Chapter LII: Appendix: I

THE OXFORD CHAIR OF POETRY.

THE HOLDERS—EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MINORS—LOWTH— HURDIS—THE RALLY:
COPLESTON—CONYBEARE— MILMAN—KEBLE—THE ‘OCCASIONAL [ENGLISH] PAPERS’—
THE ‘PRÆLECTIONS’—GARBETT—CLAUGHTON— DOYLE—SHAIRP—PALGRAVE—
“SALUTANTUR VIVI.”

(_I have thought this sketch worth giving, partly as an example of the kind of excursus which might be appended, perhaps not without some advantage, and certainly in some numbers, to this History. But I give it also because it illustrates—in a manner which cannot be elsewhere paralleled at all in our own country, and to which I know no Continental parallel—by a continuous and unbroken chain of instances and applications, the course of European as well as English theory, practice, and taste in Criticism, from a period when the Neo-classic creed was still in at least apparently fullest flourishing, through nearly two whole centuries, to what, in the eye of history, is the present moment. The enforced vacation of the Chair after a single decade at most, and its filling by popular election, and not by the choice of an individual or a board, add to its representative character: and the usual publication of at least some of the results, in each case, makes that character almost uniquely discoverable in its continuity, while even the change of vehicles from Latin to English is not without its importance. There is no room here—and it would perhaps be unnecessary in any case—to anticipate the easy labour of summarising its lessons. But I think they may be said to emphasise the warning—frequently given or hinted already—that the result of the altered conditions and laws of criticism is not clear gain. No part of Mr Arnold’s best critical work was, I think, done for the Chair; and I should myself be inclined to select, as the best work actually done for it, that of Keble, who represents the combination of the old Classical-Preceptist tradition, with something of the new comparison and free expatiation, as well as very much of the purely appreciative tendency._)

[Sidenote: _The holders._]

This Chair—founded by Henry Birkhead, D.C.L., a Trinity man, a Fellow of All Souls, and a member of the Inner Temple—began its operations in 1708, the conditions of its tenure (which have only recently been altered) providing for a first holding of five years, a single renewal for the same period, and a sort of rotation, in the sense that the same college could not supply two successive occupants. The actual incumbents have been: 1708-18, Trapp; 1718-28, Thomas Warton the elder; 1728-38, Spence; 1738-41, John Whitf(i)eld; 1741-51 (the most distinguished name as yet), Lowth; 1751-56, William Hawkins; 1756-66, Thomas Warton the younger; 1766-76, Benjamin Wheeler; 1776-83, Randolph; 1783-93, Holmes; 1793 to 1802, Hurdis. With the nineteenth century a brighter order begins, all but one or two of the Professors having made their mark out of the Chair as well as in it. They were: Copleston, 1802-12; Conybeare, 1812-21; Milman, 1821-31; Keble, 1831-42; Garbett (the dark star of this group, but, as we shall see, not quite lightless), 1842-52; Claughton, 1852-57; Matthew Arnold, 1857-67; Sir Francis Doyle, 1867-77; Principal Shairp, 1877-87; Mr Palgrave, 1887-95; while of living occupants Mr Courthope resigned the Chair after a single tenure; and Mr Bradley was elected to it under a statutory limitation to this term.

[Sidenote: _Eighteenth century minors._]

Of these, Trapp, Spence, the younger Warton, and Arnold have received notice in the text, which would have been theirs had they never held the Chair. The lucubrations of the first held for some time an honourable place as an accepted handbook on the subject. Spence, profiting by the almost Elysian tolerance of his sensible century, and finding that neither residence nor lecturing was insisted on, seems to have resided very little, and to have lectured hardly or not at all. Tom Warton the younger, whose _History_ would have dignified any _cathedra_, appears to have devoted himself during his actual tenure entirely to the classics, and never to have published any of his lectures except one on Theocritus. His father, in the interval between the respectable labours of Trapp and the philosophical silence of Spence, had earned no golden opinions, and though the repeated attacks of Amherst in _Terræ Filius_ may have been due partly to political rancour, and partly to that ingenious and unlucky person’s incorrigible Ishmaelitism, it seems to have been admitted that the Professor’s understanding and erudition lay very open to criticism, and that his elocution and manner were not such as could shield them. Of Whitfield, Hawkins, Wheeler, Randolph, and Holmes, what I have been able to gather may best be set in a note.[1105] The first person to make any real figure in and for the Chair was the author of _De Sacra Poesi Hebræorum_, which at once attained not merely an English but a European reputation.

[Sidenote: _Lowth._]

To discuss the Hebrew scholarship of this famous book (which was first published in 1753, and repeatedly reprinted, revised, translated, attacked, defended) would be wholly out of place here, even if the writer had not almost wholly forgotten the little Hebrew he learnt at school. It is still, I believe—even by specialists with no general knowledge of literature—admitted to have been epoch-making in its insistence on the parallelism of Hebrew poetry. But to those who take the historical view of literature and of criticism its place is secure quite apart from this. Not merely in the Renaissance, but in the Middle and even the Dark Ages, the matter of the Bible had been used to parallel and illustrate rhetorical and literary doctrines and rules. But Lowth was almost the first to treat its poetical forms from something like the standpoint of sound comparative literary criticism.[1106] Now this, as the whole tenor of our book has gone to contend, was the chief and principal thing that had to be done. If we have any advantage over the men of old, it is that we (or some of us) have at last mastered the fact that one literature or one language cannot _prescribe_ anything to another, but that it may _teach_ much. And this new instance of a literature—unique in special claims to reverence, unique likewise in the fact that in its best examples it could owe nothing to those Greeks and Romans who have so beneficently but so tyrannously influenced all the modern tongues—was invaluable in its quality and almost incalculable in its moment. That Lowth’s exposition resulted directly or indirectly in not a little maladroit _imitation_ of Hebrew poetry was not his fault; his critical lesson was wholly good.

[Sidenote: _Hurdis._]

Hurdis, a person now very much forgotten, had his day of interest and of something like position. He is not unfrequently quoted by writers, especially by Southey, of the great period of 1800-1830, which he a little preceded, and he has the honour—rare for so recent a writer—of a whole article[1107] on his poems in the _Retrospective Review_. As a poet he was mainly an imitator of his friend Cowper—a fact which, with the title of his chief work, _The Village Curate_, will give intending or declining readers a sufficiently exact idea of what they are undertaking or relinquishing. Easy blank verse, abundant and often not infelicitous description, and unexceptionable though slightly copybook sentiments,[1108] form his poetic or versifying staple. As a critic I regret to find that my note on him is “Chatter”: and I do not know anything of his that makes me, on reflection, think this unjust.

[Sidenote: _The rally: Copleston._]

I should be half afraid that the interest which I feel in the next set of Prælections, those of Edward Copleston,—“_the_ Provost,” as he anticipated Hawkins in being to Oxford men, even not of his own college of Oriel,—might be set down to that _boulimia_ or morbid appetite for critical writings of which I have been accused, if I had not at hand a very potent compurgator. Keble, it is true, was a personal friend of Copleston’s. But he was not at all the man to let personal friendship, any more than personal enmity, bias his judgment; and he was admirably qualified to judge. Yet he says deliberately[1109] that the book “is by far the most distinct, and the richest in matter, of any which it has fallen to our lot to read on the subject.” I cannot myself go quite so far as that, and I doubt whether Keble himself would have gone so far when, twenty years later, he wrote his own exquisite Lectures; but I can go a long way towards it.

The future Provost and Bishop has, indeed, other critical proofs on which to rely,[1110]—the famous and excellent “Advice to a Young Reviewer,” which I fear is just as much needed, and just as little heeded, as it was a hundred years ago, the admirable smashing of the _Edinburgh’s_ attack on Oxford, and other matters,—but the _Prælections_[1111] are the chief and principal thing. Keble insisted that they ought to be Englished, but I am not so sure. They form one of the _severest_ critical treatises with which I am acquainted; and some of the features of this severity would, I think, appear positively uninviting in English dress, while they consistently and perfectly suit the toga and the sandal. But I must explain a little more fully in what this “severity” consists; for the word is ambiguous. I do not mean that Copleston rejects Pleasure as the end of Poetry; for, on the contrary, he writes _Delectare_ boldly on his shield, and omits _prodesse_ save as an indirect consequence. I do not mean that he is a very Draconic critic of particulars, though he can speak his mind trenchantly enough.[1112] Nor do I mean that he is a very abstract writer; for every page is strewn with concrete illustrations, very well selected, and, for the most part, un-hackneyed.

His severity is rather of the ascetic and “methodist” kind; he resembles nothing so much as a preceptist of the school of Hermogenes, who should have discarded triviality, and risen to very nearly the weight and substance of Aristotle. At the very beginning he makes a statute for himself, to cite no literature but Greek and Latin, and to use no language but these. And he never breaks either rule; for though, on rare occasions, he refers to English writers— Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Burke, Reynolds[1113]—it is a reference only to books, or poems, or passages, never a citation. And in the second place his method is throughout—constant as is his use of the actual poetic object-lesson—to proceed by general categories, not of poetic kinds (he shuns that ancient and now well-beaconed quicksand[1114]) but of qualities, constituents, means. His whole book, after a brief definition or apology for not defining, is distributed under four parts,—Of Imitation, Of the Emotions, Of Imagination (Phantasia), and Of Judgment,—though he never reached the fourth,[1115] owing to his tenure of the Chair coming to an end. After a pretty full discussion of the nature and subject of Imitation, he makes his link with his next subject by dwelling on the _Imitatio morum_, and so of the Passions themselves. In this part a very large share is given to the subject of _Sententiæ_— “sentiments,” as Keble translates it, though, as I have pointed out formerly,[1116] no single translation of the word is at all satisfactory. The section on Imagination is very interesting. Copleston is at a sort of middle stage between the restricted Addisonian and the wide Philostratean-Shakespearean-Coleridgean interpretation of the word. He expressly admits that other senses besides sight can supply the material of _Phantasia_; but his examples are mainly drawn from material which _is_ furnished by the sight, and his inclusions of Allegory, Mythology, &c., with other things, sometimes smack of an insufficient discrimination between Imagination and Fancy. Indeed the fact that he is Præ-Coleridgean helps to give him his interest.

Keble mildly complains that Copleston does not make use of that doctrine of Association which he himself, writing so early, had perhaps adopted, not from Coleridge but direct from Hartley. We have, in our day, seen this doctrine worked to death and sent to the knacker’s in philosophy generally; but there is no doubt that it can never be neglected in poetry, being, perhaps, the most universal (though by no means _the_ universal) means of approach to the sources of the poetic pleasure. It does not, however, seem to me that Copleston intended to mount so high, or go so far back: his aim was, I think, more rhetorical, according to a special fashion, than metacritical. But his mediate axioms are numerous and often very informing: and his illustrations, as has been said, abundant, really illustrative, and singularly recreative. He lays most Latin and many Greek poets under contribution; but some of his most effective examples are drawn from a poet whom he does not critically overvalue, but who has no doubt been, as a rule, critically undervalued, and for whom he himself evidently had a discriminating affection—that is to say, Claudian.

On the whole, the appearance of a book of this scope and scheme, at the very junction of the centuries and the ’isms, Classic and Romantic, is of singular interest. Until intelligent study of the Higher Rhetoric— reformed, adjusted, and extended—has been reintroduced, such another will not come. But such another might come with very great advantage, and would supply a very important _tertium quid_ to the mere Æsthetics and to the sheer Impressionism between which Criticism has too often divided itself.

[Sidenote: _Conybeare._]

There is almost as much significance in Copleston’s successor, though it is a significance of a different kind. For J. J. Conybeare was the first Professor of Poetry to bestow attention on Anglo-Saxon (Warton, even in his _History_, had not gone, with any knowledge, beyond Middle English), and so to complete the survey of all English Literature. Before his appointment he had held, as its first occupant, the chair of Anglo-Saxon itself; and while Professor of Poetry he was a country parson. He died suddenly and comparatively young, and his remarkable _Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry_[1117] were published after his death by his brother, who is actually responsible for a good part of its matter, so that the book is a composite one. It is thus mainly in its general significance— for Conybeare’s Prælections as Professor were not, so far as I know, published—that it is valuable for us. But the value thus given is unmistakable. Conybeare’s individual judgments and _aperçus_ are always interesting, and often acute; but his real importance lies in the fact that he was almost the first—though Mitford, after Ellis, had attempted the thing as an outsider—to move back the focussing-point sufficiently to get _all_ English Literature under view. Nothing could serve more effectually to break up the false standing-ground of the eighteenth century.

[Sidenote: _Milman._]

A curious but perhaps not surprising thing about Milman’s Professorship is that it aroused the ire of an undergraduate poet of the rarest though of the most eccentric type—namely, Beddoes. If Milman really did “denounce” _Death’s Jest-Book_,[1118] it is a pity that his lectures were (so far as I know) never printed, or at least collected, for there might have been more such things of the fatally interesting kind which establishes the rule that Professors should not deal, in their lectures, with contemporary literature. It was certainly unlucky for a man to begin by objecting in one official capacity to _Death’s Jest-Book_, and to end by objecting in another to Stevens’s Wellington Monument. And that Milman had generally the character of a harsh and donnish critic is obvious, from Byron’s well-known suggestion of him as a possible candidate for the authorship of the _Quarterly_ article on Keats, though the rhyme of “kill man” may have had something to do with this. If he wrote much literary criticism we have little of it in the volume of _Essays_ which his son published, after his death, in 1870. Even on Erasmus—surely a tempting subject—he manages to be as little literary as is possible, and rather less than one might have thought to be; and his much better-known _Histories_ are not more so.

[Sidenote: _Keble._]

Ignorance may sneer, but Knowledge will not even smile, at the dictum that not the least critical genius that ever adorned the Oxford Chair was possessed by John Keble. There is some faint excuse for Ignorance. The actual _Prælections_[1119] of the author of _The Christian Year_, being Latin, are not read: his chief English critical works,[1120] though collected not so very long ago, were collected too late to catch that flood-tide, in their own sense, which is unfortunately, as a rule, needed to land critical works out of reach of the ordinary ebb. Moreover, there is no question but Keble requires “allowance”; and the allowance which he requires is too often of the kind least freely granted in the present day. If we have anywhere (I hope we have) a man as holy as Keble, and as learned, and as acute, he will hardly express the horror at Scott’s occasional use of strong language which Keble expresses.[1121] Our historic sense, and our illegitimate advantage of perspective, have at least taught us that to quarrel with Scott again, for not being “Catholic” enough, is almost to quarrel with Moses for not having actually led the children of Israel into Palestine. And no man, as honest as Keble was, would now echo that other accusation against the great magician (whom, remember, Keble almost adored, and of whom he thought far more highly as a poet than many good men do now) of tolerating intemperance; though some might feign it to suit a popular cant.

But in all these respects it is perfectly easy for those who have once schooled themselves to this apparently but not really difficult matter, to make the necessary allowance.[1122] And then, even in the English critical Essays—the “Scott,” the “Sacred Poetry,” the “Unpublished Letters of Warburton,” and the “Copleston”—_verus incessu patet criticus_.

[Sidenote: _The_ Occasional [_English_] Papers.]

His general attitude to poetic criticism (he meddled little with any other) is extremely interesting. His classical training impelled him towards the “subject” theory, and the fact that his two great idols in modern English poetry were Scott and Wordsworth was not likely to hold him back. He has even drifted towards a weir, pretty clearly, one would think, marked “Danger!” by asking whether readers do not feel the attraction of Scott’s novels to be as great as, and practically identical with, that of his poems. But no “classic” could possibly have framed the definition of poetry which he puts at the outset[1123] of the Scott Essay as “The indirect expression in words, most appropriately in metrical words, of some overpowering emotion, or ruling taste, or feeling, the direct indulgence whereof is somehow repressed.” Everybody will see what this owes to Wordsworth; everybody should see how it is glossed and amplified—in a non-Wordsworthian or an extra-Wordsworthian sense. We meet the pure critical Keble again, in his enthusiastic adoption of Copleston’s preference for “Delight” (putting Instruction politely in the pocket) as the poetic criterion.[1124] And his defence of Sacred Poetry, however interested it may seem to be, coming from him, is one of the capital essays of English criticism. He makes mince-meat of Johnson, and he takes by anticipation a good deal of the brilliancy out of his brilliant successor, Mr Arnold, on this subject. The passage, short but substantial,[1125] on Spenser in this is one of the very best to be found on that critic of critics (as by an easily intelligible play he might be said to be) as well as poet of poets. Spenser always finds out a bad critic—he tries good ones at their highest.

[Sidenote: _The_ Prælections.]

Still the _Prælections_ themselves must, of course, always be Keble’s own touchstone, or rather his ground and matter of assay. And he comes out well. The dedication (a model of stately enthusiasm) to Wordsworth as _non solum dulcissimæ poeseos verum etiam divinæ veritatis antistes_, strikes the keynote of the whole. But it may be surprising to some to find how “broad” Keble is, in spite of his inflexible morality and his uncompromising churchmanship. He was kept right partly, no doubt, by holding fast as a matter of theory to the “Delight” test—pure and virtuous delight, of course, but still delight, first of all and most of all. But mere theory would have availed him little without the poetic spirit, which everywhere in him translates itself into the critical, and almost as little without the wide and (whether deliberately so or not) comparative reading of ancient and modern verse which he displays. His general definition of Poetry here is slightly different from that given above, as was indeed required by his subject and object. He presents it— at once refining and enlarging upon part of the Aristotelian one of Tragedy, and neutralising the _vinum dæmonum_ notion at once,—as _subsidium benigni numinis_, the medicinal aid given by God to subdue, soften, and sanctify Passion. But his working out—necessarily, in its main lines, obvious but interesting to contrast with his successor Mr Arnold’s undogmatised and secularised application of the same idea[1126]—is less interesting to us in itself than the _aperçus_ on different poets, ancient and modern, to which it gives rise. Few pages deserve to be skipped by the student: even technical discussion of the _tenuis et arguta_ kind, as he modestly calls it, becomes alive under his hand on such subjects as the connection of Poetry and Irony (_Præl._ v.) But there is a still higher interest in such things as the contrast, in the same Prælection, of the undeviating self-consistency of Spenser in all his work, the bewildering apparent lack of central unity in Shakespeare with its resolution, and the actual inconsistency of Dryden. All the Homeric studies deserve reading, the discussion of the _Odyssey_ in _Præl._ xi. being especially noteworthy, with its culmination in that delightful phrase about Nausicaa which we quoted in the last volume.[1127] Particularly wise and particularly interesting is the treatment of “Imitation” (the lower imitation) in _Præl._ xvi., where those who are of our mystery will not fail to compare the passage with Vida. How comfortable is it to find a poet-critic, so uncompromising on dignity of subject, who can yet admit, and that with not the faintest grudging, that it “is incredible how mightily the hidden fire is roused by single words or clauses—nay, by the sound of mere syllables, that strike the ear at a happy nick of time.”[1128] This is almost “the doctrine of the Poetic Moment” itself, though we must not urge it too far, and though it is brought in apropos of the suggestiveness _to poets_ of antecedent poetic work. It is still sovereign against a still prevailing heresy. The abundant treatment of Æschylus[1129] is also to be carefully noted; for, as we have observed, that mighty poet had been almost neglected during the Neo-classic period.

The second score of Lectures is still technically devoted to the ancients, especially Pindar, the second and third Tragedians, Theocritus, Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace; but references to the moderns, not very rare in the first volume, become still more frequent here, and are sometimes, as those to Spenser and Bunyan in the matter of allegory,[1130] and the contrast of Jason and Macduff as bewailing their children,[1131] very notable. On his narrower subject, the judgment of Sophocles in _Præl._ xxviii. is singularly weighty; and I should like to have heard Mr Matthew Arnold answer on behalf of his favourite. The comparative tameness, and the want of variety and range, which some (not all, of course) feel in the “singer and child of sweet Colonos” are here put with authority by one whom no one could accuse of _Sturm und Drang_ preferences, or of an undisciplined thirst for novelty. Only on Theocritus, perhaps, does Morality sit _in banco_ with Taste to a rather disastrous effect, and the fact is curiously explicable. His disapproval of Scott’s strong language, and his want of ecclesiastical-mindedness, and his lenity to liquor, had not blinded Keble in the least to Scott’s poetry; he had admitted the charitable and comfortable old plea of “time, not man,” in favour of certain peccadilloes of Shakespeare; he is, in fact, nowhere squeamish to silliness. But he cannot pardon Theocritus for the _Oaristys_ and such things, simply because the new Wordsworthian nature-worship in him is wounded and shocked _insanabiliter_. “Like Aristophanes,” he says, “like Catullus, like Horace, Theocritus betakes himself to the streams and the woods, not to seek rest for a weary mind, but as provocatives for a lustful one.”[1132] This new “sin against the Spirit” is most interesting.

On the other hand, this very nature-worship keeps his balance, where we might have thought he would lose it, on the subject of Lucretius. He contrasts the comparative triviality and childishness of Virgil, agreeable enough as it is, in regard to nature, with the mystic majesty of his great predecessor. The charges of atheism and indecency trouble him very little:[1133] the intense earnestness, the lofty delight in clouds and forests and the vague, the likeness to Æschylus and Dante—all these things he fixes on, and delights in. I wish he had written more on Dante himself; what he has[1134] is admirable.

As to Virgil in person, though sensible enough of his merits, he says things which would have elicited the choicest combinations of Scaligerian Billingsgate; and brings out, in a way striking and I think rather novel, the _permolestum_, the “serious irritation” caused by the fact that Virgil either could not or would not give Æneas any character at all, and that you feel sometimes inclined to think that he never himself had any clear idea what sort of a real man his hero was. This exaltation of the Character above the Action is very noteworthy.

But, in fact, Keble always is noteworthy, and more. Mere moderns may dismiss him, with or without a reading, as a mill-horse treader of academic rounds. He is nothing so little. He is, in fact, almost the first representative of the Romantic movement who has applied its spirit to the consecrated subjects of study; and he has shown, unfortunately to too limited a circle, how fresh, how interesting, how inspiring the results of this and of the true comparison of ancient and modern may be.[1135] Literary criticism—indeed literature itself as such—was with him, it is true, only a by-work, hardly more than a pastime. But had it been otherwise, he would, I think, twenty years before Arnold, have given us the results of a more thorough scholarship, a reading certainly not less wide, a taste nearly as delicate and catholic, a broader theory, and a much greater freedom from mere crotchet and caprice.

[Sidenote: _Garbett._]

I am not quite so well acquainted with the whole work of Keble’s successor Garbett.[1136] Elected as he was, by the anti-Tractarian reaction, against the apparently far superior claims of Isaac Williams, his appointment has generally been regarded as a job; and I had to divest myself of prejudice in reading him. He has indeed nothing of his predecessor’s serene scholarship, and little of his clear and clean taste. His form puts him at a special disadvantage. Instead of Keble’s pure and flowing Latinity, you find an awkward dialect, peppered after the fashion of Cicero’s letters with Greek words, peppered still more highly with notes of exclamation, and, worst of all, full of words, and clauses, and even whole sentences, in capitals, to the destruction of all repose and dignity. He seems to have simply printed each Prælection as he gave it (the pagings are independent), and then to have batched them together without revision in volume form.[1137] But one cannot read far or fairly without perceiving that, either before his election or after it, Garbett had taken the pains to qualify by a serious study of antecedent criticism—a study, it may be added, of which there is hardly any trace in Keble. Garbett devotes especial attention to Longinus and Dryden; and though I do not (as I have formerly hinted)[1138] agree with him in regard to either,[1139] it is beyond all doubt that he had made a distinct and original attempt to grasp both as critics. He deals with Horace, of course; but it is noteworthy that he has again aimed at a systematic and fresh view, taking Horace as the master of “Art Poetic,” and comparing Boileau, &c. He has an abundant discussion of Scaliger, whom he takes as third type and (rightly) as the father of classical French criticism, while Dryden gives him his fourth. He knows the Germans—not merely Lessing and Goethe, but Kant; and whatever the failures in his execution, he can “satisfy the examiners” not merely from the point of view of those who demand acquaintance with the history and literature of the subject, but from that of those who postpone everything to what they think philosophy. He refers to the climatic view of literature,[1140] constantly combines historical and literary considerations, and is altogether a “modern.” As has been said, I disagree with him more often than I agree; but I do not think there can be any serious denial of the fact that he was worthy of the Chair and of a place here.

[Sidenote: _Claughton._]

The tenure of his successor Claughton, afterwards Bishop, was but for a single term; and he seems to have left little memorial of it except a singularly elegant Latin address on the appointment of Lord Derby as Chancellor. Elegance, indeed, was Claughton’s characteristic as an orator,[1141] but I should not imagine that he had much strength or very wide or keen literary knowledge and enthusiasm. Of Mr. Arnold we have spoken.

[Sidenote: _Doyle._]

There were foolish folk, not without some excuse of ignorance (if that ever _be_ an excuse) for their foolishness, who grumbled or scoffed when he was followed by Sir Francis Doyle. There had been some hopes of Browning, which had been foiled—if by nothing else—by the discovery that an Honorary M.A. degree was not a qualification; and it must be owned that curiosity to see what Browning would do _in_ prose _on_ poetry was highly legitimate. Moreover, the younger generation was busy with Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Morris, who had not turned Tennyson and Browning himself out, and they knew little of Sir Francis. Better informed persons, however, reported of him as of an Oxford man of the best old type of “scholar and gentleman,” a person of very shrewd wits, of probably greater practical experience than any Professor of Poetry had ever had, and the author of certain things like _The Red Thread of Honour_ and _The Private of the Buffs_, which, in their own peculiar style and division, were poetry _sans phrase_. The report was justified by the new Professor’s Lectures.[1142] They are frankly exoteric; but they are saved by scholarship from the charge of ever being popular in the bad sense. They adopt as frankly, and carry a little farther, that plan of making the lectures, if not exactly reviews of particular books new and old, at any rate _causeries_ hung on particular texts and pegs, which the vernacularisation of the Chair had made inevitable, and to which Matthew Arnold himself had inclined gladly enough. They are, though not in the least degree slipshod or slovenly, quite conversational in style. But they deserve, I think, no mean place among the documents of the Chair. Their easy, well-bred common-sense, kept from being really Philistine (which epithet Sir Francis good-humouredly accepted), not merely by their good breeding, but by the aforesaid scholarship, by natural acuteness, and by an intense unaffected love for poetry, might not be a good staple. But if the electors could manage to let it come round again, as an exception, once in a generation or so, it would be well, and better than well.

[Sidenote: _Shairp._]

Of Principal Shairp so many good men have said so many good things that it is almost unnecessary to add, in this special place and context, the praise (which can be given ungrudgingly) that he has always, in his critical work, had before him good intentions and high ideals. Much further addition, I fear, cannot be made. When I read his question, “Did not Shakespeare hate and despise Iago and Edmund?”[1143] when I remember how Shakespeare himself put in the mouth of the one—

“I bleed, sir, but not killed”;

in the mouth of the other—

“The wheel is come full circle; I am here”;

and—

“Yet Edmund was beloved,”

I own I sympathise with an unconventional and unsophisticated soul who, once reading this same utterance of Mr. Shairp’s, rose, strode about the room, and sitting down, ejaculated, “What are you to do? What are you to say? Where are you to go? when a Professor of Poetry, uttering such things in Oxford, is not taken out, and stoned or burnt forthwith, between Balliol and the _Randolph_?” And there is an only less dreadful passage[1144] of miscomprehension on the magnificent close of Tennyson’s “Love and Duty”—one of the greatest examples of the difficult “_Versöhnung_ close,” the reconciliation of art, the relapse into peace.

But the lesson of criticism is a lesson of tolerance. A complete and careful perusal of Mr Shairp’s _Aspects of Poetry_, and of his other books, will indeed show that the _apices_ of criticism, whether historical, or appreciative, or even philosophical, were beyond his climb. He shows that constant necessity or temptation of engaging in comment—eulogistic or controversial—upon the _ephemera critica_ of the time, which has been one of the worst results of the change of the lectures from Latin to English. You could not, in the stately old vehicle, do more than occasionally decline upon such a lower level as this. Mr Shairp is always citing and fencing with (or extolling reviewer-fashion) Arnold or Bagehot, Hutton or Myers. _Quotidiana quotidie moriuntur_; and, though no doubt it saves much trouble to Professors if they can take out of a newspaper or a review, or even a recent book, on their way to Oxford, a text for an hour’s sermon, their state _sub specie æternitatis_ is far from the more gracious. Oxford is constantly making new statutes now; I think one forbidding any citation from this Chair of critical or creative literature less than thirty years old would not be bad.

More happy, if not always more critical, were his dealings with things Scottish, where sympathy lifted him out of the peddling, and transformed the parochial. On Burns (even though there must have been searchings of heart there) he could sometimes, though by no means always, speak excellently; on Scott superexcellently; on Wordsworth almost as well; on the Highland poets (if we do not forget our salt-cellar) best of all, because he spoke with knowledge and not as Mr Arnold. His work is always amiable, often admirable: I wish I could say that it is always or often critical.[1145]

[Sidenote: _Palgrave._]

The great achievement of Mr Shairp’s successor, Francis Turner Palgrave, in regard to literary criticism, is an indirect one, and had been mostly done years and decades before he was elected to the Chair. Indeed, I think little if anything was given to the world as the direct result of his professorial work. As an actual critic or reviewer, Palgrave was no doubt distinguished not over-favourably by that tendency to “splash” and _tapage_ of manner which he shared with Kinglake and some other writers of the mid-nineteenth century, and which has been recently revived. But his real taste was in a manner warranted by his friendships; and his friendships must almost have kept him right if he had had less taste. He may have profited largely by these friendships in the composition of the two parts of that really _Golden Treasury_, which, if it does not achieve the impossible in giving everybody what he wants, all that he wants, and nothing that he does not want, is by general confession the most successful attempt in a quite appallingly difficult kind. The second part, which has of course been the most criticised, seems to me even more remarkable than the first, as showing an almost complete freedom from one easily besetting sin, the tendency not to relish styles that have come in since the critic “commenced” in criticism.

[Sidenote: Salutantur vivi.]

Of the late and the present holders of the Chair we are happily precluded from speaking critically. May the bar not soon be lifted!

-----

Footnote 1105:

Of Whitfield (or Whit_feld_, as some write) I have found nothing but
that he wrote some Latin verses on William the Third. The second
volume of William Hawkins’s _Tracts_ (1758) contains, besides a
ridiculous tragedy, _Henry and Rosamond_, an _Essay on Drama_,
principally occupied by carpings at Mason’s _Elfrida_, and some
Letters on Pope’s Commentary on Homer—very small critical beer. About
Wheeler I find less even than about Whitfield. The piety of his son
published—long after date and in our own times—1870—the _Prælections_
of John Randolph, a man who, besides holding several other
professorships at Oxford, attained to eminence in the Church, and died
Bishop of London in 1813. They are very sober and respectable. There
is in poetry a _non contemnenda proprietas quod imitando præcipiat_;
and the warning, _non aliunde artis suæ rudimenta desumet Criticus
nisi ex sanæ Logices præceptis_, might with advantage have been
observed oftener than it has been. But Randolph sticks in the bark and
the letter. Holmes, a poet after a fashion, a theologian, and what
not, seems to have written more freely on anything than on criticism.

Footnote 1106:

He complies with the requirements of method and fashion by dealing
_generally_ with the End and Usefulness of Poetry, its Kinds and so
forth. But all this we have had a thousand times. What we have here
specially is a comparison, and a new comparison.

Footnote 1107:

Vol. i. p. 57 _sq._

Footnote 1108:

Southey, himself a proper moral man in all conscience, but a sensible
one withal, somewhere remarks, “said well but not wisely” on Hurdis’s

“Give me the steed
Whose generous efforts bore the prize away,
I care not for his grandsire or his dam.”

A mild echo of the revolutionary period!

Footnote 1109:

In a review in the _British Critic_ (1814), reprinted in _Papers and
Reviews_, Oxford and London, 1877.

Footnote 1110:

See the _Remains_, edited by his son. London, 1871.

Footnote 1111:

First published at the end of his tenure in 1813. My copy is the 2nd
ed., Oxford, 1828.

Footnote 1112:

See remarks on Trapp, pp. 6 and 7 ed. cit.

Footnote 1113:

_V._ pp. 187, 197, 390, 229, 177.

Footnote 1114:

Keble, however, was right in specifying the chief exception—the
admirable prælection on _Epitaphs_ (No. 27, p. 340).

Footnote 1115:

This is all the more tantalising in that his definition of _Judicium_
in _Præl._ 2 seems to promise nothing less than an inquiry into the
critical and appreciative faculty as regards Poetry.

Footnote 1116:

_V._ vol. i.

Footnote 1117:

London, 1826.

Footnote 1118:

See Beddoes’ _Letters_ (ed. Gosse, London, 1894), p. 68: “Mr Milman
(our poetry professor) has made me quite unfashionable here by
denouncing me as one of a ‘villainous school.’” These Letters are
crammed with matter of literary and critical interest. I was much
tempted to give them a place in the text as illustrating the critical
opinions of a person in whom great wits and madness were rather
blended than allied; in the transition generation—the _mezzanine_
floor—of 1800-1830.

Footnote 1119:

_Prælectiones Academicæ Oxonii habitæ annis_ 1832-41. Oxford, 1844. 2
vols., but continuously paged.

Footnote 1120:

_Occasional Papers and Reviews_, by John Keble, M.A. Oxford and
London, 1877.

Footnote 1121:

_Occ. Pap._, p. 62.

Footnote 1122:

The place most perilously aleatory is the fling in _Occ. Pap._, p. 87,
at “Mr Leigh Hunt _and his miserable followers_.”

Footnote 1123:

_Occ. Pap._, p. 6.

Footnote 1124:

Ibid., p. 150.

Footnote 1125:

Ibid., pp. 98-102.

Footnote 1126:

Those who make the contrast will, however, I think, find out that
Arnold owes more to his forerunner than might be gathered from his
published lectures.

Footnote 1127:

P. 312.

Footnote 1128:

_Præl. Ac._, p. 281.

Footnote 1129:

It occupies seven Prælections (xvii.-xxiii.) and some 200 pages.

Footnote 1130:

ii. 415.

Footnote 1131:

ii. 586.

Footnote 1132:

ii. 641. He has a liking for Horace; but objects to him (not quite
unreasonably) as _sordidior quidem_ in his Epicureanism, when you
compare him with Lucretius.

Footnote 1133:

He allows him, as well as Byron and Shelley, the plea of _vix compos_
in certain respects.

Footnote 1134:

ii. 678 _sq._ and elsewhere.

Footnote 1135:

I pass, as needless to dwell on at length, the excellence of his
style and expression in these lectures. “So acute in remark, so
beautiful in language,” as Newman says in the letter printed in _Occ.
Pap._, p. xii. _sq._

Footnote 1136:

My only _possession_ is _De Re Critica Prælectiones_. Oxford, 1847.

Footnote 1137:

My copy, which is “from the author” to some one unknown, has not a few
pen-corrections, apparently in his own hand.

Footnote 1138:

Vol. ii. p. 372.

Footnote 1139:

It is particularly unfortunate that he has endeavoured to construct a
theory of Longinus as a statesman-critic, comparing him with Burke. I
have already said that I do not think the identification of the author
of the book with Zenobia’s prime minister in the least disproved or
(with the materials at present at disposal) disprovable: but it
certainly is not proved to the point of serving as basis to such a
theory.

Footnote 1140:

With reference to Schlegel and Madame de Staël.

Footnote 1141:

His sermons have been disrespectfully spoken of; but I think unjustly.
I heard them myself in pretty close juxtaposition with those of Pusey
and Wilberforce, and even with the, in both senses, rare discourses of
Mansel. In vigour and body they were nowhere beside any of these; but
they could fairly hold their own in the softer ways of style.

Footnote 1142:

First Series (comprising the “Inaugural,” with two others on
“Provincial Poetry” and _The Dream of Gerontius_), London, 1869. A
second appeared in 1877.

Footnote 1143:

_Aspects of Poetry_ (London, 1881), p. 30.

Footnote 1144:

Ibid., p. 157.

Footnote 1145:

How entirely _un_critical he was may be judged from the fact that he
brackets Voltaire and Diderot as apostles of the _Aufklärung_ in an
anti-Romantic sense.