Chapter I (3)

His almost entire ignorance of all literatures but his own gives him no trouble, though it cannot be said that it does him no harm. In treating of comic writers, not in English only but generally, he says[479] (with perfect truth) that Aristophanes and Lucian are two of the four chief names for comic humour, but that he shall say little of them, for he knows little. Would all men were as honest! but one cannot say, “Would all critics were as ignorant!” In his _Lectures on the English Poets_ he is transparently, and again quite honestly, ignorant of mostly all the earlier minorities, with some not so minor. He almost prided himself upon not reading anything in the writing period of his life; and he seems to have carried out his principles so conscientiously that, if anything occurred in the course of a lecture which was unknown to him, he never made the slightest effort to supply the gap. His insouciance in method was equal to that in regard to material; and when we find[480] Godwin and Mrs Radcliffe included, with no satiric purpose, among “The English Comic Writers,” they are introduced so naturally that the absurdity hardly strikes us till some accident wakes us up to it. If inaccuracies in matters of fact are not very common in him, it is because, like a true critic, he pays very little attention to such matters, and is wholly in opinion and appreciation and judgment, and other things where the free spirit is kept straight, if at all, by its own instinct. But he does commit such inaccuracies, and would evidently commit many more if he ran the risk of them oftener.

[Sidenote: _Extra-literary prejudice._]

The last and gravest of his drawbacks has to be mentioned, and though it may be slurred over by political partisanship, those who admire and exalt him in spite of and not because of his politics, are well entitled to call attention to it. To the unpleasantness of Hazlitt’s personal temper we have the unchallengeable testimony of his friends Lamb, who was the most charitable, and Hunt, who with all his faults was one of the most good-natured, of mortals. But what we may call his political temper, especially when it was further exasperated by his personal, is something of the equal of which no time leaves record. Whenever this east wind blows, the true but reasonable Hazlittian had better, speaking figuratively, “go to bed till it is over,” as John Hall Stevenson is said to have done literally in the case of the literal Eurus. Not only does Hazlitt then cease to be a critic,—he ceases to be a rational being. Sidney and Scott are the main instances of its effect, because Sidney could not have annoyed, and Scott we know did not in any way annoy, Hazlitt personally. Gifford is not in this case, and he was himself so fond of playing at the roughest of bowls that nobody need pity him for the rubbers he met. But Hazlitt’s famous _Letter_ to him, which some admire, always, I confess, makes me think of the Doll’s-dressmaker’s father’s last fit of the horrors in _Our Mutual Friend_, and of the way in which the luckless “man talent” fought with the police and “laid about him hopelessly, fiercely, staringly, convulsively, foamingly.” Fortunately the effect was not so fatal, and I know no other instance in which Hazlitt actually required the strait waistcoat.[481] But he certainly did here: and in a considerable number of instances his prejudices have made him, if not exactly _non compos mentis_, yet certainly _non compos judicii_.

[Sidenote: _His radical and usual excellence._]

Fortunately, however, the wind does not always blow from this quarter with him, and when it does the symptoms are so unmistakable that nobody can be deceived unless he chooses to be, or is so stupid that it really does not matter whether he is deceived or not. Far more usually it is set in a bracing North or fertilising West, not seldom even in the “summer South” itself. And then you get such appreciations, in the best, the most thorough, the most delightful, the most _valuable_ sense, as had been seldom seen since Dryden, never before, and in him not frequently. I do not know in what language to look for a parallel wealth. Systematic Hazlitt’s criticism very seldom is, and, as hinted above, still seldomer at its best when it attempts system. But then system was not wanted; it had been overdone; the patient required a copious alterative. He received it from Hazlitt as he has—virtue and quantity combined—received it from no one else since: it is a “patent medicine” in everything but the presence of quackery. Roughly speaking, Hazlitt’s criticism is of two kinds. The first is very stimulating, very interesting, but, I venture to think, the less valuable of the two. In it Hazlitt at least endeavours to be general, and takes a lesson from Burke in “prodigious variation” on his subject. The most famous, the most laboured, and perhaps the best example is the exordium of the _Lectures on the English Poets_, with its astonishing “amplification” on what poetry in general is and what it is not. A good deal of this is directly Coleridgean. I forget whether this is the lecture which Coleridge himself, when he read it, thought that he remembered “talking at Lamb’s”; but we may be quite sure that he had talked things very like it. Much in the “Shakespeare and Milton” has the same quality, and may have been partly derived from the same source: the critical character of Pope[482] is another instance, and probably more original. For Hazlitt had not merely learnt the trick from his master but had himself a genius for it; and he adorned these disquisitions with more _phrase_ than Coleridge’s recalcitrant pen usually allowed him, though there seems to have been plenty in his speech.

The Pope passage is specially interesting, because it leads us to the second and, as it seems to me, the chief and principal class of Hazlitt’s critical deliverances—those in which, without _epideictic_ intention, without, or with but a moderate portion of, rhetoric and amplification and phrasemaking, he handles separate authors and works and pieces. I have said that I think him here unsurpassed, and perhaps unrivalled, in the quantity and number of his deliverances, and only surpassed, _if so_, in their quality, by the greatest things of the greatest persons. These deliverances are to be found everywhere in his extensive critical work, and it is of a survey of some of them, conditioned in the manner outlined above, that the main body of any useful historical account of his criticism must consist. The four main places are the Lectures on _The English Poets_ (1818), on _The English Comic Writers_ (1819), on _Elizabethan Literature_ (1820), and the book on _Characters of Shakespeare_ (1817). We may take them in the order mentioned, though it is not quite chronological, because the chronological dislocation, in the case of the second pair, is logically and methodically unavoidable.

[Sidenote: The English Poets.]

How thoroughly this examination of the greater particulars (as we may call it) was the work which he was born to do is illustrated by the sketches (at the end of the first Lecture on _The English Poets_[483]) of _The Pilgrim’s Progress_, _Robinson Crusoe_, the _Decameron_, Homer, the Bible, Dante, and (O Groves of Blarney!) _Ossian_. Hazlitt’s faults (except prejudice, which is here fortunately silent) are by no means hidden in them—irrelevance, defect of knowledge, “casualness,” and other not so good things. But the _gusto_,[484] the spirit, the inspiriting quality, are present in tenfold measure. Here is a man to whom literature is a real and live thing, and who can make it real and alive to his readers—a man who does not love it or its individual examples “by allowance,” but who loves it “with personal love.” Even his Richardsonian digression[485]—horrible to the stop-watch man—is alive and real and stimulating with the rest. The Dante passage is a little false perhaps in parts, inadequate, prejudiced, what you will in others. But it is criticism—an act of literary faith and hope and charity too—a substance; something added to, and new-born in, the literary cosmos. He is better (indeed he is here almost at his very best) on Spenser than on Chaucer, but why? Because he _knew_ more about Spenser, because he was plentifully read in sixteenth- and hardly read at all in fourteenth-century literature. And so always: the very plethora of one’s notes for comment warning the commentator that he is lost if he indulges rashly. Where Hazlitt is inadequate (as for instance on Dryden) he is more instructive than many men’s adequacy could be, and where he is not— on Collins, on the Ballads, and elsewhere—he prepares us for that ineffable and half-reluctant outburst—a very Balaam’s blessing—on Coleridge,[486] which stands not higher than this, not lower than that, but as an _A-per-se_, consummate and unique.

[Sidenote: _The_ Comic Writers.]

In a sense the _Comic Writers_ are even better. The general exordium on Wit and Humour belongs to the first class of Hazlitt’s critical performances as defined above, and is one of the cleverest of them; though it may perhaps have the faults of its class, and some of those of its author. That on Comedy—the general part of it—incurs this sentence in a heavier degree; for Aristotle or somebody else seems to have impressed Hazlitt too strongly with the necessary _shadiness_ of Comedy, and it is quite clear that of the Romantic variety (which to be sure hardly anybody but Shakespeare has ever hit off) he had an insufficient idea. He is again inadequate on Jonson; it is indeed in his criticism, because of its very excellence, that we see—more than anywhere else, though we see it everywhere—the truth of his master’s denunciation of the “criticism which denies.” But his lecture or essay on the capital examples of the comedy which he really liked—that of the Restoration—is again an apex: and, as it happens, it is grouped for English students with others—the morally excellent and intellectually vigorous but rather purblind onslaught of Collier, the again vigorous but somewhat Philistine following thereof by Macaulay, the practical confession of Lamb’s fantastic and delightful apology, Leigh Hunt’s rather feeble compromise—after a fashion which shows it off to a marvel. While as to the chapter on the Eighteenth-century Novel it has, with a worthier subject, an equal supremacy of treatment. You may differ with much of it, but always agree to differ: except in that estimate of Lovelace which unfortunately shows us Hazlitt’s inability to recognise a _cad_ in the dress and with the manners of a fine gentleman.[487]

[Sidenote: The Age of Elizabeth.]

The _Lectures on the Age of Elizabeth_ (which succeeded the _Comic Writers_, as these had succeeded the _Poets_) maintain, if they do not even raise, the standard. Perhaps there is nothing so fine as the Coleridge passage in individual and concentrated expression; nor any piece of connected criticism so masterly as the chapter on the Novel. But the level is higher: and nowhere do we find better expression of that _gusto_—that amorous quest of literary beauty and rapturous enjoyment of it—which, has been noted as Hazlitt’s great merit. His faults are here, as always, with him and with us. Even the faithful Lamb was driven to expostulate[488] with the wanton and, as it happens, most uncritical belittlement of Sidney,[489] and (though he himself was probably less influenced by political partisanship or political feeling of any kind than almost any great writer of whom we know) to assign this to its true cause. It is odd[490] that a critic, and a great critic, should contrive to be inadequate both on Browne and on Dryden: and again one cannot but suspect the combination to be due to the fact that both were Royalists. But the King’s Head does not always come in: and it is only fair to Hazlitt to say that he is less biassed than Coleridge by the royalism itself of Beaumont and Fletcher, and the supposed republicanism of Massinger. And in by far the greater part of the book— nearly the whole of that part of it which deals with the dramatists— there is no disturbance of this kind. The opening, if somewhat discursive, is masterly, and with very few exceptions the lecturer or essayist carries out the admirable motto—in fact and in deed the motto of all real critics—“I have endeavoured to feel what was good, and to give a reason for the faith that was in me when necessary and when in my power.”[491] Two of his sentences, in dealing with Beaumont and Fletcher, not merely set the key-note of all good criticism but should open the stop thereof in all fit readers. “It is something worth living for to write or even read such poetry as this, or to know that it has been written.” Again, “And so it is something, as our poets themselves wrote, ‘far above singing.’”[492]

[Sidenote: Characters of Shakespeare.]

The _Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays_ is perhaps not as good as any of these three courses of Lectures; but it should be remembered that it came earlier in time, and that the critic had not “got his hand in.” The notes are as a rule nearly as desultory as Coleridge’s, with less suggestiveness; there is at least one outburst, in the case of _Henry V._, of the usual disturbing influence; there is very much more quotation than there need be from Schlegel; and there are other signs of the novitiate. Yet the book contains admirable things, as in the early comparison of Chaucer and Shakespeare, where, though Hazlitt’s defective knowledge of Chaucer again appears, there is much else good. Among the _apices_ of Shakespearian criticism is the statement that the poet “has no prejudice for or against his characters,”[493] that he makes “no attempt to force an interest: everything is left for time and circumstance to unfold.”[494] There is perhaps something inconsistent with this as well as with truth in the observation on _Lear_,[495] that “He is here fairly caught in the web of his own imagination”; but, like most of the greater critics, Hazlitt cares very little for superficial consistency. The characters of Falstaff and Shylock are masterpieces in his _bravura_ style, and one need perhaps nowhere seriously quarrel with any critical statement of his except the astonishing one, that _All’s Well that Ends Well_ is “one of the most _pleasing_” of the plays.

In the remaining volumes the literary articles or passages are only occasional, and are often considerably adulterated with non-literary matter. In _The Plain Speaker_, for instance, the opening paper on “The Prose Style of Poets” holds out almost the highest promise, and gives almost the lowest performance. Hazlitt, as is not so very uncommon with him, seems to have deliberately set himself to take the other side from Coleridge’s. That it happens also to be the wrong side matters very little. But even his attack on Coleridge’s own prose style (open enough to objection) has nothing very happy in it except the comparison, “To read one of his disquisitions is like hearing the variations to a piece of music without the score.” So, too, “On the Conversation of Authors,” though intensely interesting, has no critical interest or very little— the chief exception being the passage on Burke’s style. Far more important is the glance at the theory of the single word in “On Application to Study,”[496] and in that in “On Envy”[497] on the taste of the Lake School.

[Sidenote: The Plain Speaker.]

Much of _The Plain Speaker_ is injured as a treasury of criticism, though improved as a provision of amusement, by Hazlitt’s personal revelations, complaints, agonies; but the critical _ethos_ of the man was so irrepressible that it will not be refused. There is a curious little piece[498] of critical blasphemy, or at least “dis-_gusto_” (the word is wanted and is fairly choice Italian), in “On the Pleasure of Hating,” and, almost throughout the series, the sharp flux and reflux of literary admiration and political rage in respect of Scott is most noteworthy. “On the Qualifications necessary to Success in Life” contains yet another[499] of those passages on Coleridge which are like nothing so much as the half-fond, half-furious, retrospects of a discarded lover on his mistress—which are certainly like nothing else in literature. But “On Reading Old Books” does not belie the promise of its title, and is a complete and satisfactory palinode to the fit of critical headache noted just now. One must not venture to cite from it; it is to be read and re-read, and hardly any single piece, except the immortal “Farewell to Essay-Writing,” gives us so much insight into Hazlitt’s critical temperament as this. “On People of Sense” contains many critical glances, and, unfortunately, one[500] of those on Shelley which show Hazlitt at his worst. One might think that he who found others so “far above singing” could not miss the similar altitude of the author of _Prometheus Unbound_. But Shelley was a contemporary, something of an acquaintance, a man of some means, a gentleman—so Hazlitt must snarl[501] at him. Let us sigh and pass.

“Antiquity,” though on one side only, is almost throughout ours, and therefore not ours: and there is not a little for us in “On Novelty and Familiarity,” while “Old English Writers and Speakers” speaks for itself, and is specially interesting for its glances on matters French and its characteristically Hazlittian fling—one I confess with which I have for once no quarrel—that “_’Tis pity She’s a Whore_ will no more act than Lord Byron and Goethe together could have written it.”[502] It puts one in charity for the absurd description,[503] contradicted by

his own remarks, of _Redgauntlet_s “the last and almost worst” of Scott’s novels, and the prediction (alas! to be falsified) that “Old Sir Walter will last long enough”—in the flesh, not in fame.[504] “Scott, Racine, and Shakespeare” is not unworthy of its title, though it is really on the first and last only. Racine is brought in perfunctorily, and justice is done to him in neither sense.

_Table-Talk_, one of the greenest pastures of the Hazlittian champaign generally, is among the least literary of the books, and yet so literary enough. “On Genius and Common Sense” contributes its Character of Wordsworth,[505] on whom Hazlitt is always interesting, because of the extraordinary opposition between the men’s temperaments. The companion on Shelley,[506] which is supplied by “On Paradox and Commonplace,” is hardly less interesting, though, for the reasons above indicated, much less valuable. “On Milton’s Sonnets,” however, is, as it ought to be, a pure study and an admirable one.[507] “The Aristocracy of Letters” carries its hay high on the horn, yet it is not negligible: and “On Criticism,” which follows, really deserves the title, despite its frequent and inevitable flings and runnings-amuck. The good-humoured, though rather “home” description of “the Occult School”[508] (_v. supra_ on Lamb) is perfectly just. “On Familiar” Style is also no false promiser, and yet another passage on Coleridge meets us in the paper “On Effeminacy of Character.”

[Sidenote: The Round Table, _&c._]

Nor is the interesting “omnibus” volume, which takes its general title from _The Round Table_, of the most fertile. The collection of short papers, properly so called, was written earlier (1817) than most of the books hitherto discussed, and therefore has some first drafts or variants of not a little that is in them. In a note of it[509] occurs the passage on Burke, which, with that on Scott in the _Spirit of the Age_, is Hazlitt’s nearest approach to the sheer _delirium tremens_ of the Gifford Letter: but he is not often thus. “The Character of Milton’s Eve” is a fine critical paper of its kind, and “takes the taste out” well after the passage on Burke. The long handling of _The Excursion_ is very interesting to compare with that in the _English Poets_, as is the earlier “Midsummer Night’s Dream” with similar things elsewhere. “Pedantry” and others give something: and though no human being (especially no human being who knows both books) has ever discovered what made Hazlitt call _John Buncle_ “the English Rabelais,” the paper on Amory’s queer novel is a very charming one. “On the Literary Character” does somewhat deceive us: “Commonplace Critics” less so: but to “Poetical Versatility” we must return. Of the remaining contents of the volume, the well-known _Conversations with Northcote_ (where the painter plays Hazlitt’s idea of an Advocatus Diaboli on Hazlitt) gives less still. But there is a striking passage on Wordsworth,[510] a paradox (surely?) on Tom Paine[511] as “a fine writer” (you might as well call a good getter of coal at the face “a fine sculptor”), an interesting episode[512] on early American nineteenth-century literature; and not a few others, especially the profound self-criticism (for no doubt Northcote had nothing to do with it) on Hazlitt’s abstinence from society.[513] In _Characteristics_, one of the few notable collections of the kind in English, CCXC, a most curious and pretty certainly unconscious echo of Aristotle,[514] is our best gleaning; while the 52d “Commonplace,” on Byron and Wordsworth, and the 12th and 11th “Trifles light as air,” on Fielding and on “modern” critics, play the same part there.

[Sidenote: The Spirit of the Age.]

On the other hand, _The Spirit of the Age_ (with the exception of some political and philosophical matter) is wholly literary; and may rank with the three sets of _Lectures_ and the _Characters of Shakespeare_ as the main storehouse of Hazlitt’s criticism. Here, too, there is much repetition, and here, at the end of the Scott article, is the almost insane outburst more than once referred to. But the bulk of the book is at Hazlitt’s very best pitch of appreciative grasp. If he is anywhere out of focus, it is in reference to Godwin’s novels—the setting of which in any kind of comparison with Scott’s (though Hazlitt was critic enough from the first to see that Godwin could by no possibility be the “Author of _Waverley_”) is a remarkable instance of the disadvantage of the contemporary, and, to some extent, the sympathiser. But the book certainly goes far to bear out the magnificent eulogy of Hazlitt for which Thackeray[515] took it as text, quite early in his career.

[Sidenote: Sketches and Essays.]

The _Sketches and Essays_ are again very rich, where they are rich; and advertise the absence of riches most frankly where they are not. “On Reading New Books”; not a little of “Merry England”; the whole of “On Taste” and “Why the Heroes of Romances are insipid” speak for themselves, and do not bewray their claim. “Taste,” especially, contains[516] one of Hazlitt’s own titles to critical supremacy in his fixing on Perdita’s primrose description as itself supreme, when “the scale of fancy, passion, and observation of nature is raised” high enough. [Sidenote: Winterslow.] And as for _Winterslow_, its first and its last papers are “things enskied” in criticism, for the one is “My First Acquaintance with Poets,” and the last “The Farewell to Essay Writing.”

[Sidenote: _Hazlitt’s critical virtue,_]

These two last, the sentence on

“That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty”;

and (say) the paper referred to a little above on “Poetical Versatility,” will serve as texts for some more general remarks on Hazlitt’s critical character. We have said at the beginning of this notice everything that need be said by way of deduction or allowance; we have only hinted at the clear critical “balance to credit” which remains; and these essays and passages will help to bring this out.

To take the “Poetic Versatility” first, it is an interesting paper, and with the aid of those “characters” of poets, &c., which have been indicated in the survey just completed, gives the best possible idea of one (and perhaps the most popular) of Hazlitt’s forms of critical achievement and influence. In it he eddies round his subject—completing his picture of it by strokes apparently promiscuous in selection, but always tending to body forth the image that presents itself to him, and that he wishes to present to his readers. “Poetry dwells in a perpetual Utopia of its own.” It “does not create difficulties where they do not exist, but contrives to get rid of them whether they exist or not.” “Its strength is in its wings; its element the air.” We “may leave it to time to take out the stains, seeing it is a thing immortal as itself.” Poets “either find things delightful or make them so,” &c. &c., some of the etceteras drawing away from the everlasting, and condescending rather lamentably to the particular.

[Sidenote: _in set pieces,_]

Now there is no need to tell the reader—even the reader of this book, I hope—that this, of these utterances, is a reproduction of Longinus (whom Hazlitt most probably had not read), or that of Coleridge, whom most certainly he had both read and heard.[517] “The man who plants cabbages imitates too”: and it is only the foolishest folk of rather foolish times who endeavour to be original, though the wisest of all times always succeed in being so. The point with Hazlitt is that in these circlings round his subject—these puttings of every possible way in which, with or without the help of others, it strikes him—he gives the greatest possible help to others in being struck. One of the blows will almost certainly hit the nail on the head and drive it home into any tolerably susceptible mind: many may, and the others after the first will help to fix it. Of method there may not be very much—there is rather more here than in most cases; but whether there is method or not, “everything,” in the old military phrase, “goes in”; the subject and the reader are carried by assault, mass, variety, repetition of argument, imagery, phrase. Hazlitt will not be refused; he takes towns at a hand-gallop, like Condé at Lerida—and he does not often lose them afterwards.

[Sidenote: _and universally._]

In this phase of his genius, however, there is perhaps, for some tastes at any rate, a little too much of what has been called _bravura_—too much of the merely epideictic. It is not so in the other. Appreciate the appreciation of the _Winter’s Tale_ passage; still more take to heart (they will go to it without much taking where there is one) the “First Acquaintance with Poets,” or still better the marvellous critical swan-song of the “Farewell,” and there can be no more doubt about Hazlitt. _Quia multum amavit_ is at once his best description and his greatest glory. In all the range of criticism which I have read I can hardly think of any one except Longinus who displays the same faculty of not unreasonable or unreasoned passion for literature; and Longinus, alas! has, as an opportunity for showing this to us, scarcely more than the bulk of one of Hazlitt’s longest Essays, of which, long and short, Hazlitt himself has given us, I suppose, a hundred. Nor, as in some others (many, if not most of whom, if I named them, I should name for the sake of honour), is a genuine passion made the mere theme of elaborate and deliberate literary variations. As we have seen, Hazlitt will often leave it expressed in one sentence of ejaculatory and convincing fervour; it seldom appears at greater length than that of a passage, while a whole lecture or essay in the key of rapture is exceedingly rare. Hazlitt is desultory, irrelevant, splenetic, moody, self-contradictory; but he is never merely pleonastic,—there is no mere verbiage, no mere virtuosity, in him.

And the consequence is that this enthusiastic appreciation of letters, which I have, however heretically, taken throughout this book to be really the highest function of criticism, _catches_: that the critical yeast (to plagiarise from ourselves) never fails to work. The order of history, as always, should probably be repeated, and the influence of Coleridge should be felt, as Hazlitt himself felt it, first: it is well to fortify also with Longinus himself, and with Aristotle, and with as many others of the great ones as the student can manage to master. But there is at least a danger, with some perhaps of not the worst minds, of all this remaining cold as the bonfire before the torch is applied. The _silex scintillans_ of Hazlitt’s rugged heart will seldom fail to give the vivifying spark from its own inward and immortal fire.[518]

[Sidenote: _Blake._]

There have been times—perhaps they are not quite over—when the admission of William Blake[519] into the category of critics would have been regarded as an absurdity, or a bad jest. Nothing is more certain, however, than that the poet-painter expresses, with a force and directness rather improved by that lack of complete technical sanity which some of his admirers most unwisely and needlessly deny, the opinions of the “Extreme Right,” the high-fliers of the Army of Romanticism. He may often be thinking of painting rather than of poetry; but this is sometimes expressedly not the case, and many of his most pointed sayings apply to the one art just as well as to the other—if indeed it would not be still more correct to say that, except when they concern mere technique, they always apply to both. His work, despite the attention which it has received from hands, sometimes of the most eminent, during the last forty years, has never yet been edited in a fashion making its chaos cosmic or the threading of its labyrinths easy: and it may be well to bring together some of the most noteworthy critical expressions in it. That which has been referred to in a former passage,[520] “Every man is a judge of pictures who has not been connoisseured out of his senses,”[521] is in itself almost a miniature manifesto of the new school of criticism. For “connoisseurship”—the regular training in the orthodox system of judgment by rule and line and pattern—is substituted the impression of the natural man, unconditioned except by the retirement that it _shall_ be impression, and not prejudice.

[Sidenote: _His critical position and dicta._]

So, again, that remarkable expression of the Prophet Isaiah[522] when, as Blake casually mentions, he and Ezekiel “dined with me”—an occasion on which surely any one of taste would like to have completed the quartette. The poet-host tells us that he asked, “Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so make it so?” and that the prophet-guest answered, “All poets believe that it does”—a position from which La Harpism and the reluctance to “surrender disbelief” are at once crushed, concluded, and quelled.

In the remarkable engraved page on Homer and Virgil,[523] Blake adventures himself (not with such rashness as may at first seem) against Aristotle (or what he takes for Aristotle), by laying it down that Unity and Morality belong to philosophy, not poetry, or at least are secondary in the latter; that goodness and badness are not distinctions of “character” (a saying in which there is some quibbling but much depth as well); that the Classics, not Goths or Monks, “desolate Europe with wars” (a great enough dictum at the junction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries); and that “Grecian wit is mathematical form,” which is only “eternal in the reasoning memory,” while Gothic is “living form, that is to say, eternal existence”—perhaps the deepest saying of the whole, though it wants large allowance and intelligent taking.

The “Notes on Reynolds” are naturally full of our stuff.

[Sidenote: _The “Notes on Reynolds”_]

“Enthusiastic admiration is the first principle of knowledge.” [Sir Joshua had stated just the contrary.]

“What has reasoning to do with the art of painting [or, we may safely add, of poetry]?”

“Knowledge of ideal beauty is not to be acquired; it is born in us.”

“One central form ... being granted, it does not follow that all other forms are deformity. All forms are perfect in the poet’s mind, ... they are from imagination.”

“To generalise is to be an idiot. To particularise is the great distinction of merit.” [The “streak of the tulip” re-habilitated, and with a vengeance!]

“Invention depends altogether upon execution.”

“Passion and expression are beauty itself.”

“Ages are all equal: but genius is always above its age.”

[Sidenote: _and Wordsworth._]

It is worth while to add to these the very remarkable annotations upon Wordsworth’s Prefaces: “I don’t know who wrote these: they are very mischievous, and direct contrary to Wordsworth’s own practice” [where if Blake had added the words “when he is a poet,” he would simply have given the conclusion of the whole matter], with the very shrewd addendum that Wordsworth is not so much attacking poetic diction, or defending his own, as “vindicating unpopular poets.”

[Sidenote: _Commanding position of these._]

Scanty as this critical budget may seem, its individual items are of extraordinary weight, when we remember that some of them were written before the _Lyrical Ballads_ themselves appeared, and all of them by a man of hardly any reading in contemporary literature, and quite out of the circle of Coleridgean influence. It is scarcely, if at all, too much to say that they are almost enough to start, in a fit mind, the whole system of Romantic criticism in its more abstract form, and sometimes even in its particular and concrete applications. All the eighteenth-century Dagons—the beliefs in official connoisseurship, in the unapproachable supremacy of the ancients, in the barbarism and foolishness of Gothic art and literature, in the superiority of the general to the particular, in the necessity of extracting central forms and holding to them, in the supremacy of reason, in the teachableness of poetry, in the virtues of copying, in the superiority of design to execution,—all are tumbled off their pedestals with the most irreverent violence. That the critic’s applications in the sister art to Rubens, to Titian, to Reynolds himself, are generally unjust, and not infrequently the result of pure ignorance, does not matter; his own formulas would often correct him quite as thoroughly as those of the classical school. What is important is his discovery and enunciation of these formulas themselves.

For by them, in place of these battered gods of the classical or neo-classical Philistia, are set up Imagination for Reason, Enthusiasm for Good Sense, the Result for the Rule; the execution for the mere conception or even the mere selection of subject; impression for calculation; the heart and the eyes and the pulses and the fancy for the stop-watch and the boxwood measure and the table of specifications. It is not necessary to argue the question whether Blake’s own poetical work (we are not concerned with his pictorial) justifies or disconcerts the theories under which it was composed; it may be very strongly suspected, from utterances new as well as old, that approval of the theory and approval of the practice, as well as disapproval in each case, are too intimately bound up with each other to make appeal to either much of an argument. But for our main purpose, which is purely historical, the importance of Blake should, even in these few pages, have been put out of doubt. In no contemporary—not in Coleridge himself—is the counter-creed to that of the Neo-classics formulated with a sharper precision, and withal a greater width of inclusion and sweep.

[Sidenote: _Sir Walter Scott commonly undervalued as a critic._]

There are more senses than one (or for the matter of that two) in the famous proverb, “The better is the enemy of the good.” And in one of them, though not the commonest, it is eminently true of the criticism of Sir Walter Scott. No one, of course, would give to Scott any such relative rank as a critic as that which is his due either as poet or as novelist; but the extent to which his fame as poet and novelist has obscured his reputation as critic is altogether disproportionate and unfair. It is even doubtful whether some tolerably educated persons ever think of him as a critic at all. For his so-called “Prose Works” (except _Tales of a Grandfather_) are very little read, and as usual the criticism is the least read part of them. Yet it is a very large part— extending, what with the Lives of _Swift_ and _Dryden_, the shorter “_Biographies_,” the _Chivalry, Romance, and Drama_, and the collection or selection of _Periodical Criticism_, to ten pretty solid volumes, while even this excludes a great amount of critical matter in the notes and Introductions to the _Poems_, the Novels, the _Dryden_ and _Swift_ themselves, and other by-works of Sir Walter’s gigantic industry.

Mere bulk, however, it may be said, is nothing—indeed it is too often, in work of which posterity is so shy as it is of criticism, a positive misfortune and drawback. What makes the small account taken of Scott as a critic surprising and regrettable is the goodness as well as the bulk of his critical production. Perhaps it may be urged with some justice, in defence of this popular neglect, that his want of attention to style is particularly unfortunate here. He is notoriously a rather “incorrect” writer; and he does not, as many so-called incorrect writers have known how to do, supply the want of academic propriety by irregular brilliances of any kind.

[Sidenote: _Injustice of this._]

Another charge sometimes brought against him—that he is too good-natured and too indiscriminate in praise—will less hold water;[524] and indeed is much too closely connected with the popular notion of the critic as a sort of “nigger”-overseer, whose business is to walk about and distribute lashes—a notion which cannot be too often reprobated. As a private critic Scott _was_ sometimes too easy-going, but by no means always or often in his professional utterances. And he had what are certainly two of the greatest requirements of the critic, reading and sanity. Sometimes some amiable prepossession (such as the narrower patriotism in his relative estimate of Fielding and Smollett) leads him a little astray; but this is very seldom—far seldomer than is the rule with critics of anything like his range. Here, as elsewhere, he does not much affect the larger and deeper and higher generalisations; but here, as elsewhere, his power of reaching these has been considerably underrated. And the distaste itself saves him—and his readers—from the hasty and floundering failures of those who aim more ambitiously at width, depth, and height. In the methodic grasp and orderly exposition of large and complicated subjects (as in the _Romance_[525] and _Drama_ examples) he leaves nothing to desire. Sometimes, in his regular reviews, he condescends too much to the practice of making the review a mere abstract of the book; but I have known readers who complain bitterly of any other mode of proceeding.

Moreover, in two most important divisions of the critic’s art Scott has very few superiors. These are the appreciation of particular passages, books, and authors, and the writing of those critical biographies which Dryden first essayed in English, and of which Johnson is the acknowledged master. The Prefaces to the Ballantyne Novels[526] are the best among Scott’s good things in this kind on the small scale, as the _Dryden_ and the _Swift_ are on the great: for evidences of the former excellence the reader has only to open any one of the half-score volumes referred to above. And those golden qualities of heart which accompanied his genius are illustrated, as well as that genius itself, in his frequent critical writing on other novelists. The criticism of creators on their fellows is not always pleasant reading, except for those who delight to study the weaknesses of the _verdammte Race_. Scott criticises great and small among the folk of whom he is the king, from the commonest romancer up to Jane Austen, with equal generosity, acuteness, and technical mastery. Nor ought we, in this necessarily inadequate sketch, to omit putting in his cap the feather so often to be refused to critics—the feather of catholicity. Macaulay could not praise the delightful lady, whom both he and Scott did their utmost to celebrate, without throwing out a fling at _Sintram_, as if there were no room for good things of different kinds in the great region of Romance. In Scott’s works you may find,[527] literally side by side, and characterised by equal critical sense, the eulogy of _Persuasion_ and the eulogy of _Frankenstein_.[528]

[Sidenote: _Campbell: his_ Lectures on Poetry.]

Campbell’s critical work is chiefly concentrated in two places, one of them accessible with some difficulty, the other only too accessible after a fashion. The first is the _Lectures on Poetry_, which, after delivering them at the Royal Institution during the great vogue of such things in 1820, he refashioned later for the _New Monthly Magazine_ when he was its editor, so that they are only to be had by one of the least agreeable of all processes, the rummaging _for a purpose_ in an old periodical.

[Sidenote: _His_ Specimens.]

The accessibility of the other place—the critical matter contributed to the well-known _Specimens of the British Poets_, and to some extent the actual selections themselves—is greater because they are in nearly all the second-hand book-shops, where from sixpence to a shilling a volume will buy—well bound often and in perfectly good condition—matter which, at any proper ratio of exchange, is worth a dozen times the money. This worth consists of course mainly in the matter selected: but the taste which selected it must figure for no small increment, and the purely critical framework is, to say the least, remarkably worthy of both. Campbell, a very puzzling person in his poetry, is by no means a very easily comprehensible or appraisable one in his critical attitude. In the general arrangement of this he is distinctly of the older fashion, as the fashions of his time went. Like his style, though this is a very fair specimen of the “last Georgian,” still in a manner the standard and staple of the plainer English prose, his opinions are a thought periwigged and buckrammed. He demurs to the “Romantic Unity” of Hurd earlier and Schlegel later; and when in his swashing blow (and a good swashing blow it is of its kind) on the side of Pope in the weary quarrel, he tries to put treatment of artificial on a poetical level with treatment of natural objects, we must demur pretty steadily ourselves. But, on the other hand, he distinctly champions (and was, I believe, the first actually so to formulate) the principle that “in poetry there are many mansions,” and, what is more, he lives up to it. He really and almost adequately appreciates Chaucer: it is only his prejudice about Unity and the Fable that prevents him from being a thorough-going Spenserian; and when we come to the seventeenth century he is quite surprising. Again, it is true, his _general_ creed makes him declare that the metaphysicians “thought like madmen.” But he is juster to some of them than Hazlitt is; he has the great credit of having (after a note of Southey’s, it is true) re-introduced readers to the mazy but magical charms of _Pharonnida_; and he admits Godolphin and Stanley, Flatman and Ayres. If the history of the earlier part of his Introductory Essay is shaky, it could not have been otherwise in his time; and it shows that the indolence with which he is so often charged did not prevent him from making a very good use of what Warton and Percy, Tyrwhitt and Ritson and Ellis, had provided.

This indolence, however, is perhaps more evident in the distribution of the criticism, which, if not careless, is exceedingly capricious. Campbell seems at first to have intended to concentrate this criticism proper in the Introduction (to which nearly the whole of the first volume is allotted), and to make the separate prefaces to the selections mainly biographical. But he does not at all keep to this rule; the main _Introduction_ itself is, if anything, rather too copious at the beginning, while it is compressed and hurried at the end: not a few of the minor pieces and less prominent poets have no criticism at all; while, in the case of those that have it, it is often extremely difficult to discover the principle of its allotment. Yet, on the whole, Campbell ought never to be neglected by the serious student; for even if his criticism were solely directed from an obsolete standpoint, it would be well to go back to it now and then as a half-way house between those about Johnson and those about Coleridge, while as a matter of fact it has really a very fair dose of universal quality.[529]

[Sidenote: _Shelley: his_ Defence of Poetry.]

There are several critical passages in Shelley’s _Letters_, but, as formally preserved, his criticism is limited to the _Defence of Poetry_, which, despite its small bulk, is of extreme interest.[530] It is almost the only return of its times to that extremely abstract consideration of the matter which we found prevalent in the Renaissance, and which in Shelley’s case, as in the cases of Fracastoro or of Sidney, is undoubtedly inspired by Plato. It seems to have been immediately prompted by some heresies of Peacock’s: but, as was always its author’s habit, in prose as well as in verse, he drifts “away, afar” from what apparently was his starting-point, over a measureless ocean of abstract thinking. He endeavours indeed, at first, to echo the old saws about men “imitating natural objects in the youth of the world” and the like, but he does not in any way keep up the arrangement, and we are almost from the outset in contact with his own ardent imagination—of which quality he at once defines poetry as the expression. Again, the poetic faculty is “the faculty of approximation to the beautiful.” Once more we have the proud claim for poetry that poets are not merely the authors of arts, but the inventors of laws, the teachers of religion. They “participate in the eternal, the infinite, and the one.” They are not necessarily confined to verse, but they will be wise to use it. A poem is the very image of life, expressed in its eternal truth. “Poetry is something divine,” the “centre and circumference of knowledge,” the “perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things,” the “record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.” All which (or all except the crotchet about verse) I for one do most powerfully and potently believe: though if any one says that, as generally with Shelley, one is left stranded, or rather floating, in the vague, denial is not easy. One can only wish oneself, as Poins wished his sister, “no worse fortune.”[531]

[Sidenote: _Landor._]

In the course of this History we have seen not infrequent examples of Criticism divorced from Taste—a severance to which the peculiarities of classical and neo-classical censorship lent but too much encouragement. It must be obvious that the general tendency of the criticism which we are calling Modern inclines towards the divorce of Taste from Criticism— to the admission of the monstrous regiment of mere arbitrary enjoyment and liking, not to say mere caprice. But it is curious that our first very distinguished example of this should be found in a person who, both by practice and in theory, had very distinct “classical” tendencies—who, in fact, with the possible exception of Mr Arnold, was the most classical of at least the English writers of the nineteenth century.

[Sidenote: _His lack of judicial quality._]

Landor’s[532] critical shortcomings, however, are the obvious and practically inevitable result of certain well-known peculiarities of temperament, moral rather than intellectual, and principles of life rather than of literature. With him, as with King Lear (whom in more ways and points than one he resembled, though, luckily, with the tragedy infinitely softened and almost smoothed away), the dominant is _impotentia_—the increasing and at last absolute incapacity of the intellect and will to govern the emotions and impulses. Now, as criticism is itself an endless process of correcting impressions—or at least of checking and auditing them till we are sure that they are genuine, co-ordinated, and (with the real if not the apparent consistency) consistent—a man who suffers from this _impotentia_ simply cannot be a real critic, though he may occasionally make observations critically sound.

[Sidenote: _In regular Criticism._]

The rule and the exceptions hold good with Landor unfailingly. He was an excellent scholar; his acquaintance with modern literatures, though much smaller and extremely arbitrary, was not positively small, and his taste, in some directions at least, was delicate and exquisite. But of judicial quality or qualities he had not one single trace, and, even putting them out of the question, his intelligence was streaked and flawed by strange veins of positive silliness. We need not dwell too much on his orthographical and other whims, which have been shared by some great ones—the judgments are the things. In the very first paragraph of his very first regular criticism we find the statement that the Poems of Bion and Moschus are not only “very different” from those of Theocritus but “very inferior.” Inferior in what? in bulk certainly: but in what else are the _Adonis_ and the _Bion_ itself inferior to anything Theocritean? A critic should have been warned by his own “different” not to rush on the “inferior,” which is so often fallaciously consequent. I shall not be accused of excessive Virgil-worship, but what criticism is there in the objection to _me ceperat annus_ as “scarcely Latin” (really! really! Mr Landor, you were not quite a Pollio!), and in the flat emendation of _mihi coeperat_; or in the contemptuous treatment of that exquisite piece containing

ὁ θὴρ δ' ἔβαινε δειλῶς,
φοβεῖτο γὰρ Κυθήρην,

a phrase which, for simplicity, pictorial effect, and suggestion, is almost worthy of Sappho? Such a sentence as that of Politian’s poems, “one only has any merit,” is simply disabling: mere schoolboy prejudice has evidently blinded the speaker. Yet it occurs in his best critique, that on Catullus.

[Sidenote: _The Conversations._]

These set criticisms, however, are few, and Landor was evidently not at ease in them. The literary “Conversations,” it may be said, are the true test. And it is at least certain that these conversations supply not a few of those more excellent critical observations which have been acknowledged and saluted. Especially must we acknowledge and salute one[533] which, though of considerable length, must be made an exception to the rule of “not quoting.” Nowhere, in ancient or modern place, is the education of the critic outlined with greater firmness and accuracy; and those who, by this or that good fortune, have been put through some such a process, may congratulate themselves on having learnt no vulgar art in no vulgar way.

[Sidenote: _Loculus aureolus._]

l would seriously recommend to the employer of our critics, young and
old, that he oblige them to pursue a course of study such as this;
that, under the superintendence of some respectable student from the
University, they first read and examine the contents of the book—a
thing greatly more useful in criticism than is generally thought;
secondly, that they carefully write them down, number them, and range
them under their several heads; thirdly, that they mark every
beautiful, every faulty, every ambiguous, every uncommon expression.
Which being completed, that they inquire what author, ancient or
modern, has treated the same subject; that they compare them, first in
smaller, afterwards in larger portions, noting every defect in
precision and its causes, every excellence and its nature; that they
graduate these, fixing _plus_ and _minus_, and designating them more
accurately and discriminately by means of colours stronger or paler.
For instance purple might express grandeur and majesty of thought;
scarlet, vigour of expression; pink, liveliness; green, elegant and
equable composition; these, however, and others as might best attract
their notice and serve their memory. The same process may be used
where authors have not written on the same subject, when those who
have are wanting or have touched on it but incidentally. Thus Addison
and Fontenelle, not very like, may be compared in the graces of style,
in the number and degree of just thoughts and lively fancies; thus the
dialogues of Cicero with those of Plato, his ethics with those of
Aristotle, his orations with those of Demosthenes. It matters not if
one be found superior to the other in this thing and inferior in that:
the qualities of two authors are explored and understood and their
distances laid down, as geographers speak, from accurate survey. The
_plus_ and _minus_ of good and bad and ordinary will have something of
a scale to rest upon: and after a time the degrees of the higher parts
in intellectual dynamics may be more nearly attained, though never
quite exactly.

[Sidenote: _But again disappointing._]

Yet in close context with this very passage comes an idle “splurt” (evidently half-due to _odium anti-theologicum_) at Coleridge—a thing exactly of the kind which such discipline as has been just recommended should check. And everywhere, especially in the long Miltonic examen between “Southey and Landor,” the effects of Landor’s character appear side by side with a sort of peddling and niggling censorship which one might have thought not natural to that character at all, and which perhaps is a _damnosa hereditas_ from the worse kind of classical scholarship. Even on Boileau[534] he manages to be unfair; and at his objection to one of Milton’s most exquisite and characteristic lines—

“Lancelot and Pelleas and Pellinore”—