Chapter II: Between Coleridge and Arnold (1)

THE ENGLISH CRITICS OF 1830-60—WILSON—STRANGE MEDLEY OF HIS CRITICISM—
THE ‘HOMER’ AND THE OTHER LARGER CRITICAL COLLECTIONS—THE ‘SPENSER’—
THE ‘SPECIMENS OF BRITISH CRITICS’—‘DIES BOREALES’—FAULTS IN ALL,
AND IN THE REPUBLISHED WORK—DE QUINCEY: HIS ANOMALIES AND
PERVERSITIES AS A CRITIC, IN REGARD TO ALL LITERATURES—THEIR CAUSES—
THE ‘RHETORIC’ AND THE ‘STYLE’—HIS COMPENSATIONS—LOCKHART—DIFFICULTY
OF APPRAISING HIS CRITICISM—THE ‘TENNYSON’ REVIEW—ON COLERIDGE,
BURNS, SCOTT, AND HOOK—HIS GENERAL CRITICAL CHARACTER—HARTLEY
COLERIDGE—FORLORN CONDITION OF HIS CRITICISM—ITS QUALITY—DEFECTS AND
EXAMPLES—MAGINN—HIS PARODY-CRITICISMS AND MORE SERIOUS EFFORTS—
MACAULAY—HIS EXCEPTIONAL COMPETENCE IN SOME WAYS—THE EARLY ARTICLES—
HIS DRAWBACKS—THE PRACTICAL CHOKING OF THE GOOD SEED—HIS LITERARY
SURVEYS IN THE ‘LETTERS’—HIS CONFESSION—THE ‘ESSAYS’—SIMILAR
DWINDLING IN CARLYLE—THE EARLIER ‘ESSAYS’—THE LATER—THE ATTITUDE OF
THE ‘LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS’—THE CONCLUSION OF THIS MATTER—THACKERAY—
HIS ONE CRITICAL WEAKNESS AND EXCELLENCE—‘BLACKWOOD,’ IN 1849, ON
TENNYSON—GEORGE BRIMLEY—HIS ESSAY ON TENNYSON—HIS OTHER WORK—HIS
INTRINSIC AND CHRONOLOGICAL IMPORTANCE—“GYAS AND CLOANTHUS”—MILMAN,
CROKER, HAYWARD—SYDNEY SMITH, SENIOR, HELPS—ELWIN, LANCASTER,
HANNAY—DALLAS—THE ‘POETICS‘—‘THE GAY SCIENCE’—OTHERS: J. S. MILL.

There are few things more difficult to the conscientious writer, and few which he knows will receive so little consideration from the irresponsible reader, as those overlappings on the one hand, and throwings-back on the other, which are incumbent on all literary historians save those who are content to abjure form and method altogether. The constituents of the present chapter give a case in point. Some of them may seem unreasonably torn away from their natural companions in our last chapter dealing with English criticism; some unreasonably kept back from the society of the next. But, once more, things have not been done entirely at the hazard of the orange-peel or the die.

[Sidenote: _The English Critics of 1830-60._]

There is, to the present writer at any rate, a distinct colour, or set of colours, appertaining to most of the English criticism of 1830-1860, and it seems worth while to bring this out by isolating its practitioners to a certain extent. We shall find these falling under three main divisions—the first containing the latest-writing, and in some cases hardly the least, of the great band of periodical critics, mostly Romantic in tendency, of whom Coleridge is the Generalissimo and Hazlitt the rather mutinous Chief of the Staff. Then come the mighty pair of Carlyle and Macaulay; and then a rear-guard of more or less interesting minors and transition persons. So, first of the first, let us deal with one who, not only to his special partisans and friends, seemed a very prince of critics in his day.

[Sidenote: _Wilson._]

The difficulties of appraising “Christopher North” as a critic are, or should be, well known in general; but it is doubtful whether many persons have recently cared to put themselves in a position to appreciate them directly. No such revival has come to him as that which has come to Hazlitt: and I have elsewhere given at some length[896] the reasons which make me inclined to fear that no such revival is very likely to come soon. For Wilson accumulated, with a defiance valorous enough but certainly not discreet, provocation after provocation to Nemesis and Oblivion. He is immensely diffuse; he is not more diffuse than he is desultory; and in the greater part of his work he sets his criticism with a habitual strain of extravagant and ephemeral _bravura_ which even the most tolerant and catholic may not seldom find uncongenial. [Sidenote: _Strange medley of his criticism._] But all this, though bad, is followed by things worse—critical incivility of the worst kind, violent political and other partisanship, a prevailing capriciousness which makes his critical utterances almost valueless, except as words to the wise; and occasional accesses of detraction and vituperation which suggest either the exasperation or some physical ailment, or a slight touch of mental aberration. And yet, side by side with all this, there is an enthusiastic love of literature; a very wide knowledge of it; a real capacity for judging, wherever this capacity is allowed to exercise itself; a generosity (as in the famous palinodes to Leigh Hunt and to Macaulay) which only makes one regret the more keenly that this generosity is so Epimethean; and, lastly, a faculty of phrase which, irregular and uncertain as it is, apt as it is to fall on one side into bombast and on the other into bathos, is almost always extraordinary. An anthology of critical passages might be extracted from Wilson which few critics could hope to surpass; but the first and probably the last exclamation of any one who was driven by this to the contexts would be, “How on earth could such good taste live in company with a Siamese brother so hopelessly bad!”[897]

[Sidenote: _The_ Homer _and the other larger critical collections_.]

Wilson’s admirers, from his daughter downwards, have lamented that the _Homer_—a good thing but not his best—was the only one of his longer and more connected critical exercitations that was included[898] in his collected works, while three others—the _Spenser_, the _Specimens of British Critics_, and the dialogue _Dies Boreales_—were excluded. The reasons of the exclusion seem obvious enough. At a rough and unprofessional “cast-off,” I should guess each of the two earlier series at about 300 of these present pages, and the _Dies_ at nearer 400. This would have meant at least another three volumes added to a collection already consisting of twelve. The Devil’s Advocate, moreover, would have had other things to urge. Whatever Wilson had gained by age and sobering (and he had gained much), he had lost nothing of his tendency to exuberance and expatiation. After the first paper or two, the whole of the _Spenser_ criticism is occupied with an examination of the First Book of the _Faerie Queene_ only—the best known part of the poem. The _Specimens of British Critics_—an admirable title which might have served for a most novel, useful, and interesting work—means in fact a very copious examination of Dryden’s critical utterances and a rather copious one of those of Pope—so that this _professor_ at any rate has not filled this _hiatus_. And the _Dies_, though they have got rid of some of the superabundant animal spirits of the _Noctes_, are (it is necessary to say it) very much duller.

[Sidenote: _The_ Spenser.]

Yet the regretters had some reason. I myself could relinquish without much sorrow, from the matter actually republished, more than as much as would accommodate the _Spenser_, nearly as much as would make room for the _Specimens_ also. As for the former, the famous compliment of Hallam[899] (not a person likely, either on his good or his bad side, to be too lenient to Wilson’s faults) is at least a strong prerogative vote. Nor does it[900] stand in need of this backing. Wilson spends far too much time in slaying forgotten Satans that never were very Satanic— the silliness of the excellent Hughes, the pedantry of the no less excellent Spence, the half-heartedness, even, of Tom Warton. He does not entirely discard his old horse-play and his old grudges, though we can well pardon him for the fling that “the late Mr Hazlitt” did not think Sidney and Raleigh gentlemen. But he discards them to a very great extent; as well as the old namby-pambiness which sometimes mars his earlier work, when he is sentimental, and which, with him as with Landor, was a real danger. And the thing is full of admirable things,— the generous admission that “Campbell’s criticism is as fine and true as his poetry”; the victorious defence of the Spenserian stanza against those who think it a mere following of the Italians: a hundred pieces of good exposition and appreciation. While as for mere writing, we have “written fine” after De Quincey and Wilson himself for some eighty years. But have we often beaten this: “Thus here are many elegies in one; but that one [_Daphnaida_] is as much a whole as the _sad_ sky with all its _misty_ stars”?[901]

[Sidenote: _The_ Specimens of British Critics.]

The _Specimens of British Critics_,[902] ten years later, maintains, and even with rare exceptions improves, the standard of taste in the _Spenser_, but its faults of disproportion, irrelevance, and divagation are much greater. The author himself once insinuates that his work may be taken for “an irregular history of British Criticism,” and it certainly might have been made such—“nor so very irregular neither,” as they would have said in the days when Englishmen were allowed to write English, and grammarians to prate about grammar. But Wilson cannot resist his propensity to course any hare that starts. As has been said above, he has the compass of a by no means meagre volume for dealing ostensibly with no British critics but Dryden and Pope. If he dealt with them only, and only as critics, there would not be much fault to find, though we might wish for a better and fuller planned work. But not a quarter—not, we might almost venture to say, a tenth—of his space is occupied with them or with criticism. A very large part is given to discussion, not merely of Dryden and Pope but of Churchill as _satirists_; Dryden’s plays, rhymed and other, receive large consideration, his theory of translation almost a larger, with independent digressions on every poet whom he translates. Two or three whole papers are devoted to Chaucer, not merely as Dryden translated him but in all his works, in his versification, and so forth. I do not wonder that, seeing a farrago so utterly non-correspondent to its title, any one should have hesitated to reprint it. But I do know that there is admirable criticism scattered all over it, that if it appeared as _Miscellanies in English Criticism_, or _Critical Quodlibeta_, or something of that sort, it would be worth the while of every one who takes an interest in the subject to read it: and I do think it a pity that it should be practically as if it were not.

[Sidenote: Dies Boreales.]

Perhaps hardly as much can be said of _Dies Boreales_,[903] which was written when the author’s bodily strength was breaking, and which betrays a relapse on senescent methods, with, naturally, no relief of juvenile treatment. The dialogue form is resumed, but “Seward,” “Buller,” and “Tallboys” are, as Dryden might have said, “the coolest and most insignificant” fellows, the worst possible substitutes for “Tickler,” and the Shepherd, and the wonderful _eidolon_ of De Quincey in the _Noctes_. There is no gusto in the descriptions, even of Loch Awe: and among the rare and melancholy flashes of the old genial tomfoolery, the representation of a banquet at which these thin things, these walking gentlemen, sit down with the ghost of Christopher to a banquet of _twenty-five_ weighed pounds of food per man, is but ghastly and resurrectionist Rabelaisianism. But if there is not the old exuberance, there is the old pleonasm. Wilson seems unable to settle down to what is his real subject—critical discussion of certain plays of Shakespeare and of _Paradise Lost_. Nor, when the discussions come, are they quite of the first class, though there are good things in them. The theory of a “double time” in Shakespeare—one literal and chronological, which is often very short, and another extended by poetical licence—is ingenious, if somewhat fantastic, and, critically, quite unnecessary. But the main faults of the writer, uncompensated for the most part by his merits, are eminently here.

[Sidenote: _Faults in all,_]

These faults, to be particularised immediately, result in a lack of directness, method, clean and clear critical grip, which is continuous and pervading. Forty pages could generally be squeezed into fourteen, and not seldom into four, with great gain of critical, no loss of literary, merit. Now diffuseness, a bad fault everywhere, is an absolutely fatal one in critical literature that wishes to live. It is hard enough for it to gain the ear of posterity anyhow; it is simply impossible when the real gist of the matter is whelmed in oceans of divagation, of skirmishes, courteous or rough-and-tumble, with other critics, of fantastic flourish and fooling. It is no blasphemy to the _Poetics_ and the Περὶ Ὕψους themselves to say that to their terseness they owe at least half their immortality.

[Sidenote: _and in the republished work._]

In the earlier, better known, and more easily accessible work the same merits and defects appear in brighter or darker colours, as the case may be. In once more going through the ten volumes of the _Noctes_,[904] and the _Recreations_, and the _Essays_, I can find nothing more representative than the Wordsworth Essay,[905] the famous onslaught on Tennyson’s early Poems,[906] and the eulogy of Macaulay’s _Lays_,[907] though I should now add _An Hour’s Talk about Poetry_ from the _Recreations_.[908] In the first the author tries to be systematic, and fails; in the second he is jovially scornful, not without some acute and generous appreciation; in the third he is enthusiastically appreciative, but not, on the whole, critically satisfactory; in the fourth he compasses English sea and land to find one Great Poem, and finds it only in _Paradise Lost_. Everywhere he is alive and full of life; in most places he is suggestive and stimulating at intervals; nowhere is he critically to be depended upon. Praise and blame; mud and incense; vision and blindness alike lack that interconnection, that “central tiebeam,” which Carlyle, in one of the least unsympathetic and most clear-sighted of his criticisms of his contemporaries, denied him. The leaves are not merely—are not indeed at all—Sibylline; for it is impossible to work them into, or to believe that they were ever inspired by, a continuous and integral thought or judgment. There is enjoyment on the reader’s part, as on the writer’s, but it is “casual fruition”: there is even reasoning, but it is mostly on detached and literally eccentric issues. A genial chaos: but first of all, and, I fear, last of all, chaotic.

[Sidenote: _De Quincey: his anomalies_]

Wilson’s neighbour, friend, contributor, and, in a kindly fashion, half-butt, De Quincey[909] is, like Southey, though in different measure, condition, and degree, rather puzzling as a critic. He, too, had enormous reading, a keen interest in literature, and a distinctly critical temperament. Moreover, during great part of his long life, he never had any motive for writing on subjects that did not please him: and, even when such a motive existed, he seems to have paid sublimely little attention to it. The critical “places” in his works are in fact very numerous; they meet the reader almost _passim_, and often seem to promise substantive and important contributions to criticism. Nor, as a matter of fact, are they ever quite negligible or often unimportant. They constantly have that stimulating and attractive property which is so valuable, and which seems so often to have been acquired by “the Companions” from contact with the loadstone-rock of Coleridge. Every now and then, as in the well-known “Note on the Knocking at the Gate in _Macbeth_,” De Quincey will display evidence (whether original or suggested) of almost dæmonic subtlety. Very often, indeed, he will display evidence, if not of dæmonic yet of impish and almost fiendish acuteness, as in his grim and (for a fellow artificial-Paradise seeker) rather callous suggestion[910] that Coleridge and Lamb should have put down their loss of cheerfulness in later years not to opium or to gin but to the later years themselves. “Ah, dear Lamb,” says the little monster,[911] “but note that the drunkard was fifty-six years old and the songster twenty-three!”

[Sidenote: _and perversities as a critic,_]

Yet De Quincey is scarcely—on the whole, and as a whole—to be ranked among the greatest critics. To begin with, his unconquerable habit of “rigmarole” is constantly leading him astray: and the taste for jaunty personality which he had most unluckily imbibed from Wilson leads him astray still further, and still more gravely and damagingly. In the volume on _The Lake Poets_ I do not suppose that there are twenty pages of pure criticism, putting all orts and scraps together. The main really critical part of the essay on Lamb—then a fresh and most tempting subject—is a criticism of—--Hazlitt! The extremely interesting subject of “Milton _v._ Southey and Landor” (though the paper does contain good things, and, in particular, some excellent remarks on Metre) is all frittered and whittled off into shavings of quip, and crank, and gibe, and personality. The same is the case with what should have been, and in part is, one of his best critical things, the article on Schlosser’s _Literary History of the Eighteenth Century_. The present writer will not be suspected, by friend or foe, of insisting ruthlessly on a too grave and chaste critical manner: but De Quincey here is too much for anything and anybody. “For Heaven’s sake, my good man,” one may say almost in his own words, “do leave off fooling and come to business.” In the very long essay on Bentley he has little or no criticism at all; and here, as well as in the “Cicero,” he is too much stung and tormented by his hatred of the drab style of Conyers Middleton to see anything else when he gets near to that curious person, as he must in both. On Keats, without any reason for hostility, he has almost the full inadequacy of his generation, with not much less on Shelley; and when he comes to talk even of Wordsworth’s _poetry_, though there was no one living whom he honoured more, he is not very much less unsatisfactory.

[Sidenote: _in regard to all literatures._]

Nor are these inadequacies and perversities limited to English. There was a good excuse (more than at one time people used to think under the influence of the fervent Goethe-worship of the mid-nineteenth century) for his famous and furious attack on _Wilhelm Meister_; but what are we to think of a man (admitting that much has been said and thought of it) coolly “dismisses,”[912] without so much as an unfavourable opinion, the lyric and miscellaneous poetry of one of the greatest lyric poets of Europe, or the world? He persistently belittles French literature: and he had, of course, a right to give his judgment. But, unfortunately, he not only does not give evidence of knowledge to support his condemnation, but does give negative evidence of ignorance. That ignorance, as far as contemporary literature went, seems to have been almost absolute. Even Chateaubriand (a rhetorician after his own heart) he never names in his dealing with French rhetoric, and never at all, so far as I remember, except as a praiser of Milton; while the subject before the seventeenth century seems to have been equally a blank to him. But he is most wayward and most uncritical about the classics. He gives himself all the airs of a profound scholar, and seems really to have been a very fair one. Yet that “Appraisal of Greek Literature” which Professor Masson has ruthlessly resuscitated[913] might almost have been written by the most ignorant of the “Moderns,” two hundred years ago, for its omissions and commissions. He seems to have been in his most Puckish frame of mind if he was not serious; if he was, _actum est_ (or almost so) with him as a critic.

[Sidenote: _Their causes._]

The truth seems to be that he had no very deep, wide, or fervent love of poetry as such. He could appreciate single lines and phrases,—Milton’s

“Sole sitting by the shores of old romance,”

Landor’s

“Beyond the arrows, views, and shouts of men”;

but on the whole his curious, and of course strictly “interested,” heresy about prose-poetry made him as lukewarm towards poetry pure and simple as it made him unjust to the plainer prose, such as that of Middleton, that of Swift, and even (incomprehensible as this particular injustice may seem) that of Plato. Yet we should not be sorry for this heresy, because it gave us, independently of the great creative passages of the _Confessions_, the _Suspiria_, and the rest, the critical pieces of the _Rhetoric_ and the _Style_. It is somewhat curious that in the midst of an appreciative period we should have to fall back upon “preceptist” work. But it is certainly here that De Quincey, though not without his insuperable faults, becomes of most consequence in the History of Criticism. In fact, he may be said to have been almost the “instaurator”[914] of this preceptist criticism which, since its older arguments had become nearly useless from the disuse of the Neo-classic appreciation upon which they were based, or which was based upon them, very urgently and particularly required such instauration.

[Sidenote: _The_ Rhetoric _and the_ Style.]

The _Rhetoric_ in particular, with all its defects, has not been superseded as a preceptist canvas, which the capable teacher can broider and patch into a competent treatise of the ornater English style. Its author’s unconquerable waywardness appears in his attempt—based in the most rickety fashion and constantly self-contradictory—to combine the traditional and the popular senses of the word in a definition of Rhetoric as _unconvinced_ fine writing,—the deliberate elaboration of mere _tours de force_ in contradistinction to genuine and heartfelt Eloquence. But its view is admirably wide—the widest up to its time that can be found anywhere, I think; it is instinct with a crotchety but individual life; and if the defects of the new method appear when we compare it with Rapin or Batteux, the merits thereof appear likewise, and in ample measure. Nor, despite some digression, is there much of the author’s too frequent tomfoolery. His erudition, his interest in the subject, and (towards the end) his genuine and alarmed eagerness to contradict Whately’s damaging pronouncements as to poetry and prose, keep him out of this. The _Style_ is much more questionable, and has much more ephemeral matter in it—the author rides out all his favourite cock-horses by turns, and will often not bate us a single furlong of the journey to Banbury Cross on them. Moreover, much of it is occupied with often just condemnation of the special vices of ordinary English newspaper-and-book style in the earlier middle nineteenth century—Satans which, though not quite extinct, have given main place to other inhabitants of Pandemonium. But the paper, with the subsidiary pieces on _Language_ and _Conversation_, will never lose interest and importance.

[Sidenote: _His compensations._]

No incident in the ruthless duty of the critical historian has given me more trouble, or been carried through with more reluctance, than this handling of De Quincey. I have to acknowledge a great, a very early, and a constantly continued indebtedness to him. I could, as was hinted at the beginning of this notice, compile a long and brilliant list of separate instances in which his old-man-of-the-sea caprices have left him free to give admirable critical pronouncements. His suggestive and _protreptic_[915] quality cannot be overrated. On a philosophical point of criticism he is very rarely wrong, though even here he is too apt to labour the point, as in his deductions in the _Appraisal_ from the true and important caution that “sublime” is a defective and delusive word for the subject of Longinus. But he is of those critics, too commonly to be found in the present stage of our inquiry, who are eminently _unsafe_—who require to be constantly surrounded with keepers and guards. I do not remember that Mr Matthew Arnold often, or ever, refers to De Quincey. But I cannot help thinking that, in his strictures on the English critics of his earlier time, he must often have had him in mind. He could not have charged him with narrow reading. He could not have charged him with mere insularity, or with flattery of his co-insulars. But he might easily have produced him,—and it would have been very difficult to get him out of the Arnoldian clutches, as a victim of that “eternal enemy of Art, Caprice.”

[Sidenote: _Lockhart._]

There are few critics of whom we have been less allowed to form a definite and well-grounded opinion, than of one of the most famous of the practitioners of the art in the first half of the nineteenth century. Some, I should hope, of the very unjust obloquy which used to rest on Lockhart for his “scorpion” quality has been removed by Mr Lang’s _Life_: but of his more than thirty years of criticism not much more is accessible than what was public the day after his death. It is true that this—the main articles of it being the _Scott_, the _Burns_, the _Theodore Hook_, and the earlier _Peter’s Letters_[916]—is a very goodly literary baggage indeed, and one which any man of letters might consent to have produced, at the cost of a large curtailment of his _peau de chagrin_. [Sidenote: _Difficulty of appraising his criticism._] It is true, further, that great part of it puts Lockhart in the forefront of the critical army. But its criticism, like the mousquetaireship of Aramis, is but of an interim order; and of the necessarily great body of anonymous reviewing, wherein at once the sting and the strength of his critical powers must have been revealed, we have but a very few instances even indirectly authenticated, the chief being the famous _Quarterly_ review of Tennyson’s early work. Eking this further with indications from letters and the like, we shall find in Lockhart a notable though a more accomplished instance of the class of critic to which, on the other side, Jeffrey also belonged. He is differentiated from Jeffrey by a harder, if clearer and stronger, intellect, by more critical system, and, no doubt, by less amiability of temper. He had formed his taste by a deeper and wider education, he possessed a better style, and he had, as his non-critical work shows, far more imagination.

[Sidenote: _The_ Tennyson _review_.]

In the “Tennyson” paper, the authorship of which appears to be certain, we have an example of Lockhart himself and of the school of criticism which he represents, very far from at the best, but far also from at the worst. This worst would have been nearly reached by him, if we could believe the earlier “Keats” article in _Blackwood_ to be his—a charge which, fortunately, is as yet Not Proven to any competent court, though there may be searchings of heart about it. Undoubtedly Lockhart was capable of indulging in that style of sneering insolence which, though it is intellectually at a higher level by far than the other style of hectoring abuse, is nearly as offensive, and less excusable because it requires and denotes this very intellectual superiority. But the author of the Tennyson article displays neither. He is merely polite and even good-tempered for the most part; and it is constantly necessary to remember, that if there were beauties which ought to have drawn his eyes away from the faults, there were, in the earlier versions of these early poems, faults enough to draw the eyes of any critic of his stamp away from the beauties. There were trivial and mawkish things which have disappeared entirely; flawed things which have been reforged into perfect ring and temper; things, in the main precious, which were marred by easily removable disfigurements. From unwillingness to accept the later stages of a movement of which he had joyfully shared the earlier, Lockhart cannot be cleared; but his guilt extends little further.

[Sidenote: _On Coleridge, Burns, Scott, and Hook._]

And he has excellent compurgation to bring forward against it. Quite early, in _Peter’s Letters_, he had defended the genius of Coleridge against his detractors with admirable vigour and taste. He is extraordinarily good on Burns. The abundant critical remarks which he has interspersed in the _Life of Scott_ itself, afford a wonderful exhibition of sensitiveness and fineness of taste, with nothing to be set on the other side except the very pardonable tendency to undervalue and grudge a little in the case of the non-Scottish novels. But an almost better instance of Lockhart’s critical power, on the biographical as well as the literary side, is to be found in his article on Theodore Hook, with its remarkable welcome of the new school of Victorian novelists, which shows that his want of receptivity, as regards new poetry, did not extend to prose fiction.

[Sidenote: _His general critical character._]

On the whole, we have few better examples than Lockhart, if we have any, of the severer type of critic—of the newer school, but with a certain tendency towards the older—a little too prone, when his sympathies were not specially enlisted, to think that his subjects would be “nane the waur of a hanging”—a little too quick to ban, and too slow to bless—but acute, scholarly, logical, wide enough in range, when his special prejudices did not interfere, and entitled to some extent to throw the responsibility of those prejudices on the political and literary circumstances of his time.

[Sidenote: _Hartley Coleridge._]

If the pixies had not doomed Hartley Coleridge[917] to a career (or an absence of one) so strange and in a manner so sad, there would pretty certainly have been a case, not merely of poetic son succeeding poetic father, against the alleged impossibility or at least non-occurrence of which succession he himself mildly protested, but of critical faculty likewise descending in almost the highest intensity from father to son. And the not ungracious creatures might plead that, after all, opportunity was not lacking. During that strange latter half of his lifetime when he fulfilled, more literally than happily, the poetic prophecy of Wordsworth in his childhood, he seems to have had very little other occupation—indoors at least—besides criticism actual and practical. But, with the inveterate Coleridgean habit of “marginalling,” and the equally inveterate one of never turning the Marginalia to any solid account, the results of this practice, save in the case of the famous copy of Anderson’s _Poets_ (shabbiest and slovenliest treasure-house of treasures immortal and priceless!) which bears his father’s and uncle’s notes as well as his own, are mostly Sibylline Leaves _after_ the passage of the blast. [Sidenote: _Forlorn condition of his criticism._] When a man commits his critical thoughts to the narrow margins of weekly newspapers _unbound_—indeed, if he had them bound, the binder would no doubt have exterminated them after the fashion of his ruthless race—he might just as well write on water, and better on sand. Still, the _disjecta membra_ do exist—in the _Biographia Borealis_, or _Northern Worthies_, to some extent; in the Essays, collected by the pious, if sometimes a little patronising, care of his brother Derwent, to a much greater; and perhaps in one instance only, the “Massinger and Ford” Introduction, after a fashion in a manner finished. Yet even here the intended critical _coda_ is wanting, and the inevitable critical divagation too much present.

[Sidenote: _Its quality._]

But in all this there is also present, after a fashion of which I can remember no other instance, the evidences of a critical genius which not only did not give itself, but which absolutely refused itself, a chance. Hartley Coleridge has never, I think, been the subject of much study: but a more tempting matter for “problem” lovers can hardly exist. Nothing in his _known_ history accounts for the refusal. He was admittedly not temperate: but no one has ever pretended that he was the slave of drink to the extent to which his father was the slave of opium; his interest in literature was intense and undying—that every page that he ever wrote shows beyond possibility of doubt; and the fineness of his critical perceptions is equally indubitable. [Sidenote: _Defects_] But the extraordinary and, I think, unparalleled intellectual indolence—or rather intellectual paralysis—which beset him, seems to have prevented him not merely from writing, but from that mere reading in which men, too indolent to make any great use of it, constantly indulge as a mere pleasure and pastime. He confesses frankly that he had read very little indeed: and this, though he had been almost all his life within reach of, and for great part of it actually under the same roof with, Southey’s hardly equalled library. This ignorance leads him wrong not only on matters of fact, but also on matters of opinion: indeed, he seldom goes wrong, except when he does not know enough about the matter.

It is unfortunate that we have hardly anything finished from him in the critical way, except the “Massinger and Ford” and the Essays he wrote for _Blackwood_, while these last bear such a strong impress of Wilson’s own manner[918] that it is impossible not to think them Christopherically sophisticated. In the _Northern Worthies_ he professes not to meddle with Criticism at all, or to touch it very little. In the “Marvell,” however, the “Bentley,” the “Ascham,” the “Mason,” the “Roscoe,” and the “Congreve,” he is better than his word, and gives some excellent criticism as a seasoning to the biography. [Sidenote: _and examples._] One cannot, indeed, but grudge the time that he spends on such worthless stuff as _Elfrida_ and _Caractacus_, but we must remember that in that generation of transition, the generation of Milman and Talfourd earlier, of Henry Taylor and others later, the possibility of reviving the serious drama was a very important subject indeed. Hartley, whose reverence for his father is as pleasant as his affection for his mother, evidently thought much of _Remorse_ and _Zapolya_, and might probably, if he ever could have got his will to face any hedge, have tried such things himself. On Congreve he is nearly at his best: and his essay certainly ought to be included in that unique volume of _variorum_ critical documents on the Restoration Drama, which somebody some day may have the sense to edit.

But he would be neither Hartley nor Coleridge if he were not best in the _Marginalia_, good as the “Massinger and Ford” introduction is in parts. The “Anderson” notes, and those on Shakespeare, deserve the most careful reading: and I shall be much surprised if any competent reader fails to see that the man who wrote them at least had it in him to have made no inadequate thirdsman to his father[919] and Hazlitt.

[Sidenote: _Maginn._]

Very few people nowadays, in all probability, think much of “bright, broken Maginn”[920] as a critic; and of those few some perhaps associate his criticism chiefly with such examples of it as the article on Grantley Berkeley, which almost excused the retaliation on its unfortunate publisher, or the vain attempt to “bluff” out the Keats matter by ridiculing _Adonais_. Even as to most of his exercitations in this most unlovely department, or rather corruption, of our art, there is perhaps something to be said for him. He fights, as a rule, not with Lockhart’s dagger of ice-brook temper, nor with Wilson’s smashing bludgeon, but with a kind of horse-whip, stinging indeed enough, but letting out no life and breaking no bones at worst and heaviest, at lightest not much more than switching playfully. Had there, however, been nothing to plead for him but this, there would have been no room for him here. [Sidenote: _His parody-criticisms_] But his favourite way of proceeding in his lighter critical articles, though not invented by himself (as it was not of course invented even by Canning and his merry men, from whom Maginn took it), the method of parody-criticism, is, if not a very high variety, and especially not in the least a convincing one, still one which perhaps deserves a few lines of reference, and of which he was himself decidedly the chief master. These parody-criticisms[921] are often quite good-natured, and they exhibit the seamy sides of the various styles in a manner which is critical “after a sort.”

[Sidenote: _and more serious efforts._]

Still, a mere allusion would suffice for them if they stood alone, and Maginn’s paragraph might be completed by observing that he has repaired the absolutely false statement, that “Michael Angelo was a very indifferent poet,” by the far too true one, that “Any modern sermon, after the Litany of the Church of England, is an extreme example of the bathos.”[922] But his _Essay on Dr Farmer’s Learning of Shakespeare_,[923] and the much shorter but still substantial _Lady Macbeth_,[924] are by no means to be omitted or merely catalogued. These two pieces show that Maginn, if

only he could have kept his hand from the glass, and his pen from mere gambols or worse, not only might but would have been one of the most considerable of English critics. The goodness, and the various goodness, of both is all the more remarkable because Maginn seems to have owed little or nothing to the influence of Coleridge. Almost the only fault in the first is the hectoring incivility with which Farmer himself is spoken of, and this, as we have seen, is but too old a fault with critics, while it was specially prevalent at this period, and our own is far from guiltless of it. But the sense and learning of the paper are simply admirable: and Maginn’s possession of the last critical secret is almost shown by his wise restraint in arguing that Farmer’s argument for Shakespeare’s ignorance is invalid, without going on, as some would do, and have done, to argue the poet omniscient by learning as well as by genius. As for the _Lady Macbeth_, the sense is reinforced, and the learning (here not necessary) replaced, by taste and subtlety of the most uncommon kind. I do not know a piece of dramatic character-criticism (no, not the thousand-times-praised thing in _Wilhelm Meister_) more unerringly delicate and right. And this man, not, as the cackle goes, by “neglect of genius,” by the wicked refusal of patrons to patronise, not by anything of the kind, but by sheer lack of self-command, wasted his time in vulgar journalism at the worst, and with rare exceptions[925] in mere sport-making at the best!

We have been occupied since the beginning of this chapter by men who, save in the case of Hartley Coleridge, were closely connected with the periodical press, and owed almost all their communication with the public to it. We now come to a pair, greater than any of them, who were indeed “contributors,” but not contributors mainly.

[Sidenote: _Macaulay._]

Another great name is added, by Macaulay, to the long and pleasant list of our examples how “Phibbus car” has, in unexpected and puzzling but always interesting ways, “made or marred the” not always “foolish Fates” of critics and criticism. When we first meet him as a critic of scarcely four-and-twenty, in the articles contributed to _Knight’s Quarterly_, we may feel inclined to say that nobody whom we have yet met (except perhaps Southey) can have had at that age a wider range of reading, and nobody at all an apparently keener relish for it. [Sidenote: _His exceptional competence in some ways._] He is, what Southey was not, a competent scholar in the classics; he knows later (if unfortunately not quite earlier) English literature extraordinarily well; he has, what was once common with us, but was in his days getting rare, and has since grown rarer, a pretty thorough knowledge of Italian, and he is certainly not ignorant of French (though perhaps at no time did he thoroughly relish its literature), while he is later to add Spanish and German. But he does not only know, he loves. There is already much personal rhetoric and mannerism especially in the peroration of his review of Mitford’s _Greece_, where he reproaches that Tory historian with his neglect of Greek literature. But it is quite evidently sincere. He has shown similar enthusiasm, combined in a manner not banal, in his earlier article on Dante, and he shows wonderful and prophetic knowledge of at least parts of literature in his paper on the Athenian Orators, as well as in the later article on History belonging to his more recognised literary period. [Sidenote: _The early articles._] From a candidate of this kind, but just qualified to be a deacon of the Church in years, we may surely expect a deacon in the craft of criticism before very long, particularly when he happens to possess a ready-made style of extraordinarily, and not merely, popular qualities. There are some who would say that this expectation was fully realised: I am afraid I cannot quite agree with them, and it is my business here to show why.

[Sidenote: _His drawbacks._]

We have said that, even in these early exercitations, Macaulay’s characteristics appear strongly: and among not the least strongly appearing are some from which, unless a man disengages himself, he shall very hardly become a really great literary critic. The first of these is the well-known and not seriously to be denied tendency, not merely to “cocksureness,” but to a sweeping indulgence in superlatives, a “knock-me-down-these-knaves” gesticulation, which is the very negation of the critical attitude. Even the sound, the genuine, the well-deserved literary preferences above referred to lose not a little by this tone of swaggering sententiousness in their expression; and they lose a great deal more by the simultaneous appearance of the hopelessly uncritical habit of making the whites more dazzling by splashing the deepest black alongside of them. The very eulogy of Dante as a whole seems to Macaulay incomplete without an elaborate pendant of depreciation of Petrarch, while “Tasso, Marino, Guarini, and Metastasio” are swept into a dust-bin of common disdain, and we are told that the _Secchia Rapita_, “the best poem of its kind in some respects,” is “painfully diffuse and languid,” qualities which one might have thought destructive of any “bestness.”

[Sidenote: _The practical choking of the good seed._]

It is of less importance—because the fault is so common as to be almost universal—that the “Mitford” displays very strong political prejudice, which certainly affects, as it should not do, the literary judgment. Mitford may have been an irregular and capricious writer, but the worst vices of the worst Rymer-and-Dennis criticism appear in the description of him as “bad.” His style could not possibly be so described by a fair critic who did not set out with the major premiss that whatever is unusual is bad. And not only here, but even in the purely literary essays, even at their most enthusiastically literary pitch, we may, I think, without any unfairness, perceive an undertone, an undercurrent, of preference for the not purely literary sides of the matter—for literature as it bears on history, politics, manners, man, instead of for literature in itself and for itself.

With the transference from _Knight’s_ to the _Edinburgh_, which was political and partisan-political, or nothing, these seeds of evil grew and nourished, and to some extent choked the others. The “Milton,” the “Machiavelli,” the early and, for a long time, uncollected “Dryden,” serve as very hot-beds for them. All three are, as the French would say, _jonchés_ with superlatives, arranged side by side in contrast like that of a zebra. The “Dryden”—a very tempting subject for this kind of work— is not the worst critically; indeed it is perhaps the best. It is, at any rate, far the most really literary, and it may not be unfair to think that this had something to do with the fact that Macaulay did not include it in the collected _Essays_.

[Sidenote: _His literary surveys in the_ Letters.]

The real _locus classicus_, however, for Macaulay’s criticism is perhaps to be found, not in his published works at all, but in the letters which he wrote to Flower Ellis from Calcutta,[926] taken in connection with their context in Sir George Trevelyan’s book, and especially with the remarkable avowal which occurs in a letter, a very little later, to Macvey Napier. Macaulay, as is well known, availed himself of his Indian sojourn to indulge in almost a debauch of reading, especially in pure literature, and especially (again) in the classics. And his reflections to Ellis, a kindred spirit, are of the most interesting kind. He tells his correspondent that he has gone back to Greek literature with a passion quite astonishing to himself. He had been enraptured with Italian, little less pleased with Spanish, but when he went back to Greek he felt as if he had never known before what intellectual enjoyment was. It is impossible to imagine a happier critical _diathesis_: and the individual symptoms confirm it. Admiration of Æschylus is practically a passport for a man claiming poetical taste: admiration of Thucydides holds the same place in prose. And Macaulay puts them both _super æthera_. But it is a tell-tale that his admiration for Thucydides (of whom he says he had formerly not thought much) seems to have been determined by his own recent attention to “historical researches and political affairs.” He does full justice to Lucian. He is capital on Niebuhr: a good deal less capital on the Greek Romances; for though Achilles Tatius is not impeccable in taste and exceeding peccable in morality, it is absurd to call his book “detestable trash.” Perhaps he is hard on Statius as compared with Lucan: but here taste is free. It is more difficult to excuse him for the remark that St Augustine in his _Confessions_ (a book not without interest) “expresses himself in the style of a field-preacher.” The present writer is not fond of conventicles, either house or hedge. But if he knew of a field-preacher who preached as St Augustine writes, he fears he might be tempted astray.

[Sidenote: _His confession._]

And then, after the six months’ voyage home in the slow _Lord Hungerford_ (which must have been six months' hard reading, though not penal), comes the great avowal to Macvey Napier, now editor of the _Edinburgh_:—

You cannot suspect me of any affectation of modesty: and you will
therefore believe me that I tell you what I sincerely think, when I
say that I am not successful in analysing the effect of works of
genius. I have written several things on historical, political, and
moral questions of which, on the fullest reconsideration, I am not
ashamed, and by which I should be willing to be estimated; but _I have
never written a page of criticism on poetry or the fine arts which I
would not burn if I had the power_. Hazlitt used to say of himself, “I
am nothing if not critical.” The case with me is exactly the reverse;
I have a strong and acute enjoyment of works of the imagination, but I
have never habituated myself to dissect them.... Trust to my knowledge
of myself; I never in my life was more certain of anything than of
what I tell you, and I am sure that Lord Jeffrey will tell you exactly
the same.[927]

Such a deliberate judgment on himself by such a man, close on the “age of wisdom,”[928] after fifteen years’ constant literary practice, is practically final; but probably not a few readers of Sir George’s book felt, as the present writer did, that it merely confirms an opinion formed by themselves long before they ever read it.

[Sidenote: _The_ Essays.]

At any rate, in nearly all the best known _Essays_ the literary interest dwindles and the social-historic grows. I do not object, as some do, to the famous “Robert Montgomery.” This sort of criticism ought not to be done too often: and no one but a Dennis of the other kind enjoys doing it, except when the criminal’s desert is of peculiar richness. But it has to be done sometimes, and it is here done scientifically, without rudeness I think, with as much justice[929] as need be “for the good of the people,” and well. Still, it is not in the hangman’s drudgery, it is in the herald’s good office, that Macaulay’s critical weakness shows. There are some who, in all good faith and honest indignation, will doubtless cry “What! is there no literary interest in the “Milton” itself or in the “Bunyan”? Certainly there is. But, in the first case, let the Devil’s Advocate’s devil (it is too easy for his chief) remind us that there is very strong party feeling in both—that no less a person than Mr Matthew Arnold denied criticism to the “Milton”—that the author of the “Bunyan” himself puts in the forefront of his praise of _The Pilgrim’s Progress_ its “strong _human_ interest,” and that he goes on to make one of his too frequent uncritical contrasts, and one of his very rare gross blunders of fact, as to the _Faerie Queene_. And, besides, he was still in the green tree, as he was also when he gave the, in part, excellent criticism of the “Byron,” where the sweeping general lines of the sketch of the poetry of “correctness” follow those of some inferior but more original surveys of Macaulay’s editor Jeffrey. And though there is interesting criticism in the “Boswell,” it is pushed to the wall by the (I fear it must be said) ignoble desire to “dust the varlet’s jacket,” and pay Croker off in the _Edinburgh_ for blows received at St Stephen’s.[930]

Indeed it would be quite idle to stipulate that anything here said to the detriment of Macaulay’s criticism is said relatively, if there were not a sort of doubtless honest folk who seem to think that denying a man the riches of Crœsus means that he is penniless and in debt. Macaulay _was_ a critic on his day—a good one for a long time, and perhaps always a great one _in potentia_. But his criticism was slowly edged out by its rivals or choked by its own parasitic plants. It occupies about a twentieth part (to adopt his own favourite arithmetical method) of the Essay on Bacon, about one-tenth of that on Temple. In the famous piece on “Restoration Drama” it is the moral and social, not the literary or even the dramatic, side of the matter that interests Macaulay: and in dealing with Addison himself, a man who, though not quite literary or nothing, was certainly literary first of all, the purely literary handling is entirely subordinated to other parts of the treatment. This may be a good thing or it may be a bad thing: the _tendenz_-critics, and the criticism-of-life critics, and the others, are quite welcome to take the first view if they please. But that it is a _thing_; that Macaulay himself acknowledged it, and that—despite his unsurpassed devotion to literature and his great performance therein—it must affect our estimate of him, according to the schedules and specifications of this book, is not, I think, deniable by any honest inquirer.

[Sidenote: _Similar dwindling in Carlyle._]

A phenomenon by no means wholly dissimilar in kind, but conditioned as to extent and degree by the differing temperaments and circumstances of the two men, may be seen in the criticism of Macaulay’s great contemporary, opposite, and corrective, Carlyle;[931] and those who care for such investigations might find it interesting to compare both with the admitted instances of dwindling literary interest—not critical but simply enjoying—in cases like that of Darwin. But leaving this extension as out of our province, and returning to our two great men of letters themselves, we shall find differences enough between them, here as elsewhere, but a remarkable agreement in the gradual ascendancy obtained by anthropology over (in the old and good sense, not the modern perversion) philology. Carlyle had always the more catholic, as Macaulay had the exacter, sense of literary form; but it may be suspected that at no time was the form chiefly eloquent to either: and in Carlyle’s attitude for many years after the somewhat tardy commencement of his actual critical career, something ominous may be observed. It may seem strange and impious to some of those who acknowledge no greater debt for mental stimulation to any one than to Carlyle, and who rank him among the greatest in all literature, to find one who joins them in this homage, and perhaps outgoes most of them therein, questioning his position as a critic. Let us therefore examine the matter somewhat carefully.

Carlyle’s criticism, like his other qualities, interpenetrates nearly all his work, from _Sartor_ to the “Kings of Norway”: it appears in the _Life of Schiller_,[932] in _Heroes and Hero-Worship_, in _Past and Present_, in the _Life of Sterling_, while it _fuliginates_ itself to share in the general fuliginousness of the _Latter-day Pamphlets_, and is strewn even over the greater biographies and histories of the _Cromwell_ and the _Frederick_. We shall, however, lose nothing, and gain much, by confining ourselves mainly to the literary constituents of the great collection of _Essays_ in this place. The discussion can be warranted to be well leavened with remembrance of the other work.