Chapter I (2)

But the most interesting piece that the book contains is the Lecture on Style, with its satellite note (a small but sparkling star) on the “Wonderfulness of Prose.”[403] The author’s definition of his most elusive subject is indeed not only not satisfying, but (unless you remember his own dictum about being “right incompletely”) demonstrably and almost astoundingly _un_satisfactory. “Style is of course nothing but the art of conveying the meaning appropriately and with perspicuity.” One feels inclined in one’s haste to say, “That is just what it is _not_”; one must cool down a little before one can modify this to “Style begins exactly where” the art, &c., “leaves off,” and one can perhaps never come nearer to an accommodation than “The necessary preliminary to Style, and one essential ingredient of it,” is “the art,” and so forth.[404] It was no doubt this side of the matter that Coleridge was looking at, and at this he stopped, as far as his general way of looking at the thing went. But the main interest of the piece does not lie here. He bases his definition on, and tries to adjust it to, a survey of English style, which is probably one of the first of the kind ever attempted, after the notion of the Queen Anne men being the crown and flower of English had been given up. And though his history, as was natural, is sometimes shaky, and his conclusions are often to be disputed and even overthrown, the whole is of the highest value, not merely as a _point de repère_ historically, but as an introduction to the consideration of Style itself.

[Sidenote: _The_ Anima Poetæ.]

But the book of Coleridge which, next to the _Biographia_, is of most importance to the student of his criticism, is perhaps the long-posthumous _Anima Poetæ_. Mr Ernest Coleridge, in his preface to the _Anima_ itself, says that the _Biographia_ is now little read. I hope he is wrong: but if he is right it would explain many things.

This volume—a collection of extracts from Coleridge’s pocket-books— appeared[405] more than sixty years after the poet’s death, and the notice taken of it was comparatively small. That it contains passages of ornate prose superior to anything in the previously published writings is interesting, but for our purpose almost irrelevant: it is not so that it gives the fullest and clearest side-lights on Coleridge’s criticism that we have. The earliest years (and pages) are not very fertile, though I subjoin some references[406] which will assist the reader in looking them up. But from p. 119 for some fifty pages onward (it is significant that the time of writing, 1805-8, corresponds with Coleridge’s absence in Malta, &c., from which we have little or no published work) the entries are “diamondiferous.” On French poetry (mistaken but so informingly!);[407] on Cowper;[408] on the absurdity of calling etymology (how much more philology!) a “science”;[409] on the attitude to poetry and to books;[410] on Leibnitz’s “profound sentence” that “men’s intellectual errors consist chiefly in _denying_”;[411] on the “instinctive passion in the mind for one word to express one act of feeling” (Flaubert fifty years before date); on pseudo-originality,— Coleridge is at his very acme. The _yeast_ of criticism—the reagent which, itself created by the contact of the critical with the creative, re-creates itself in all fit media—has never been more remarkably represented than here.

And great as are these passages, there are many others (though not so many in close context) to match them. See the entry (which I venture to think has been wrongly side-headed as “A plea for poetic license” at the foot of p. 165) as to the desire of carrying things to a greater height of pleasure and admiration than they are susceptible of—the old “wish to write better than you can,” the “loss of sight between this and the other style.”[412] See the astonishing anticipation of the best side of Ruskinism in the note on architecture and climate;[413] and that on poetry and prose and on the “esenoplastic” power;[414] and that on somebody (Byron?) who was “splendid” everywhere, but nowhere poetical;[415] and that on scholastic terms;[416] and that on the slow comprehension of certain (in this case Dantean) poetry.[417] They are all _apices criticismi_—not easy reading, not for the running man, but for him who reads them fitly, certain to bear fruit if he reads them early, to coincide with his own painful and struggling attainments if he reads them late.

[Sidenote: _The_ Letters.]

Nor must the _Letters_[418] be omitted in any sufficient survey of Coleridge’s criticism. That at one early period[419] he apparently thought Schiller more sublime than Milton is not in the least to his discredit. He was twenty-two; he was, I think, demonstrably in love with _three_ ladies[420] at once, and extremely uncertain which of two of them he should marry—a state of mind neither impossible nor unnatural, but likely to lead to considerable practical difficulties, and to upset the judgment very decidedly. His minor critical remarks at this very time on Southey’s poems are excellent. That Bowles should be “divine” and Burke “sad stuff”[421] does not matter—we can explain both statements well enough. But how many men of three- or four-and-twenty (or for that matter of three- or four-and-seventy) were there, are there, have there ever been, who could ask, “Why pass an _Act of Uniformity_ against poets?”[422] one of the great critical questions of the world, and never, so far as I remember, formulated so pertinently before. It is odd that he should have forgotten (if he knew) Sidney, in his singular and pedantic complaint that to give the name Stella to a woman is “unsexing” it, and his supposition that “Swift is the authority.”[423] But another astonishing critical truth is that “Poetry ought not always to have its _highest_ relish”;[424] and yet another in the contrast[425] of himself with Southey, “I think too much to be a poet; he too little to be a great poet,” unjust as the application is in the first half; and yet again on metre itself “_implying_ a passion,”[426] a passage worth comparing with, and in some points better than, the _Biographia_ (with which compare also pp. 386, 387). Nor these alone, but many others later—the criticism on Wordsworth’s “Cintra” pamphlet;[427] that on the inadequacy of one style for all purposes;[428] the remarks on stage illusion,[429]—might be cited.

[Sidenote: _The Coleridgean position and quality._]

When the first volume of this history was published, an excellent scholar said to me, “How will you ever finish that book? Why, Coleridge himself would take a volume!” There is something to be said for the hyperbole. In this and that critic, of these many ages which we have essayed to survey, we may find critical graces which are not in him; but in all, save two, we shall find corresponding deficiencies. In all the ancient critics, save these two, the limitation of the point of view, the hamper of the scheme, are disastrously felt, nor is either Aristotle or Longinus quite free from them. In the greatest of the sixteenth-century Italians these limitations recur, and are repeated in most of those of the seventeenth and eighteenth. Dante is of the greatest, but he touches the subject very briefly and from a special side. Dryden is great, but he is not fully informed, and comes too early for his own point of view. Fontenelle is very nearly great, but he has the same drawbacks, and adds to them those of an almost, perhaps a quite, wilful eccentricity and capriciousness. Lessing is great, but he has fixed his main attention on the least literary parts of literature; while Goethe later is great but a great pedant.[430] Hazlitt is great; but Coleridge was Hazlitt’s master, and beside the master the pupil is insular and parochial in range and reading if not in spirit. In Sainte-Beuve himself we want a little more theory; some more enthusiasm; a higher and more inspiriting choice of subjects. And in Mr. Arnold the defects of Fontenelle reappear without Fontenelle’s excuse of chronology.

So, then, there abide these three, Aristotle, Longinus, and Coleridge. The defects of the modern, as contrasted with the ancient, man of letters are prominent in Coleridge when we compare him with these his fellows: and so we cannot quite say that he is the greatest of the three. But his range is necessarily wider: he takes in, as their date forbade them to take, all literature in a way which must for centuries to come give him the prerogative. It is astonishing how often, when you have discovered in others of all dates, or (as you may fondly hope) found out for yourself, some critical truth, you will remember that after all Coleridge in his wanderings has found it before, and set it by the wayside for the benefit of those who come after. For all, I believe, of these later days—certainly for all whose mother-tongue is English— Coleridge is the critical author to be turned over by day and by night. Never take him on trust: it is blasphemy to the Spirit of Criticism to do that with any critic. Disagree with him as often as you like, and as you can stand to the guns of your disagreement. But begin with him, continue with him, come back to him after excursions, with a certainty of suggestion, stimulation, correction, edification. _C’est mon métier à moi d'être professeur de littérature_, and I am not going to _parvify_ my office. But if anybody disestablished us all (with decent pensions, of course), and applied the proceeds of our Chairs to furnishing the boxes of every one who goes up to the University with a copy of the _Biographia Literaria_, I should decline to be the person chosen to be heard against this revolution, though I should plead for the addition of the _Poetics_ and of Longinus.

[Sidenote: _He introduces once for all the criterion of Imagination,
realising and disrealising._]

And if any one is still dissatisfied with particular critical utterances, and even with the middle axioms interspersed among them, let him remember that Coleridge—not Addison, not the Germans, not any other— is the real introducer into the criticism of poetry of the realising and disrealising Imagination as a criterion. Even now, a hundred years after his earliest day as a critic, the doctrine, though much talked of, is apparently little understood. Even such a critic as the late Mr Traill, while elsewhere[431] admitting that “on poetic _expression_” Coleridge “has spoken the absolutely last word,” almost apologised[432] for his putting on a level “lending the charm of imagination to the real” and “lending the force of reality to the imaginary.” He confessed that, “from the point of view of the highest conception of the poet’s office there can be no comparison”—where indeed I might also “say ditto to Mr Burke,” but in a sense opposite to his. And if, on such a mind and such an appreciation as Mr Traill’s, this one-sided interpretation of “the _esenoplastic_ faculty” had hold, how much more on others in increasing measure to the present day? The fallacy is due, first, to the hydra-like vivacity of the false idea of _mimesis_, the notion that it is not re-presentation, re-creation _adding_ to Nature, but copying her; and, secondly, to the Baconian conception of poetry as a _vinum dæmonum_, a poison with some virtue as a medicine. What power these errors have all our history has shown,—all Histories of Criticism that ever can be written will show if they are written faithfully. But Coleridge has provided—once for all, if it be not neglected—the safeguard against this in his definitions of the two, the co-equal, the co-eternal functions of the exercise of the poetic Imagination.

[Sidenote: _The “Companions.”_]

In the title of the present chapter I have used the word “companions” in a double sense—the first and special application of it being that in which it is technically applied to the Companions of the Prophet—to the early coadjutors of Mahomet in his struggle with the Koreish. Of these the chief are Southey, Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and Hazlitt, with perhaps as an even closer ally—though unknowing and unknown—William Blake. Then follow companions in the wider sense—associates in the work, who varied from nearly complete alliance, as with Scott, to very distant and lukewarm participation, as in Campbell, and (in literary position) from the captaincy of Scott again and of Shelley to the more than respectable full-privateship of the contributors to the _Retrospective Review_. As for the “Adversaries,” they can be more briefly dealt with, for their work was mostly “wood, hay, stubble”; but Gifford and Jeffrey at least could not be excluded here, and a few more may deserve notice. So let the inquiry proceed in this order.

[Sidenote: _Southey._]

It may seem at first sight curious, and will perhaps always remain a little so, that we have no collected examples, nor many uncollected but singly substantive pieces, of strictly critical work, from the most widely read and the most industrious of the whole literary group of 1800-1830 in England—from a man who, for eleven years at least, wrote reviews almost wherever he could place them without hurting his conscience, and who for another five-and-twenty was a pillar of one of the greatest of critical periodicals. But Southey’s earlier reviewing is for the most part not merely whelmed in the dust-bins of old magazines, but, as his son and biographer complains, extremely difficult to trace even there; and his later was, by choice or by chance (more I think by the former than by the latter), mainly devoted to subjects not purely literary. If that great _Bibliotheca Britannica_[433] (which so nearly existed, and which is a thing lacking in English to this present day, a hundred years later) had come actually into existence, it would hardly have been necessary to look beyond that: as it is, one has the pleasing but rather laborious and lengthy duty of fishing out and piecing together critical expressions from _The Doctor_ and other books to some extent, and from the two parallel collections of the _Life and Correspondence_[434] and the _Letters_[435] to a still greater. The process is necessary for a historian of criticism, and the results, if hardly new to him, are interesting enough; but they cannot claim any exhibition at all correspondent to the time taken in arriving at them. Nor will any such historian, if he be wise, complain, for Southey is always delightful, except when he is in his most desperately didactic moods: and the Goddess of Dulness only knows how even the most egregious of her children, unless from pure ignorance, has managed to fix on him the title of “dull.”

[Sidenote: _General characteristics of his Criticism._]

That “a man’s criticism is the man himself” is almost truer than the original bestowal of the phrase; and it is nowhere truer than with Southey. That astonishing and almost godlike _sanity_ which distinguished him, in almost all cases save as regards the _Anti-Jacobin_, Mr Pitt, the Roman Catholic Church, and my Lord Byron (who, by the way, lacked it quite as conspicuously in regard to Southey), is the constant mark of his critical views. Except his over-valuation of Kirke White,[436] which was undoubtedly due to his amiable and lifelong habit of helping lame dogs, I cannot, at the moment or on reflection, think of any critical estimate of his (for that of himself as a poet is clearly out of the question) which is flagrantly and utterly wrong; and I can think of hundreds which are triumphantly right. In respect of older literature, in particular,[437] his catholicity is free from the promiscuousness of Leigh Hunt, and his eclecticism from the caprice of Charles Lamb: while, prejudiced as he can be, I do not remember an instance in which prejudice blinds or blunts his critical faculty as it does Hazlitt’s. On all formal points of English poetry he is very nearly impeccable. He may have learnt his belief in substitution and equivalence from Coleridge; but it is remarkable that his defences of it to Wynn[438] are quite early, quite original, and quite sound, while Coleridge’s own account long after, in the preface to _Christabel_, is vague and to some extent incorrect. He knew, of course, far more literary history than any one of his contemporaries—an incalculable advantage—and he could, sometimes at least, formulate general critical maxims well worth the registering.

[Sidenote: _Reviews._]

Of his regular critical work, however, which can be traced in the _Annual_ and _Quarterly Reviews_ from the list given by his son at the end of the _Life_, some notice must be taken, though the very list itself is a tell-tale in the large predominance of Travels, Histories, and the like over pure literature. That he should have made a rule for himself after he became Laureate not to review poetry (save in what may be called an eleemosynary manner) is merely what one would have expected from his unvarying sense of propriety; but there were large ranges of _belles lettres_ to which this did not apply. The articles which will best repay the looking up are, in the _Annual_, those on _Gebir_, Godwin’s _Chaucer_, Ritson’s _Romances_, Hayley, Froissart, _Sir Tristram_, Ellis’s _Specimens_, Todd’s _Spenser_, and _Ossian_; in the _Quarterly_, those on Chalmers’s _Poets_, Sayers, Hayley again, Camoens, and Lope de Vega, with some earlier ones on Montgomery (James, not Robert).[439]

[Sidenote: The Doctor.]

_The Doctor_ also must have its special animadversion, for this strangely neglected and most delightful book is full of critical matter. Its showers of mottoes—star-showers from the central glowing mass of Southey’s enormous and never “dead” reading—amount almost in themselves to a critical education for any mind which is fortunate enough to be exposed to them when young, while the saturation of the whole book with literature can hardly fail to produce the same effect. It is lamentable, astonishing, and (the word is not too strong) rather disgraceful that, except the “Three Bears” story, the appendix on the Cats, and perhaps the beautiful early passages on the Doctor’s birthplace and family, the book should be practically unknown. But it by no means owes its whole critical value to these borrowed and reset jewels. The passages of original criticism—direct or slightly “applied”—which it contains are numerous and important. The early accounts of the elder Daniel’s library[440] and of Textor’s dialogues[441] are valuable; the passage on “Taste and Pantagruelism”[442] much more so. On Sermons,[443] on Drayton,[444] on the Principles of Criticism,[445] on the famous verse-tournament of the Poitiers Flea,[446] on the Reasons for Anonymity,[447] on Mason[448] (for whom Southey manages to say a good word), on Bowdlerising and Modernising, and (by an easy transition) Spenser[449]—the reader will find nuggets, and sometimes whole pockets, of critical gold, the last-mentioned being one of the richest of all. It is to Southey’s immortal honour (an honour not sufficiently paid him by some Blakites) that he recognised and quoted at length[450] the magnificent “Mad Song,” which is perhaps Blake’s most sustained and unbroken piece of pure poetry. His discussion on Styles[451] is of great value: while the long account[452] of the plays of Langeveldt (Macropedius), and of our kindred English Morality _Everyman_, shows how admirably his more than once projected Literary Histories would have been executed.

[Sidenote: _Altogether somewhat_ impar sibi.]

Still, I am bound to say that he conveys to my mind the impression of not quite having his soul bound up in the exercise of his critical function. He was a little too fond of extending his love of books to those which, as Lamb would say, are no books—of giving the children’s bread unto dogs. Occasionally, moreover, that want of the highest enthusiasm and sympathy, the highest inspiration, which—after the rather ungracious and ungrateful suggestion of Coleridge—it has been usual to urge against him, and which cannot be wholly disproved, does appear. Some would say that this was due to his enormous reading, and to the penal servitude for life to what was mostly hack-work, which fate and his own matchless sense of duty imposed upon him. I do not think so; but of course if it be said that no one with the more translunary fancies, the nobler gusts, could have so enslaved himself, an authority[453] who takes so high a ground must be allowed his splendid say. Anyhow, and on the whole, we must return to the position that Southey does not hold a very high position among English critics, and that it is easier to give plausible reasons for the fact than entirely to understand it.[454]

[Sidenote: _Lamb._]

In criticising the criticism of Charles Lamb[455] one has to walk warily; for is he not one of the most justly beloved of English writers, and are not lovers apt to love more well than wisely? I shall only say that if any be an “Agnist,” I more. Ever since I can remember reading anything (the circumstance would not have seemed trivial to himself), I have read and revelled in, and for nearly forty years I have possessed in fee, a copy of the original _Elia_ of 1823, in the black morocco coat which it put on, at least seven years before Lamb’s death, in 1827. I have also read its contents, and all other attainable _Agnalia_, in every edition in which I have come across them, with introductions by “Thaunson and Jaunson,” in and on all sorts of shapes and types and papers and bindings. I have never wearied of reading them; I am sure I never shall weary as long as eye and brain last. That Lamb is one of the most exquisite and delightful of critics, as of writers, is a proposition for which I will go to the stake; but I am not prepared to confess him as one of the very greatest in his critical capacity.

[Sidenote: _His “occultism”_]

The reasons for this limitation are to be found in two passages of his friend Hazlitt—a ruthless friend enough, but one who seldom goes wrong in speaking of friend or foe, unless under the plain influence of a prejudice which here had not the slightest reason for existing. The passages (referred to again elsewhere) are that on “the Occult School” in the “Criticism”[456] and one in the “Farewell.”[457] The first speaks of those “who discern no beauties but what are concealed from superficial eyes, and overlook all that are obvious to the vulgar part of mankind.” “If an author is utterly unreadable they can read him for ever.” “They will no more share a book than a mistress with a friend.” “Nothing goes down with them but what is caviare to the multitude,” &c. The other, in which Lamb is actually named, contrasts his “surfeit of admiration,” the antiquation of his favourites after some ten years, with the “continuity of impression” on which Hazlitt prided himself.

[Sidenote: _and alleged inconstancy._]

I am inclined to think that both these charges—made with what is (for the author) perfect good-humour, and only in the first case slightly exaggerated, as was almost permissible when he was dealing ostensibly with a type not a person—are quite true. One would not indeed have them false; it would be most “miserably wise” economy to exchange Lamb, as he is, for a wilderness of consistent, equitable, catholic mediocrities. As Hazlitt himself admits, _this_ “Occult Criticism” does not or need not come from any affectation or love of singularity: indeed, some occult critics “smack of genius and are worth any money.” The Lothario part of the indictment, the desertion after enjoyment, is perhaps less easy to authenticate as well as to defend; but I think it existed, and was indeed a necessary consequence of the other tendency. If you love merely or mainly as a collector, and for rarity,—if not only thus but because others do _not_,—the multiplication of the object or of the taste must necessarily have a disgusting effect. “The bloom is _off_ the rye.” And I should say that, beyond all reasonable question, there is a distinct character of _eccentricity_ in the strict sense, of whim, of will-worship, about many, if not most, of Lamb’s preferences. There is no affectation about him; but there is what might be affectation in another man, and has been affectation in many and many another. Take the most famous instances of his criticism—the defence of Congreve and Wycherley, the exaltation of Ford, the saying (productive of endless tribulation to the matter-of-fact) that Heywood is “a prose Shakespeare,” the enthusiasm shown towards that rather dull-fantastic play _A Fair Quarrel_, while the magnificence of the same author’s _Changeling_ was left to Leigh Hunt to find out—these and other things distinctly show the _capriccio_. Lamb, not Hunt, is really the “Ariel of Criticism,” and he sometimes pushes tricksiness to a point which would, we fear, have made his testy Highness of Milan rather angry. It was probably in conversation rather than in writing that his fickleness showed itself: we can never conceive Lamb _writing_ down anything that he had ever written up. But something of disillusionment must, as has been said, almost necessarily have resulted from the peculiarly whimsical character of his inamoration. Canon Ainger has noted, as the distinguishing features of Lamb’s critical power, “width and versatility.” One differs with the Master[458] of the Temple unwillingly and _suo periculo_: but neither term seems to me quite appropriate. “Width” implies continuity, and there is little of this in Lamb: “versatility” implies a power of turning to what you will, and Lamb, I think, loved, not as he would but as he could not help it at the time.

[Sidenote: _The early Letters._]

But he wants nothing save method and certainty (in response—not even this in touch), and he has critical graces of his own which make him all but as great as Coleridge or Hazlitt, and perhaps more delightful than either. In his very earliest critical utterances, in the Letters to Coleridge and Southey especially, much of this delightfulness displays itself as well as its two parents—Lamb’s unconquerable originality of thought and feeling, and his unsurpassable quaintness and piquancy of phrase. The critic is, as is inevitable from his youth, and from the as yet very imperfect reading which he frankly confesses, a little uncertain and inadequate. His comparative estimates of Coleridge and Southey, Southey and Milton, Southey and Cowper, and of all or most of these poets and others in themselves, exhibit an obviously unregulated compass—a tendency to correct impression rather overmuch, because the first striking off of it has been hasty. But this soon disappears: and though the eccentricity above noted rather increases than lessens with years, the critic’s real virtues—those just indicated—appear ever and ever more distinctly and more delightfully.

[Sidenote: _The_ Specimens.]

In a certain sense they never appear to greater advantage than in the brief notes included in the _Specimens of Dramatic Poets_ (1808). Everything necessary to excite Lamb’s critical excellence united here,— actual merit, private interest (for, though the study of the minor as well as of the major Elizabethans had been progressing steadily, and “Dodsley” had gone through several editions, yet the authors were caviare to the general still); presence of the highest excellence; and, as we see from the _Letters_, years of familiarity and fondness on the part of the critic.

The _Notes_ themselves pretend to no method, and fulfil their pretence very strictly. Lamb is distinctly inferior to both his great friends and rivals in _grasp_. His appreciation is tangential—though in a different sense from that in which Hazlitt applies the word to Coleridge. Lamb is not so much desultory or divagatory as apt to touch his subject only at one (sometimes one very small) point. The impact results in a spark of the most ardent heat and glowing light, but neither heat nor light _spreads_ much. Sometimes, as is inevitable in this style of criticism, he can be only disappointing: one is inclined to be pettish with him for seeing nothing to notice in the vast and shadowy sweep of _Tamburlaine_ save an interesting evidence that Pistol was not merely jesting. Nor is perhaps Barabbas “a mere monster brought in with a large painted nose to please the rabble.” But you must get out of this mood if you are to enjoy Lamb. How he makes it all up, and more than up, on _Faustus_, and (when he comes to Dekker) on _Old Fortunatus_! “Beware! beware!” is the cry here also, lest we steal too much of his honeydew. Fortunately it has been so widely used, even for the vulgar purpose of sweetening school-editions, that it has become generally accessible. The famous passage on the Witches, which Hazlitt loved to quote, is perhaps as characteristic as any: the Webster and Chapman notices are perhaps critically the best.

Next in order of time come the articles contributed to the _Reflector_, especially the magnificent paper on “The Tragedies of Shakespeare” and their actableness. I may be prejudiced in favour of this, by caring myself infinitely to read the drama, and not caring at all to see it acted; but this objection could not be made to Lamb, who was notoriously a playgoer, and an eager though unfortunate aspirant to the honours of the boards. The piece, of course, shows some traces of the _capriccio_,— especially in the confession of being utterly unable to appreciate “To be or not to be,” because of its being “spouted.” Shakespeare himself might have taught Lamb better, in a certain passage about age and custom. To learn, to hear, nay, direst curse of all! to _teach_ “To be or not to be” leaves it perfect Cleopatra. But Lamb must be Lamb and keep his Lambish mind: and he keeps it here to great purpose. The _Lear_ passage, the best known and the most generally admitted as forcible, is not more so than those on the _Tempest_ and on _Macbeth_. They all come to that position of the true critic (as I believe it to be), which has been indicated elsewhere, that drama _may_ be literature but is not bound to be—that they are different things, and that the points which drama need not have, and perhaps to which it cannot do full justice, are in literature of the greatest importance.

[Sidenote: _The Garrick Play Notes._]

It is natural, though they were written so long afterwards, to take the “Notes on the Garrick Plays” with these other forerunners and suggesters; nor do I think that so much of the “first sprightly running” is lost as has sometimes been thought. How Lamb-like and how pleasant is the phrase on Day’s quaint _Parliament of Bees_—“the very air seems replete with humming and buzzing melodies.” (Most obvious, of course: only that nobody had _met_ it before!) And the imploration to Novello to set the song from Peele’s _Arraignment_; and the fine and forcible plea for the minor Elizabethans in the note to _The Two Angry Women of Abingdon_ (a play, by the way, every fresh reading of which makes one more thoroughly agree with Lamb). The fewness and slightness of these notes should not be allowed to obscure their quality.

[Sidenote: _Miscellaneous Essays._]

It was seldom that the bee-like nature of Lamb’s own genius could settle long on a single flower; and his regular “studies” are few, and not always of his very best. The actual state of the paper on _The Excursion_, after its mangling by Gifford, illustrates the wisdom of that editorial counsel, “Always keep a copy,” which the contributor (alas! we are all guilty) doth so unwisely neglect; and the two best that we have among the miscellaneous essays are those on Wither and on Defoe’s secondary novels. It is difficult to say which is the better: but the singular unlikeness of the two subjects (except that both Wither and Defoe are eminently _homely_) shows what I presume Canon Ainger meant by the “versatility” of the critic’s genius. Both are admirable, but most characteristically “promiscuous.” The Defoe piece avowedly gives stray notes; but the “Wither,” though it has a beginning, has very little middle, and no end at all.

[Sidenote: Elia.]

As for _Elia_ itself, it is fortunately too well known to need any analysis or much detailed survey. In the first and more famous collection the literary element is rather a saturation than a separable contingent. Except the “Artificial Comedy” paper, there is none with a definitely literary title or ostensible subject: while this itself starts in the closest connection with the preceding paper on Actors, and is dramatic rather than literary. But the “saturation” is unmistakable. As one turns the beloved and hundred-times-read pages, the constant undercurrent of allusion to books and reading strikes one none the less— perhaps indeed the more—for familiarity, whether it is at some depth, as in places, or whether it bubbles up to and over the surface, as in “Oxford in the Vacation,” and the book-borrowing close of “The Two Races of Men,” and that other close of that “New Year’s Eve” which so unnecessarily fluttered Southey’s orthodoxy, and not a little of “All Fool’s Day”; and in quotations everywhere. But in the _Last Essays_ Lamb exhibits the master-passion much more openly. The “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading” of course lays all concealment aside,—it is a regular _affiche_, as are also “The Genteel Style in Writing” and (most of all) “On Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sidney”—the valiant and triumphant sally against Hazlitt—with not a little of “Old China” itself. Everywhere there is evident the abiding, unfailing love of “the book.”

[Sidenote: _The later_ Letters.]

And if we recur to the _Letters_ we shall find the most abundant proof of this quality. How admirable are those criticisms[459] of the second edition of _Lyrical Ballads_ which, because they are not “neat” praise, roused the poetic irritability, not merely of Wordsworth, whose views respecting the reception of his own verse were always Athanasian, but of Coleridge, who had, at any rate, intervals of self-perception! How sound the judgment of Mrs Barbauld and of Chapman (a pleasing pair) to Coleridge himself on Oct. 23, 1802![460] How sure the touch of the finger on that absurdity in Godwin’s _Chaucer_ which has been so frequently copied since, “the fondness for filling out the picture by supposing what Chaucer did and how he felt”![461] The choicest of his observations are naturally those to Coleridge, almost _passim_: but the vein is so irrepressible that he indulges it even in writing to Wordsworth, though he knew perfectly well that the most favourable reception could only be a mild wonder that people could think or talk of any literature, and especially any poetry, other than “W. W.’s” own. Even his experiences in 1800 could not prevent him from handling[462] the Poems of 1815 with the same “irreverent _parrhesia_” which he uses immediately after[463] also to Southey on _Roderick_ as compared with _Kehama_ and _Madoc_. His famous appreciation of Blake[464] (of whom 'tis pity that he knew no more) is one of the capital examples of pre-established harmony between subject and critic. That he could not, on the other hand, like Shelley, is not unsusceptible of explanations by no means wholly identical, though partly, with those which account for Hazlitt’s error. Lamb did not like the word “unearthly” (he somewhere objects to its use) and he did not like the thing unearthliness. The regions where, as Mr Arnold has it, “thin, thin, the pleasant human noises sound,” were not his haunt. Now Blake always has a homely domestic everyday side close to his wildest prophetisings,[465] and Shelley has not. On the other hand, how completely does he grasp even Cervantes in the few _obiter dicta_ to Southey on Aug. 19, 1825,[466] and how instantly he seizes the “charm one cannot explain” in _Rose Aylmer_.[467] And his very last letter concerns a book, and a book on poetry, Phillips’s _Theatrum Poetarum_.

[Sidenote: _Uniqueness of Lamb’s critical style_]

His love was, as we said, “of the book,” perhaps, rather than, as in Hazlitt’s case, “of literature.” The Advocatus Diaboli may once more suggest that to Lamb the book was a very little too much on a level with the tea-pot and the engraving—that he had a shade in excess of the collector’s feeling about him. But the Court will not call upon the learned gentleman to say anything more on that head. It is time to acknowledge, without reservations or provisos, the unique quality of “Elia’s” critical appreciation. Very much of this quality—if a quality be separable into parts—arises from his extraordinary command of phrase,—the phrase elaborate without affectation, borrowed yet absolutely individual and idiosyncratic, mannered to the _n_th, but never mannerised, in which, though he might not have attained to it without his great seventeenth-century masters, he stands original and alone. In no critic perhaps—not even in Mr Pater—does style count for so much as in Lamb; in none certainly is it more distinctive, and, while never monotonous, more homogeneous, uniform, instantly recognisable and self-bewrayed. The simulative power—almost as of the leaf-insect and suchlike creatures—with which he could imitate styles, is of course most obvious in the _tour de force_ of the Burton counterfeits. But in his best and most characteristic work it is not this which we see, but something much nobler, though closely allied to it. It is not Browne, or Fuller, or Burton, or Glanvill, but something like them, yet different. And though it has more _outré_ presentation in some of his miscellaneous writing than in his criticism, yet it is never absent in the most striking pieces of this, and gives them much of their hold on us.

[Sidenote: _and thought._]

Still, those who, however unnecessarily (for no one surely is going to deny it save in a mood of paradox or of monomania), insist that style must be the body of thought—nay, that this body itself must think (in Donne’s phrase), and not merely live, will find no difficulty in claiming Lamb as theirs. Nothing of the kind is more curious than the fact that, strongly marked as are his peculiarities and much as he may himself have imitated, he is not imitable; nobody has ever, except in the minutest shreds—rather actually torn off from his motley than reproducing it—written in Lamb’s style save Lamb. And accordingly no one (though not a few have tried) has ever criticised like Lamb. It is very easy to be capricious, fantastic, fastidious—as easy as to wear yellow stockings and go cross-gartered, and as effective. To Lamb’s critical attitude there go in the first place that love for the book which has been spoken of; then that faculty of sound, almost common-sense, “taste” which is shown in the early letters to Coleridge and Southey; then the reading of years and decades; and, lastly, the _je ne sais quoi_ that “fondoos” the other things, as the old Oxford story has it—a story to be constantly borne in mind by the critic and the historian of criticism.[468] Even the other ingredients are not too common, especially in conjunction: the _je ne sais quoi_ itself is here, and nowhere else.

[Sidenote: _Leigh Hunt: his somewhat inferior position._]

Leigh Hunt[469] claims less space from us than either of his friends Hazlitt and Lamb. This is not because he is an inconsiderable critic, for he is by no means this. As has been said, he has the immense and surprising credit of having first discovered the greatness of the tragic part of Middleton’s _Changeling_, as an individual exploit, and in more general ways he has that, which Macaulay duly recognised in a well-known passage,[470] of being perhaps more _catholic_ in his tastes as regards English Literature than any critic up to his time. He has left a very large range of critical performance, which is very rarely without taste, acuteness, and felicity of expression; and he has, as against both the greater critics just named, the very great advantage of possessing a competent knowledge of at least one modern literature[471] besides his own, and some glimmerings of others. He has the further deserts of being almost always readable, of diffusing a pleasant sunny atmosphere, and of doing very much to keep up the literary side of that periodical production which, for good or for evil, was, with the novel, the great literary feature of the nineteenth century. These are not small merits: and while they might seem greater if they were not thrown somewhat into the shade by the superior eminence of Coleridge and Hazlitt, and the superior attractiveness of Lamb, they retain, even in the vicinity of these, claims to full acknowledgment.

[Sidenote: _Reasons for it._]

A severely critical estimate, however, will discover in Leigh Hunt— perhaps in very close juxtaposition and in a sort of causal relation to these merits themselves—something which is not quite so good. Even his catholicity may be set down in part, by the Enemy, to a certain loose facility of liking, an absence of fastidiousness and selection. If Lamb goes too far towards the ends of the English literary earth for the objects of his affection, Hunt is rather too content to find them _in triviis et angiportis_. He does not exactly “like grossly,” but he likes a little promiscuously. The fault is no very bad one; and it becomes exceedingly venial—nay, a positive virtue in time and circumstance—when we compare it with the unreasonable exclusiveness of the Neo-classic period. But it is a kind of criticism which inclines rather too much to the uncritical.

[Sidenote: _His attitude to Dante._]

A further objection may be taken by applying that most dangerous of all tests, the question “What does he _dis_like?” For the twentieth time (probably) let us repeat that in criticism likes and dislikes are free; and that the man who, however unfortunately, still honestly dislikes what the consensus of good criticism approves, is entitled to say so, and had much better say so. But he gives his reasons, descends upon particulars, at his peril. Leigh Hunt, to do him justice, is not like Mr Rymer—it is not his habit “no wise to allow.” But it is certainly a pity that one of his exceptions should be Dante, and it is certainly a much greater pity that among the reasons given for unfavourable criticism[472] should be because Dante “puts fabulous people with real among the damned,” because Purgatory is such a very disagreeable idea, and because the whole poem contains “absurdities too obvious nowadays to need remark.”

This, however, was merely an exceptional outburst of that “Liberal” Philistinism and blundering which, it is only fair to say, had been provoked by plentiful exhibition of the same qualities on the other side, and which was more particularly excusable in Leigh Hunt (humanly, if not critically, speaking), because nobody, not even Hazlitt, had received worse treatment from that side than himself. But it does something affect his critical position; for even Hazlitt managed, in some queer fashion, to distinguish between the prostitute baronet, Sir Walter Scott, and “the Author of _Waverley_,” between that wicked Mr Burke and the author of the great speeches and treatises. But the main reasons why Hunt must go with shorter measure than others, is the combination of abundance in quantity with a certain want of distinction in quality, which mars his writings. Not even the largest space here possible would enable us to go through them all, and we should be able to select but a few that are of unquestionably distinctive and characteristic _race_. It is, indeed, rather in his favour that you may dip almost anywhere into him with the certainty of a wholesome, pleasant, and refreshing critical bath or draught. He is very rarely untrustworthy; and when he is, as in the _Dante_ case, he tells the fact and its secret more frankly even than Hazlitt himself. But it would be unjust to refer to no samples of him, and a few of the most characteristic shall therefore be given.

[Sidenote: _Examples from_ Imagination and Fancy.]

Fortunately there is an extremely favourable example of his criticism which fills a whole book to itself, and is written under something like a general scheme. This is the volume—modestly sub-titled “Selections,” but containing a very large proportion of comment and original matter— which he called _Imagination and Fancy_,[473] and intended to follow up with four others, though only one, _Wit and Humour_,[474] was ever written. The plan was begun late (1844); but as we have seen in almost every instance, a man’s critical work very rarely declines with years, unless he actually approaches dotage: and the book is, on the whole, not merely the most favourable but the most representatively favourable example of Leigh Hunt’s criticism. It opens by a set Essay on the question “What is Poetry?” from which, perhaps, any one who knew the author’s other work, but not this, might not expect very much, for Hunt had not an abstract or philosophical head. He acquits himself, however, remarkably well. His general definition that Poetry is “the utterance of a passion for truth, beauty, and power, embodying and illustrating its conceptions by imagination and fancy, and modulating its language on the principle of variety in uniformity,” is not bad; but these things are never very satisfactory. It will be seen that Hunt, like Coleridge, though with a less “Cimmerian” obscurity of verbiage, “dodges” the frank mention of “metre” or “verse”; but this is not because he is in any way inclined to compromise. On the contrary, he says[475] (taking, and perhaps designedly, the very opposite line to Wordsworth) that he “knows of no very fine versification unaccompanied with fine poetry.” But the strength of the “Essay,” as of the whole book, is in the abundant and felicitous illustration of the various points of this definition by commented selections from the poets themselves.

That catholicity which has been said to be his main critical virtue will be found (without any of the vice which has been hinted as sometimes accompanying it) in the very list of the authors selected from—Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Middleton, Dekker, and Webster, Milton, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats: while the less “imaginative” poets are by no means neglected, and in particular Leigh Hunt brings out, often as no one had ever done before, that sheer poetical quality of Dryden to which the critics of 1800-1830 had been as a rule unjust. But the comment (and one cannot say more) is usually worthy of the selection. The fullest division of all is that on Spenser— indeed Leigh Hunt’s appreciation of this at once exquisite and magnificent poet is one of the very best we have, and would be the best of all if it had been a little more sensitive to Spenser’s “brave_st_ translunary things,” to the pervading exaltation and sublimation of thought and feeling which purifies the most luscious details, and unites the most straggling divagations in a higher unity. But, short of this, it would be difficult to have a better detailed eulogium, _pièces en main_, of the subject; nor does Hunt fail to make out something of a case against, at least, the exaggeration of Lessing’s attack on the _ut pictura poesis_ view. But his limitations appear in his complete misunderstanding of Coleridge’s exact and profound observation that Spenser’s descriptions are “not in the true sense of the word _picturesque_, but composed of a wondrous series of images as in dreams.” What Coleridge meant, of course, is that sequence rather than strict “composition” is Spenser’s secret—that his pageants _dissolve into_ one another. But in these finesses Hunt is seldom at his ease. So, again, he blasphemes one of the most beautiful lines of _The Tempest_—

“The fringed curtains of thine eye advance”—

as “elaborate nothingness, not to say nonsense” [how nothingness can in any case be sense he shall tell us], “pompous,” “declamatory,” and disapproved of by—Pope!

One really blushes for him. Could he possibly be unaware that when a person is about to look at anything, the natural gesture is to lower the head and thrust it a little forward, raising or depressing the eyelids at the same time? or be insensible to the exquisite profile image of Miranda with the long eyelashes projected against the air? And he was the author of _A Criticism of Female Beauty_! But if he sometimes misunderstands, he seldom misses good things such as (it is true Warton put him on this) the Medea passage of Gower.[476] Ben Jonson made him uncomfortable, which is again a pity; and on Beaumont and Fletcher he is at almost his very worst: but he is sounder than some greater ones on Ford and Massinger, and his great “catch” of De Flores deserves yet a third mention. He is at his very best and pleasantest, too, where most men fail—where they are even often very _un_pleasant—on his contemporaries, Coleridge, and Shelley, and Keats. When you have said such a thing as this[477] of Coleridge, “Of pure poetry, ... consisting of nothing but its essential self, ... he was the greatest master of his time,” you had better “stand down.” Your critical claim is made out: you may damage but can hardly increase it. Yet it is only in the severe court of critical history that one would wish to silence Hunt: for, in truth, nine-tenths of his criticism is admirable, and most admirably suited to instruct and encourage the average man. Impressionism and Rulelessness are almost as fairly justified of him, their child, as of any other that I can think of. They scarcely ever lead him wrong in liking; and he mentions what he dislikes so seldom that he has only occasional chances of being wrong there.

[Sidenote: _Hazlitt._]

But the greatest of the “Cockney critics” (_quelle Cocaigne!_) has yet to come. There is “a company of warm young men,” as Dryden has it, who would doubtless disdain the inquiry whether Coleridge or Hazlitt is the greatest of English critics; and it is quite certain that this inquiry might be conducted in a sufficiently futile sense and manner. There are others, less disdainful, who might perhaps be staggered by the acknowledgment _in limine_ that it is possible to answer the question either way—nay, for the same person to give both answers, and yet be “not unwelcome back again” as a reasonable disputant. I have myself in my time, I think, committed myself to both propositions; and I am not at all disposed to give up either—for reasons which it will be more proper to give at the end than at the beginning of an examination of Hazlitt himself. That he was a great critic there will probably now be little dispute, though Goethe is said not to have found much good in him; though persons of worship, including Mr Stevenson, have thought him greater as a miscellaneous essayist; and though you may read writings of considerable length upon him in which no attempt is made to bring out his critical character at all.

[Sidenote: _Method of dealing with him._]

His critical deliverances are so numerous and so voluminous that the “brick of the house” process, which we have frequently found applicable, has in his case to be given up, or at least considerably modified—for it is too much the principle of the present History to be given up altogether. Fortunately there is no difficulty in the modification. Hazlitt is not, like Coleridge, remarkable for the discovery and enunciation of any one great critical principle, or for the emission (_obiter_ or otherwise) of remarkable mediate _dicta_, or for _marginalia_ on individual passages or lines, though sometimes he can do the last and sometimes also the second of these things. What he is remarkable for is his extraordinary fertility and felicity, as regards English literature, in judgments, more or less “grasped,” of individual authors, books, or pieces. As, by preference, he stops at the passage, and does not descend to the individual line or phrase, so, by preference also,[478] he stops at the individual example of the Kind, and does not ascend to the Kind itself, or at least is not usually very happy in his ascension. But within these limits (and they are wide enough), the fertility and the felicity of his criticism are things which strike one almost dumb with admiration; and this in spite of certain obvious and in their way extremely grave faults.

The most obvious, though by far the least, of these,—indeed one which is displayed with such frankness and in a way so little delusive as to be hardly a fault at all, though it is certainly a drawback,—is a sort of audacious sciolism—acquiescence in ignorance, indifference about “satisfying the examiners”—for half a dozen different names would be required to bring out all the sides of it.

[Sidenote: _His surface and occasional faults: Imperfect knowledge and
method._]