Chapter II: Between Coleridge and Arnold (2)

Who indeed is more rememberable than Carlyle? Of late years, partly from having read them so much, partly from having so much else to read, I have left parts of these Essays unopened for a long time. Yet, in looking them through for the purpose of this present writing, I have found myself constantly, even in the least familiar and famous parts, able to shut the book and complete clause, sentence, or even to some extent paragraph, like a text, or a collect, or a tag of Horace or Virgil. But in this re-reading it has struck me, even more forcibly than of old, how much Carlyle’s strictly critical inclinations, if not his strictly critical faculties, waned as he grew older. In the earlier Essays—those written before and during the momentous period of the Craigenputtock sojourn—there is a great deal of purely or almost purely literary criticism of an excellent kind—sober and vigorous, fresh and well disciplined. There may be, especially in regard to Richter and Goethe, a slightly exaggerated backing of the German side. But it is hardly more than slightly exaggerated, and the treatment generally is of the most thorough kind compatible with an avowed tendency towards “philosophical” rather than “formal” criticism. Professor Vaughan was certainly justified in including part of the _Goethe_ in his selected specimens of English criticism[933] for its general principles and examples of method. Nor is Carlyle less to be praised for his discharge of the more definitely practical part of the critic’s business. He is thought of generally as “splenetic and rash”: but it would be impossible to find anywhere a more good-humoured, and (in parts at least) a more judicial censure than that of William Taylor’s preposterous _German Poetry_,[934] or a firmer, completer, and at the same time less excessive condemnation than that of the equally preposterous method of Croker’s original _Boswell_. We may see already that the critic evidently prefers matter to form, and that he is by no means quite catholic even in his fancy for matter. [Sidenote: _The earlier_ Essays.] But he has a right to be this; and altogether there are few things in English criticism better worth reading, marking, and learning, by the novice, than the literary parts of these earlier volumes of _Essays_.[935] It may be that the channels in which his ink first flowed (especially that rather carefully, not to say primly, banked and paved one of the _Edinburgh_) imposed some restriction on him; it may be that he found the yet unpublished, or just published, _Sartor_ a sufficient “lasher” to draw off the superfluous flood and foam of his fancy. But the facts are the facts.

[Sidenote: _The later._]

And so, too, it is the fact that, later, he draws away from the attitude of purely literary consideration, if he does not, as he sometimes still later does, take up one actually hostile to this. The interesting “Characteristics” (as early as 1831) is one of the places most to be recommended to people who want to know what Carlyle really was, and not what divers more or less wise or unwise commentators have said of him. The writer has flings at literary art—especially conscious literary art— towards the beginning: afterwards (which is still more significant) he hardly takes any notice of it at all. In the much better known “Boswell,” “Burns,” and “Scott”[936] Essays, his neglect of the purely literary side is again the more remarkable, because it is not ostentatious. In the “Diderot,” dealing with a subject who was as much a man of letters first of all (though of very various and _applied_ letters) as perhaps any man in history, he cannot and does not neglect that subject’s literary performance; but the paper is evidence of the very strongest how little of his real interest is bestowed upon it. It is of the man Diderot—and of the man Diderot’s relation to, and illumination of, that condition of the French mind and state of which some good folk have thought that Carlyle knew nothing—that he is thinking, for this that he is caring. Later still, he will select for his favourite subjects people like Mirabeau, who had much better have written no books at all, or Dr Francia, whose connection with literature is chiefly limited to the fact of his having written one immortal sentence. And this sentence, not having myself seen or wished to see the works of Rengger, I have always suspected that Carlyle or “Sauerteig” edited for him.[937]

[Sidenote: _The attitude of the_ Latter-day Pamphlets.]

And then things get worse. That invocation of the Devil in the _Latter-day Pamphlets_,[938] “to fly away with the poor Fine Arts,” is indeed put off on “one of our most distinguished public men.” But Carlyle avows sympathy with it. He even progresses from it to the Platonic view that “Fiction” at all “is not quite a permissible thing”— is “sparingly permissible” at any rate. “Homer” was meant for “history”:[939] the arts were not “sent into the world to fib and dance.” As for Literature more particularly, “if it continue to be the haven of expatriated spiritualisms,” well: but “if it dwindle, as _is probable_, into mere merry-andrewism, windy twaddle, and feats of spiritual legerdemain,” there “will be no hope for it.” Its “regiment” is “extremely miscellaneous,” “more a _canaille_ than a regiment,” and so forth. The “brave young British man” is adjured to be “rather shy of Literature than otherwise, for the present,”—a counsel which, it is well known, Mr Carlyle repeated in his Edinburgh Rectorial address sixteen years later. Nor did he ever alter the point of view which he had now taken up, either in book, or minor published work, or Letters, or autobiographic jottings, or those _Ana_ which still flit on the mouths of men concerning his later years.

[Sidenote: _The conclusion of this matter._]

A man who speaks thus, and thinks thus, has perforce renounced the development of any skill that he may once have had in the analysis of the strands of the tight-rope, or the component drugs of the Cup of Abominations. Still less can he be expected to expatiate, with the true critic’s delight, on the elegance with which the dancer pirouettes over vacancy, or on the iridescent richness of the wine of Circe, as it moveth itself in the chalice. I do not know that—great critic, really, as he had been earlier and always might have been—the loss of his services in this function is much to be regretted. For he did other things which assuredly most merely literary critics could not have done: and not a few good workmen stepped forward, in the last thirty years of his life, to do the work which he thus left undone, not without some flouting and scorning of it. But, once more, the fact is the fact: and his estrangement from the task, like that of Macaulay, undoubtedly had something to do with the general critical poverty of the period of English literature, which was the most fertile and vigorous in the literary life of both.

[Sidenote: _Thackeray._]

Another of the very greatest gods of mid-nineteenth century literature in England displays the slightly anti-critical turn of his time still more curiously. It is one of the oddest and most interesting of the many differences between the two great masters of English prose fiction in the mid-nineteenth century that, while there is hardly any critical view of literature in Dickens, Thackeray is full of such views.[940] He himself practised criticism early and late; and despite the characteristic and perhaps very slightly affected depreciation of the business of “reading books and giving judgment on them,” which appears in _Pendennis_ and other places, it is quite clear that he pursued that business for love as well as for money. Moreover, from first to last,— from his early and long uncollected “High-Jinkish” exploits in _Fraser_ to the _Roundabout Papers_,—he produced critical work from which an anthology of the very finest critical quality, and by no means small in bulk, might be extracted with little pains and no little pleasure. [Sidenote: _His one critical weakness_] If he “attains not unto the first three,” it is I think only from the effect of the reaction or ebb that we note in this chapter, and from a certain deficiency in that catholic sureness which a critic of the highest kind can hardly lack. Nobody is obliged to like everything good; probably no one _can_ like everything good. But, in case of disliking, the critic must be able either to give reasons (like those of Longinus in regard to the _Odyssey_) relatively, if not positively, satisfactory: or he must frankly admit that his objections are based upon something extra-literary, and that therefore, in strictness, he has no literary judgment to give.

Now Thackeray does not do this. He was not, perhaps, very good at giving reasons at all: and he was specially affected by that confusion of literary and extra-literary considerations from which all times suffer, but from which his own time and party—the moderate Liberals of the mid-nineteenth century in England—suffered more than any time or party known to us. Practically we have his confession, in the famous and dramatically paradoxical sentence on Swift, that, though he is the greatest of the Humourist company, “I say we should hoot him.” The literary critic who has “got salvation” knows that he must never do this—that whatever his dislike for the man—Milton, Racine, Swift, Pope, Rousseau, Byron, Wordsworth (I purposely mix up dislikes which are with those which are not mine)—he must not allow them to colour his judgment of the writer. _Gulliver_ may be a terrible, humiliating, heart-crushing indictment, but nothing can prevent it from being a glorious _book_: and so on. Now Thackeray, by virtue of that quality of his, different sides of which have been—with equal lack of wisdom perhaps—labelled “cynicism” and “sentimentality,” was wont to be very “peccant in this kind,” and it, with some, though less, purely political or religious prejudice, and a little caprice, undoubtedly flawed his criticism.

[Sidenote: _and excellence._]

When, however, these outside disturbers kept quiet, as they very often did, Thackeray’s criticism is astonishingly catholic and sound, and sometimes he was able to turn the disturbers themselves out. He had a most unhappy and Philistine dislike of the High Church movement: yet the passage in _Pendennis_ on _The Christian Year_ is one of the sacred places of sympathetic notice. The well-known _locus_ in _The Newcomes_, as to the Colonel’s horror at the new literary gods, shows how sound Thackeray’s own faith in them was: yet he, least of all men, could be accused of forsaking the old. He had that generous appreciation of his own fellow-craftsmen by which novelists have been honourably distinguished from poets: though not all poets have been jealous, and though, from Richardson downwards, there have been very jealous novelists. If there were more criticism like the famous passage on Dumas in the _Roundabouts_, like great part of the solid _English Humourists_, like much elsewhere, our poor Goddess would not be liable to have her comeliness confounded with the ugliness of her personators, as is so often the case. And his is no promiscuous and undiscriminating generosity. He can “like nicely,” and does.

Still, though he has sometimes escaped the disadvantages of his temperament, he has often succumbed to those of his time; and what those disadvantages were cannot be better shown than by an instance to which we may now turn.

[Sidenote: Blackwood, _in 1849, on Tennyson_.]

When, in writing a little book upon Mr Matthew Arnold,[941] the present writer spoke severely of the state of English criticism between 1830 and 1860, some protests were made, as though the stricture were an instance of that “unfairness to the last generation” which has been frequently noticed, and invariably deprecated and condemned here. I gave, on that occasion, some illustrative instances;[942] I may here add another and very remarkable one, which I had not at that time studied. In April 1849 there appeared in _Blackwood’s Magazine_ an article of some length on Tennyson’s work, which at the time consisted of the revised and consolidated _Poems_ of 1842 (still further castigated in the one-volume form, so familiar to the youth of my generation), and of _The Princess_. This article[943] is not in the least uncivil—“Maga” had now outgrown her hoydenish ways: but we do not find the maturer, yet hardly less attractive, graces of the _trentaine_. The writer proclaims himself blind and deaf at every moment. He misses—he positively blasphemes—the beauty of many things that Wilson had frankly welcomed. He selects for praise such second—or third-rate matter as _The Talking Oak_. _Claribel_, not Tennyson’s greatest thing, but the very Tennyson in germ, “leaves as little impression on the living ear as it would on the sleeper beneath.” The exquisite _Ode to Memory_, with all its dreamy loveliness, is “an utter failure throughout,” it is a “mist” “coloured by no ray of beauty.” But the critic is made most unhappy by the song “A spirit haunts the last year’s bowers.” It is “an odious piece of pedantry.” Its admirable harmony, at once as delightful and as true to true English prosody as verse can be, extracts from him the remark, “What metre, Greek or Roman, Russian or Chinese, it was intended to imitate, we have no care to inquire: the man was writing English, and had no justifiable pretence for torturing our ears with verse like this.” The _Lady of Shalott_ is “intolerable,” “odious,” “irritating,” “an annoyance,” “a caprice”: anybody who likes it “must be far gone in dilettanteism.” Refrains are “melancholy iterations.” With a rather pleasing frankness the critic half confesses that he knows he ought to like the _Marianas_, but wholly declares that he does not. He likes the _Lotos-Eaters_, so that he cannot have been congenitally deprived of _all_ the seven senses of Poetry; but he cannot even form an idea what “the horse with wings kept down by its heavy rider” means in the _Vision of Sin_, and he cannot away with the _Palace_ and the _Dream_, now purged, let it be remembered, of their “balloons” and Groves-of-Blarney stanzas, and in their perfect beauty. “Giving himself away,” in the fatal fashion of such censors, he does not merely in effect pronounce them both with rare exceptions “bad and unreadable,” but selects the magnificent line—

“Throb through the ribbed stone”—

for special ridicule. “To hear one’s own voice throbbing through the ribbed stone is a startling novelty in acoustics,” which simply shows, not merely that he had never heard his own or any other voice singing under a vaulted roof, but that he had not the mite of imagination necessary for conceiving the effect. With _The Princess_, as less _pure_ poetry—good as it is—he is less unhappy; but he is not at all comfortable there.

To do our critic justice, however, though it makes his case a still more leading one, he is not one of the too common carpers who string a reasonless “I don’t like this” to a tell-tale “I can’t understand that,” until they can twist a ball (not of cowslips) to fling at a poet. He has, or thinks he has, a theory: and in some respects his theory is not a bad one. He admits that “the subtle play of imagination” may be “the most poetical part of a poem,” that it may “constitute the difference between poetry and prose,” which is good enough. But he thinks you may have too much of this good thing, that it may be “too much divorced from those sources of interest which affect all mankind”; and he thinks, further, that this divorce has taken place, not merely in Tennyson, but in Keats and in Shelley. Yet, again, as has been indeed already made evident, he has not in the least learnt the secret of that prosodic freedom, slowly broadened down from precedent to precedent of early Middle English writers, and Chaucer, and the Balladists, and Spenser, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Coleridge, which it is the glory of the nineteenth century to have perfected. And he detests the new poetic diction, aiming at the utmost reach of visual as well as musical appeal, which came with this freedom. His recoil from the “jingling rhythm” throws him with a shudder against the “resplendent gibberish.” In other words, he is not at focus: he is outside. He can neither see nor hear: and therefore he cannot judge.

But others’ eyes and ears were opening, though slowly, and with indistinct results, at first.

[Sidenote: _George Brimley._]

I hardly know a book more interesting to the real student of real criticism than George Brimley’s _Essays_.[944] That it gives us, with Matthew Arnold’s earliest work, the first courses of the new temple of English Criticism is something, but its intrinsic attraction is its chief. The writer was apparently able to devote his short but not unhappy life, without let or hindrance other than that of feeble health, to literature; he was unhampered by any distracting desire to create; he could judge and enjoy with that almost uncanny calmness which often results, in happy dispositions, from the beneficent effect of the _mal physique_, freed from the aggravation of the _mal moral_.[945] He has idols; but he breaks away from them, if he does not quite break them. He puts no others in their places, as Arnold did too often: and, like Dryden (though they had no other point of resemblance than in both being admirable critics, and both members of Trinity College, Cambridge), he never goes wrong without coming right, with a force and vehemence of leap only intensified by his recoil. In his best work, what should be the famous, and is, to those who know it, the delightful, Essay on Tennyson, we have a thing profitable at once for example, for reproof, and for instruction, as few critical things are.

[Sidenote: _His Essay on Tennyson._]

We find him at the opening a little joined to one idol, that apparently respectable, but infinitely false, god, the belief that the poet must somehow or other deal with modern life.[946] Even from this point of view he will not give up Tennyson, but he apologises for him, and he colours nearly all his remarks on at least the early _Poems_ by the apologies. He cannot shake himself quite free. He sees the beauty of _Claribel_: but he will not allow its beauty to be its sole duty. It “is not quite certain what the precise feeling of it is,” and “no poem ought to admit of such a doubt.” No music of verse, no pictorial power, “will enable a reader to care for such ‘creatures of the fancy’” as Margaret or Eleanore, as the Sea Fairies, and many others. “_If_ expression were the highest aim of poetry,” _Mariana_ would be consummate: but—--! Mr Tennyson “moved in the centre of the most distinguished young men of the University,” “yet his poems present faint evidences of this,” strange to say! _The Miller’s Daughter_, and _The Gardener’s Daughter_, and _The May Queen_ are dwelt on at great length, and with an evident feeling that here is something you can recommend to a practical friend who cannot embrace day-dreams. _Mariana in the South_ should “connect itself more clearly with a person brought before the mind”—with a certificate of birth, let us say, and something about her parentage, and the bad man who left her, and the price of beans and garlic in the next village. _The Lady of Shalott_ “eliminates all human interest.” _Fatima_, justly admired, “has neither beginning, middle, or end.” _The Palace of Art_ has “no adequate _dramatic_ presentation of the mode in which the great law of humanity works out its processes in the soul.” [So lyric poets, we understand, are _not_ entitled to speak lyrically: but must write drama!] And, greatest shock of all, _The Dream of Fair Women_ is not so much as mentioned. When Brimley wrote it had long shaken off its earlier crudities,—had attained its final symmetry. It was there, entire and perfect, from the exquisite opening, through the matchless blended shiftings of life and literature, woven into one passionate whole, to those last two stanzas which give the motto of Life itself from youth to age, the _raison d'être_ of Heaven, the undying sting of Hell, the secret of the peace that grows on the soul through Purgatory. And the critic says nothing about it!

Yet he has justified his instinct—if not quite his cleared vision—from the first. Of _Claribel_ itself, of the _Marianas_, of _The Lotos-Eaters_, of the _Palace_, he has given analytic appreciations so enthusiastic, and at the same time so just, so solidly thought, and so delicately phrased, that there is nothing like them in Mr Arnold (who was rather grudging of such things), and nothing superior to them anywhere.

There is a priceless wavering, a soul-saving “suppose it were true?” in that “If” (most virtuous of its kind!),—“_If_ expression were the highest aim of poetry,” nor do I think it fanciful to see in the blasphemy about music and painting _not_ saving “creatures of the fancy,” a vain protest against the conviction that they _do_. Where he can get his prejudice and his judgment to run in couples—as in regard to _Locksley Hall_—the car sweeps triumphantly from start to finish, out of all danger from the turning pillar. When he comes to _Maud_ (which the folk who had the prejudice, but not the judgment, were blaspheming at the very moment at which he wrote), he turns on them with a vehemence almost inconsistent—but with the blessed inconsistency which is permissible—and lays it down plump and plain, that “it is well not to be frightened out of the enjoyment of fine poetry ... by such epithets as morbid, hysterical, spasmodic.” Most true, and it would be still better to add “beginning,” “middle,” “end,” “not human,” the neglect of acquaintance with the most distinguished young men of the university, the absence of dramatic presentation, and the rest of them, to the herd of bogies that should first be left to animate swine, and then be driven into the deep. Once, indeed, afterwards he half relapses, observing that there is “incongruity” in _The Princess_. But his nerves have grown firmer from his long bath of pure poetry, and he agrees to make the best of it.

[Sidenote: _His other work._]

This “Tennyson” essay is one of a hundred pages, though not very large ones: but the only other piece of length which has been preserved, a paper on “Wordsworth” not much shorter than the “Tennyson,” is, as was perhaps natural, seeing that it was published immediately after the poet’s death, mainly biographical, and so uninteresting: while the remaining contents of the volume are short reviews. The “Wordsworth” starts, however, with reasoned estimates of Byron, Scott, and Shelley, as foils to Wordsworth: and to these, remembering their time,[947] the very middle of the century, we turn with interest. The “Byron” and the “Scott” reward us but moderately: they are in the main “what he ought to have said,”—competent, well-balanced, true enough as far as they go, but showing no very individual grip. The Shelley, a better test, is far more satisfactory in the result. It is quite clear that Brimley sympathised neither with Shelley’s religious views, nor with his politics, nor with his morals. He may be thought to be even positively unjust in saying that Shelley’s “mind was ill-trained, and not well furnished with facts,” for _intellectually_ few poets have been better off in this respect. Yet, in spite of all this, he says, “with one exception a more glorious poet has not been given to the English nation,” which once more shows how very much sounder he was on the subject of poetry than Arnold, and how little beginnings, and middles, and ends, with all their trumpery, really mattered to him. Among the shorter pieces, the attempts at abstract, or partly abstract, treatment in “Poetry and Criticism” and “The Angel in the House” (only part of which latter is actually devoted to its amiable but rather wool-gathering title-subject) are not conspicuously successful; they are, in fact, trial-essays, by a comparative novice, in an art the secrets of which had been almost lost for nearly a generation. But the attempt in “Poetry and Criticism” to gather up, squeeze out, and give form to the Coleridgean vaguenesses (for that is very much what it comes to), has promise and germ. As for the smaller reviews, Mr Brimley had the good fortune to deal as a reviewer with Carlyle, Thackeray, and Dickens, as well as Bulwer and Kingsley, not to mention such different subjects as the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_ and the _Philosophie Positive_: and the merit of coming out, with hardly a stain upon his character, from any one of these (in some cases very high) trials. We may think that he does not always go fully right; but he never goes utterly wrong. And when we think what sorrowful chances have awaited the collision of great books at their first appearance even with by no means little critics, the praise is not small.

[Sidenote: _His intrinsic and chronological importance._]

Yet a sufficient study of the “Tennyson” essay should have quite prepared the expert reader for these minor successes. Brimley, as we have said, was only partially favoured by time, place, and circumstance, even putting health out of the question. He was heavily handicapped in that respect: and he had no time to work out his critical deliverance fully, and to justify it by abundant critical performance. But he has the root of the matter in him: and it throws out the flower of the matter in that refusal to be “frightened out of the enjoyment of fine poetry by epithets.” When a man has once shown himself _ausus contemnere vana_ in this way, when he has the initial taste which Brimley everywhere shows, and the institution of learning which he did not lack, it will go hard but he is a good critic _in posse_ already, and harder if he is not a good one in such actuality as is allowed him. And this was well seen of George Brimley.

[Sidenote: “_Gyas and Cloanthus._”]

It is one of the penalties, late but heavy, of an attempt to take a kingdom (even one not of Heaven) by storm for the first time, that you have to “refuse” or “mask” not a few of its apparently strong places—and if their strength be more than apparent, the adventurer will not be conqueror. There are in English, as in other nineteenth-century literatures, many persons who addressed themselves more or less seriously to criticism, who obtained more or less name as critics, with whose works every well-read person is more or less acquainted, yet who must be so refused or masked at the writer’s peril of the reader’s disappointment or disapproval. Many of them seemed to be pillars of the early and middle nineteenth-century reviews; from some of them, no doubt, some institution in criticism has been received by readers of all the three generations which have passed since the appearance of the earliest. [Sidenote: _Milman, Croker, Hayward._] It may seem intolerable _outrecuidance_ to put Milman and Croker and Hayward, Sydney Smith and Senior and Helps, with others not even named, as it were “in the fourpenny box” of our stall. Yet it is unavoidable, and the stall-keeper must dare it, not merely—not even mainly—because he has no room to give them better display. Milman was at least thought by Byron a formidable enough critic to have the apocryphal crime of “killing John Keats” assigned to him by hypothesis: and his merits (not of the bravo kind) are no doubt much greater than the bad critics who, after Macaulay, depreciate his style, and the maladroit eulogists of his free thought, who would make him a sort of nineteenth-century Conyers Middleton, appear to think. But he has no critical credential, known to the present writer, that would give him substantive place here.[948] Croker was neither such a bad man nor such a bad writer as Macaulay would have had him to be: but he was almost as much more of a bravo than Milman as he was less of a scholar. Senior, before he became a glorified earwig, or, if this seem disrespectful, the father of all such as interview, was a sound, if not very gifted, reviewer, but little more: Hayward, a much cleverer and, above all, much more worldly wise Isaac Disraeli, who made the most of being “in society” (see Thackeray), talked better than he wrote, but still wrote well, especially by the aid of _l’esprit des autres_. [Sidenote: _Sydney Smith, Senior, Helps._] Of Sydney Smith earlier, and Sir Arthur Helps later, the fairest thing to say in our present context is, that neither held himself out as a literary critic at all. Sydney could give admirable accounts of books: but he nowhere shows, or pretends to, the slightest sense of literature. Helps, starting[949] a discussion on Fiction,—the very most interesting and most promising of all literary subjects for a man of his time—a subject which was just equipped with material enough at hand, and not yet too much, neither novel to the point of danger nor stale to the point of desperation,—“keeps to the obvious,” as one of his own characters acknowledges, in a fashion almost excusing the intrinsically silly reaction from obviousness, which distinguished the last quarter of the century, and is now getting obviously stale itself. The influence of works of fiction is unbounded. The Duke of Marlborough took his history from Shakespeare. Fiction is good as creating sympathy. It is bad as leading us into dreamland. Real life is more real than fiction. Writers of fiction have great responsibility. In shorter formula, “We love our Novel with an N because it is Nice; we hate it because it is sometimes Naughty; we take it to the Osteria[950] of the Obvious, and treat it with an Olio of Obligingness and Objurgation.” But Helps, in this very passage, tells us that he prefers life to literature, and no one can be a good critic who, _when he criticises_, does that: though he may be a very bad one, and yet make the other preference.

[Sidenote: _Elwin, Lancaster, Hannay._]

We must still extend this _numerus_ a little in order to do that justice—unjust at the best—which is possible here, and which is yet not quite so futile and inadequate as some still more unjust judgments would have it. For the object of this History is to revive and keep before the eye of the reader the names, the critical position, and, if only by touches, the critical personality, of as many of those who have done good service to criticism in the past as may be possible. A little less wilfulness and exclusiveness of personal taste, or rather less opportunity of indulging it, would probably have made of Whitwell Elwin— who survived till the earlier portion of this book was published, but did his critical work long ago—a really great critic. Even as it is, his _Remains_[951] contain some of the best critical essays, not absolutely supreme, to be found among the enormous stores of the nineteenth century, especially on the most _English_ Englishmen of letters during the eighteenth, such as Fielding and Johnson. A short life, avocations of business, and perhaps the absence of the pressure of professional literary occupation, prevented the work of Henry Lancaster[952] from being much more than a specimen: but his famous essay on Thackeray showed (and not alone) what he could do. On the other hand, the not always mischievous, though too often galling, yoke of the profession was not wanting to James Hannay. His literary work was directed into too many paths, some of them too much strewn with the thorns and beset with the briars of journalism. But there are very few books of the kind which unite a certain “popularity” in no invidious sense, and an adaptation for the general reader, with sound and keen criticism, as does his far too little known _Course of English Literature_;[953] while many of his scattered and all but lost essays show admirable insight.

[Sidenote: _Dallas._]

To one remarkable critic, however, who, though a younger man than Mr Arnold, is on the whole of a Præ-Arnoldian type, and to whom justice, I think, has not usually been done, a little larger space must be given. I must admit that, having been disgusted at the time of the appearance of _The Gay Science_[954] by what I then thought its extremely silly, and now think its by no means judicious, title, I never read it until quite recently, and then found (of course) that Mr Dallas had said several of my things before me, though usually with a difference.[955] But I have not the least inclination to say _Pereat_: on the contrary, I should like to revive him. [Sidenote: _The_ Poetics.] Fourteen years earlier than the date of his principal book, as a young man fresh from the influence of the Hamiltonian philosophy, and also, I think, imbued with not a little of Ruskinism, he had written a volume of _Poetics_,[956] which, though it does not come to very much, is a remarkable book, and a very remarkable one, it we consider its date—a year before Mr Arnold’s _Preface_, and when Brimley and others were only waking up by fits, and starts, and relapses, to the necessity of a new criticism. Not that Dallas is on the right track: but he is on a track very different from that of most English critics since Coleridge. He revives, in an odd way,—odd, at least, till we remember the Philistinism of the First Exhibition period,—the Apologetic for Poetry; he establishes, rather in the old scholastic manner, the distinction between Poetry the principle and Poesy the embodiment: he talks about the “Law of Activity,” the “Law of Harmony,” and the like.

[Sidenote: The Gay Science.]

There is, for the time, not a little promise in this: and there is much more, as well as some, if not quite enough, performance, in the later book. _The Gay Science_ (an adaptation, of course, of the Provençal name for Poetry itself) was originally intended to be in four volumes: but the reception of the two first was not such as to encourage the author— who had by this time engaged in journalism, and become a regular writer for _The Times_—to finish it. I cannot agree with the author of the article in the _D. N. B._, that the cause of its ill-success was its “abstruseness”: for really there is nothing difficult about it. On the contrary, it is, I should say, rather too much in the style of the leading article—facile, but a little “woolly.” Its faults seem to lie partly in this, but more in the two facts that, in the first place, the author “embraces more than he can grasp”; and that, in the second, he has not kept pace with the revival of criticism, though he had in a manner anticipated it. He knows a good deal; and he not only sees the necessity of comparative criticism, but has a very shrewd notion of the difference between the true and the false Comparisons. Acuteness in perception and neatness in phrase appear pretty constantly: and he certainly makes good preparation for steering himself right, by deciding that Renaissance criticism is too verbal (he evidently did not know the whole of it, but is right so far); German too idealist; Modern generally too much lacking in system. Yet, when he comes to make his own start, he “but yaws neither.” He is uncomfortable with Mr Arnold (who, by this time, had published not merely the _Preface_ but the _Essays in Criticism_), and finds fault with him, more often wrongly than rightly. Especially he shows himself quite at a loss to comprehend Sainte-Beuve, whom he, like some later persons, hardly thinks a critic at all.[957] He gets boldly into the “_psycho_logical coach,” and books himself, as resolutely as any German, for the City of Abstraction. “The theory of imitation,” we are told, “is now utterly exploded”—a remarkable instance of saying nearly the right thing in quite the wrong way. We travel arm-in-arm with “Imagination” and “The Hidden Soul” (which seems to be something like Unconscious Cerebration); we hear even more than from Mr Arnold about the “Play of Thought”; we have chapters on chapters about Pleasure—not the specially poetic pleasure, but pleasure in general. In short, we are here in the presence, not so much of what we have called “metacritic” as of something that might almost better be called “_pro_critic”—altogether in the vestibule of critical inquiries proper. Of course it is fair to remember the two unwritten or unpublished volumes. But I venture very much to doubt, from a perusal of both his published works, whether Dallas would have ever thoroughly “collected” his method, or have directed it to that actual criticism of actual literature, of which, however (as of most things), there are fragments and essays in his work. The disturbing influences which, as we have seen, acted on so many of his contemporaries or immediate seniors acted differently on him, but they acted: and his literary “ideation” was, I think, too diffuse to make head completely against them. Yet he had real critical talent: and it is a pity that it has not had more adequate recognition.

[Sidenote: _Others: J. S. Mill._]

But it is time to leave this part of the subject, only casting back among the elders, because each of these has “become a name,”—to John Foster,[958] and W.J. Fox,[959] Henry Rogers,[960] and the first Sir James Stephen, not even naming others of perhaps hardly less fame. And let us salute the man among these elders who, at first sight and frankly, could pronounce _The Lady of Shalott_, “except that the versification is less exquisite [it was much improved later], entitled to a place by the side of _The Ancient Mariner_ and _Christabel_,” who doubted whether “poetic imagery ever conveyed a more intense conception of a place and its inmate than in _Mariana_,” and who justified his right to pronounce on individual poems by the two very remarkable articles on “What is Poetry?” and “The Two Kinds of Poetry.” One remembers, with amused ruth, Charles Lamb’s friend and his “What a pity that these fine ingenuous youths should grow up to be mere members of Parliament?” as one thinks of the Juvenilia and the Senilia of John Stuart Mill.[961]