Chapter XXVI: Part I: sect. xv., on the effects of tragedy, is almost purely ethical

In the parts—the best of the book—which deal directly with the title subjects (Parts II. and III.), an excellent demonstration[316] is made of the utter absurdity of that scheme of physical proportion which we formerly laughed at:[317] but the application, which might seem so tempting, to similar arbitrariness in judging of literature, is not made. Still more remarkable is the scantiness of the section on “The Beautiful in Sounds”[318] which should have brought the writer to our proper subject. Yet we can hardly regret that he says so little of it when we read that astonishing passage[319] in which the great Mr Burke has “observed” the affections of the body by Love, and has come to the conclusion that “the head reclines something on one side; the eyelids are more closed than usual, and the eyes roll gently with an inclination towards the object; the mouth is a little opened and the breath drawn slowly with now and then a low sigh; the whole body is composed, and the hands fall idly to the sides”—a sketch which I have always wished to have seen carried into line by the ingenious pencil of Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe.[320] A companion portrait of the human frame under the influence of poetic afflatus, in writer or in reader, would indeed have been funny, but scarcely profitable. In fact, the most that can be said for Burke, as for the generality of these æsthetic writers, is that the speculations recommended and encouraged could not but break up the mere ice of Neo-classic rule-judgment. They almost always go directly to the effect, the result, the event, the pleasure, the trouble, the thrill. That way perhaps lies the possibility of new error: but that way certainly lies also the escape from old.

[Sidenote: _The Scottish æsthetic-empirics: Alison._]

The trinitarian succession of Scottish æsthetic-empirics—Gerard, Alison, Jeffrey—could not with propriety be omitted here, but the same propriety would be violated if great space were given to them. They connect with, or at least touch, Burke and Smith on the one hand, Kames on the other: but they are, if rather more literary than the first two, very much less so than the third. All, in degrees modified perhaps chiefly by the natural tendency to “improve upon” predecessors, are associationists: and all display (though in somewhat decreasing measure as a result of the time-spirit) that sometimes amusing but in the end rather tedious tendency to substitute for actual reasoning long chains of only plausibly connected propositions, varied by more or less ingenious substitutions of definition and equivalence, which is characteristic of the eighteenth century. Gerard, the earliest, is the least important:[321] and such notice of Jeffrey as is necessary will come best in connection with his other critical work. Alison, as the central and most important of the three, and as representing a prevailing party for a considerable time, may have some substantive notice here.

[Sidenote: _The_ Essay on Taste.]

The _Essay on Taste_, which was originally published in 1790, and which was sped on its way by Jeffrey’s Review (the original form of the reviewer’s own essay) in 1811, had reached its sixth edition in 1825, and was still an authority, though it must by that time have begun to seem not a little old-fashioned, to readers of Coleridge and Hazlitt. It is rather unfortunately “dated” by its style, which—even at its original date something of a survival—is of the old “elegant” but distinctly artificial type of Blair: and, as has been hinted already, it abuses that eighteenth-century weakness for substituting a “combined and permuted” paraphrase of the proposition for an argument in favour of the fact. There is a very fair amount of force in its associationist considerations, though, as with all the devotees of the Association principle down to Mill, the turning round of the key is too often taken as equivalent to the opening of the lock. But its main faults, in more special connection with our subject, are two. [Sidenote: _Its confusions_] The first is a constant confusion of Beauty or Sublimity with Interest. Alison exhausts himself in proving that the associations of youth, affection, &c., &c., cause _love_ of the object—a truth no doubt too often neglected by the Neo-classic tribe, but accepted and expressed by men of intelligence, from the Lucretian _usus concinnat_ down to Maginn’s excellent “Don’t let any fool tell you that you will get tired of your wife; you are much more likely to get quite unreasonably fond of her.” But love and admiration, though closely connected, are not the same thing, and love and interest are still farther apart. Another confusion of Alison’s, very germane indeed to our subject, is that he constantly mixes up the beauty of a thing with the beauty of the description of it.

The most interesting point, however, about Alison is his halting between two opinions as to certain Neo-classic idols. His individual criticisms of literature are constantly vitiated by faults of the old arbitrariness, especially as to what is “low.” There is an astonishing lack of critical imagination in his objections to two Virgilian lines—

“Adde tot egregias urbes, operumque laborem
. . . . . . . .
Septemque una sibi muro circumdedit arces”—

as “cold,” “prosaic,” “tame,” “vulgar,” and “spiritless.” As if the image of the busy town after the country beauty were not the most poetic of contrasts in the first: and as if the City of the Seven Hills did not justly fire every Roman mind![322]

[Sidenote: _and arbitrary absurdities._]

These, however, might be due to “the act of God,” to sheer want of the quality on which the essay is written. A large part of the second volume exhibits the perils of that Castle Dangerous, the “half-way house,” unmistakably and inexcusably. Alison is dealing with the interesting but ticklish subject of human beauty, and, like Burke, is justly sarcastic on the “four noses from chin to breast,” “arm and a half from this to that” style of measurement. But he is himself still an abject victim of the type-theory. Beauty must suit the type; and its characteristics must have a fixed qualitative value—blue eyes being expressive of softness, dark complexions of melancholy, and so on. But here he is comparatively sober.[323] Later he indulges in the following: “The form of the Grecian nose is said to be originally beautiful, ... and in many cases it is undoubtedly so. Apply, however, this beautiful form to the countenance of the Warrior, the Bandit, the Martyr, or to any which is meant to express deep or powerful passion, and the most vulgar spectator would be sensible of dissatisfaction, if not of disgust.” Let us at least be thankful that Alison has freed us from being “the most vulgar spectator.” Why the Warrior, why the Martyr, why the deep and powerful man, should not have a Grecian nose I fail to conceive: but the incompatibility of a Bandit and a straight profile lands me in profounder abysses of perplexity. The artillery and the blue horse must yield their pride of place: the reason in that instance is, if not exquisite, instantly discernible. But nothing in all Neo-classic arbitrariness from Scaliger to La Harpe seems to me to excel or equal the Censure of the Bandit with the Grecian Nose as a monstrous Bandit, a disgustful object, hateful not merely to the elect but to the very vulgar.[324]

[Sidenote: _An interim conclusion on the æsthetic matter._]

Let us hear the conclusion of this whole æsthetic matter. Any man of rather more than ordinary intelligence—perhaps any man of ordinary intelligence merely—who has been properly educated from his youth up (as all men who show even a promise of ordinary intelligence should have been) in ancient and modern philosophy, who knows his Plato, his Aristotle, and his neo-Platonists, his Scholastics, his moderns from Bacon and Hobbes and Descartes downwards, can, if he has the will and the opportunity, compose a theory of æsthetics. That is to say, he can, out of the natural appetite towards poetry and literary delight which exists in all but the lowest and most unhappy souls, and out of that knowledge of concrete examples thereof which exists more or less in all, excogitate general principles and hypotheses, and connect them with immediate and particular examples, to such an extent as the Upper Powers permit or the Lower Powers prompt. If he has at the same time—a happy case of which the most eminent example up to the present time is Coleridge—a concurrent impulse towards actual “literary criticism,” towards the actual judgment of the actual concrete examples themselves, this theory _may_ more or less help him, need at any rate do him no great harm. _Mais celà n’est pas nécessaire_, as was said of another matter; and there are cases, many of them in fact, where the attention to such things has done harm.

For after all, once more Beyle, as he not seldom did, reached the _flammantia mœnia mundi_ when he said, in the character of his “Tourist” _eidolon_, “En fait de beau chaque homme a sa demi-aune.” Truth is not what each man troweth: but beauty is to each man what to him seems beautiful. You may better the seeming:—the fact is at the bottom of all that is valuable in the endlessly not-valuable chatter about education generally, and it excuses, to a certain extent, the regularity of Classicism, the selfish “culture” of the Goethean ideal, the extravagances of the ultra-Romantics. But yet

“A God, a God, the severance ruled,”

and you cannot bridge the gulfs that a God has set by any philosophastering theory.[325]

Yet although all this is, according to my opinion at least, absolutely true; although literary criticism has not much more to do with æsthetics than architecture has to do with physics and geology—than the art of the wine-taster or the tea-taster has to do with the study of the papillæ of the tongue and the theory of the nervous system generally, or with the botany of the vine and the geology of the vineyard; although, finally, as we have seen and shall see, the most painful and earnest attention to the science of the beautiful appears to be compatible with an almost total indifference to concrete judgment and enjoyment of the beautiful itself, and even with egregious misjudgment and failure to enjoy,—yet we cannot extrude this other _scienza nuova_ altogether, if only because of the almost inextricable entanglement of its results with those of criticism proper. And it is more specially to be dealt with in this particular place because, beyond all question, the direction of study to these abstract inquiries did contribute to the freeing of criticism from the shackles in which it had lain so long. Any new way of attention to any subject is likely to lead to the detection of errors in the old: and as the errors of Neo-classicism were peculiarly arbitrary and irrational, the “high _priori_ way” did certainly give an opportunity of discovering them from its superior height—the most superfluous groping among preliminaries and foundations gave a chance of unearthing the roots of falsehood. As in the old comparison Saul found a kingdom when he sought for his father’s asses, so it was at least possible for a man, while he was considering whether poetry is an _oratio sensitiva perfecta_, or whether there is a separate Logic of Phantasy, to have his eyes suddenly opened to the fact that Milton was not merely a fanatic and fantastic, with a tendency to the disgusting, and that Shakespeare was something more than an “abominable” mountebank.