Chapter III: English Criticism—1860-1900 (2)

That George Henry Lewes had many of the qualities of the critic it would be mere foolish paradox to deny. His _Goethe_ and his _History_ (if not) _of Philosophy_ yet “of Philosophers” are sufficient proofs for any one to put in: and of his mastery of that element of criticism which goes to the making of an _impresario_ the wonderful success with which he formed and trained his companion, George Eliot, is a still more convincing demonstration. [Sidenote: _His_ Principles of Success in Literature.] I understand, also, that he had real merits as a dramatic critic. But his chief critical work, _The Principles of Success in Literature_,[975] betrays by its very title the presence of an element of _vulgarity_ in him, which can indeed scarcely escape notice in other parts of his work, and which is by no means removed or neutralised by the quasi-philosophic tone of the work itself. Much may be forgiven to a man, born in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, when he uses the words “progress,” “success,” and the like: but not everything. Fame may be the last infirmity of noble minds; Success is but the first and last morbid appetite of the vulgar. And, as has been said, Lewes does not fully redeem his title by his text. There is plenty of common-sense and shrewdness. There is plenty of apparent and some real philosophy. Some, no doubt, will delight to be told that there are three Laws of Literature, that “the intellectual form is the Principle of Vision; the moral form the Principle of Sincerity; and the æsthetic form the Principle of Beauty,” and then to have these various eggs tossed and caught, in deft arrangements, for some chapters.

Indeed, there be many truths in the book, and I would most carefully guard against the idea that Lewes knowingly and deliberately recommends a mere tradesman-like view of literature. On the contrary, he strongly protests against it: and writes about Sincerity with every appearance of being sincere.[976] But his view of Imagination is confessedly low, and almost returns to the Addisonian standpoint of “ideas furnished by sight.” And when, with a rather rash hiatus, he promises[977] “_for the first time_ to expound scientifically the Laws that constitute the Philosophy of Criticism,” we listen even less hopefully and even more doubtfully than somebody did when he understood somebody else to say that he had killed the Devil. Lewes is not unsound on the subject of imitation of the classics. He has learnt from Coleridge, or from Wordsworth, or from De Quincey, that style is the _body_ not the _dress_ of thought: and much that he says about it is extremely shrewd and true. But when he comes to its actual Laws and gives them as Economy, Simplicity, Sequence, Climax, and Variety, the old not at all divine despair comes upon us. All these are well, but they are not Style’s crown; they are only and hardly some of the balls and strawberry leaves of that crown. A sentence, or a paragraph, or a page may be economic, simple, sequacious, climacteric, and various, and not be good style. I am not sure that a great piece of style might not be produced to which, except by violence, no one of these epithets—I am sure that many such pieces could be produced to which not all—will apply. Once more the light and holy soul of literature has wings to fly at suspicion of these bonds—and uses them.

[Sidenote: _His_ Inner Life of Art.]

Lewes’s best critical work by far[978] is to be found in the Essay on _The Inner Life of Art_, where he handles, without ceremony and with crushing force, the strange old and new prudery about the connection of verse and poetry, declaring plumply that the one is the form of the other. But it is noticeable that this Essay is in the main merely a catena or chrestomathy of critical extracts, united by some useful review-work. On the whole, even after dismissing or allowing for any undue “nervous impression” created by the unlucky word “Success,” it is not very possible to give him, as a critic, a position much higher than one corresponding to the position of Helps. Lewes is a Helps much unconventionalised and cosmopolitanised, not merely in externals. He is not only much more skilled in philosophical terminology, but he really knows more of what philosophy means. He has more, much more, care for literature. But the stamp of the Exhibition of 1851 is upon him also: and it is not for nothing that his favourite and most unreservedly praised models of style are drawn from Macaulay. I have no contempt for Macaulay’s style myself: I have ventured in more places than one or two to stigmatise such contempt as entirely uncritical. But the _preference_ of this style tells us much in this context, as the _preference_ of champagne in another.

[Sidenote: _Bagehot._]

The evils of dissipation of energy have been lamented by the grave and precise in all ages: and some have held that they are specially discoverable in the most modern times. It is very probable that Criticism may charge to this account the comparatively faint and scanty service done her by one who displayed so much faculty for that service as Walter Bagehot. A man whose vocations and avocations extend (as he himself says in a letter quoted by Mr Hutton) from hunting to banking, and from arranging Christmas festivities to editing the _Economist_, can have but odd moments for literature. Yet this man’s odd moments were far from unprofitable. His essay on _Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art in Poetry_ would deserve a place even in a not voluminous collection of the best and most notable of its kind. The title, of course, indicates Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning: and the paper itself may be said to have been one of the earliest frankly to estate and recognise Tennyson— the earliest of importance perhaps to estate and recognise Browning— among the leaders of mid-nineteenth century poetry. As such titles are wont to do, it somewhat overreaches itself, and certainly implies or suggests a confusion as to the meaning of “pure.” If pure is to mean “unadorned,” Wordsworth is most certainly not at his poetical best when he has most of the quality, but generally at his worst; if it means “sheer,” “intense,” “quintessential,” his best of poetry has certainly no more of it than the best of either of the other two. The classification suggests, and the text confirms, a certain “popularity” in Bagehot’s criticism. But it is popular criticism of the very best kind, and certainly not to be despised because it has something of mid-nineteenth century, and Macaulayan, materialism and lack of subtlety. This _derbheit_ sometimes led him wrong, as in that very estimate of Gibbon which the same Mr Hutton praises, but oftener it contributed sense and sanity to his criticism. And there are not many better things in criticism than sanity and sense, especially when, as in Bagehot’s case, they are combined with humour and with good-humour.[979]

[Sidenote: _R. H. Hutton._]

The criticism of a critic just cited, the late Mr R. H. Hutton, affords opportunity for at least a glance at one of the most important general points connected with our subject—the general distaste for pure criticism, and the sort of relief which _l’homme sensuel moyen_ seems to feel when the bitter cup is allayed and sweetened by sentimental, or political, or religious, or philosophical, or anthropological, or pantopragmatic adulteration. Mr Hutton’s criticism was, it is believed, by far the most popular of his day; the very respectable newspaper which he directed was once eulogised as “telling you what you _ought to_ read, you know ”—a phrase which might have awakened in a new Wordsworth thoughts too deep for tears or even for laughter.

[Sidenote: _His evasions of literary criticism._]

The commentary on it is supplied by the two volumes of Mr Hutton’s selected and collected _Essays_.[980] These constantly deal with things and persons of the highest importance in literature; but they abstain with a sort of Pythagorean asceticism from the literary side of them. In his repeated dealings with Carlyle, it is always as a man, as a teacher, as a philosopher, as a politician, as a moralist, that he handles that sage—never directly, or at most rapidly and incidentally, as a writer. On Emerson he is a little more literary, but not much: and on him also he slips away as usual. Even with Poe, whom one might have thought literary or nothing, he contrives to elude us, till his judgment on the Poems suggests that _inability_ to judge literature caused his refusal. Dickens, Amiel, Mr Arnold himself—the most widely differing persons and subjects—fail to tempt him into the literary open; and it is a curious text for the sermon for which we have here no room that he most nearly approaches the actual literary criticism of verse, not on Tennyson, not on “Poetry and Pessimism,” not on Mr Shairp’s _Aspects of Poetry_, but on Lord Houghton. He goes to the ant and is happy: with deans, and bishops, and archbishops, and cardinals he is ready to play their own game. But if Literature, as literature, makes any advances to him, he leaves his garment in her hands and flees for his life.

[Sidenote: _Pater._]

To assert too positively that Mr Walter Pater was the most important English critic of the last generation of the nineteenth century—that he stands to that generation in a relation resembling those of Coleridge to the first, and Arnold to the latter part of the second—would no doubt cause grumbles. The Kingdom of Criticism has been of old compared to that of Poland, and perhaps there is no closer point of resemblance than the way in which critics, like Polacks, cling to the _Nie pozwalam_, to the _liberum veto_. So, respecting this _jus Poloniæ_ let us say that those are fair reasons for advancing Mr Pater to such a position, while admitting that he is somewhat less than either of his forerunners.

[Sidenote: _His frank Hedonism._]

His minority consists certainly not in faculty of expression, wherein he is the superior of both, nor in fineness of appreciation, in which he is at least the equal of either: but rather in a certain eclectic and composite character, a want of definite four-square originality, which has been remarkably and increasingly characteristic of the century itself. In one point, indeed, he is almost entitled to the highest place, but his claim here rests rather on a frank avowal and formulation of what everybody had always more or less admitted, or by denying had admitted the acceptance of it by mankind at large—to wit, the _pleasure_-giving quality of literature. Even he, however, resolute Hedonist as he was, falters sometimes in this respect—is afraid of the plain doctrine that the test of goodness in literature is simply and solely the spurt of the match when soul of writer touches reader’s soul, the light and the warmth that follow.

[Sidenote: _His_ polytechny _and his style_.]

In two other main peculiarities or properties of his—the, we will not say confusion but deliberate blending of different arts in method and process, and the adoption (modifying it, of course, by his own genius) of the doctrine of the “single word,”—he is again more of a transmitter than of a kindler of the torch. The first proceeding had been set on foot by Lessing in the very act of deprecating and exposing clumsy and blind anticipations of it; the second was probably taken pretty straight from Flaubert. But in the combination of all three, in the supplements of mother-wit, and, above all, in the clothing of the whole with an extraordinarily sympathetic and powerful atmosphere of thought and style—in these things he stands quite alone, and nearly as much so in his formulation of that new critical attitude which we have seen in process of development throughout the present volume.

[Sidenote: _His formulation of the new critical attitude._]

The documents of his criticism are to be chiefly sought in the _Studies in the History of the Renaissance_,[981] in parts of _Marius the Epicurean_, and, of course, in the volume of _Appreciations_, and the little collection of Essays reprinted from _The Guardian_.[982] The posthumous books are less to he depended on, in consequence of Mr Pater’s very strong tendency to _cuver son vin_—to alter and digest and retouch. I do not know any place setting forth that view of criticism which I have myself always held more clearly than the Preface of the _Studies_. “To feel the virtue of the poet, or the painter, to disengage it, to set it forth,—these are the three stages of the critic’s duty.” The first (Mr Pater does not say this but we may) is a passion of pleasure, passing into an action of inquiry; the second is that action consummated; the third is the interpretation of the result to the world.

[Sidenote: The Renaissance.]

He never, I think, carried out his principles better than in his first book, in regard to _Aucassin et Nicolette_, to Michelangelo, to Du Bellay, as well as in parts of the “Pico” and “Winckelmann” papers. But the method is almost equally apparent and equally helpful in the more purely “fine art” pieces—the “Lionardo,” the “Botticelli,” the “Luca della Robbia.” In that passage on the three Madonnas and the Saint Anne of Da Vinci, which I have always regarded as the triumph both of his style and of his method, the new doctrine (_not_ the old) of _ut pictura poesis_ comes out ten thousand strong for all its voluptuous softness. This is the way to judge Keats and Tennyson as well as Lionardo: nay, to judge poets of almost entirely different kinds, from Æschylus through Dante to Shakespeare. Expose mind and sense to them, like the plate of a camera: assist the reception of the impression by cunning lenses of comparison, and history, and hypothesis; shelter it with a cabinet of remembered reading and corroborative imagination; develop it by meditation, and print it off with the light of style:—there you have, in but a coarse and half-mechanical analogy, the process itself.

[Sidenote: _Objections to its process._]

I fancy that objections to this proceeding take something like the following form: “In the first place, the thing is too effeminate, too patient, too submissive,—it substitutes a mere voluptuous enjoyment, and a dilettante examination into the causes thereof, for a virile summoning of the artist-culprit before the bar of Reason to give account of his deeds. In the second, it is too facile, too _fainéant_. In the third, it does not give sufficient advantage to the things which we like to call ‘great.’ The moments of pleasure are too much _atomised_: and though it may be admitted that some yield larger, intenser, more continuous supplies of moment than others, yet this is not sufficient.” Lastly [this is probably always _subaud._, but seldom uttered except by the hotter gospellers], “_We_ don’t believe in these ecstatic moments, analysed and interpreted in tranquillity; we don’t feel them, and we don’t want to feel them; and you are a nasty hedonist if you do feel them.”

Which protest could, no doubt, be amplified, could, with no doubt also, be supported to a certain extent. Nor is it (though he should placard frankly the fact that he agrees in the main with Mr Pater) exactly the business of the present historian to defend it at any length here, inasmuch as he is writing a history, not a “suasory.” Let it only be hinted in passing that the exceptions just stated seem inconclusive—that the wanters of a sense cannot plead their want as an argument that no others have it; that the process has certainly given no despicable results; that it has seldom demonstrably failed as disastrously as the antecedent rule-system; and, most of all, that nothing can be falser than the charge of _fainéantise_ and dilettanteism. Only as “the last corollary of many of an effort” can this critical skill also be attained and maintained.

[Sidenote: _Importance of_ Marius the Epicurean.]

At any rate, though, as often happens to a man, he became rather more of a preceptist and less of an impressionist afterwards, Mr Pater certainly exemplified this general theory and practice in a very notable manner. _Marius_ is full of both: it is much more than the _Wilhelm Meister_ of the New Criticism. It is this which gives the critical attitude of Flavian, the hero’s friend and inspirer, the supposed author of the _Pervigilium_; this, which is the literary function of “Neo-Cyrenaicism” itself—the μονόχρονος ἡδονή, the integral atom, or moment of pleasure, being taken as the unit and reference-integer of literary value; this, which gives the adjustment _ad hoc_ of the _Hermotimus_. The theory and the practice take their most solid, permanent, and important form in this most remarkable book, of which I find it hard to believe that the copy, “From the Author,” which lies before me, reached me nearly twenty years ago. The _Renaissance_ holds the first blooms and promises of them; _Appreciations_ and the _Guardian Essays_ the later applications and developments; but the central gospel is here.

[Sidenote: Appreciations _and the_ “Guardian” _Essays_.]

That the opening essays of these two latter books happen to contain references to myself is a fact. But I fancy that this will not be the main interest of them to posterity, nor, strange as it may seem, is it their main interest to me.[983] The Essay on _Style_ which opens the larger and more important book, is, I think, on the whole, the most valuable thing yet written on that much-written-about subject. It presents, indeed, as I have hinted, a certain appearance of “hedging,” especially in the return to matter as the distinction between “good art” and “great art,” which return, as easily rememberable and with a virtuous high sound in it, appears to have greatly comforted some good if not great souls. Certainly a pitcher of gold is in some senses greater than a pitcher of pewter of the same design, especially if you wish to dispose of it to Mr Polonius. A pewter amphora is again in some senses greater than a pewter cyathus. But it does not seem to me that this helps us much. How good, on the other hand, and how complete, is that improvement upon Coleridge’s dictum, which makes Style consist in the adequate presentation of the writer’s “sense of fact,” and the criticism of the documents adduced! How valuable the whole, though we may notice as to the writer’s selection of _prose_ literature as the representative art of the nineteenth century, that this was _his_ art, his in consummate measure, and that verse was not. Altogether, in short, a great paper,—a “furthest” in certain directions.

There is an interesting tender, or rather pilot-boat, to this Essay in the first of the _Guardian_ Reviews on “English Literature,” where the texts are the present writer’s _Specimens_, Professor’s Minto’s _English Poets_, Mr Dobson’s _Selections from Steele_, and one of Canon Ainger’s many bits of yeoman’s service to Lamb. The relation is repeated between the Wordsworth Essay in _Appreciations_ and a Wordsworth review among the _Guardian_ sheaf: while something not dissimilar, but even more intimate, exists between the “Coleridge” Essay and the introduction to that poet in Mr Ward’s well-known book, which Introduction actually forms part of the Essay itself. In the two former cases, actual passages and phrases from the smaller, earlier, and less important work also appear in the larger and later. For Mr Pater—as was very well known, when more than thirty years ago it was debated in Oxford whether he would ever publish anything at all, and as indeed might have been seen from his very first work, by any one with an eye, but with no personal knowledge—was in no sense a ready writer, and, least of all, anxious to write as he ran, that those who run might read. There have been critics who, without repeating themselves, and even, perhaps, with some useful additions and variations, could write half a dozen times on the same subject; and indeed most literary subjects admit of such writing. But such (we need not say frivolity but) flexibility was not in accordance with Mr Pater’s temperament.

There is hardly one of the papers in either book (though some of the _Guardian_ pieces are simple, yet quite honest and adequate reviews) that does not display that critical attitude which we have defined above, both directly and in relation to the subjects. The most interesting and important passages are those which reveal in the critic, or recognise in his authors, this attitude itself—as when we read of Amiel: “In Switzerland it is easy to be pleased with scenery. But the record of such pleasure becomes really worth while when, as happens with A., we feel that there has been and, with success, an intellectual effort to get at the secret, the precise motive, of this pleasure—to define feeling.” Indeed, I really do not know that “to define feeling” is not as good—it is certainly as short—a definition of at least a great part of the business of the critic as you can get. And so again of Lamb: “To feel strongly the charm of an old poet or moralist,... and then to interpret that charm, to convey it to others,... this is the way of his criticism.”

It is certainly the way of Mr Pater’s, and it is always good to walk with him in it—better, I venture to think, than to endeavour to follow him in his rarer and never quite successful attempts to lift himself off it, and flutter in the vague. Good, for instance, as is the Essay on “Æsthetic Poetry,” it would have been far better if it had contented itself with being, in fact and in name, what it is in its best parts—a review of Mr William Morris.[984] This, however, was written very early, and before he had sent out his spies to the Promised Land in _The Renaissance_ (and they had brought back mighty bunches of grapes!), still more before he had reached the Pisgah of _Marius_. Even here though, and naturally still more in the much later paper on Rossetti, he presents us, as he does almost everywhere, with admirable, sometimes with consummate, examples of “defined feeling” about Wordsworth and Coleridge, about Browning and Lamb, about Sir Thomas Browne (one of his most memorable things), about more modern persons—Mr Gosse, M. Fabre, M. Filon. Particularly precious are the three papers on Shakespeare. I have always wished that Mr Pater had given us more of them, as well as others on authors possessing more of what we may call the _positive_ quality, than those whom he actually selected. It would, I think, speaking without impertinence, have done him some good: and it would, speaking with certainty, have done us a great deal. One may sometimes think that it was in his case (as in some others, though so few!) almost a pity that he was in a position to write mainly for amusement. But it is not likely that his sequestered and sensitive genius could ever have done its best—if it could have done anything at all—at forced draught. So, as usual, things are probably better as they are.

[Sidenote: _Universality of his method._]

What, however, is not probable but certain, and what is here of most importance, is that the Paterian method is co-extensive in possibility of application with the entire range of criticism—from the long and slow degustation and appreciation of a Dante or a Shakespeare to the rapidest adequate review of the most trivial and ephemeral of books. Feel; discover the source of feeling (or no feeling, or disgust, as it will often be in the trivial cases); express the discovery so as to communicate the feeling: this can be done in every case. And if it cannot be done by every person, why, that is only equivalent to saying that it is not precisely possible for everybody to be a critic, which, again, is a particular case of a general proposition announced in choice Latin a long time ago, practically anticipated in choicer Greek long before, and no doubt perfectly well understood by wise persons of all nations and languages at any time back to the Twenty-third of October B.C. 4004, or any other date which may be preferred thereto. Besides the objections before referred to, there may be others—such as that the critic’s powers, even if he possesses them, will become callous by too much exercise,—an objection refuted by the fact, so often noticed, that there is hardly an instance of a man with real critical powers becoming a worse critic as he grew older, and many a one of his becoming a better. But, at any rate, this was Mr Pater’s way of criticism: this had already been the way pursued, more or less darkling or in clear vision, by all modern critics—the way first definitely formulated, and, perhaps, allowing for bulk of work, most consistently pursued, by himself. And I have said—perhaps often enough—that I do not know a better.

[Sidenote: _Mr J. A. Symonds._]

Although the relation of “moon” to “sun,” so often used as an image in literary history, will not work with pedantic exactness in relation to Mr J. A. Symonds and the critic just mentioned,—for the moon is not many times more voluminous than the sun, and there are other difficulties,—it applies to a certain extent. Both were literary Hedonists; both were strongly influenced by Greek and Italian. But Mr Symonds’s mind, like his style, was very much more irregular and undisciplined than Mr Pater’s (which had almost something of Neo-classic precision adjusting its Romantic luxuriance), and this want of discipline let him loose[985] into a loquacity which certainly deserved the Petronian epithet of _enormis_, and could sometimes hardly escape the companion one of _ventosa_. His treatise on _Blank Verse_,[986] interesting as it is, would give the enemy of the extremer “modern” criticism far too many occasions to blaspheme by its sheer critical anti-nomianism: and over all his extensive work, faults of excess of various kinds swarm. But beauties and merits are there in ample measure as well as faults: and in the literary parts of _The Renaissance in Italy_ the author has endeavoured to put some restraint on himself, and has been rewarded for the sacrifice. From some little acquaintance with literary history, I think I may say that there is no better historical treatment of a foreign literature in English. One can never help wishing that the author had left half his actual subject untouched, and had completed the study of Italian literature.[987]

[Sidenote: _Thomson (“B. V.”)_]

Not much need be said of the critical production—arrested, like the poetical, by causes unhappy but well known—of James Thomson “the Second,” hardly “the Less,” but most emphatically “the Other.” It ought to have been good: and sometimes (especially under the unexpected and soothing shadow of _Cope’s Tobacco Plant_) was so.[988] Thomson had much of the love, and some of the knowledge, required; his intellect (when allowed to be so) was clear and strong; he was, in more ways than one, of the type of those poets who have made some of the best critics, despite the alleged prodigiousness of the metamorphosis. But the good seed was choked by many tares of monstrous and fatal growth. The least of these should have been (but perhaps was not) the necessity of working for a living, and not the necessity, but the provoked and accepted doom, of working for it mostly in obscure and unprofitable, not to say disreputable, places, imposed upon a temperament radically nervous, “impotent,” in the Latin sense, and unresigned to facts. That temperament itself was a more dangerous obstacle: and the recalcitrance to religion which it was allowed to induce was one more dangerous still. There are no doubt many instances where rigid orthodoxy has proved baneful, even destructive, to a man’s critical powers, or at any rate to his catholic exertion of them: but there are also many in which it has interfered little, if at all. On the other hand, I can hardly think of a case in which religious, and of very few in which political, heterodoxy has not made its partisans more or less hopelessly uncritical on those with whom they disagree. Nor could the peculiar character of Thomson’s education and profession fail to react unfavourably on his criticism. It is hard to get rid of some ill effects of schoolmastering in any case; it must be nearly impossible, in the case of a proud and rather “ill-conditioned” man, who has not enjoyed either full liberal education or gentle breeding, and who is between the upper and nether millstone, as Thomson seems to have been, or at least felt himself, while he was a military schoolmaster. All these irons entered into a critical soul which might have been a fair one and brave: and we see the scars of them, and the cramp of them, too often.[989]

[Sidenote: _William Minto._]

A journalist for one-half of his working life, and a professor—partly—of literature for the other, William Minto executed in both capacities a good deal of literary work: but his most noteworthy contribution[990] to our subject consisted in the two remarkable manuals of English literary history which, as quite a young man, he drew up.[991] To say that these manuals were at the time of their publication by far the best on the subject would be to say little: for there were hardly any good ones. Their praise can be more of a cheerfully positive, and less of a “rascally, comparative” character. They were both, but especially the _Poets from Chaucer to Shirley_, full of study, insight, originality, and grasp—where the author chose to indulge his genius. [Sidenote: _His books on English Prose and Poetry._] Their defects were defects which it requires genius indeed, or at least a very considerable share of audacity, to keep out of manuals of the kind. There is, perhaps, too much biography and too much mere abstract of contents—a thing which will never serve the student in lieu of reading, which will sometimes disastrously suggest to him that he need not read, and which must always curtail the space available for really useful guidance and critical illumination to him when he does. In the _Prose_ there is something else. The book is constructed as a sort of enlarged _praxis_ on a special pedagogic theory of style-teaching, that of the late Professor Bain: and is elaborately scheduled for the illustration of Qualities and Elements of Style, of Kinds of Composition. There is no need to discuss how far the schedule itself is faulty or free from fault; it is unavoidable that rigid adjustment to it—or to any such—shall bring back those faults of the old Rhetoric on which we commented in vol. i., with others more faulty than themselves. For classical literature was very largely, if not wholly, constructed according to such schemes, and might be analysed with an eye on them: English literature had other inceptions and other issues. That Minto’s excellent critical qualities do not disappear altogether behind the lattice-work of schedule-reference speaks not a little for them.

[Sidenote: _H. D. Traill._]

Few writers have lost more by the practice of anonymous journalism than the late Mr Traill. He engaged in it, and in periodical writing generally, from a period dating back almost to the time of his leaving Oxford,[992] and he had to do with it, I believe, till his death, the extraordinary quality of his work recommending him to any and every editor who knew his business. It was impossible, in reading any proof of his, be it on matters political, literary, or miscellaneous, not to think of Thackeray’s phrase about George Warrington’s articles, as to “the sense, the satire, and the scholarship” which characterised them. In the rather wide knowledge, which circumstances happened to give me, of writers for the press during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, I never knew his equal for combination of the three. [Sidenote: _His critical strength._] For a great many years, however, chance, or choice, or demand, directed him chiefly to the most important, as it is thought, and the most paying, but the most exhausting and, as far as permanent results go, the most utterly thankless and evanescent division of journalism—political leader-writing, with actual attendance at “the House” during the Session. And this curtailed both his literary press-work and his opportunities of literary book-work. He did, however, a great deal of the former: and the labours of the much-abused but sometimes useful literary resurrection-men, who dig contributions out of their newspaper graves, could hardly be better bestowed than upon him. Fortunately, however, the literary side of his criticism—he was a critic of letters and life alike, born and bred, in prose and in verse, by temper and training, in heart and brain—remains in part of _The New Lucian_, in the admirable monographs on Sterne and Coleridge,[993] and in the collection of Essays[994] issued but a year or two before his death.

[Sidenote: _On Sterne and Coleridge._]

In the three last-named volumes especially, his qualities as a critic are patent to any one with eyes. The two monographs are models of competence and grasp, but they are almost greater models of the combination of vigour and sanity. Both subjects are of the kind which used to tempt to cant, and which now tempts to paradox. To the first sin Mr Traill had no temptation—whatever fault might have been found with him, neither Pecksniffery nor Podsnappery was in the faintest degree his failing. But he might have been thought likely to be tempted, as some very clever men in our day have been, by the desire to fly in the face of the Philistine, and to flout the Family Man. There is no trace of any such beguilement—the moral currency is as little tampered with as it could have been by Johnson or by Southey, while there is no trace of the limitations of the one or of the slight Pharisaism of the other. And yet the literary judgment is entirely unaffected by this moral rectitude: the two do not trespass on each other’s provinces by so much as a hair’s-breadth.

[Sidenote: _Essays on Fiction._]

The title-paper of the collected _Essays_, “The New Fiction,” connects itself with several other pieces in the volume, “The Political Novel,” “Samuel Richardson,” “The Novel of Manners,” and, to some extent, “The Future of Humour.” Mr Traill was a particularly good critic of the most characteristic product of the nineteenth century: I doubt whether we have had a better. In poetry he seemed to me to sin a little, in one direction (just as, I know, I seemed to him to sin in the other), by insisting, too much in the antique fashion, on a general unity and purpose. He shows this, I think, here in the paper on “Matthew Arnold,” who, indeed, himself could hardly have objected, for they were theoretically much at one on the point. But as to prose fiction he had no illusions, and his criticism of it is consummate. We have not a few instances of onslaughts upon corrupt developments of the art by critics great and small; but I do not think I know one to equal Mr Traill’s demolition of the “_grime_-novel” of to-day or yesterday. [Sidenote: “_The Future of Humour._”] His highest achievement, however, in a single piece, is undoubtedly “The Future of Humour,” which transcends mere reviewing, transcends the mere _causerie_, and unites the merits of both with those of the best kind of abstract critical discussion. One may say of it, without hesitation, _Ça restera_; it may be lost in the mass, now and then, but whenever a good critic comes across it he will restore it to its place. It is _about_ a day, but not _of_ or _for_ it: it moves, and has its being, as do all masterpieces of art, small and great, _sub specie æternitatis_. If it were not so idle, one could only sigh at thinking how many a leading article, how much journey-work in biography, one would give for Traill to be alive again, and to write such criticism as this.

[Sidenote: _Others: Mansel, Venables, Stephen, Lord Houghton, Pattison,
Church, &c._]

Others, great and small, we must once more sweep into the _numerus_ named, or unnamed. Mr Traill himself—for they were both of St John’s—may be said to have directly inherited the mantle of Dean Mansel in respect of critical wit and sense, though the Dean had only occasionally devoted these qualities, together with his great philosophical powers, and his admirable style, to pure literary criticism.[995] Of the immense critical exercise of Mr George Venables, a little lacking in flexibility, sympathy, and unction, but excellently sound and strong, no salvage, I think, has ever been published: and though a good deal is available from his yoke-fellow, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen,[996] this latter’s tastes—as his father’s had done before, though in a different direction—led him away from the purer literary criticism. Of three other persons, eminent in their several ways, more substantive notice may perhaps have been expected by many, and will certainly be demanded by some. But Lord Houghton’s _Monographs_,[997] admirably written and extremely interesting to read, hardly present a sufficiently individual kind, or a sufficiently considerable bulk of matter, for a separate paragraph. Mr Mark Pattison’s dealings with Milton and with Pope, as well as with the great seventeenth-century scholars, may seem more, and more imperatively, to knock for admission. As far as scholarship, in almost every sense of the word, is concerned, no critic can surpass him; but scholarship, though all but indispensable as the critic’s _canvass_, needs much working upon, and over, to give the finished result. And Pattison’s incurable reticence and recalcitrance—the temperament which requires the French words _rêche_ and _revêche_, if not even _rogue_, to label it—were rebel to the suppleness and _morigeration_ which are required from all but mere scholastic critics. The happier stars or complexion of his near contemporary, Dean Church, enabled him to do some admirable critical work on Dante, on Spenser, and on not a few others, which will be found in the _English Men of Letters_, in Mr Ward’s _Poets_, in his own Collected _Essays_, and in separate books. Dr Church combined, with an excellent style, much scholarship and a judgment as sane as it was mild, nor did he allow the natural drift of his mind towards ethical and religious, rather than purely literary, considerations to draw him too much away from the latter.

[Sidenote: _Patmore._]

Mr Coventry Patmore has been extolled to the skies by a coterie. But to the cool outsider his criticism, like his poetry, has somewhat too much the character of “diamondiferous rubbish,”—a phrase which, when applied to the poetry itself, did not, I am told, displease him. For though, in _Principle in Art_[998] and _Religio Poetæ_[999] there may be a few things rich and rare, there is a very large surplusage of the _other_ constituents of the mixture. The short articles of the first volume consist almost wholly of it, and might have been left in the columns of the Daily Paper in which they appeared with a great deal of advantage.[1000] Indeed those on Keats, Shelley, Blake, and Rossetti, which unfortunately follow each other, make a four-in-hand good only for the knacker. Mr Patmore, when he wrote them, was too old to take the benefit of _no_-clergy, to be allowed the use of undergraduate paradox. And as, unfortunately, he was a craftsfellow, and a craftsfellow not very popular or highly valued with most people, his denigration is all the more awkward. A man who says that _The Burden of Nineveh_ “might have been written by Southey” (and I do not undervalue Southey), must have an insensible spot somewhere in his critical body. A man who says that Blake’s poetry, “with the exception of four or five pieces and a gleam here and there,” is mere drivel, must be suffering from critical hemiplegia. There are better things in the other volume, and its worst faults are excesses of praise, always less disgusting, though not always less uncritical, than those of blame. But I am not here giving a full examination to Mr Patmore’s criticism, I am only indicating why I do not here examine it, as I am perfectly ready to do at any moment in a proper place.

[Sidenote: _Mr Edmund Gurney._]

There were, I think, few English writers of the last quarter of the nineteenth century who showed more of the true critical _ethos_ than the late Mr Edmund Gurney. I did not know Mr Gurney myself, but most of my friends did; a situation in which there is special danger (when the friends are complimentary) of the fate of Aristides for the other person. But the good things which were told me of Mr Gurney I find to be very much more than confirmed by his books, though, of course, I also find plenty to disagree with. The earlier of them, _The Power of Sound_,[1001] is in the main musical; and I have generally found (though there are some capital exceptions) that critics of poetry, or of literature generally, who start from much musical knowledge, are profoundly unsatisfactory, inasmuch as they rarely appreciate the radical difference between musical music and poetical music. Even Mitford fails here. But Mr Gurney does not. He was the first, or one of the first, I think, in English to enunciate formally the great truth that “the setting includes a new substance”—meaning not merely the technical music-setting of the composer, but that “sound accompaniment” which, in all poetry more or less, and in English poetry of the nineteenth century especially, gives a bonus, adds a _panache_, to the meaning.

[Sidenote: The Power of Sound.]

He was right too, I have not the slightest doubt, in laying it down that “metrical rhythm is imposed upon, not latent in, speech”; and he went right, where too many scholars of high repute have gone wrong, in seeing that the much-decried English scansion-pronunciation of Latin almost certainly brings out _to an English ear_ the effect on a Latin one, better than any conjectured attempt to mimic what might have been the Latin pronunciation itself. I was delighted to find that he, too, had fixed upon Tennyson’s “Fair is her cottage” (his is not quite my view, and perhaps we were both guided by a reported speech of Mr Spedding’s) as almost the _ne plus ultra_ of “superadded” audible and visual effect combined. And he is well worth reading on certain “illusions” of Lessing’s.

[Sidenote: Tertium Quid.]

The literary part of _The Power of Sound_ is, however, if not accidental, incidental mainly: not a few of the papers in the second volume of _Tertium Quid_[1002] deal with literature pure and simple. They are to some extent injured by the fact that many, if not most of them, are merely strokes, or parries, or _ripostes_, in particular duels or _mêlées_ on dependences of the moment. And, as I have pointed out in reference to certain famous altercations of the past, these critical squabbles seem to me almost invariably to darken counsel—first, by leading the disputants away from the true points, and secondly, by inducing them to mix in their pleadings all sorts of flimsy, ephemeral, and worthless matter. Not the point, but what Jones or Brown has said about the point, becomes the object of the writer’s attention; he wants to score off Brown or Jones, not to score for the truth. So when Mr Gurney contended with the late Mr Hueffer—another literary-musical critic, who did _not_, as Mr Gurney did, escape the dangers of the double employ—when he contributed not so much a _tertium_ as a _quartum quid_ to the triangular duel of Mr Arnold, Mr Austin, Mr Swinburne about Byron—he did not always say what is still worth reading. And he makes one or two odd blunders, such as that the French are blind to Wordsworth, whereas Wordsworth’s influence on Sainte-Beuve, to name nobody else,[1003] was very great. But he is always sensible,[1004] and he always has that double soundness on the passionate side of poetry and on the peculiar appeal of its form, which is so rare and so distinctive of the good critic.

These qualities should, of course, appear in his essay on the “Appreciation of Poetry”;[1005] and they do. It is, however, perhaps well to note that, while quite sound on the point that there is a right as well as a wrong comparison, he, like others, hardly escapes the further danger of “confusing the confusion”—of taking what is really the right comparison for what is really the wrong. The comparison which disapproves one thing because it is unlike another is wrong, not the comparison which is used to bring out a fault, though the unlikeness is not assigned as the reason of the fault at all. But I am here slipping from history to doctrine on this particular point. I think Mr Gurney, right in the main, might have been still _righter_: but in general I am sure that he had admirable critical qualities, and I only wish he had chosen, or had been forced, to use them more fully and frequently.[1006]