Batteux.

[Sidenote: _The Letters._]

From the very first these observations have, to us, no uncertain sound. In a letter to West,[104] when the writer was about six-and-twenty, we find it stated with equal dogmatism, truth, and independence of authority that “the language of the age is never the language of poetry except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs nothing from prose,” with a long and valuable citation, illustrating this defence of “poetic diction,” and no doubt thereby arousing the wrath of Wordsworth. Less developed, but equally important and equally original, is the subsequent description of our language as not being “a settled thing” like the French. Gray, indeed, makes this with explicit reference only to the revival of archaisms, which he defends; but, as we see from other places as well as by natural deduction, it extends to reasonable neologisms also. In this respect Gray is with all the best original writers, from Chaucer and Langland downwards, but against a respectably mistaken body of critics who would fain not merely introduce the caste system into English, but, like Sir Boyle Roche, make it hereditary in this caste not to have any children.

This same letter contains some of Gray’s best-known criticisms, in his faint praise of _Joseph Andrews_ and his warm appreciation of Marivaux and Crébillon. I am not quite certain that, in this last, Gray intended any uncomplimentary comparison, or that he meant anything more than a defence of the novel generally—a defence which itself deserves whatever crown is appropriated to critical merit, inasmuch as the novel had succeeded to the place of Cinderella of Literature. However, both Fielding and Smollett were probably too boisterous for Gray, who could appreciate Sterne better, though he disliked “Tristram’s” faults.

But the fact is that it is not in criticisms of his contemporaries, or indeed in definite critical appreciation at all, that Gray’s strength lies. For any defects in the former he has, of course, the excuse that his was a day of rather small things in poetry; but, once more, it is not quite certain that circumstances would have much altered the case. We must remember that Mr Arnold also does not come very well out of this test; and indeed, that second variety of the critical temperament which we have defined above is not conducive to enthusiasm.[105] It is, of course, unlucky that Gray’s personal affection for Mason directed his most elaborate praises to a tenth-rate object; but it is fair to remember that he does reprehend in Mason faults—such as excessive personification—which were not merely those of his friend, the husband of “dead Maria,” but his own. It is a thousand pities that, thanks to Mason himself, we have the similar criticisms of Beattie only in a garbled condition; but they too are sound and sensible, if _very_ merciful. The mercy, however, which Gray showed perhaps too plentifully to friends and relations he did not extend to others. That the “frozen grace” of Akenside appealed little to him is less remarkable than his famous pair of judgments on “Joe” Warton and Collins.

The coupling itself, moreover, and even the prophecy that “neither will last,” are less extraordinary (for the very keenest eyes, when unassisted by “the firm perspective of the past,” will err in this way, and Joseph’s _Odes_ are, as his friend, Dr. Johnson, said of the rumps and kidneys, “very pretty little things”) than the ascription of “a bad ear” to Collins. This is certainly “a term inexplicable to the Muse.” It was written in 1746. Five years later an undated but clearly datable letter to Walpole contains (lxxxiv., ed. cit.) in a notice of Dodsley’s _Miscellany_, quite a sheaf of criticisms. That of Tickell—“a poor short-winded imitator of Addison, who had himself not above three or four notes in poetry, sweet enough indeed, like those of a German flute, but such as soon tire and satiate the ear with their frequent return”—is very notable for this glance backward on the great Mr Addison, though it would have been unjust to Tickell if (which does not quite appear) it had been intended to include his fine elegy on Addison himself, and the still finer one on Cadogan.[106] Gray is quite amiable to _The Spleen_ and _The Schoolmistress_, and _London_; justly assigns to Dyer (the Dyer of _Grongar Hill_, not of _The Fleece_) “more of poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number,” but unjustly calls him “rough and injudicious,” and brushes most of the rest away, not too superciliously. A year later (December 1752, to Wharton) he grants to Hall’s Satires “fulness of spirit and poetry; as much of the first as Dr Donne, and far more of the latter.” In the elaborate “buckwashing” of Mason’s _Caractacus_ ode, which occupies great part of the very long letter of December 19, 1756, there is a passage of great importance on Epic and Lyric style, which exhibits as well perhaps as anything else the independence, and at the same time the transitional consistency, of Gray’s criticism.

He says first (which is true, and which no rigidly orthodox Neo-Classic would or could have admitted): “The true lyric style, with all its flights of fancy ornaments, heightening of expression, and harmony of sound, is in its nature superior to every other style.” Then he says that this is just the cause why it could not be borne in a work of great length; then that the epic “therefore assumed graver colours,” and only stuck on a diamond borrowed from her sister here and there; then that it is “natural and delightful” to pass from the graver stuff to the diamond, and then that to pass from lyric to epic is to drop from verse to mere prose. All of which seems to argue a curious inequality in clearing the mind from cant. It _is_ true, as has been said, that Lyric is the highest style. But surely the reason why this height cannot be kept is the weakness, not of human receptivity but of human productiveness. Give us an _Iliad_ at the pitch of the best chorus of the _Agamemnon_, and we will gladly see whether we can bear it or not. Again, if you can pass from the dress to the diamond, why not pass from the diamond to the dress? It is true that in Mason’s case the diamonds were paste, and bad paste; but that does not affect the argument. When, in still a later letter (clxii.) to the same “Skroddles”[107] he lays it down that “extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical is one of the grand beauties of lyric poetry,” we must accentuate _one of the_. But there is a bombshell for Neo-Classicism in cvii., still to “Skroddles.” “I insist that sense is nothing in poetry, but according to the dress she wears and the scene she appears in.”

Gray’s attitude to _Ossian_ is interesting, but very much what we should have expected. He was bribed by its difference from the styles of which he was weary; but he seems from the very first to have had qualms (to which he did some violence, without quite succeeding, in order to stifle them) as to its genuineness.

[Sidenote: _The_ Observations _on Aristophanes and Plato_.]

No intelligent lover of the classics, whose love is not limited to them, can fail to regret that by very far the larger bulk of Gray’s critical _Observations_ is directed to Aristophanes and Plato. The annotator is not incompetent, and the annotated are supremely worthy of his labours; but the work was not specially in need of doing, and there have been very large numbers of men as well or better qualified to do it. Such things as this—_Aves_, 1114: “These were plates of brass with which they shaded the heads of statues to guard them from the weather and the birds”—are things which we do not want from a Gray at all. They are the business of that harmless drudge, the lexicographer, in general, of a competent fifth-form master editing the play, in particular. But there was probably at that time not a single man in Europe equally qualified by natural gifts and by study to deliver really critical and comparative opinions on literature, to discuss the history and changes of English, and the like. Nor has there probably at any date been any man better qualified for this, having regard to the conditions of his own time and country. One cannot, then, but feel it annoying that a life, not long but by no means very short, and devoted exclusively to literary leisure, should have resulted, as far as this special vocation of the author is concerned, in some eighty small pages of Dissertation devoted to English metres and to the Poems of Lydgate.

Let us, however, rather be thankful for what we have got, and examine it, such as it is, with care.

[Sidenote: _The_ Metrum.]

In the very first words of the _Metrum_ it is curious and delightful to see a man at this early period cutting right and left at the error of the older editors, who calmly shoved in, or left out, words and syllables to make what they thought correct versification for Chaucer, and at the other error committed by the majority of philologists to-day in holding that Chaucer’s syntax, accidence, and orthography were as precise as those of a writer in the school of the French Academy. Even more refreshing are, on the one hand, his knowledge and heed of Puttenham, and, on the other, his correction of Puttenham’s doctrine of the fixed Caesura, his admissions of this in the case of the Alexandrine, and his quiet demonstration that the admission of it in the decasyllable and octosyllable would make havoc of our best poetry. The contrast of this reasonable method and just conclusion, not merely with the ignorant or overbearing dogmatism of Bysshe half a century earlier, but with the perversity, in the face of light and knowledge, of Guest a century later, is as remarkable as anything in the history of English criticism.

Gray, of course, was fallible. He entangles himself rather on the subject of “Riding Rhyme”; and though he, first (I think) of all English writers, notices the equivalenced dimeter iambics of Spenser’s _Oak and Bryar_, and compares Milton’s octosyllables with them, he goes wrong by saying that this is the _only_ English metre in which such a liberty of choice is allowed, and more wrong still in bringing Donne’s well-known ruggedness under this head. And he does not allow himself to do more than glance at the Classical-metre craze, his remarks on which would have been very interesting.

His subsequent analysis of “measures” with the chief books or poems in which they are used is of very great interest, but as it is a mere table it hardly lends itself to comment, though it fills nearly twenty pages. The conclusion, however, is important, and, without undue guessing, gives us fair warrant for inferring that Gray would have had much (and not a favourable much) to say on the contemporary practice he describes if the table had been expanded into a dissertation. And the table itself, with its notes, shows that though his knowledge of Middle English before Chaucer was necessarily limited, yet he knew and had drawn right conclusions from Robert of Gloucester and Robert of Brunne, _The Owl and the Nightingale_, the early English Life of St. Margaret, and the _Poema Morale_.[108]

His observations on “the pseudo-Rhythmus” (which odd and misleading term simply means Rhyme) present a learned and judicious summary of the facts as then known with the shorter appendices on the same subject.

[Sidenote: _The Lydgate Notes._]

The observations on John Lydgate which close Gray’s critical _dossier_ might have been devoted to a more interesting subject, but they enable us to see what the average quality of the _History_ would have been. And they certainly go, in scheme and quality, very far beyond any previous literary history of any country with which I am acquainted. The article (as we may call it) is made up of a judicious mixture of biography, account of books (in both cases, of course, as far as known to the writer only), citation, exposition of points of interest in subject, history, manners, &c., criticisms of poetical characteristics in the individual, and now and then critical _excursus_ of a more general kind suggested by the subject. In one place, indeed, Gray does introduce Homer in justification of Lydgate: but no one will hesitate to do this now and then; and it is quite clear that he does not do it from any delusion as to a cut-and-dried pattern, or set of patterns, to which every poem, new or old, was bound to conform.

And to this we have to add certain facts which, if not critical utterances, speak as few such utterances have done—the novelty of Gray’s original English poetry, and his selection of Welsh and Scandinavian originals for translation and imitation. These things were themselves unspoken criticism of the most important kind on the literary habits and tastes of his country, and of Europe at large. The, to us, almost unintelligible puzzlement of his contemporaries—the “hard as Greek” of the excellent Garrick, and the bewilderment of the three lords at York races, establish[109] the first point; as for the second, it establishes itself. To these outlying languages and literatures nobody had paid any attention whatever previously;[110] they were now not merely admitted to literary attention, but actually allowed and invited to exercise the most momentous influence on the costume, the manners, the standards of those literatures which had previously alone enjoyed the citizenship of Parnassus.

Small, therefore, as is the extent of deliberate critical work which Gray has left us, we may perceive in it nearly all the notes of reformed, revived, we might almost say reborn, criticism. The two dominants of these have been already dwelt upon—to wit, the constant appeal to history, and the readiness to take new matter, whether actually new in time, or new in the sense of having been hitherto neglected, on its own merits; not indeed with any neglect of the ancients—for Gray was saturated with “classical” poetry in every possible sense of the word, with Homer and Virgil, as with Dante and Milton and Dryden—but purely from the acknowledgment at last of the plain and obvious truth, “other times, other ways.” As a deduction from these two we note, as hardly anywhere earlier, a willingness to take literature as it is, and not to prescribe to it what it should be—in short, a mixture of catholicity with tolerance, which simply does not exist anywhere before. Lastly, we may note a special and very particular attention to prosody. This is a matter of so much importance that we must[111] ourselves bestow presently some special attention upon it, and may advantageously note some other exercitations of the kind at the time or shortly afterwards.

[Sidenote: _Shenstone._]

Of the rest of the group mentioned above, Shenstone[112] is the earliest, the most isolated, and the least directly affected by the mediæval influence. Yet he, too, must have felt it to have engaged, as we know he did, with Percy in that enterprise of the _Reliques_ which his early death cut him off from sharing fully. From his pretty generally known poems no one need have inferred much tendency of the kind in him: for his Spenserian imitation, _The Schoolmistress_, has as much of burlesque as of discipleship in it. Nor are indications of the kind extremely plentiful in his prose works. But the remarkable _Essays on Men and Manners_, which give a much higher notion of Shenstone’s power than his excursions into the rococo, whether versified or hortulary, are full of the new germs. Even here, however, he is, after the prevailing manner of his century, much more ethical than literary, and shows deference, if not reverence, to not a few of its literary idols. The mixed character of his remarks on Pope[113] (which are, however, on the whole very just) may be set down by the Devil’s Advocate to the kind of jealousy commonly entertained by the “younger generations who are knocking at the door”; and his objection to the plan of Spenser is neo-classically purblind. But his remarks on Prosody[114] breathe a new spirit, which, a little later, we shall be able to trace in development. His preference for rhymes that are “long” in pronunciation over snip-snaps like “cat” and “not”; his discovery—herald of the great Coleridgean reaction—that “there is a vast beauty in emphasising in the eighth and ninth place a word that is virtually a dactyl”; the way in which he lays stress on harmony of period and music of style as sources of literary pleasure; and above all the fact, that when examining the “dactylic” idea just given, he urges the absurdity of barring trisyllabic feet in _any_ place, and declares that a person ignorant of Latin can discern Virgil’s harmony, show us the new principles at work. Perhaps his acutest critical passage is the maxim, “Every good poet includes a critic: the reverse will not hold”; his most Romantic, “The words ‘no more’ have a singular pathos, reminding us at once of past pleasure and the future exclusion of it.”[115]

[Sidenote: _Percy._]

Shenstone’s colleague in the intended, his executor in the actual, scheme of the _Reliques_ was allowed by Fate to go very much further in the same path. At no time, perhaps, has Bishop Percy had quite fair play. In his own day his friend Johnson laughed at him, and his enemy Ritson attacked him with his usual savagery. In ours the publication at last of his famous _Folio Manuscript_[116] has resulted in a good deal of not exactly violent, but strong language as to his timorous and eclectic use of the precious material he had obtained, and his scarcely pardonable tamperings with such things as he did extract. Nobody indeed less one-sided and fanatical than Ritson himself, or less prejudiced than the great lexicographer, could ignore the vastness of the benefit which the _Reliques_ actually conferred upon English literature, or the enormous influence which it has directly and indirectly exercised; but there has been a slight tendency to confine Percy’s merits to the corners of this acknowledgment.

Yet there is much more, by no means always in the way of mere allowance, to be said for Percy than this. His poetic taste was not perfect: it could not be so. It was unlucky that he had a certain not wholly contemptible faculty for producing as well as for relishing verse, and an itch for exercising this; while he suffered, as everybody did till at least the close of his own life, from failing entirely to comprehend the late and rather decadent principle that you must let ruins alone—that you must not “improve” your original. But a man must either be strangely favoured by the gods, or else have a real genius for the matter, who succeeds, at such a time and in such circumstances, in getting together and publishing such a collection as the _Reliques_. Nor are Percy’s dissertations destitute of critical as well as of instinctive merit. Modern scholarship—which has the advantage rather of knowing more than Percy could know than of making a better use of what it does know, and which is much too apt to forget that the scholars of all ages are

“Priests that slay the slayer
And shall themselves be slain”—

can find, of course, plenty of errors and shortcomings in the essays on the Minstrels and the Ancient Drama, the metre of _Piers Plowman_, and the Romances; and they are all unnecessarily adulterated with theories and fancies about origin, &c. But this last adulteration has scarcely ceased to be a favourite

“form of competition” among critics; while I am bound to say that the literary sense which is so active and pervading in Percy seems to have deserted our modern philologists only too frequently.

At any rate, whatever may be his errors and whatever his shortcomings, the enormous, the incalculable stimulus and reagency of the _Reliques_ is not now matter of dispute; while it is equally undeniable that the poetical material supplied was reinforced by a method of historical and critical inquiry which, again with all faults, could not fail to have effects almost equally momentous on criticism if not quite so momentous on creation.

[Sidenote: _The Wartons._]

The two Wartons and Hurd gave still more powerful assistance in this latter department, while Thomas Warton at least supplied a great deal of fresh actual material in his _History_. To none of the three has full justice, as it seems to me, been recently done; while to one of them it seems to me that there has been done very great injustice. The main documents which we have to consider in the case of the two brothers are for Joseph, his _Essay on Pope_ (1756-71), and the numerous critical papers in _The Adventurer_; for Thomas, the _Observations on The Faerie Queene_ (1754), and of course _The History of English Poetry_ (1774-81).

[Sidenote: _Joseph’s_ Essay on Pope.]

Warton’s _Essay on Pope_[117]—vaguely famous as a daring act of iconoclasm, and really important as a document in the Romantic Revolt— almost literally anticipates the jest of a hundred years later on another document, about “chalking up ‘No Popery!’ and then running away.” It also shows the uncertainty of stand-point which is quite pardonable and indeed inevitable in these early reformers. To us it is exceedingly unlucky that Warton should at page ii. of his Preface ask, “What traces has Donne of pure poetry?” Yet when we come immediately afterwards to the (for the time) bold and very nearly true statement that Boileau is no more poetical than La Bruyère, we see that Warton was thinking only of the satirist, not of the author of _The Anniversaries_ and the “Bracelet” poems.

Further, Warton lays down, _sans phrase_ and with no Addisonian limitations, that “a poet must have imagination.” He is sure (_we_ may feel a little more doubtful) that Young, his dedicatee, would not insist on being called a poet on the strength of his own Satires. And he works himself up to the position that in Pope there is nothing _transcendently_ sublime or pathetic, supporting this by a very curious and for its time instructive division of English poets into four classes. The first contains poets of the first rank on the sublime-pathetic-imaginative standard, and is limited to three—Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. The second company—headed by Dryden, but including, not a little to our surprise, Fenton—has less of this poetic intensity, but some, and excels in rhetorical and didactic vigour. The third is reserved for those—Butler, Swift, Donne, Dorset, &c.—who, with little poetry, have abundant wit; and the fourth “gulfs” the mere versifiers, among whom we grieve to find Sandys and even Fairfax herded with Pitt and Broome.

There is evidently, both in its rightgoings and its short-comings, considerable matter in this for discussion were such discussion in place. But the main heads of it, which alone would be important, must be obvious to every one. In the body of the _Essay_, Warton, as was hinted above, rather “hedges.” He maintains his position that Pope was not _transcendently_ a poet; and indulges in much detailed and sometimes rather niggling criticism of his work; but readmits him after a fashion to a sort of place in Parnassus, not quite “utmost, last, provincial,” but, as far as we can make out, on the fence between Class Two and Class Three. The book, as has also been said, is a real document, showing drift, but also drifting. The Time-Spirit is carrying the man along, but he is carried half-unconsciously.

[Sidenote: _The_ Adventurer _Essays_.]

Warton’s _Adventurer_ essays are specially interesting. They were written early in 1753-54, some years before the critical period of 1760-65, and two or three before his _Pope_ essay; and they were produced at the recommendation, if not under the direct editorship, of Johnson. Further, in the peroratorical remarks which were usual with these artificial periodicals, Warton explains that they were planned with a definite intention not merely to reintroduce Criticism among polite society, but to reinvest her with something more of exactness and scholarship than had been usual since Addison followed the French critics in talking politely about critical subjects. Warton’s own exercitations are distinguished by a touch which may be best called “gingerly.” He opens (No. 49) with a “Parallel between Ancient and Modern Learning,” which is in effect an almost violent attack on French critics, with exceptions for Fénelon, Le Bossu, and Brumoy. Then, taking the hint of Longinus’s reference to “the legislator of the Jews,” he feigns a fresh discovery of criticisms of the Bible by the author of the Περὶ Ὕψους. He anticipates his examination of Pope by some remarks (No. 63) on that poet from the plagiarism-and-parallel-passage standpoint; upholds the _Odyssey_ (Nos. 75, 80, 83) as of equal value with the _Iliad_, and of perhaps greater for youthful students; insinuates some objections to Milton (No. 101); studies _The Tempest_ (Nos. 93, 97) and _Lear_ (Nos. 113, 116, 122) more or less elaborately.[118] Throughout he appears to be conditioned not merely by the facts glanced at above, by the ethical tendency of these periodicals generally, and by his own profession of schoolmaster, but also by a general transition feeling, a know-not-what-to-think-of-it. Yet his inclination is evidently towards something new—perhaps he does _not_ quite know what—and away from something old, which _we_ at least can perceive without much difficulty to be the Neo-Classic creed. He would probably by no means abjure that creed if it were presented to him as a test, but he would take it with no small qualifications.

[Sidenote: _Thomas Warton on Spenser._]

For a combination of earliness, extension, and character no book noticed in this chapter exceeds in interest Thomas Warton’s _Observations on Spenser_.[119] To an ordinary reader, who has heard that Warton was one of the great ushers of Romanticism in England, and that Spenser was one of the greatest influences which these ushers applied, the opening of the piece, and not a very few passages later, may seem curiously half-hearted and unsympathetic. Such a reader, from another though closely connected point of view, may be disappointed by the fragmentary and _annotatory_ character of the book, its deficiency in _vues d’ensemble_, its apologies, and compromises, and hesitations. But those who have taken a little trouble to inform themselves on the matter, either by their own inquiries or by following the course which has been indicated in this book, will be much better satisfied. They will see that he says what he ought to have said in the concatenation accordingly.

It is impossible to decide how much of yet not discarded orthodoxy, and how much of characteristic eighteenth-century compromise there is in the opening about “depths of Gothic ignorance and barbarity,” “ridiculous and incoherent excursions,” “old _Provençal_ vein,” and the like. Probably there is a good deal of both;[120] there is certainly a good deal which requires both to excuse it. Yet before long Warton fastens a sudden petard on the main gate of the Neo-Classic stronghold by saying: “But it is absurd to think of judging either Ariosto or Spenser by precepts which they did not attend to.” Absurd, indeed! But what becomes of those antecedent laws of poetry, those rules of the kind and so forth, which for more than two hundred years had been accumulating authority? It is no good for him to go on: “We who live in the days of writing by rule.... Critical taste is universally diffused ...” and so on. The petard goes on fizzing and sparkling at the gate, and will blow it in before long.

In the scattered annotations, which follow for a long time, the attitude of compromise is fairly kept; and even Neo-Classics, as we have seen, need not necessarily have objected to Warton’s demonstration[121] _pièces en main_, that Scaliger “had no notion of simple and genuine beauty”; while the whole of his section (iv.) on Spenser’s stanza, &c., is full of _lèse-poésie_, and that (vii.) on Spenser’s inaccuracies is not much better. But the very next section is an important attack on the plagiarism-and-parallel-passage mania which almost invariably develops itself in bad critics; and the defence of his author’s Allegory (§ x.), nay, the plump avowal of him as a Romantic poet, more than atones for some backslidings even here. Above all, the whole book is distinguished by a genuine if not always understanding _love_ of the subject; secondly, by an obvious refusal—sometimes vocal, always latent—to accept _a priori_ rules of criticism; thirdly, and most valuably of all, by recurrence to contemporary and preceding models as criteria instead of to the ancients alone. Much of the last part of the book is occupied with a sort of first draft in little of the author’s subsequent _History_; he is obviously full of knowledge (if sometimes flawed) and of study (if sometimes misdirected) of early English literature. And this is what was wanted. “Nullum numen abest si sit _conscientia_” (putting the verse aside) might almost be the critic’s sole motto if it were not that he certainly cannot do without _Prudentia_ itself. But Prudentia without her sister is almost useless: she can at best give inklings, and murmur, “If you are not conscious of what has actually been done in literature you can never decide what ought and ought not to have been done.”

[Sidenote: _His_ History of English Poetry.]

This is what gives the immense, the almost unequalled importance which Warton’s _History of English Poetry_[122] should possess in the eyes of persons who can judge just judgment. It has errors: there is no division of literature in which it is so unreasonable to expect accuracy as in history, and no division of history to which that good-natured Aristotelian dictum applies so strongly as to literary history. Its method is most certainly defective, and one of its greatest defects is the disproportion in the treatment of authors and subjects. When the author expatiates into Dissertation, he may often be justly accused of first getting out of his depth as regards the subject, and then recovering himself by making the treatment shallow.[123] And I do not know that his individual criticisms betray any very frequent or very extraordinary acuteness of appreciation. To say of the lovely

“_Lenten is come with love to town_,”

that it “displays glimmerings of imagination, and exhibits some faint ideas of poetical expression,” is surely to be, as Dryden said of Smith and Johnson in _The Rehearsal_, a “cool and insignificant gentleman”; and though it is quite accurate to recognise “much humour and spirit” in _Piers Plowman_, it is a little inadequate and banal.

But this is mere hole-picking at worst, at best the necessary or desirable ballast or set-off to a generous appreciation of Warton’s achievement. If his erudition is not unflawed, its bulk and mass are astonishing in a man of his time; if his method and proportion are defective, this is almost inevitable in the work of a pioneer; and we have seen enough since of critics and historians who make all their geese swans, not to be too hard on one who sometimes talked of peacocks or humming-birds as if they were barndoor fowls or sparrows. The good which the book, with its wealth of quotation as well as of summary, must have done, is something difficult to realise but almost impossible to exaggerate. Now at least, for England and for English, the missing links were supplied, the hidden origins revealed, the Forbidden Country thrown open to exploration. It is worth while (though in no unkind spirit) once more to recall Addison’s _péché de jeunesse_ in his _Account of the English Poets_, in order to contrast it with the picture presented by Warton. Instead of a millennium of illiteracy and barbarism, with nothing in it worth noticing at all but Chaucer and Spenser—presented, the one as a vulgar and obsolete merryandrew, and the other as half old-wives’-fabulist and half droning preacher—century after century, from at least the thirteenth onward (Warton does not profess to handle Anglo-Saxon)’ was presented in regular literary development, with abundant examples of complicated literary kinds, and a crowded bead-roll of poets, with specimens of their works. Men had before them—for the first time, except in cases of quite extraordinary leisure, opportunities, taste, and energy—the _actual_ progress of English prosody and English poetic diction, to set against the orthodox doctrine that one fine day not so very early in the seventeenth century Mr Waller achieved a sort of minor miracle of creation in respect of both. And all these works and persons were accorded serious literary and critical treatment, such as had been hitherto reserved for the classics of old, for the masterpieces of what Callières calls _les trois nations polies_ abroad, and for English writers _since_ Mr Waller. That Warton did not gush about them was no fault; it was exactly what could have been desired. What was wanted was the entrance of mediæval and Renaissance poetry into full recognition; the making of it _Hoffähig_; the reconstitution of literary history so as to place the work of the Middle Period on a level basis, and in a continuous series, with work ancient and modern. And this Warton, to the immortal glory of himself, his University, and his Chair,[124] effected.

[Sidenote: _Hurd. His Commentary on Addison._]

The remaining member of the group requires handling with some care. Not much notice has been taken of Bishop Hurd for a long time past, and some authorities who have given him notice have been far from kind. Their unkindness, I think, comes very near injustice; but Hurd has himself to blame for a good deal of it. As a man he seems to have been, if fairly respectable, not in the least attractive; an early but complete incarnation of the disposition called “donnishness”; a toady in his earlier manhood, and an exacter of toadying in his later. He lived long enough to endanger even his critical fair fame; by representing his admiration for Shakespeare as an aberration, and declaring that he returned to his first love Addison.[125] And his work upon Addison himself (by which, I suppose, he is most commonly known) is of a meticulous and peddling kind for the most part, by no means likely to conciliate the majority of recent critics. Most of Hurd’s notes deal with mere grammar; and while nearly all of them forget that writers like Addison make grammar and are not made by it, some are choice examples of the sheer senseless arbitrariness which makes grammar itself too often a mere Lordship of Misrule and Abbacy of Unreason.[126] Yet even here there are good things; especially some attempts[127]—very early and till recently with very few companions in English—to bring out and analyse the rhythmical quality of prose. But it may be frankly admitted that if the long-lived Bishop[128] had been a critic only in his Addisonian commentary, he would hardly have deserved a reference, and would certainly have deserved no long reference, here.

[Sidenote: _The Horace._]

His own _Works_[129] are of much higher importance. The edition (with commentary, notes, and dissertations) of Horace’s _Epistles to the Pisos and to Augustus_ is in part of the class of work to which in this stage of our history we can devote but slight attention, but even that part shows scholarship, acuteness, and—what is for our purpose almost more important than either—wide and comparative acquaintance with critical authorities, from Aristotle and Longinus to Fontenelle and Hume.[130]

[Sidenote: _The Dissertations._]

The “Critical Dissertations” which follow mark a higher flight, indeed, as their titles may premonish, they rather dare that critical inane to which we have more than once referred. Hurd is here a classicist with tell-tale excursions and divagations. In his _Idea of Universal Poetry_ he will not at first include verse in his definition, nor will he accept the commonplace but irresistibly cogent argument of universal practice and expectation. Poetry is the only form of composition which has pleasure for its end; verse gives pleasure; therefore poetry must use verse. The fiction or imitation is the soul of poetry; but style is its body (not “dress,” mark). Hurd even takes the odd and not maintainable but rather original view that the new prose fiction is a clumsy thing, foolishly sacrificing its proper aids of verse.[131] He is most neo-classically peremptory as to the laws of Kinds, which are _not_ arbitrary things by any means, nor “to be varied at pleasure.”[132] But the long Second Dissertation _On the Provinces of the Drama_, which avowedly starts from this principle shows, before long, something more than those easements and compromises by which, as was said in the last volume, eighteenth-century critics often temper the straitness of their orthodoxy. “It is true,” says Hurd,[133] “the laws of the drama, as formed by Aristotle out of the Greek poets, can of themselves be no rule to us in this matter, because these poets had given no examples of such intermediate species.” It is, indeed, most true; but it will be a little difficult to reconcile it with the prohibition of multiplying and varying Kinds. The Third and Fourth Dissertations, filling a volume to themselves, deal with _Poetical Imitation_ and its _Marks_, the hard-worked word “imitation” being used in its secondary or less honourable sense.

The Discourses are, in short, of the “parallel passage” kind, but written in a liberal spirit,[134] showing not merely wide reading but real acuteness, and possessing, in the second instance, the additional interest of being addressed to “Skroddles” Mason, who certainly “imitated” in this sense pretty freely. Even here that _differentia_ which saves Hurd appears, as where he says,[135] “The golden times of the English poetry were undoubtedly the reigns of our two queens,” while, as we saw in the last volume,[136] Blair was teaching, and for years was to teach,

his students at Edinburgh, a scheme of literary golden ages in which that of Elizabeth was simply left out.

Still, these three volumes, though they would put Hurd much higher than the Addison Commentary, are not those which give him the position sought to be vindicated for him here.

[Sidenote: _Other Works._]

Neither will his titles be sought by any one in his _Lectures on the Prophecies_: while even that edition of Cowley’s _Selected Works_ the principle of which Johnson[137] at one time attacked, while at another he admitted it to more favour, can only be drawn on as a proof that Hurd was superior to mere “correctness” in harking back to this poet. Nay, the _Moral and Political Dialogues_ (which drew from the same redoubtable judge[138] the remark, “I fear he is a Whig still in his heart”), though very well written and interesting in their probable effect on Lander, are not in the main literary. Literary characters— Waller, Cowley, and others—often figure in them, but only the third, “On the Age of Queen Elizabeth,” has something of a literary bent, and this itself would scarcely be noteworthy but for its practically independent appendix, the _Letters on Chivalry and Romance_. Here—not exactly in a nutshell, but in less than one hundred and fifty small pages—lie all Hurd’s “proofs,” his claims, his titles: and they seem, to me at least, to be very considerable. It is true that even here we must make some deductions. [Sidenote: _The_ Letters on Chivalry and Romance.] The passages about Chivalry and about the Crusades not merely suffer from necessarily insufficient information, but are exposed to the diabolical arrows of that great _advocatus diaboli_ Johnson when he said[139] that Hurd was “one of a set of men who account for everything systematically. For instance, it has been a fashion to wear scarlet breeches; these men would tell you that according to causes and effects no other wear could at the time have been chosen.” This is a most destructive shrapnel to the whole eighteenth century, and by no means to the eighteenth century only; but it is fair to remember that Hurd’s Romance was almost as distasteful to Johnson as his Whiggery. And now there is no need for any further application of the refiner’s fire and the fuller’s soap; while on the other hand what remains of the _Letters_ (and it is much) is of altogether astonishing quality. I know nothing like it outside England, even in Germany, at its own time; I know nothing like it in England for more than thirty years after its date; I should be puzzled to pick out anything superior to the best of it (with the proper time allowance) since.

[Sidenote: _Their doctrine._]

At the very opening of the _Letters_, Hurd meets the current chatter about “monkish barbarism,” “old wives’ tales,” and the rest, full tilt. “The greatest geniuses,” he says, “of our own and foreign countries, such as Ariosto and Tasso in Italy, and Spenser and Milton in England, were seduced by these barbarities of their forefathers; were even charmed by the Gothic Romances. _Was this caprice and absurdity in them? Or may there not be something in the Gothic Romance peculiarly suited to the views of a genius, and to the ends of poetry? And may not the philosophic moderns have gone too far in their perpetual contempt and ridicule of it?_” There is no mistake possible about this; and if the author afterwards digresses not a little in his “Chivalry” discussions— if he even falls into the Addisonian track, which he elsewhere condemns, of comparing classical and romantic methods, as a kind of apology for the latter, one ought, perhaps, to admit that it was desirable, perhaps necessary, in his day to do so. But when he returns to his real subject, the uncompromisingness and the originality of his views are equally evident, and they gain not a little by being compared with Warton, whose _Observations on the Faërie Queene_ had already appeared. After arguing, not without much truth, that both Shakespeare and Milton are greater when they “use Gothic manners” than when they employ classical, he comes[140] to Spenser himself, and undertakes to “criticise the _Faërie Queene_ under the idea not of a classical, but of a Gothic composition.” He shows that he knows what he is about by subjoining that, “if you judge Gothic architecture by Grecian rules, you find nothing but deformity, but when you examine it by its own the result is quite different.” A few pages later[141] he lays the axe even more directly to the root of the tree. “The objection to Spenser’s method arises from your classic ideas of Unity, which have no place here.” There is unity in the _Faërie Queene_, but it is the unity not of action, but of design.[142] Hurd even reprobates the additional unities which Spenser communicates by the ubiquity of Prince Arthur, and by his allegory. (He may be thought wrong here, but this does not matter.) Then he proceeds to compare Spenser with Tasso, who tries to introduce classic unity, and gives the Englishman much the higher place; and then again he unmasks the whole of his batteries on the French critics. He points out, most cleverly, that they, after using Tasso to depreciate Ariosto, turned on Tasso himself; and, having dealt dexterous slaps in the face to Davenant, Rymer, and Shaftesbury, he has a very happy passage[143] on Boileau’s _clinquant du Tasse_, and the way in which everybody, even Addison, dutifully proceeded to think that Tasso was _clinquant_, and nothing else. Next he takes the offensive-defensive for “the golden dreams of Ariosto, the celestial visions of Tasso” themselves, champions “the fairy way,” and convicts Voltaire out of the mouth of Addison, to whom he had appealed. And then, warming as he goes on, he pours his broadsides into the very _galère capitaine_ of the pirate fleet, the maxim “of following Nature.” “The source of bad criticism, as universally of bad philosophy, is the abuse of terms.”[144] A poet, no doubt, must follow “Nature”; but it is the nature of the poetical world, not of that of science and experience. Further, there is not only confusion general, but confusion particular. You must follow the ordinary nature in satire, in epigram, in didactics, _not_ in other kinds. _Incredulus odi_ has been absurdly misunderstood.[145] The “divine dream”[146] is among the noblest of the poet’s prerogatives. “The _Henriade_,” for want of it, “will in a short time be no more read than _Gondibert_.”[147] And he winds up a very intelligent account of Chaucer’s satire on Romance in _Sir Thopas_ by a still more intelligent argument, that it was only the abuse of Romance that Chaucer satirised, and by an at least plausible criticism of the advent of Good Sense,

“Stooping with disenchanted wings to earth.”

“What,” he concludes, “we have gotten is, you will say, a great deal of good sense; what we have lost is a world of fine fabling, the illusion of which is so grateful to the charmed spirit that, in spite of philosophy and fashion, ‘Fairy’ Spenser still ranks highest among the poets; I mean, with all those who are either come of that house, or have any kindness for it.”

And now I should like to ask whether it is just or fair to say that the work of the man who wrote this thirty-three years before _Lyrical Ballads_ is “vapid and perverted,” that it is “empirical, dull, and preposterous,” and, at the best, “not very useful as criticism”?

[Sidenote: _His real importance._]