Chapter LIII: Appendix: II (1)

AMERICAN CRITICISM.

AN ATTEMPT IN OUTLINE ONLY—ITS DIFFICULTIES— THE EARLY STAGES—THE
ORIGINS AND PIONEERS— TICKNOR—LONGFELLOW—EMERSON—POE— LOWELL: HIS
GENERAL POSITION—‘AMONG MY BOOKS’— ‘MY STUDY WINDOWS‘—‘ESSAYS ON THE
ENGLISH POETS’— LAST ESSAYS—O. W. HOLMES—THE WHOLE DUTY OF CRITICS
STATED BY HIM _IN ALIA MATERIA_— WHITMAN AND THE “DEMOCRATIC” IDEAL—
MARGARET FULLER— RIPLEY—WHIPPLE—LANIER.

[Sidenote: _An attempt in outline only._]

I am very well aware of the arguments which may be advanced against attempting to extend our survey of criticism across the Atlantic. I at least do not undervalue the apparently formal, but in truth real, objection that we have undertaken _European_ criticism only: while I appreciate the opposite demur, that the space of an appendix is as uncomplimentary and as uncomplementary as total exclusion would be. But after having taken counsel of more than one American friend, by no means specially Anglophile in temper, I found that, apparently, the inclusion even in this form would be at least sometimes taken in the spirit in which it is meant, while on the other hand I had myself felt very strongly the disadvantage of excluding such a critic as Mr Lowell, who has all the characteristics of the best of our own with an inviting _differentia_. The bursting-point, however, of this volume is pretty nearly reached; and I must again observe that there is no invidious intention in the proportion of the notice. I have endeavoured to allot to Mr Lowell himself a space (allowing for differences of scale and type) not, I think, unfair in proportion to his English fellows; others I have had to survey more in summary. But I hope that the whole may at any rate provide a not inadequate outline-sketch of the subject; and in this hope I submit it, not merely to English readers, but to those still more nearly concerned, from some of whom this book has received attention at once of the most candid (in the better pre-Sheridanian sense of that word) and of the most searchingly competent.

[Sidenote: _Its difficulties._]

The difficulties of the task are complicated by the necessity, according to our plan, of omitting living writers. The history of American criticism appears, even more than that of other departments of literature, to be very mainly a history of the present; and I could write _ex abundanti_ on that. The “middle distance” is also well provided. But the origins are singularly obscure, and appear to be regarded with neither pride nor interest by Americans themselves. When I thought of this excursus first, some years ago, I was referred by an American friend to two articles[1146] which had appeared not long before in _The International Monthly_ on “American Literary Criticism and the Doctrine of Evolution.” The title gave me some forebodings in its doubleness; yet this might be interpreted favourably, for how can you treat the “evolution” of a subject without treating its history? I found, however, that the author, though his papers lacked neither thought nor style, was wholly occupied with the doctrine of evolutionary criticism generally, as against judicial and appreciative; and that he did not even propose to meddle with the history of his subject save by occasional allusion. The histories of American literature have afforded me something more, but not much.

[Sidenote: _The early stages._]

I do not mention this in any spirit of fault-finding, for few people are less likely than myself to need reminding that in literary and critical history, as elsewhere, you cannot make bricks without straw, and still less without clay. There was, and there could be, little attempt at important criticism in “colonial” times, and the immense material expansion of the earlier Republican period was very little more favourable to it than the quiescence and dependence of the Monarchical.[1147]

The definite entrance of the United States into the society of nations, after the second war with England and the settlement of Europe by the final suppression of Napoleon, as necessarily brought with it the organisation of critical as of other employment for the intellect. [Sidenote: _The origins and pioneers._] There is something agreeably Arcadian in the idea of Longfellow, a boy of nineteen, being sent to Europe by the trustees of his college to qualify himself for a Chair of Literature; but the fact is no more and no less creditable to these functionaries than it is symbolic of the new tendencies of the time. Still, Longfellow was not actually the apostle of comparative and extensive criticism in America. Ticknor, his elder by eighteen years, had, partly no doubt by this very fact of the admission of his country to the full franchise of nations, been induced to give up the study and practice of the law, and to devote himself to literature, in the very year of Waterloo itself. And he too, after a sojourn in Europe, became, some years before his fellow at Bowdoin, Professor of Modern Languages and Belles Lettres at Harvard. Emerson, born between the two, was a little later in treading the same road than either, but he trod it; and his visit to Europe, in 1833, determined the critical writings and lectures which followed.

These three I should take to be the founders of American criticism of the adult and accomplished kind, and they represent it, interestingly enough, in three different ways. It is true that no one of them is first of all a critic, or even, as Mr. Lowell was afterwards, a critic in power at least equal to that of any other of his qualities. But this was only in the nature of things.

[Sidenote: _Ticknor._]

It is not merely because Ticknor’s lifework was a literary history that one may call him first of all a literary historian. The fact that the _History of Spanish Literature_, more than fifty years after its publication, and nearly seventy after its inception, although the interval has been one of the fiercest in pursuing, and one of the most voluminous in recording, literary explorations, retains, and is likely to retain, its position not merely as a classic, but as an authority, shows some pre-established harmony between writer and task. Yet, though the provinces of the literary historian and the critic overlap to a very large extent,—though the historian who is not a critic must be a mere reference-monger, and the critic who is not a historian a mere bellettrist,—yet there are skirts and fringes of each province which are not necessarily part of the other. Ticknor is rather less of a critic than he is of a historian—his grouping of facts, his investigation and statement of them, his perception of origins and connections, are all a little superior to his appreciation pure and simple. Yet there are few who can afford to look down on him in this latter respect; and as historical critic and critical historian I do not know where to look for his superior, while I should have very soon done looking for his equals.

[Sidenote: _Longfellow._]

Longfellow (for it will be convenient to take Emerson last) shows us, as a matter of course, a different critical phase. He never, so far as I know, wrote any connected study of literature, and I do not think that it would have been very good if he had. His lectures, which were necessarily numerous, and the articles which he wrote (I believe in no small numbers) have never taken any important position, and again I should doubt whether, if we had them or more of them, anything very remarkable would be included.[1148] Yet he had, and displayed in the intensest degree, that most agreeable and not least profitable function of the critical faculty which attaches itself to literature, assimilates it, transforms it into instruction and delight. This is noticeable in almost every page of his poems: it is the very genesis of many of them, and perhaps of the best of them: it is at once the explanation and the refutation of the charge of want of originality brought against him. So in his prose. _Hyperion_ and _Outre-Mer_ are permeated and saturated with it. The literature of Germany, the literature of Spain, have done more than colour the poet’s or prose-writer’s work; they have penetrated to its substance, fed it, been digested and absorbed into its very life. From _The Golden Legend_ and _The Spanish Student_ to the smallest fragments this process is noteworthy. And while it shows, on the part of the writer himself, processes necessary to the critic, in intenser and more poetic form, it performs on the reader “the office of the critic”— his hierophantic, initiating, inoculating office—in the most vivid and forcible manner and degree. No one who, susceptible to literature, but more or less ignorant of it, reads Longfellow but must, consciously or unconsciously, imbibe something of literature itself—of a literature far wider and deeper than that which the poet (though I speak as a lifelong lover of Longfellow’s poetry) himself creates.

[Sidenote: _Emerson._]

That Emerson also is not first of all a critic is not surprising, because, as most people have seen, Emerson is not, first of all, anything but Emerson. But he is in some ways more of a critic than either of the others, and the reason why he is not more so still is that, like his master or analogue Carlyle, he rather refuses to look on literature as literature. His ethical preoccupations and his transcendentalism alike prevent him from doing this—he is Carlyle _plus_ Vinet. In the second place, if I may say so without offence, he shows us, as neither Ticknor nor Longfellow, both of whom were too cosmopolitan, shows us, the American touch-me-not-ishness, the somewhat unnecessary affectation of nationality. The literary chauvinism of the famous lecture on “The American Scholar” is perhaps more apparent than real; but his query, “Who is Southey?” in the record of his interview with Landor, is awkward. “Southey is, say what you like about his poetry or his politics, one of the greatest _men of letters_ of all time,” is the answer which a critic should have given to himself. Yet there is much good positive criticism in Emerson (if there can be said to be anything positive in him), and there is still more of that vague stimulative force which is so noticeable in these first great writers of America, and which is so interesting when we consider their circumstances, individual and national. In the _English Traits_ and the _Representative Men_, in the lectures and elsewhere, there is always ringing to the fit ear the “_Tolle, lege!_” of the greater critics, with the comment which helps to make the book understood, when it is taken up and read.

[Sidenote: _Poe._]

By the ’Thirties and ’Forties of the nineteenth century the European pilgrimage was no longer necessary to fetch the critical spark home. American criticism became abundant, and not merely abundant. In no case do I so much regret the necessity of compression as in that of Poe. The extreme and almost incomprehensible injustice with which the ill-fated author of _Ligeia_ and _The Haunted Palace_ was so long treated by his countrymen has, I believe, abated; and I have seen, in the article referred to, a complimentary, though merely passing, reference to him as a critic. But there is still room, I think, for some substantial _Rettung_, as Lessing would have said. The substance would have to be considerable, for the matter under consideration,[1149] which is not small in bulk, is heterogeneous, and even to some extent chaotic. More than any other part of Poe’s work it is the scapegoat of his unfavourable circumstances, of his patchy education, of his weaknesses in conduct, temper, and constitution. A great deal is mere hack-writing— _chaînes de l’esclavage_—stuff never meant to abide the steady judgment of posterity. You may, if you please, pick out of it the most amazing things, such[1150] as that “for one Fouqué there are fifty Molières” (I am no undervaluer of Fouqué, but I wish—I _do_ wish—that I knew where to look for even one of the forty-nine additional Poquelins); and “for one Dickens ... five million ... Fieldings,” where perhaps five million marks of exclamation might not inadequately meet the case. Generous as is the praise which he heaps upon Mrs Browning and Mr Horne; true as much of what he says is; one feels that his observations want _reducing_, adjusting, co-ordinating under the calmer influence of comparative and universal criticism. There was not the slightest reason why he should get into such a frantic rage with, the “devilled kidneys” (a most pleasant and wholesome food) in that very pleasant and wholesome book _Charles O’Malley_; or why he should have so furiously resented Mr Lowell’s remarks on himself in the _Fable for Critics_, open as these are to criticism; or why he should have said or done a hundred other things of the kind. His “hungry heart and burning,” his ill-disciplined intellect and temper, drove him in all sorts of directions, and not unfrequently in the wrong ones.

Yet his critical instincts were almost always right; and not seldom they were remarkably original. Considering what the ways of poets are, and that Poe had his full share of the then prevailing American soreness towards “British” writers, I know few things in literature more pleasant and edifying at once than his enthusiastic and intelligent welcome of Tennyson. “The Rationale of Verse,” though there are faults in it, due to ignorance or carelessness in terminology, to haste, and to imperfect reading, is one of the best things ever written on English prosody, and quite astonishingly original. Although, when he takes a great deal of pains it is apt to be rather lost labour, as, for instance, in the comically laborious dissection of Longfellow’s _Spanish Student_ (a delightful thing if taken in the proper way), the acuteness which he often shows even in such pieces, and much more in his lighter _aperçus_, is remarkable. The _Marginalia_ are full of good things—I find, after reading them anew for this purpose, that my reference slips “stand like the corn arow.” His dislike of German criticism[1151] may have been half opposition to Carlyle, between whom and himself there was a gulf fixed; and he should not have said that Macaulay had more true critical spirit than both the Schlegels put together. But this very passage is worth pondering, and it was very bold at the time. I do not think he borrowed the true observation of the resemblance between _Hudibras_ and the _Satyre Menippée_.[1152] His defence of the “rhetorician’s rules”[1153] is just and lively: it is not a little noteworthy that he, the most apparently irregular and spasmodic of men of genius, perfectly understands the importance of Form.

And all this, let it be remembered, was written, not merely in distress, and in disease, and sometimes in despair, but—to adapt the Dickensian and Gautieresque juxtaposition—in the ’Thirties and 'Forties, when, as we have seen, criticism in England itself had fallen into the state from which it was aroused by Matthew Arnold years after Poe’s death; when Carlyle was turning his back on it, when Macaulay was acknowledging that he was not the man for it, when the men who meddled with it were showing absolute want of comprehension of Tennyson, and passing Browning over as beneath their notice. It was written in spite of the bad influence (discernible enough, as it is, in Poe) of the swaggering, swashbuckler fashion of “British” criticism itself. It was written before—long before in most cases—Lowell came to his maturity as a critic. It is, except in flashes and indications, mostly a might-have-been. But that might-have-been, translated into fact, would, I think, have ranked with the most noteworthy critical achievements that we possess in regard to poetry and _belles-lettres_. On other departments Poe could probably never, in the most favourable circumstances, have laid much hold. But in his own sphere he not only did the works, but knew those who did them and how they were done.

[Sidenote: _Lowell: his general position._]

On the whole, however, I suppose that a majority of the best judges would award the place of premier critic of America to Mr Lowell, and I should certainly not attempt to contest the judgment. He had, in an eminent degree, most of the qualities which our long examination has enabled us to specify as generally found in good critics; catholic and observant reading, real enthusiasm for literature, sanity of judgment, good-humour, width of view, and (though this perhaps in rather less measure than the others) methodic arrangement and grasp. He was free, not merely from the defects which are the opposites of these good qualities, but from others—the niggling and carping of the gerund-grinder and the _gradus_-hunter,[1154] the hideboundness of the type-and-kind critic, and above all the incomprehensible and yet all-pervading inability to like something because it is not something else. He could put his perceptions brightly and forcibly—in a way perhaps rather tempting to re-read than at once sinking into the memory, but not the less excellent, and perhaps (in criticism) rather the more uncommon, for that.

On the wrong side of the account there are of course some things to put. I shall not be suspected of wishing to banish quips and cranks from criticism, but Mr Lowell was perhaps a little too prodigal of them. His patriotism was a little aggressive—not in the way (which he had far too much critical good sense ever to tread) of overvaluing his countrymen’s literary performances, but in too often infusing into his criticism a sort of _Nemo-me-impune-lacessit_ flavour which was quite unnecessary, and in fact almost entirely irrelevant. And lastly, as has been hinted above, his grasp was not always sure. To compare the two papers on Gray, written at no great interval of time, by him and by his slightly younger contemporary Mr Arnold, is very interesting and instructive. I am not sure that, if it were just (or indeed possible) to extract separate good critical things, like nuggets, from the two essays, and weigh the parcels against each other, the American would not prove the richer, even allowing weight for length. But Gray is not “put” in the Harvard man’s essay as he is in the Oxonian’s: the critical contact is less full and vital, the congress less complete. It may be urged, indeed, that the selection is not quite fair, because of the unusual sympathy, and as it were harmony pre-established, between the Graian and the Arnoldian temperaments; but the same slight shortcoming will be found elsewhere.[1155]

[Sidenote: Among my Books.]

Mr Lowell’s best known book of literary criticism is, no doubt, _Among my Books_; but though it shows his method characteristically enough, it is by no means mainly bookish: in fact, I think there is rather less in it about the literary part of the matter than in others. The famous essay on “Dryden” is of course a standard, and perhaps its author’s diploma-piece as a critic; and the “Shakespeare once More” (a title suggested by Goethe) is a very interesting literary _pot-pourri_. But the “Lessing” and the “Rousseau” are chiefly biographical; and such papers as “Witchcraft” and “New England,” attractive as they are, are from the literary point of view quite “off,” as literary slang has it. There is nothing to object to in this, for the general title covers subjects suggested by books, or the subjects of books, quite as amply as books-by-themselves-books; and there can be no doubt that the reader usually likes the others best. But the whole volume shows its author well as a scholar but not a pedant, a man of letters who is also a man of the world, and a judge who, though by no means ideally impartial, and even with a tolerably well-stuffed portfolio of prejudices, can give judgments not to be pooh-poohed at the worst, and at the best things worthy to take their place with the best of judge-made law in our subject.

[Sidenote: My Study Windows.]

The equally well-known _My Study Windows_ does not contain, as the title may seem to intimate, matter of _more_ mixed quality as regards pure literature, but the quality is still mixed. Mr Lowell was not happy in his reception of the avatar of Mr Swinburne: it is indeed so rare for a man of more than middle age to be quite at focus with a new poet, that some of the wiser or more pusillanimous of our kind decline in such cases to register a formal judgment. The “Carlyle” is much tainted by political prejudice, though it does credit to Mr Lowell’s perspicacity to have so early found out in Carlyle that real “Toryism” which was so long mistaken. But the “Chaucer” and the “Pope”—differ here and there with them as we may or must—are solid and substantive contributions to the main shelf of criticism; while in the lower ranges “The Life and Letters of James Gates Perceval” only needed more quotation and more ruthlessness to make it a pendant to Macaulay’s “Montgomery.”

[Sidenote: Essays on the English Poets.]

The Essays which have been reprinted in England, with the permission of Mr Lowell and with a Preface by his own hands, as _Essays on the English Poets_[1156] (including those on Lessing and Rousseau as a very welcome though not exceedingly relevant bonus or make-weight), are partly drawn from the two books just noticed. Some of them seem to have been written rather early; most were originally lectures to a university, and may have a little sacrificed literature to instruction. The best by a good deal is, I think, the “Wordsworth,”[1157] which, though there are many good essays on Wordsworth to make up for the many bad ones, deserves to rank almost with the best. It is seldom that in a single essay one finds such a capital specimen of delicate appreciation as the comparison of the fall of Goethe’s _Ueber allen Gipfeln_ to “blossoms shaken down by a noonday breeze on turf”; so good an example of the criticism of epigram as “Wordsworth is the historian of Wordsworthshire”;[1158] and so fine and just a critical simile as the comparison of Milton’s verse to a mixed fleet of men-of-war and merchantmen, which comes shortly after. The “Milton” itself has more to do with Milton’s editor and biographer than with Milton, and is marred by that curious impatience of a reasoned prosody which appears in Mr Lowell so often. So is the Spenser—quite admirable in great part of it—by the author’s well-known and excessive depreciation of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century poetry.[1159] The “Keats” leaves off just when we are expecting the critic to begin. As if to carry out unity of cross-purpose, if of nothing more, the “Lessing” hardly says anything about Lessing’s criticism, and the “Rousseau” is chiefly about Rousseau as a man. But though, putting the “Wordsworth” aside, the contents of the volume would hardly have given us a fair idea of Mr Lowell’s critical powers by themselves, it could have been written by no bad critic as a whole, and in part could only have been written by a very good one.

[Sidenote: _Last Essays._]

As nearly always, too, this critic’s last work is of his best. The “Gray” we have noticed. The “Landor” is mainly, though not wholly, personal; and the “Walton,” as a “Walton” must be and ought to be, rather of life rather than of literature. But the paper on the _Areopagitica_ is an admirable piece, and “On the Study of Modern Languages” stands, I think, alone among the arguments on its side, distinguished at once by competent knowledge and judicial fairness in regard to ancient and modern alike.

So much critical gift, indeed, of so wide a range and so happy in its display, is seldom to be found. And though nothing is more impertinent than to recommend a representative to a constituency to which you do not yourself belong, I think that perhaps these volumes may give me the right to say that if I were an American I should vote for Mr Lowell, and that whatever might be my nationality I should say “Well done!” if he were elected.

[Sidenote: _O. W. Holmes._]

To pass to yet another of the same distinguished group. There is, though a great deal of indirect, not much direct criticism in the omniform and (when the writer could keep the cant of anti-cant out) almost always agreeable trilogy of the _Breakfast-Table_. But there is one passage[1160] in the last of the three which, with hardly an alteration, is so admirable and final a description of the duty of the critic himself that I must borrow it with some slight interlineations. These, I am sure, Dr Holmes—if only as to a brother member of the Rabelais Club of pleasant memory—would not have refused me:—

[Sidenote: _The whole duty of critics stated by him_ in alia materia.]

“Now the present case, as the (critic)/doctor sees it, is just exactly
such a collection of paltry individual facts as never was before—a
snarl and tangle of special conditions out of which it is his business
to wind as much thread as he can. It is a good deal as when a painter
goes to take the portrait of any sitter who happens to send for him.
He has seen just such noses, and just such eyes, and just such mouths:
but he never saw exactly such a face before, and his business is with
that and no other person’s—with the features of the worthy father of a
family before him, and not with the portraits he has seen in
galleries, or books, or Mr Copley’s grand pictures of the fine old
Tories, or the Apollos and Jupiters of Greek sculpture. It is the same
with (critic’s subject)/the patient. His (production)/disease has
features of its own; there never was and never will be another case in
all respects exactly like it. If a (critic)/doctor has science without
common-sense he treats a (book)/fever, but not this man’s
(book)/fever. If he has common-sense without science he treats this
man’s (book)/fever without knowing the general laws that govern (books
and all literature)/all fevers and all vital movements.”

Which thing let it be frontlet and wristlet to whosoever meddles with criticism.

[Sidenote: _Whitman and the “Democratic” ideal._]

The poet who seems to some possibly rash non-American persons to divide with Poe the prize due to the worthiest in American poetry, was also a critic—less of the professional kind, much more _borné_, but more concentrated, and in some ways more influential. The critical views of Walt Whitman are scattered all over his not inconsiderable works, but are to be found brought together and marshalled most aggressively in his prose _Democratic Vistas_, with their “General Notes,” and in the _numeris lege solutis_ of the _Song of the Exposition_. According to these views, though Whitman speaks of individual writers (not merely Shakespeare but even Scott) with warm admiration, and with nothing of the curious blindness which has characterised some of his followers in the line, “English literature is not great” because it is anti-Democratic and Feudal. These “Notes” must develop something quite different, and of the nature of an antidote. All “warrior epics” are “void, inanimate, passed,” and so forth. The expression of this is often, as Whitman’s expression constantly is, admirable, and the temper of it is always intentionally wholesome and generous. If I regard it as hopelessly bad criticism, it is not (to repeat the refrain once more) because I disagree with its conclusions, but because it seems to me to start from a hopelessly wrong principle, and to proceed on hopelessly mistaken methods. That principle and those methods, _mutatis mutandis_, would justify _me_ in dismissing—nay, would force me to dismiss—as void, inanimate, worthless, mischievous, something of Heine, much of Shelley, more of Hugo, and very nearly the whole of Whitman himself—four poets in four different countries born, whom, as it happens, if I were the responsible literary adviser of a new King Arthur of Poetry, I should bid him summon among the very first to his Round Table. To the critic, as I understand criticism (and if I may adapt a famous text of Scripture), Feudalism is nothing and Democracy is nothing, but the Spirit of Literature. Whitman did not think so, and unfortunately his ideas (which may have been partly suggested by Emerson) have found followers who have not always mellowed and antidoted the crude poison of theory with the generous wine of temperament and expression.

Of the remarkable, if somewhat abortive, “Transcendental” group in the latter part of the first half of the nineteenth century, George Ripley and Margaret Fuller seem to call for notice here: as specimens of later writers, Whipple and Sidney Lanier may suffice, in the impossibility of including a considerable _numerus_.[1161]

[Sidenote: _Margaret Fuller._]

The critical writings of the Marchesa Ossoli are, I suppose, chiefly contained in the volumes of her works entitled _Art, Literature, and Drama_, and _Life Without and Life Within_. They have much interest, and I think deserve the position assigned to her[1162] as the first American woman who had regularly trained for criticism, and as being in a way the chief of all such to the present day. They have, however, certain characteristics which perhaps might be anticipated. The merely silly reproach of transcendentalism leaves “Margaret” unscathed. She does not talk nonsense. But she does talk a little vaguely and loosely; and it does seem rather difficult for her to keep her eye steadily on any one object. We know that she will overvalue Goethe; it was, as we have pointed out, the very form and pressure of the time that made her do so, and probably to no country was the gospel according to Wolfgang a more powerful and beneficent gospel than to the United States of America in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. But when we read, _in English_, that “the frail Philina, graceful though contemptible, presents the degradation incident to an attempt at leading an exclusively poetic life,” or that “not even in Shakespeare” has she “felt the organising power of genius as in” Ottilie of the _Wahlverwandtschaften_, we think a great deal more than there is room or necessity here to say. The article on Poe’s Poems is very curious; the critic appears as a sort of she-Balaam, without that unlucky prophet’s generous frankness when he found he could not help it; she cannot ban, and will not bless freely. That on _Philip van Artevelde_ is more curious still in another way. It makes the most enormous and yet indecisive sweeps before attacking its subject, feints at the whole question of Classic _v._ Romantic, says more about Alfieri (who seems to have been Margaret’s favourite poet) than about Taylor, and finally despatches the nominal theme in very few and very inadequate words. She is always attractive[1163]—this “_Margarita_ del Occidente”—this new “Margarite of America,” and the ideas which, before reading, some may have formed of her as of a sort of “mother of all such as are schoolmarms” melt at once in contact with her work. But would she ever have become a great critic? I doubt it; she certainly had not become one when she died. She was thinking of things other than the Power of the Word. Better, if anybody likes; but other.

[Sidenote: _Ripley._]

Her editor, I think, and, with Emerson, certainly her teacher, the Reverend George Ripley, did very much to imbue his country with foreign literature; not a little to help it to understand that literature. Ripley has been very highly spoken of, by good authorities, for the attempts which he made to produce a higher standard and a wider range of literary scholarship in the United States: and in fact there is no doubt that the Transcendental group did yeoman’s service in this way, their work not a little resembling that done in Germany a hundred years, or a little less, earlier. But I do not know many of his later Reviews in the _Tribune_, and his _Specimens of Foreign Literature_, two volumes published at Boston in 1838 as the ushers and samples of a much larger library of the subject, are not in the least literary, but purely philosophical. They give translated extracts from Cousin, Jouffroy, and Benjamin Constant, with Introductions and rather copious notes or short excursus. The whole shows knowledge, judgment, and a real critical capacity; but these good gifts are, as has been said, devoted to the philosophic, not the literary character and achievement of their subjects, and it is very noticeable that of the nearly twenty books or parts of books which are announced as to form the intended library, more than half are purely philosophical and only a small part purely literary.

[Sidenote: _Whipple._]

Of Whipple I chiefly know the two volumes of _Essays and Reviews_, which appeared as long ago as 1849. He must have written much else, as he did not die till 1886; but the contents of these volumes are bulky enough and varied enough, I should suppose, to afford a fair field of judgment. His countrymen have, I believe, rather outgrown him, and do not at present rank him very high; but the “perspective of the past,” as it “firms,” will probably establish him in a fair though not a very high place. He seems to me to have been one of the first American writers who set themselves to be critics without further ambitions, and took literature calmly to be their province in the judicial way. He might, no doubt, have had more style: not that his is bad, but that it is undistinguished, wanting more grace to win that prize and more vigour to win the other. He might also have had more grasp. His dicta are occasionally unfortunate: one reads that Pinkney has written “as well as Lovelace and Carew, better than Waller, Sedley, _Etherege_, and Dorset”; and asks for those works of Pinkney which are as good as “To Althea,” and “To Lucasta,” and “To A. L.”; better than “Phillis is my only Joy” and “To all you Ladies.”[1164] And it is strange to find a man in two minds about Keats, and sure that Barry Cornwall has “splendid traits of genius.” But these things will happen. I do not know what Whipple’s education was, but I should rather doubt whether he had been sufficiently brought up on the chief and principal things to keep his eye from wandering and “wobbling.” His article on the Elizabethan dramatists has a fatal look of being founded rather on Lamb and Hunt and Hazlitt than on Dodsley and Dilke. Still he is by no means a merely negligible quantity in our calculus. He has interesting separate things— a capital, and, for an American at the moment, very magnanimous article on Sydney Smith; two notable ones on Talfourd and “British Critics”; early, and so valuable, notices of _Jane Eyre_ and _Vanity Fair_. A paper on “South’s Sermons” makes one regret that he did not turn his attention more to older literature—perhaps he would have had more doubts about the superiority of Pinkney if he had. Again, he saw, what has often to this very day been foolishly denied, the _intellectual_ importance of Tennyson—in fact, he seems to have been on the whole more disposed to the philosophical than to the purely artistic side of poetry. Of perhaps his two most ambitious essays the “Byron” has the commonplaceness which Byron’s eulogists and detractors alike so commonly display; but the “Wordsworth” is much better. He could hardly be called a critic of genius or even of great talent, but he was fair, not ill-informed, interested and disinterested (both in the good senses) and evidently a “corn-and-seeds-man”—that is to say, a critic—“in his heart.” Which things, if they could be said of all of us, so much the better.

[Sidenote: _Lanier._]

Mr Sidney Lanier was, I believe, greatly thought of, and was the object of still greater hopes on the part of those who knew him personally; and though his career was cut short, there appear in his remains such a love for literature, and such an ardent desire to keep that love pure and high, that one cannot but be well affected to him. It is, however, rather difficult to believe that he would ever have been a really great, or even a fairly catholic and competent, critic. Occasional utterances and _aperçus_, when the planets were kind, must at most have been his portion. In the literature of criticism, which has many strange things, there is hardly anything odder than his _The English Novel and the Principle of its Development_,[1165] which is simply a long, rather discursive, and wholly laudatory review of George Eliot. The selection of the individual is a matter of little consequence: I wish that I could save myself constant repetition by printing across the dog’s-ear place of these pages the warning, “_Never_ judge a critic by your agreement with his likes and dislikes.” But the narrowing down of so mighty a theme to the glorification of _any_ single novelist of a passing day would have been enough to throw the gravest doubts on Mr Lanier’s competence.

Unluckily there is more. “The quiet and elegant narratives of Miss Austen,” as the sole notice dealt out to its subject by the author of a treatise on _the English Novel_, “speaks” that author with a disastrous finality. A man need not go all lengths for Miss Austen, just as he need not for Milton or Virgil; but if in a study of Latin or English poetry as a whole he contented himself with referring _obiter_ to “the elegant and scholarly verse of Virgil” and the “serious and careful productions of Milton,” we should know what to think of him. The oddest thing in Mr Lanier’s book, however, is his intense, his obviously genuine, and I think his quite nationally disinterested abhorrence[1166] of the “Four Masters”—of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. _Pamela_ is “a silly and hideous realisation” of a really immoral idea. Fielding’s morality is similar, but “more clownish.” Sterne “spent his life in low, brutish, inane pursuits.” He “can read none of these books without feeling as if his soul had been in the rain, draggled, muddy, miserable.” He would “blot them from the face of the earth.” They are “muck.” Praise of them is simply “well-meaning ignorance.” Is it ungenerous in face of this last statement to ask whether it is well-meaning _knowledge_ which represents “Mr B.” not once but often as not an orphan but a widower, and Pamela as the servant, not of his mother but of his wife? I know that Mr Lanier died before he could revise these lectures for publication. But the point happens to be of some, if slight, importance, and when we take it in conjunction with the facts that Mr Lanier thought admirers of _Tom Jones_ must centre their admiration on Allworthy, and that he accounted for the unpopularity of _Daniel Deronda_ by asserting that English society felt its satire too keenly, our old brocard of _judicia ignorantium_ doth something buzz i’ the ear.

But Mr Lanier, though a younger man than Mr Lowell, was, to say nothing of his inferiority in genius, practically a member of an older school, corresponding, as I have already remarked, to one which not all contemporaries of his had outgone in England itself, and which, for the matter of that, we have not universally outgone even now. Since his day American criticism (except for that in all probability passing diversion into “Democratic” parochialism which has been noticed) has become very much more cosmopolitan, very much more fully developed, and in particular very much more learned. It has perhaps, of the very latest years, gone a little too much to Germany for patterns, and plunged too often into the German _cul-de-sac_ maze of specialist monographs—a dangerous and soul-killing wilderness, wherein many positively foolish and hurtful things are done, and where at the best the places are all too often dry. Yet some of these very monographs have been executed in a manner escaping the dangers and avoiding the drynesses, and not a few both of the authors of them and of others have shown soul and sight considerably above the mere trail-hunting of the specialist. If all living American critics were to be carried off by a special epidemic, I should be sorry for two reasons—first of all, because several of them are my personal friends, and secondly, because I should have to extend this appendix to an altogether unmanageable length. But meanwhile there is no doubt that Mr Lowell handed in, once for all, the “proofs” of American criticism, and that it has nothing now to do but to go on and prosper.

-----

Footnote 1146:

Vol. ii., Nos. 1 and 2, July and August 1900 (Burlington, Vt.) The
author is Mr W. M. Payne.

Footnote 1147:

In the colonial period not even the untiring industry and the
microscopic enthusiasm of Professor Tyler have discovered anything
critical. Mr Charles F. Richardson in _American Literature, 1607-1885_
(New York and London: Putnams, 1887), i. 396, says plumply, “Criticism
did not exist in this country during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, nor did it make much showing until the nineteenth century
was well advanced.” There is far less of it, for instance, in
Washington Irving than one might expect. Perhaps some may think that
an exception ought to be made for Channing. But his Essay on Milton,
which is the chief critical thing of his known to me, produces that
sense of bafflement which, if I remember rightly, Renan expresses in
regard to him on other grounds: “We are aware that it is objected to
poetry that it gives wrong views of life....” “We gaze on Satan with
an awe not unmixed with mysterious pleasure....” &c., &c. With such
matter we have known how to deal in the sixteenth, the seventeenth,
the eighteenth century; in the nineteenth it loses significance.

Footnote 1148:

The chief source of my direct knowledge of his work of the kind is the
collection called _Drift-Wood_, which I have known for very many
years. Somewhat later—the _Drift-Wood_ papers date from before 1840—he
inserted critical introductions in his _Poets and Poetry of Europe_
(1845).

Footnote 1149:

It fills half the third volume and all the fourth in Mr Ingram’s
edition of the works (4 vols., Edinburgh, 1874).

Footnote 1150:

In the article on Lever, where some special gadfly seems to have stung
Poe.

Footnote 1151:

_Marg._, 76.

Footnote 1152:

Ibid., 114.

Footnote 1153:

Ibid., 177.

Footnote 1154:

He comes perhaps too close to this in his paper on “The Library of Old
Authors”; but there was certainly no little provocation in the
editing, and even in the selection, of some of the volumes of that
always comely and mainly comfortable series.

Footnote 1155:

On some minor defects it is not worth while to dwell. Lowell could see
that Guest had no ear for verse: yet he was all his life long as
impatient as Guest himself of that duly transferred and adapted
“classical” system of English prosody which could be easily shown to
justify almost all the things he himself liked, and to explain the
badness of those which he thought bad. He began this impatience quite
early with Poe in the _Fable for Critics_; and he never shook it off.

Footnote 1156:

London, n. d. The Preface is dated 1888.

Footnote 1157:

Ed. cit., pp. 184-239.

Footnote 1158:

Unfortunately the readers of that very peculiar kind of literature the
“County History” are not often critical students of literature itself:
so the charm of this remark may be missed.

Footnote 1159:

This intolerance of things not quite “best and principal” was almost
as much a _tic_ with him as with Mr Arnold. I was once praising some
recently printed Old French poems to him. “Are they better than
Chrestien?” he said. And he would not read them.

Footnote 1160:

_The Poet at the Breakfast-Table_, chap. v.

Footnote 1161:

The poets Bryant and Whittier have respectable reputations as critics,
and, from what I know of their other work, are likely to have deserved
them. But on the same ground I rather doubt whether it is necessary to
investigate their criticism for the present purpose. Nor do I think
that the critical work of Bayard Taylor, of which I have some
knowledge, imperatively calls for notice. American Shakespeare-critics
(with Richard Grant White at their head) might occupy a special
excursus, not without advantage.

Footnote 1162:

As, for instance, by Professor Brander Matthews, _Introduction to
American Literature_ (New York, 1896), p. 226.

Footnote 1163:

And she can sometimes be piquant. This of the Schlegels: “Men to find
plausible meaning for the deepest enigma, or to hang up each map of
literature, well painted and dotted, on its proper roller,” is quite
inspiriting and tempts one to regret that she was thrown away on
Transcendentalism and Italomania.

Footnote 1164:

One might add the question, “What has ‘Gentle George’ Etherege to do
in this galley?” though he pulls a good oar in another.

Footnote 1165:

New York, 1883. The characteristics here noted appear also in the
recently and handsomely produced book on the Elizabethan period,
_Shakespeare and his Forerunners_, 2 vols., 1903. The much earlier
_Science of English Verse_, 1880, attempts to explain prosody by
musical signs, and is thus out of the pale.

Footnote 1166:

The expressions quoted and others will be found at pp. 169-183, _op.
cit._ Lanier, though quite unprejudiced, I think, by nationality, was
badly bitten by the equally fatal though less ignoble mania of
“Progress,” and by the moral heresy. He shows the same marks as do so
many pre-Arnoldian English critics of the mid-nineteenth century.

INDEX.

Adolphus, John Leycester (1795-1862), 272 _note_. Addison, 7, 8, 38, 54, 58, 72 _sq._, 146, 176, 189, 194, 227 _note_, 231, 398. _Adventurer, The_, 67 _sq._ _Advice to an Author_, 158. _Ægri Somnia_, 337 _sq._ Æschylus, 46, 47, 103, 225, 226, 400. _Æsthetica_, Baumgarten’s, 148 _sq._ Æsthetics, v. Bk. vii. ch. v., ibid., ch. vii. _passim_. Ainger, Canon, 257 _sq._ Akenside, 57. _Aletheophilus_, 149. _Alice Fell_, 216 _note_. Alison, Archibald (1757-1839), 164-167, 291 _note_. _Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste_, 150. Amiel, Henri Frédéric (1821-1881), 388, 594-598. _Among my Books_, 637. Ampère, J. J. (1800-1864), 300. _Ancient Mariner, The_, 219. André, Yves Marc de l’Isle-, Père (1675-1764), 146, 151, 186 _note_. Andrieux, François G. J. S. (1759-1833), 130 _note_. _Anima Poetæ_, 218 _sq._, 227 _sq._ _Anti-Jacobin, The_, 286 _sq._ Antoniewicz, Herr J. von, 15 _note_, 30, 147. _Appreciations_, 548 _sq._ Ariosto, 36, 69, 77, 161, 179, 400. Aristophanes, 46, 47, 252. Aristotle, _passim_. Arnold, Matthew (1822-1888), 33, 37, 46 _note_, 55, 57, 96, 118, 120, 126, 150 _note_, 218, 222, 230, 245, 286, 295, 302 _note_, 312, 320, 326 _note_, 369, 420, 482, 505 _note_, 515-537, 589, 623. _Art d’Écrire_, Condillac’s, 99 _note_. Ashe, Thomas (1836-1889), 220 _note_. Asselineau, Charles (1820-1874), 453. _Atala_, 316. Auger, Louis S. (1772-1829), 132, 133 _note_, 136. Austen, Miss, 108.

Babou, Hippolyte (1824-1878), 453. Bacon, 153, 176, 232. Bagehot, Walter (1826-1877), 542, 543. Balzac (the elder), 311, 312. —-- (the younger), 303, 457. Banville, Théodore de (1823-1891), 450. Barbazan, 177. Barbey d’Aurévilly, Jules (1808-1889), 433-436. Basil, St, 538 _note_. Batteux, 29, 43, 131. Baudelaire, Charles (1821-1867), 452. Baumgarten, Alex. G. (1714-1762), 148-150, 392. _Baviad_ and _Mæviad, The_, 286 _sq._ Béat de Muralt. See Muralt. Beattie, 57. Beaumont, Sir George, 205. Beddoes, 620, 621. Beers, Mr H. A., 69 _note_. _Beiträge_, Gottsched’s, 20. Benlowes, Edward (1603-1676), 6, 7. Bentley, 183 _note_. _Bertram_, Coleridge’s critique on, 213 _note_, 219 _note_. Beyle, Henri (1783-1842), 135-139, 160. _Bijoux Indiscrets, Les_, 94. _Biographia Literaria_, 201 _sq._ _Blackwood’s Magazine_, 502-504. See also De Quincey, Lockhart, Maginn, Wilson. Blair, 104, 128, 131, 157 _note_, 163 _note_, 166. Blake, William (1757-1827), 232, 236, 244, 266-269. Blankenberg, 150. _Blossoms of Helicon, The_, 7 _note_. Boas, Herr, 380 _note_. Boccaccio, 124. Bodmer, Johann Jakob (1698-1785), 20-28, 193, 392. Boileau, 14, 21, 124, 129, 177, 377. _Bon Gaultier Ballads, The_, 289. Borinski, Dr K., 16 _note_, _sq._ Borrow, George, 283 _note_. Bosanquet, Mr, 168, 169 _note_, 183 _note_, 573 _note_. Bouhours, 12, 131. Bowles, William Lisle (1762-1850), 218, 229, 279-281. Boyer [Bowyer], 218. —-- Philoxène (1827-1867), 453. Bradley, Prof., 616, 629. Braitmaier, Herr F., 15 _note_, and Bk. vii. ch. ii. _passim_, 148. Brandes, Dr, 386 _note_. Breitinger, Johann Jakob (1701-1776), 20-28, 148. Bridges, Mr Robert, 207 _note_. Brimley, George (1819-1857), 504-508. _British Muse, The_, 175 _note_. Browne, Sir T., 297. Browning, Mrs, 514 _note_. Brumoy, 39, 43 _note_. Brunetière, M., 184, 309, 455, 469. Bryant, 641 _note_. Brydges, Sir Samuel Egerton (1762-1837), 283, 284. Buchanan, Mr Robert, 561 _note_. Buchner, August (1591-1661), 17. Bunyan, 161, 163. Bürger, Gottfried August (1747-1794), 378, 379, 384, 576. Burke, Edmund (1729-1797), 162-164, 229, 400. Butler, Samuel (1612-1680), 5-7. Byron, George Gordon, Lord (1788-1824), 110, 136, 228, 234, 280-282, 371 _sq._, 376.

Caine, Mr Hall, 426 _note_. Callières, 12, 176. Campbell, Mr Dykes, 219 _note_, 221 _note_. —-- Thomas (1777-1844), 112 _note_, 232, 272-274. Canning, 288 _sq._ Capell, Edward (1713-1781), 175 _note_. Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881), 38, 48, 385, 387 _sq._, 393, 416 _sq._, 405-409, 537 _sq._ Caro, Esme Marie (1826-1887), 465, 466. Carrière, Moritz (b. 1817), 573-575. Castelvetro, viii, 195. Catullus, 124, 277. _Causeries_, Sainte-Beuve’s, 317 _sq._ _Censura Literaria_, 282, 283 _note_. Cervantes, 159, 182. Channing, William E. (1780-1842), 631 _note_. _Character of a Small Poet_, 6, 7. _Characteristics_, 158, 159. _Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays_, 258, 259. Chasles, V. E. Philarète (1798-1873), 432, 433. Chateaubriand, François Aug., Vicomte de (1768-1848), 99, 109-117, 131, 194, 313-317. _Chateaubriand et son Groupe Littéraire_, 313-317. Chaucer, 71, 77, 174, 256, 258, 273, 409. Chenier, A., 117. —-- M. J. (1764-1811), 130, 131. Chesterfield, 504 _note_. Christopher North. See Wilson, John. Church, Richard William (1815-1890), 558. Cicero, 124. Claudian, 282. Claughton, Thomas Legh, Bishop of Rochester (1808-1892), 626. Coleridge, Mr Ernest, 218, 227. —-- Hartley (1796-1849), 283 _note_, 485-487. —-- Samuel Taylor (1772-1834), 37, 126, 142, 149, 155, 168, 194, 197 half-title, 200-233, 236, 239, 243, 249, 250, 256, 258, 278, 288, 291 _note_, 310, 375, 392, 393, 396 _note_, 411 _sq._, 418 _note_, 472, 478, 484, 487 _note_, 489, 536, 541, 548. Collier, J. P., 209 _note_. Collier, Jeremy, 257. Collins, 58. —-- Mr Churton, 427 _note_. _Comic Writers, The English_, 256, 257. “Comparative Literature,” 460 _note_, 462 _sq._ Condillac, 99 _note_. Congreve, 161, 239. Conti, Antonio (1677-1749), 23 and _note_, 51 _note_. Conybeare, John Josias (1779-1824), 620. Copleston, Edward, Bishop of Llandaff (1776-1849), 618-620. Corneille, 13, 37, 161, 397. Courthope, Mr, 616, 629. Cousin, Victor (1792-1867), 133. Cowper, 204, 228. Creed, The Romantic, 409, 410. Creighton, Bishop, 603. Crépet’s _Poètes Français_, 450 _sq._ Crisp, “Daddy,” 39 _note_, 43 _note_. “Criticism of Life,” 531 _sq._ Croce, Signor Benedetto, 152 _note_, 155, 169 _note_, 589 _note_. Croker, John Wilson (1780-1857), 494, 509. _Cromwell_, Preface to, 331 _sq._

Dallas, Eneas Sweetland (1828-1879), 511-513. Dante, vi, 114, 179, 180, 210 _note_, 214-216, 228, 247, 248, 256, 534 _sq._ Danzel, 19 _note_, 20. _Defence of Poetry_, Shelley’s, 274, 275. _De la Littérature_, Madame de Staël’s, 101 _sq._ _De la Littérature Allemande_, 48-51. _De l’Allemagne_, 101 _sq._ _De Constantia Jurisprudentis_, 153. _De Logomachiis Eruditorum_, 18. _De Meteoris Orationis_, 19. _De Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus_, 148, 149. _De Studiorum Ratione_, 152. _De Vulgari Eloquio_, 201, 210, 215, 216. Defoe, 242. Delille, 122 _sq._, 333. Delius, 575. Denham, 6. Denina, ix. Dennis, ix, 286, 408. De Quincey, Thomas (1785-1859), 81, 355 _note_, 405 _note_, 412, 478-482. De Sanctis, Francesco (1817-1883), 589-591. Descartes, 146. Dickens, 364 _note_. Diderot, Denis (1713-1784), 41, 89-97, 99, 109, 111, 117, 178, 185, 190 _note_, 192, 194, 217. _Die Vernünftigen Tadlerinnen_, 19. _Dies Boreales_, 473 _sq._ _Diskurse der Maler_, 19 _sq._ Disraeli, Isaac (1766-1848), 284. _Divina Commedia, The_, 108. Dobell, Sydney, 514 _note_. _Doctor, The_, 235 _sq._ _Don Quixote_, 182. Doudan, Ximenès (1800-1872), 436-438. Doyle, Sir Francis Hastings Charles (1810-1888), 626, 627. Dryden, 6, 9, 14, 44 _note_, 54, 55, 71, 159, 179, 192, 200, 222, 229, 249, 256, 310, 330, 364, 398, 418 _note_, 443, 504, 513 _note_, 520. Du Bellay, 200. Ducange, 177. Dussault, Jean F. J. (1769-1824), 129. Dyer, 58.

Eberhard, Joh. Aug. (1739-1809), 151. Eckermann, Joh. Peter (1792-1854), 301, 366 _sq._ _Edinburgh Review, The_, 213 _note_, 286, 290. Egger, M., 319. _Elia_, 237 _sq._ Elton, Professor, vi. Elwin, Whitwell (1816-1900), 510. Elze, 575. Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882), 633, 634. _Emile_, 98. _English Metrists_, 83 _note_. _English Rhythms_, 235 _note_. _Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum_, 296. “Esemplastic,” } “Esenoplastic,” } 228. _Essai sur le Beau_, 151. _Essai sur les Fictions_, 102. _Essai sur les Règnes de Claude et de Néron_, 94. _Essay on Genius_, 164 _note_. _Essay on Pope_, 66. _Essay on Taste_, Alison’s, 164-167. —-- Gerard’s, 164 _note_. —-- Jeffrey’s, 164, 291 _note_. _Essays in Criticism_, 521 _sq._ _Essays on Men and Manners_, 63. _Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary_, 160. Etienne, 130. Euripides, 200. _Excursion, The_, 213.

Faguet, M. Émile, 339, 469. Farmer, Dr, 488. Feletz, C. M. Dorimont, Abbé de (1767-1850), 132. Felltham, Owen, 297 _note_. Fénelon, 177. Feydeau, 324 _note_. Fichte, 417. Fiévée, 130. Finlay, Mr F. G., 62 _note_. Fiorentino, 348 _note_. _Firmilian_, x. Flaubert, Gustave (1821-1880), 116, 120, 189, 228, 454, 461, 545, 581. Flemming, 369. Flint, Professor, 152 _note_, 153 _note_, 156. Fontanes, Louis, Marquis de (1757-1821), 112 _not_, 113, 127. Fontenelle, 9, 56, 177, 195, 230. _Fool of Quality, The_, 539. Forman, Mr Buxton, 473 _note_. Foscolo, Ugo (1778-1827), 407 _note_. Foster, John (1731-1774), 83. —-- (1770-1843), 513. Fournier, Edouard (1819-1880), 453. Fox, W. J. (1786-1864), 513. France, M. Anatole, 455 _note_, 469. Franciosi, Signor, viii. Frederick the Great (1712-1786), 48-51. Freytag, Gustav (_b._ 1816), 578, 579. _Friend, The_, 219. Froude, James Anthony (1818-1894), 539. Fuller, Margaret (1810-1850), 164, 642.