Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/essaystowardscriOOroberich ESSAYS i TOWARDS A CRITICAL METHOD JOHN M.\RiDBERTSON Sotibon T. FISHER UNWIN 26 PATERNOSTER SQUARE MDCCCtLXXXIX ^€^/ PREFACE Of the following papers, that on "Science in Criticism" was the last written ; so that the others, though selected frpm a number, are not presented as studied applications of the method or methods of judgment laid down in the introductory treatise. I trust there will be found, however, a substantial conformity between the critical essays and the general exposition, inasmuch as the former were made under the convictions and in part with the aims which led to the attempt at a com- prehensive treatment of the art or science — whichever it be termed — of literary criticism. Due heed will be given, one hopes, to the "towards" of the title. No reader can feel more strongly than I how far from -finality are these attempts to bring into literary criticism methods of scrutiny and species of criteria such as will secure, in regard to literary values, the measure of demonstrability and of agreement arrived at in, say, moral, political, economic, and therapeutic science. In the three former cases, what is attained is a division of thinking men into tendential parties, in iv PREFACE. each of which there is substantial agreement, resulting in different degrees from bias, prejudice, and reasoning towards consistency. Obviously, consensus of literary opinion cannot be reckoned on to a further extent than consensus in matters of personal conduct, legislation, and social action : all that can be hoped is that it may be carried as far. In therapeutic science, again, there is anarchy enough to show that tangibleness of subject matter does not involve certainty of interpretation. Of the four essays now published, all save the first have already appeared ; two in the magazine Our Corner ; one (" Mr. Howells' Novels ") in the West- minster Review, The two former, however, have been somewhat expanded for re-publication. I have not only added matter formerly withheld under exigencies of space, but improved and elucidated wherever later reading and reflection have enabled me to do so. It was only after the introductory treatise was in the publisher's hands that I met with " La Critique Scien- tifique," the posthumous work of the lamented Emile Hennequin. It was impossible to read that able treatise without gaining new ideas and new points of view ; and I weighed the expediency of readjusting my own essay so as to embody some of these. I soon concluded, however, that, though I would stand to lose, the pur- pose of both essays would perhaps gain by letting mine go as it was projected and written. I was struck, at the first glance over the schema of M. Hennequin, with the fact that we had approached the problem from dif- ferent sides. He had asked himself "What is a book ?" PREFACE. V or rather, " What is a work of art ? " : I had asked my- self " What is criticism ? " or rather " What is literary criticism ? " Of the value of his inquiry and analysis there could be no doubt. On the other hand, given any however small value in my inquiry and analysis, there seemed certain to result a special gain, however small, from letting the two independent treatises furnish their different kinds of suggestion and message ; seeing that, with their differences, they had so much in common at least of aim, and even of arrangement. Comparison on other grounds I need not anticipate, further than to say how clearly my own sense of shortcoming enables me to realize the loss sustained by intellectual France last year in M. Hennequin*s untimely death. His penetrating analysis has, among other supe- riorities, that of being as readily applicable to the arts as to literature. I had of course seen the desirableness of discussing art criticism as well as literary ; but had the prudence to remain on the ground on which I was most at home. In that connection I should say that it is likely I have profited by assimilation of some of the reasoning in the pamphlets of my friend Professor Geddes, entitled ** Every Man His Own Art Critic ; " my classifications or formulas showing resemblances to his, though it had not occurred to me, in planning them, to avail myself of the help which I might have remembered his work was likely to give me. CONTENTS. VACB Preface iii Science in Criticism — i. HISTORIC PHASES I ii. RECENT NIHILISM .46 ill THE PROBLEM STATED .... 65 iv. PRINCIPLES OP PRACTICE . I05 ( Mr. Ho wells* Novels 149 The Fable of the Bees 201 The Art of Tennyson 233 Index 283 SCIENCE IN CRITipiSM. I. HISTORIC PHASES. A HISTORY of criticism is one of the labours still open to the German intelligence ; andljf it be true, as has been said, that a science is not really known till we know its history, it would follow that we must remain for the present a good deal in the dark as to the scien- tific discri mination _of literary merit, supposing, what some deny, that there is anything scientific in the matterTT On either view, it is impossible to raise the question without a glance at the phases which the habit of literary judgment has assumed at different periods, /^riticism, of course, is a process that goes on over all the field of human knowledge, being simply comparison or clash of opinion Jj and literary critic ism is thus only a_de£a rtment of inquir)^ enter ed upon i'rom tftfi S^fBg" kind of motives as lead men to scientific research com monly so-called . These may be summed up as the impulses of curiosity and self-expression^the desire to_ know, and the need to express notions.! The trouble seems to be that in this particular line of thought the 2 2 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. latter impulse has hitherto been more active than the former. And yetj^hen we examine the critical literature of Greek and Roman antiquity, it cannot be said that it is notably less business-like, so to speak, than the studies of the same time in physical and ethical science^ Like these, it does not now satisfy ; it baulks the intelligence and compels retreat to new methods ; but it is hardly less circumspect a performance, so far as it goes, than the others. Aristotle laid his wizard hand on this with something of the same ordering power as marked his grasp of other provinces of mind ; linking the analysis of literary effects to his psychology ; and so strongly did he imprint his thought on the subject. that till our own day critics have been discussing and explaining him as an authority. It is doubtless, as Mr. John Morley protests/ a disgrace to human intelligence that men should so long have continued groping for the true sense of Aristotle's dictum about tragedy, instead of going to the phenomena for themselves; but at least it shows how weightily Aristotle had seemed to speak; his measure of authority, of course, proving mainly the un- progressiveness of his successors. When we turn from the mutilated and corrupt text of the *' Poetic " to Longinus, this is already clear. The once-renowned treatise " On the Sublime " one reads now (and onl}- the specialist reads it^ with an unappeasable sense of futility ; not because the criticism it embodies is felt to be bad — on the contrary, it for the most part satisfies » " Diderot," ed. 1SS4, p. 223. HISTORIC PHASES. 3 the judgment and exhibits great expertness within its limits ; but because it is become, as it were, parasitic and dilettantist, a pedant habit of tasting and relishing and objecting, with no real outlook on new practice, ' because conceiving only of imitative practice ; and with no suspicion that literature exists for the sa{ce~of life, 1/ and not life for the sake of literature. Longlnus lives in a world built up of quotation. Writing six hundred years after Aristotle, he is conscious of no forward movement since Aristotle's time, and cbnfesse^lylalls"~{b conceive ofaTny in the future. It is specially curious, to a modern sense, how in citing from Herodotus what we should term a touch of naivete or old-world quaintness, the critic objects to it just as we should object to a puerility of our own day ; he having no sense of antiqui ty in Herodotus^ style. His tests, in themselves, are mostly sound enough : t jie po int is that he has exactly the same detail-tests for the seven- centuries-old writing of Herodotus as for that of his own day. It raises afresh for us the question whether Mr. Arnold or Professor Newman was right as to the kind of impression Homer would make on Sophocles. If Longinus could thus criticize Herodotus, it would almost seem as if Homer could not have had in Sophocles' time the flavour that Chaucer has for us to- day — that Mr. Arnold was haply right in his hesitating supposition, and the stronger scholar wrong.^ But the final chances are rather that the Sophoclean age was * See Arnold's lectures "On Translating Homer," p. 34; Professor F. \V. Newman's reply, ** Homeric Translation in Theory and Practice," pp. 33-7, and Arnold's "On Translating Homer ; Last Words," pp. 17-26. 4 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. alive to the personal note of the ancients, though the much later age of Longinus was not, because in itself senescent, or rather living intellectually at second hand, not even on its own memories, but on memories of memories. Longinus, in short, has the note of that great dissolutional epoch in which, for hundreds of years, physical science made no advance, morals changed without on the whole bettering, and philo- \ sophy became a hypnotic meditation on symbols, a changing series of " doubtful dreams of dreams." He lives the reflex life vivaciously and expertly, hence his somewhat preposterous authority with his contem- poraries,^ in itself a sign, as literary dictatorships always have been, of epochal paralysis. It may be objected that in a treatise on the Sublime he can only be expected to handle style ; but the records of his fame show that, himself a qapable stylist, his whole activities ran to connoisseurship ; and the close of the treatise reveals him to us once for all as a man only artificially related to life, an jinpotent moralist and a V futile citizen . The interlocutor whom he cites stands out for us a valid and estimable figure, beside whom the phrase-spinning Longinus is a man of letters in the poorest sense. But indeed the nullity of his rela- tion to what of free life there was in his time is suffi- ciently plain from the fortuitously famous letter of defiance to Aurelian,^ a piece of rococo plastique to which the grotesque tragedy of his betrayal by Zenobia * See the preface to Smith's translation, following Eunapius. » Id, HISTORIC PHASES, 5 and his execution by the emperor is a fitting sequel. [ He is the hero and martyr of style. 1 At the outset of a treatise on criticism I have thus attempted, not uncalcnlatinfyl v^ a brief jud < ;ment on a - critic of antiquity^ t| ) ouf^h it will be part of the coming ^ ^ not o nly to seek for the c ritepa of iust or scientific v iudgmentJbut to inquire whether there should be an y ^ judicial criticism a^ all^/ The immediate purpose is to set forth the kind of impression Longinus may be held to make on the unconventionalized modern mind, and \ in so doing to make good the proposition that/She ' criticism of antiquity, like its other science, was un- > progressive after the democratic period, y The same \ lesson must needs be learned from the literature of Rome, in which Horace's ** Art of Poetry,'* based to begin with on an early Greek treatise, still represents, with his other criticism, the dynamic judgment of a living artist; but is "necessarily followed only by static commentary', since literature all round from the same point began to lapse into merely imitative life. A treatise like Quintilian's, which was but one of many, is at once the sociological and the literary testimony to the stoppage of innovating mental movement. And if Greece and Rom e thus ev olved tovvardsinanition^it was very natural that the fresTTirredTieval intelligence, to which the recovered past came as a splendid treasure- trove, should be absorbed in homage, and should set up the old standards of static criticism, to last till the influx of new knowlf ^g<^ on all hands - wrought the inevitable disusQ.Qf the-dassic moulds. 6 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. VvlLiterary criticism is, in the fuller sense (to speak ^omewhat technically), the wording of the active or y/nergizing result of the mental impression made by^* Vbooks]^as all art, including verse, and all literature as apart from criticism, is an energizing result of an im- pression niade by things or actions?i(^ts relative im- portance is therefore measurable to the common sense (which must needs repeat the critical process) byjth e scope of its minis.txi', just as is the importance of works oTart, of history, of science, and of general didactics. The test is, how far does it instruct ; or, more precisely, how far can it stimulate or control energy^that is, not merely by direct enlightenment, but by touching any side of the percipient intelligence./ Thus if, as the ancients felt. Homer and Virgil stimulated and con- trolled action directly by presenting examples, and mediately by acting on the sense of literary beaut}^ so setting up habits of thought which told on both inner and outer conduct^the most important criticism of Homer and Virgil would theoretically be that which furthest followed the possible impressions fro m^ t He authors (fealt witli. Such criticism would envisage afresh the poet's world and would sum it up in term.s of the critic's relation to Im world, which in the terms of the case would include their presentment of theirs, so far as he was awake to it. Further, his criticism would analyse the effects of style and set forth which ■ were pleasing and which unpleasing, and on what grounds of experience or analogy. The impressions he made would thus tend constantly to impinge on HISTORIC PHASES, 7 those made by the poets, and to deepen or modify them. All this, no ancient criticism appears to have done? -Vristotle's greatness lay in his power of coordinating phenomena of all kinds ; ancTto him literature was a department of phenomena like another, to be criticized only in the sense of being analysed and systematically described?^ Nor did any mind of similar scope arise to instilj^pose where he classified facts and explained causes""~"If "remained still possible, however, either to discuss the moral world of the poets on the one hand, or to discuss their style on the other, and both of these things were attempted. Thus, when Plato and Plutarch in their different ways and epochs condemned the theology of the old singers, they were doing im- portant and necessary criticism (seeing that they knew the crass religion of the poets to have an undesirable influence on many) though they did not cover the whole literary ground. When, on the other hand, the later literary criticism discussed literary effects proper, it was seriously restricted inasmuch as it included almost no such forward impulse as underlay the comments of the moralists. These were essentially creative in tendency ; as truly creative on the moral side as were the poets on the imaginatrver^anT^a corresponding literary^tfrnTcIsm would have implied a new movement of imagination, which conceivably could quite well express itself by way of demand far a fr esh seizure of life, artistic and moral^ But Longinus has no notion of such fresh seizure. He sets out to supersede 8 ^SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. Cecilius, who had given a multitude of samples of the Sublime without explicitly suggesting how it was to be attained ; but he supposes himself finally to gain his end by suggesting (c. 13, 14) that the way to be sublime is to remember how the poets managed it. Of course he enumerates the categories. Be grand and bold, he prescribes ; be pathetic, be finely figurative, be pregnant and elegant in style, be careful of the move- ment of your periods ; and he tastefully enough notes where success is attained by simplicity. But his pre- I scription has thus, on the face of it, little^pr none of the J conceivable importance of the moral criticism of Plato f and Plutarch, because right style is by him always "^t^ conceived of as the putting things after the verymaniifir of the classics, which was in fact a sure way not to put them effectively at all. His real success consists in the vivacious giving forth of his own impressions : of true dynamic impulse, Qf-,U»&~i urther-reachin^ inflj ifrLr^ on literary conduct, he is devoid, because on the side of the total literary treatment of life he has no sucli urging sense of inadequacy or incompleteness as speaks 'in the reforming moralists. His relation to literature 'is thus finally of a piece with his supine relation to IthingS social : bpjias nn nif^5;agp_ Horace, again, had exhibited his message in that fresh seizure of life which he made in his own per- formance ; and, himself in contact with things, he could not but point in his criticism to the springs of movement.^ Yet even he is sufficiently touched with ^ ''De Arte Poetics," w. 2S6-88, 309-22. Epist. ii. i. HISTORIC PHASES. * 9 the spirit of the age to play the registrar as much as the thinker, superfluously prescribing conformity to mythic tradition/ and adhesion to the arbitrary rules of the drama.' There was partly lacking to him too the forward - reaching temper, which in things literary see ms to be analofi;ous to that projection of the m ind beyond experience which in science means discovery anfT new knowle dge ; and though later in Apuleius we have something of creative originality, with all his antiquarianism, it is evident that the literary world grew ever more absorbed in bookish retrospect, antici- pating in letters the history of the State, rft was small wonder, then, if in the Renaissance the critical practice was simil^ly restricted to a prescrip- tion of how bestjto_be_£lassicri Not till a new treasure of ideaswasslowly amassed could criticism even catch up the new imaginative literature that arose out of these. ^^Hence a series of schemes of the art of poetry which did but echo and expand Horace, Aristotle, and LonginusI^ Vida, the ** Immortal Vida " of Pope's "Essay on Criticism,*' produced an **Artof Poetry" that fairly typified the criticism of his era, setting forth with much versification the abstract principles of good writing, eked out by particularization of fine things in the classics. \ You were to do everything Horace had said ; and you were further to learn style from Horace ; but also from the Holy Scriptures. You must not go beyond your powers; you must choose a subject to your own taste ; you must treat it carefully, taking « " De Arte Poetica," w. 1 19 s^^. ' /J. 189 s.jy. lo SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. great pains about your words ; you must be natural, even as the classics were natural ; and for the rest you must study them to see how to attain great effectsr? It is the criticism of the schoolmaster supervising the f\ manufacture of Latin verses : living literature is not within sight. Such tuition indeed helped the pupil to detect classic beauties, the teachers being men of taste ; and this is of course worth}^ work enough, so far as it goes. What we have to note is that only thus far did the Renaissance classic criticism go, and that, in the terms of the case, this was thought to be the entire function of criticism. /in^ Europe, after several false or partly frustrated starts, such as that represented by Chaucer in England, modern literature may be held to have come of age (though only to enter on a generation of premature artificiality), with the controversy over the relative, merits of ancients and moderns — a dispute that also marks the time about which it ceased to become a matter of course that works of study should either be written in or translated into Latin."! It would seem indeed as if the ver}^ struggle for his inheritance had at once exhausted and tamed the heir of all the ages, so retrospective and so conventional, at first, is the critical tone and temper of the new period. We to-day, indeed, regarding our own as specifically the century of criticism, are apt to assume, in our dissatisfaction with the debris of the old codes, that it is only among us that criticism has really attained importance. ** Until the last thirty or forty years," recently HISTORIC PHASES. n remarked one English writer of ability, thoupjh of chequered practice, ** nobody here had ever dreamt that a critic ought to look at a book or author from anything higher than the standpoint of his own immediate passing likes and dislikes, or that criticism need be anything different in kind from the comments which young ladies make upon the novels that they recommend or condemn to one another at the door of the circulating library." * Tliat is of course extrava- gant : methodic criticism is no such novelty even in England.2 In the words of Mr. Ward, " English literature abounds in well-meant attempts, from Putten- » Grant Allen, *• The Decay of Criticism,'* Fortnightty Rtvinv^ March, 1882, p. 342. ' A similar extravagance marks the following statement : — ** Criticism in Shakespeare's day must have lieen in great jxxrt an unknown quantity, though Greene has left us his • Groatsworth ' and Ben Jonson his c<»lloquies with Drummond. In Pope's day, and later, it was confined to the pamphleteering of the Dennises, Ralphs, and Kenricks. In Fielding's day it took sometimes a less fugitive shape, if we may judge of its character from the prefatory chapters to his books. But not yet had literary criticiim become in any sen:ie a profession. ... It was therefore at the l)cginning of the nintiecnlh century that English critical literature, properly so called, b«"gan" ("Cobwelw of Criticism," by T. Hall Cuine, 1SS3. Introd. pp. xx-x.\i). Mr. Caine has piid less heed to the earlier than to the later critical periodicaK Goldsmith in 1759 complains (" Present State of Polite Learning," ch. ix.) that " we have two literary reviews in London, with critical reviews and magazines without number," which he denounces for their malignity. And I have before me a dozen volumes of monthly critical periodicals, ** New Memoirs of Literature " (written by *' the ingenious and learned Mr. La Roche" "with general applause"), ** The Present Slate of the Republick of Letters" (also carried on by one writer, who refers to "the other journalists"), and ** Historia Litteraria" (more comprehensive) — these covering the years 1725-33. In these, however, the aggressiveness reprobated by Goldsmith does not appear, the ambition being simply to give an account of new books. 12 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. ham downwards through Sidney and Spenser and King James I. himself, to discuss \}ci^ raiiojiah,^ well as to exemplify the particular forms of the poetic art." I Puttenham, indeed, like his less scholarly predecessor, Webbe, does little that is serious, beyond setting forth in English, with a touching naivete,^ what was already familiar in the sichools in Latin; and James's '* Reulis and Cautelis to be observit and eschewit in Scottis Poesie" is just such a dominie's lesson as was to be ex- pected from him. Sidney, too, while contending for unity of time in drama " both by Aristotle's precept and common reason," must needs go to negative precedent for a caveat against Spenser's archaism: — *'That same framing of his stile, to an old rustick language, I dare not alowe, sith neyther Theocritus in Greeke, Virgill in Latine, nor Sanazar in Italian, did affect it." 3 But Webbe, Puttenham, and Sidney are in a general way reasoners, even if they reason from precedent ; and to some extent, at least in the case of Sidney, they hint' of \ the stir of intelligence that was already sending forth j that leafage of fresh literature, of which the reniark- i ableness as compared with its immediate antecedents] ' Globe ed. of Pope, p. 47. 2 His remark on parenthesis is typical : — " This insertion [in a youthful performance of his own] is very long and utterly impertinent to the principall matter, and makes a great gappe in the tale, neverthelesse is no disgrace but rather a bewtie and to very good purpose, but you must not use such insertions often nor to thick, nor those that bee very long as this of ours, for it will breede great confusion to have the tale so much inter- rupted" ('* Arte of English Poesie," Arber's reprint, p. 181). 3 " Apologie for Pdetrie," Arber's reprint, p. 63. HISTORIC PHASES. 13 will long justify even the tribute paid to its less permanently valuable parts. Unquestionably the treatises of Webbe and Putten- ham are grotesquely incommensurable with the litera- ture of the generation which dates from about the time of their appearance (1586, '89), though they seem, on the other hand, to relate naturally enough to the factitious verse of Surrey and Wyatt, of the previous generation. Both writers are essentially pedantic statists, duly proceeding to catalogue those large facts of life with which poetry is concerned, but ripe commonplacers in their own thinking. Sidney, in comparison, has the virile note of the epoch, his apology carrying the ring of creative ener gy ; though he too is fully half pedant. Neither in art nor in temper had the writers of the time much to gain from such treatises ; the genius of the language evolving its blank verse with no countenance from them, and the new drama wholly transcending their conception of literary possibility. Webbe, though he praised the " Shepherd's Calendar " with none of Sidney's reserva- tions,^ aimed at an English verse with Latin rhythms, and turned the song in the fourth eclogue of the ** Calendar " into unspeakable sapphics.^ Sidney even * ** Discourse of English Poctrie," Arber's reprint, p. 35. ' Which have, however, won the praise of Mr. Ellis by their quanti- tative correctness. See his translation of Catullus, preface, Webbe's first stave runs thus, by his own scansions : — O ye nymphes most fine who resort to this brooke For to bathe there your pretty breasts at all times. Leave tl^c watrish (I) bowres, hyther and to me come at my request nowe. SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. '^'^'(j^^^Jj^^^^ s'ee nothing in the new drama but its violation of the unities; and Puttenham's laborious pedantry ^ and laborious trifling ^ are divided by the whole current of things from the living work of his contemporaries. They indeed suggest the later running-to-seed of English invention, and may have partly inspired- the lesser Donnes and Cowleys, who doubtless gave them the study which the Marlowes and Shaksperes did not.^ LAn efficient criticism, it is obvious, comes of an eij&cient culture ; and an efficient culturCi^jwlijch means comprehensive knowledge brought into organic relation witli life, only begins to be v/idely predicable "of England towards t He close of the Commonwealth — that is, precisely at the time when strong political and social influences were about to work intellectual reaction in various directions. Shakspere, of course, is as much the soul of judgment as he is the soul of poetry in the Elizabethan and early Stuart period ; his being the rare fortune by force of genius to assimilate all his knowledge; and his unimprovable critical But the last stanza goes prettily and Englishly enough : — Daffadowndillies all a long the ground strovve. And the Cowslyppe with a pretty paunce let heere lye, Ivyngcui^pe and Liliies so belovde of all men, And the deluce flowrc. * See his list of "the names of your figures auricular" ("Arte of English Poesie," Arber's reprint, p. 31S). ^ See, in particular, the chapter " Of proportion in figure," id. p. 104. 3 Compare the chapter just cited with Addison {Spectator^ 58, 63) who finds in his own day a fashion of trifling such as Puttenham had helped to set. HISTORIC PHASES, 15 passages are the foremost of the many explicit proofs f that, in Shenstone*s phrase, "every good poet includes j a criticul/t^s reverse will not hold.**' After h im. > decli ne in jud ;;ment is only another side of the decline in ppetic -Strength, -w hie h^ again correlat es ^^vith the 'amassing of unas similat ed leay-ning. The age in which flourished ffie ** metaphysical " poets cannot have had the kind of culture that yields dynamic criticism, save as regards just the issues on which Puritanism ex- pressed itself for good and for evil. [From the time of the Restoration, however, or even earlier, there begins to be apparent a real correlation of non- religious culture with action, of which the socio- logically better side is seen in the scientific and free- thinking movements, and the rationalism, as apart from the poetry, of the verse; and the worse in the either restricted or corrupt artistic handling of concrete life which arose naturally from the socio-political reaction. /Even that, it has to be noted, is related to the rational tendency of the period, Pope presenting the moral and the dramatists the immoral side of it. d'he resulting literary criticism thus tended to be corrective or negative^ and indeed, with the examples of Donne and Cowley before them the new generation might well recoil towards sanity. (Viewed in this light, the circumspect art of the Restoration and " Augustan " period is no mere retrogression, but a_patential gain J to the language and literature, as curing a morbid ^ tendency."! In the words of Mr. Arnold, it is " an age * » **0n Wilting and Books," IxxWii. (Works, 1774, ii. 192). -y\ 16 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. . of prose and reason." It is, however, the summing-up I of that literary epoch that the general social reaction / served to maintain the inexpansive temper. The typical critique of the period, then — if a solitary masterpiece can be said to be typical — is Pope's essay "On the Art of Sinking in Poetry," which was, how- ever, only posthumously published in 1741. Pope was, within his sphere, proportionally as much of a critic as Shakspere ; and here we have him at his critical best, laying his finger, consciously or unconsciously,^ on faults he himself committed, just as Shakspere might; burlesquing Blackmore — a kind of Augustan Cowley, bent on epics, — as Shakspere burlesqued bombast in Pistol, only more comprehensively. This was efficient criticism, and certainly destroyed Blackmore in the long run, in the teeth of the successive support of Addison ^ and Johnson. 3 It is curious to contrast with the confident energy of Pope's derision of work that is devoid of judgment, the anxious courage and careful ' There is a story that some of his burlesque examples are drawn from his own early miscreations. See note in Roscoe's ed, ^ Spectator, Nos. 339, 543. s " Lives : " Blackmore. According to Warton (note on "Art of Sinking," in Roscoe's ed. vii. 119) "it is remarkable that Swift highly commends Blackmore in more than one place." I cannot discover the places, but on the contrary find Swift to have frequently spoken of Blackmore's verse with small esteem, though Blackmore was his personal friend and physician. The verses he drew up for inscription under Blackmore's portrait are in a spirit of merciless banter. The knight, however, had plenty of praise from other quarters ; and the need for Pope's assault may be gathered from the language of the translator of Bossu (in 17 19), who, though a man of some judgment, and disposed to criticize Blackmore on some points, yet attributes to him a genius " that comes but little behind that of the two ancient poets" [Pre/.), HISTORIC PHASES. /r I'Pt, «. ^f ^ contention of Addison's defence of Milton, a per%*^- / ance as to which, in view of the critic's eulog3AU5J^ Blackmore, it is not quite easy to decide how far hiH:;s ' theological tastes primed the literary. Still, it is an essentially rational and discriminating criticism, efficient jjp to the point of Addison's considerable (noral and artistic efficiency, and thus productive o^ movement o^ anollier or3er than the Augustan- pedestrian. Addison's plea for Milton, indeed, may be taken as happily representing, on the literary side, the ^minal Puritanis m that more or less obscurely per- sisted in the national breed all through the Restoration period and the next,' showing itself even in Pepys, as it did more in Evelyn and so much" more in Bunyan ; that took fresh start in the Neo-Puritanism of the Wesleyan revival ; and that has chronically coloured our literature down to the present day. On other matters, Addison is mainly static, thoug^h generally and often energetically judicious ; and it is not till the next generation that there appears, as part of the now broadened and deepened movement of historic rational- ism, a deliberate and methodical survey of the bearings of modern literature, taken as something else than an imitation of the ancient. •7 This is on the whole not too pretentious a descrip- tion to give of the systematic attempt of Lord Ka rnes to explain and adjudicate on literary effects somewhat ' The Earl of Roscommon, who before Addison praised Milton in his rhymed *' Essay on Translatetl Verse." was indeed not exactly a Puritan in his life, but i'ope (" Imit. of Hor. ," Ep. to Aii^.y 214) accords " un- spotted bays" to him only " in all Charles's days." 3 I8 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. ,^h ter the manner of Longinus, but more compre- hensively and circumspectly. The "Elements of Criticism," published in 1761, represented in its way the expression, in the walk of belles lettres, of that movement of fresh analysis of knowledge which, reaching Scotland, partly by way of France, in a period of quietude after the long fever of fanaticism, yielded such remarkable results alike in physical and mental science, historic research, and economic theory. Kames will hardly rank with Smith, Reid, Cullen, Black, and Hutton, not to mention Hume, but he will perhaps compare well enough with Robertson and Adam Ferguson ; and, after all, his " Sketches of the History of Man " is a vigorous and original if im- permanent work. In any case the " Elements of Criticism " ^ent through seven editions in twenty- seven years, and certainly counted for something as a culture force. _ Perhaps following ancient usage rather than freshly seizing a principle, Kames in his intro- duction speaks of criticism as " a rational science," " a regular science, governed by just principles ; " ^ and he bottoms his series of stylistic judgments on an indepen- dent^jisycholagicai-ftnalysis. An implacably conscien- tious analysis it is, recalling Mr. Bagehot's account of those unread works of Cornewall Lewis which so com- prehensively explained what nobody thought strange ; ^ "Elements of Criticism," 7th ed. 1787, i. 7. c/. pp. 8, 9. Burke had \ I used the phrase " as the arts advance towards their perfection, the science lof criticism advances with them" in his " Philosophical Enquiry into the iOrigin of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful" (Introd. 5th ed. p. 21) \n 1756. HISTORIC PHASES. 19 and indeed Karnes throughout yields a musty odour, as of dry-rot, bodefully significant to those of us who follow his craft. Still, he put in circulation a mass of de tail-criticis m, often acute, almost always sound, and smgularly catholic considering the environment. He always visibly thinks for himself. ** Bossu, a celebrated French critic," he obsei*ves,^ " gives many rules ; but can discover no better foundation for any of them, than the practice merely of Homer and Virgil, supported by the authority of Aristotle. Strange that in so long a work he should never once have stumbled upon the question, Whether, and how far, do {sic) these rules agree with human nature.*** Somewhat similarly had Longinus proposed to supersede Cecilius; but the hard- headed northman makes out his point rather the better of the two, harder though it is to make out. \^0T was the undertaking of Kames the only atjigmpt made " here," last century', t o bnng metho d mto literary criticism.3 Not to mention transient treatises, there is » " Elements," p. 12. ' This is perhaps less than fair. The ancient criticism which Bossu followed, recognized that art rested on congruiiy. See the passage from Cicero, "De Oratore," i. 41-2, citeti by Warburton on Pope's " Essay on Criticism," I. 88, and that cited by Pope himself (1. 98) from Quintilian. And surely the French critics saw as welJ as Pope that Those Rules of old discover'd, not devis'd. Are Nature still, but Nature methodiz'd, though they did think so much more of precedent than of fitness. Kames himself assumes (i. 378) that '* no person doubts but that our sense of beauty is the true test of what is beautiful, and our sense of grandeur, of what is great or sublime." 3 A general ofc>thctic method, indeed, had been aimed at by Burke, who, as before noted, had published his essay on the " Sublime and Beautiful " 20 SCIENCE IX CRITICISM. the performance of Hume, who gave seven of his always acute essays to matters of literary discrimina- tion. Neither writer views the task of criticism in the modern lightf as an estimating at once of author| and their work; though Hume insists^ on the invariable application of moral standards, and Karnes never scruples to indicate a low opinion of an author's faculty. Yet Kames, in deciding on the elastic dispute between Boileau and Huet as to whether the *' Let there be light " of Genesis is " sublime," at once notes, while on the whole agreeing with Huet that *' sublime" is not the word, how the piety of the latter would tend to make him more readily sensible than Boileau of the ** depressing " significance of the fiat ; and thus brings a gleam of sane science into a sufficiently hopeless con- troversy. On the final critical problem of the-ee^n#ict of judgment^ however, it is not too much to say that Kames blenched, contenting himself with an uncon- vincing assumption of security. He ends abruptly in the all-important chapter on the " Standard o f Ta ste," just where the modern reader would like him to go on ; and it is plain enough that he felt himself in presence in 1756. That treatise, usually underrated, has many just observations, which in their day were original enough. As this : — " On the whole it appears to me that what is called Taste ... is not a simple idea, but is partly made up of a perception of the primary pleasures of sense, of the secondary pleasures of the imagination, and of the conclusions of the reasoning faculty, concerning the various relations of these and concerning the human passions, manners, and actions" (5th ed. p. 17). And again :— " 1 know of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power " (p. 64). ^ Essay "Of the Standard of Taste." HISTORIC PHASES. 21 of a difficulty. The argument establishes, easily enough, that " my disgust is raised, not by differing from me, but by differing from what I judge to be the common standard ; " ' but that, of course, does not take us very far. *' Those who depend for food on bodily labour, are totally void of taste (!) ; of such a taste at least as can be of use in the fine arts. This consideration bars the greater part of mankind ; and of the remaining part many by a corrupted taste are unqualified for voting. The common sense 0/ mankind must then he confined to the few' that fall not under these exceptions,*'^ This "selec- tion," it is justly allowed, ** seems to throw matters again into uncertainty ; " and the critic is fain to con- clude abruptly by claiming that when select tastes differ the appeal must lie to those psychological laws which he had sought to analyse ; a perfectly consistent but not practically conclusive decision. But Hume had alr^^^dy. iti his essay " Of the Stan- dard of Taste,** gone further into the problem ; had indeed analysed it with his usual thoroughness ; and Kames, though following him, had not fully profited by his work. In other essays Hume had studied the con- ditions of literary advance, and the elements of perma- nent beauty in style ; and here he laid his finger secure ly enough on the main sources of variation in judgment — degree of delicacy oi taste, degree of practiceTand preju- dice ; ending by allowing for inevitable differences of taste coming of individual development, idiosyncrasy of choice as between different writers all confessedly good, ' u. 494. ' I^P- 499, 500. 22 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. and national or sectarian prejudice. Reading him now one feels, not that his grasp was inadequate to his pro- blem here any more than in metaphysics, but that his treatment of it is bounded by the rather strait limits of the literary spirit of his time. In practice, he was one of the best judges of his day. The essay " Of Sim- plicity and Refinement in Writing " says a nuniber^of things once for all ; and it would be difficult to improve on the purport of his formal restatement of an informal proposition of Addison: *' Fine writing, according to Addison, consists of sentiments which are natural, with- out being obvious. There cannot be a juster and more concise definition of fine writing." ^ In an age which had little of the genius of Catullus he declared that ** each line, each word, in Catullus has its merit ; and I am never tired with the perusal." For the same reasons, " It is sufficient to run over Cowley once ; but " — it was before the publication of Collins*s odes, which Hume might have been trusted to appreciate if he ever saw a copy ^ — " Parnel, after the fiftieth reading is as fresh as at the first ; " a judgment which startles posterity, and indeed is over-enthusiastic, but is not quite unintelligible. Hume is clearly not of the tribe of Rymer. Yet he as clearly inherits the " Augustan " temper, and thus gives vent to it: *' Whoever would ^ This may be a quotation from Addison, but I cannot find the passage. The purport, however, Hes in Spectator^ No. 62, par. 2, and No. 279, pars. 3, 7. =^ It must be admitted, however, that he spoke in his latter years with comprehensive disesteem of the EngHsh literature of his time, making no exception of Collins. HISTORIC PHASES. 23 assert an equality of genius and elegance between ; Ogilby and Milton, or Biinyan and Addison, would be ; thought to defend no less an extravagance, than if he ' had maintained a mole hill to be as high as Teneriffe, or a pond as extensive as the ocean." Something has of course to be allowed for the revolt of Hume from superstition ( his stron g est host ility next to his dislike of mobocratic and democratic politics) ; and in any case his contempt of Uunyan is perhaps not so preposterous as it may seem to a generation in which Bunyan has had a factitious vogue ; » but the critic had himself ex- pressly laid it down in the same essay,^ that " of all speculative errors, those which regard religion are the most excusable in compositions of genius; nor is it ever permitted to judge of the civility or wisdom of any people, or even of single persons, by the grossness or * In iJurkc's essay on the "Sublime and Beautiful" (1756), there is a remark on the posjiibility of making some readers understand tlie refined y language of the /Eneid " if it was degraded into the style of the ' Pilgrim's "^ Progress.'" A curious tone, too, is taken up towards Bunyan in the adver- tisements of Cooke's Pocket Libra' y, a cheap series published at the end of last cenlur)'. The "Pilgrim's Progress " is included in the section of Sacred Classics, but there is added this note :—" Although Bunyan's * Pilgrim's Progress * cannot come under the Denomination of a Classic Production, we have introduced it in ihe Sacred Classics, as it exhibits a very curious Specimen of the Allegorical Style of Writing ; and from its moral Temlency serves to co-operate with other Works in promoting the important cause of Religion and Virtue. In an Age of Erudition and Free Enquiry-, it must give a sensible Pleasure to reflecting Minds, to see Instruc- tion mingled with Amusement, and the most serious and important Truths introduced to our Notice in the Garb of Pleasure and Entertainment." It is a '* far cry " from this, in 1797, to Macaulay in 1830. Macaulay men- tions, too, how Cowper had feared to name Bunyan in his verse for fear of raising a sneer. * " Of the Standard of Taste." 24 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. refinement of their theological principles." The verdict then is invalid by reason of literary conventionality. And there is a similar note, along with that of acute observation, in the account of the development of English prose in the essay ** Of Civil Liberty " : — *'The elegance and propriety of s^yle have been very much neglected among us. We have no dictionary of our language, and scarcely a tolerable granunar. The first polite prose we have wis writ by Dr. Swift, a man who is still alive. ^ As to Sprat, Locke, and even Temple, they knew too little of the rules of art to be esteemed elegant writers. The prose of Bacon, Harrington, and Milton, is altogether too stiff and pedantic, though their sense be. excellent. Mm in thi> country have been so much occupied in the great disputes of Relig'on, Politics, and Philosophy, that they had no relish for the seemingly m nute observations of grammar and criticism. And though this turn of thinking must have consideral)ly improved our sen?e and our talent of reasoning, it must be confessed that, even in those sciences above-mentioned, we have not any standard book which we can transmit to posterity : and the utmost we have to boast of are a few essays toward a more just philosophy ; which indeed promise well, but have not as yet reached any degree of perfection. " Professor Huxley seems to me to go astray in his comments on this passage ; ^ but it certainly indicates ^ On this point Ilume partly changed his opinion later. In a letter to Robertson in 1769 he speaks of Swift as a wr.ter " whom I can often laugh with, whose style I can even approve, but surely never admire. It has no harmony, no elegance, no ornament ; and not much correctness, whatever the English may imagine. Were not their literature still in a somewhat barbarous state, that author's place would not be so hi^jh among their classics " (Stewart's "Life of Robertson," in Robertson's "Works," ed. 1821, i. 51 ; Burton's " Life of Hume," ii. 413). =" '* Hume," English Men of Letters Series, p. 22. In writing that Sprat is here " astoundingly conjoined" with Locke and Tcm}yie, Dr. Huxley must have been unaware of the extent and nature of Sprat's repu- tation last centuiy. Steele {Spectator, No. 114) in 171 1 calls him an elegant writer ; and Johnson not only praises him highly but speaks of him as a recognized classic: "an author whose pregnancy of imagination and elegance of language have deservedly set him high in the ranks ©f litera- ture " (" Lives of the Poets : "' Cowley) ; and again, with reference to his 1 HISTORIC PHASES. 25 inappreciation of the strength of the prae-Augustan literature. Thus Hume saw the problem of criticism restrictedly,' and without foresight of coming develop- ments, even while asserting the backwardness of his time ; so that, whjle_it may not be possible to carry the anal ysis of judgment much further than he did, or even to carry the psychology of slyTelriuch further than did K arnes, i t is perhaps possible to ascertain more a rately than they did Jiow far we have got, and/so/te make our criticism a little more comprehensive. B '^>^ fwhat the Scotch critics did not do, had no^^een accomplished elsewhere ; though France had produ^d>^ history, as follows: — "This is one of the few books which selection of ^^ sentiment and elegance of diction have been al»le to preserve, though written upon a subject flux and transitory. * The History of the Royal Society ' is now read, not tcitk t/u wish to know what they were then dotn^^ but how (sic) their transactions are exhibited by Sprat" (/lishing Christianity " in 1708. Already in 1705 Addison presents his book of travels to Swift as " the greatest genius of his age ; " and the Tatler only began to apjjcar in 1709 and the Spectator in 171 1. .\ddison's earlier work counts for little. ' .\ striking proof of the narrowness of Hume's grasp of literary effect is to be seen in his treatment, in the History, of the old story of Bruce's saying " I doubt I have killed the Comyn," and Kirkpatrick's grim answer: " Ve doubt ? I mak siccar." Hume gives it thus: — " Sir Thomas Kirkpatric, one of Bruce's friends, asking h.m soon after, if the traitor was slain ; / believe so, replied Bruce. And is that a mattery cried Kirkpatric, to be left to conjectured I lutll secure him.'^ The episode is reduced to burlesque. 26 SCIEXCE IN CRITICISM. a body of criticism which influenced all European literature/^] Pope's *' Essay on Criticism " — every wa}^ of course, a less significant piece of polemic than the "Art of Sinking" — does but reflect it, or rather, per- haps, the ancient criticism ^ to which that turned all eyes ; professedly finding authority in Nature for the rules, but always insisting on the classic example and the French precept, and so far from fully grasping the pro- fessed principle as to speak of an innovating success as a happy "fault" or "license," or "a grace beyond the reach of art," as did Addison. Dryden ^ had found Boileau and Rapin the greatest critics of his age ; and it w^s just their special influence that affected for the worse his proper critical judgment. ^Rajnrf g criticis m may ^ Comp. Mr. A. W. Ward, Globe ed. of Pope, p. 48: — **His [Pope's] chief obligations lie to the ancients whom he enumerates in this essay, rather than 10 the moderns, to whom at the most he owes particular felicitous thoughts and expressions." And Voltaire, after praising Horace and Boileau as on a par, writes : Mais Pope approfondit ce qu'ils ont efHeure ; D'un esprit plus hardi, d'un pas plus assure, II porta le flambeau dans I'abime de I'etre, Et Thomme avec lui seul apprit a se connaitre. (** La Religion Naturelle : Poeme au Roy de Prusse.") This chimes to some extent with the judgment of Mr. Swinburne on the relative merits of Pope and Boileau. But Pope's drift and bias were surely set by the French influence. Rapin, Bossu (on the Epic), Fontenelle (on the Pastoral) and Dacier (on Satire) were all translated early in the century. ^ " Works," Scott's ed. v. 108-9 (" Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic Licence"). Rapin, says Dryden, "is alone sufficient, were all other critics lost, to teach anew the rules of writing." '* Impartially speak- ing," he says elsewhere (" Ded. of the Aeneis," Scott's ed. xiv. 159), *'the French are as much better critics than the English, as they are worse poets." HISTORIC PHASES. 27 be^summed up as a species of Aristotle by machinery. His work and that of Bossu,* though representing a good deal of intellectual labour in the way qf formal analysis and collationjT is not the spontaneous expres - sion of a set of living judgements on cu rrent living phe nomena^ but as it were the decisions of an official * Bossu [163 1- 1 680] was pronounced by Harris to be ** the most methodic and accurate of . . . all " the French critics ('• Philological Inquiries," 1781, i. l8 = " Works," 1781, iv. 18). But in 1797, Joseph VVarton, editing Pope, on ch. 1$ of the "Art of Sinking" has a note l)eginning : — ** A severe animadversion u here intended on Bossu ; who, after he has been so many years quoted, commendetl, and followed, by a long train of respect- able disciples, must, I am afraid, alas ! be at last deserted and given up as a visionary and fantastical critic ; especially f<^ imagining, among other vain and groundless conceits and refinements, that Homer and Virgil first fixed on some one moral truth or axiom, and then added a fable or story, with suitable names and characters, proper to illustrate the truth so fixed upon." Thus four of the leading French critics were successively awarded the highest rank by English critics ; Dryden crowning Boileau and Rapin ; Addison Buuhours {Spectator^ 62), and Harris Bossu. Harris is himself a critic of much disputed rank. Johnson called him, to Boswell's perplexity, •*a prig, and a bad prig" (Boswell, ch. xxxvi.) ; and Mr. James Sime rejoins that he was *'at any rate a prig with a remarkably penetrating critical judgment " (" Life of Lessini;," i. 250). Lowtli, again, declared the *' Hermes " to be *' the most beautiful and perfect analysis . . . since the days of Aristotle : " Home Tooke pronounced it ** an improved compilation of almost all the errors, which grammarians have been accumulating from the time of Aristotle down to our present day of technical and learned affec- tation" (••Diversions of Purley," Introd.). Hazlitt too ("Spirit of the Age," ed. 1886, p. 90) characterized the " Hermes" as *' a work in which there is no analysis at all;" and Coleridge (•* Table Talk," May 7, 1830) declared that Home Tooke's "abu^ of Harris is most shallow and unfair ; " though admitting that Harris dealt " not very profoundly, it is true," with his subject. Finally, Dr. Richardson, Home Tooke's admirer and expositor, inclines to agree ('* On the Study of Language," 1854, p. 2) with Lowth, as regards the "skill of the workmanship" of Harris. Such are the diversions of criticism. The main value of the " Philological Inquiries," it may be said, lies in the historical section, which was trans- lated into French. Harris's best performance, perhaps, is his " Dialogue on Art." 28 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. bureau whose business it is to see that all papers pre- sented are in proper form, as per precedents accepted ^^ b}^ all parties^ It is,.iade£d.th£.Ji.ureau&i^4^~£iifo«L^^ ment of the static classicisDa.jQt..t^ ; though at the same time it typifies tendencies always likely to be set up in literature in certain social conditions. Briefly, it is the critique of conservatism in a consciously conservative society, whose period of unrest is held to be over. We are here once more in a period of crystallization, with critical dictators ^nd a dutiful audience, facing a literature in livery and a I society devoid of Jjiitiative, of ideas, of^sincerity, of aspiration, but .fiiuiij;ig--aii^Xi?J<^^ctual gymnastic in scholarship. ( This temper it was that naturally spread to England atlhe Restoration^^olitical conservatism and reaction against late innovations necessarily involving reaction against the literary tradition of freedom, as far back as the great creative outburst after the settlement under Elizabeth ; as well as againstjthe obvious follies in which the old literature had ended^Actual intercourse of course strengthened the bias of the new generation to French models^ Rymer was Rapin's translator and echo ; and we know from Addison how the French authorities in general operated on English judgment.^ **A few general Rules extracted out of the French Authors, with a certain Cant of Words, has sometimes set up an illiterate heavy Writer for a most judicious and formid- ^ Bossu and Bouhours, like Rapin, had great vogue in translation. HISTORIC PHASES. 29 able Critick." ^ If it be just to concede, ^vhat is urj;ed by Mr. Ward,^ that ** Boileau was as little as Pope an apostle of the pseudo-classicism of the so-called Augustan age of French literature ; . . . and the classical simplicity which he preached was not in his opinion attained by the sham revival of stock subjects of ancient poetry ;" yet none the less was his influence j mainly one of stereotype and convention, applying the i tests of " hon sens** only to the extent of the critic's own narrow and inelastic relation to life and art. In him we have one more illustration of the interdependenc e of a man's ge neral judgment in literature and his philosophy or scheme of life. A professed courtier, he as such recognized, roughly speaking, only one kind of excellence, that of judicious reflection and apt expres- sion — qualities which are, however, allowed to be absent from some of his own most ambitious work — and his whole critical influence, while certainly resist- ing extravagance, made for the restriction of effort to these ideals. He was even disloyal to his own sense of merit, earning by his attitude towards Comeille the just blame of literary posterity,3 and pushing at all costs that order of ability which best adapted itself to courtly standards. As the most influential ** literary dictator" of his period [1636-1711] — following on Rapin [1621-1687] and contemporary with Bouhours 'r52S€ 702] and Bossu — he may indeed have had some ' Spectator^ No. 291. See Professor Morley's note, in his editions, for an account of the more important of the critics in question. ' Loc. cit. 3 Sainlsbury's " History of French Literature,'' p. 284. 30 sc:eace in criticism. of the merit claimed for him by his admirers ^ as bring- ing ^^justesse" and ''soliditS" into French literature, somewhat as the conventionalism of the post-Restora- ii tion period in England in large p.aTt_^^t_£idof^lll£_idces R of the j* metaphysical " sqho ol ; but even on this view Wiwork remains only a success of the pruning-hook. Certainly it was due to no seminal virtue in him that French literature later flowered afresh : devoid ol artistic initiative, of human foresight, of intellectual ^ elan, he had no help to give towards progress^^jio \)P^^ ^J;imulus--tQ__creatiqn ; and as must always happen fT where the critic .is-ixUellectually inexpansive, his very rules for style, however just so lar as they go, were inadequate and misleading by force of assuming to be the beginning and end of poetic art. To his influence '^(jmight fairly bs ascribed the long postponement of poetic 'innovation in France as compared with England. But, as we have seen, he belongs to and represents a suf- ficiently remarkable critical period in French literary history — a period in which the national genius for criticism, for orderly discrimination, is once for all made manifest ^..^but of which the permanent critical service to humanity is^BuFsmalTT^y reason of the pre- maturity of the intellectual and social synthesis^* as Comtists would call it, of the age. ( A clearer idea of the relation of the political and social thought to the literary art of the time,may be had by ' "CEuvres de Boileau," ed. La Haye, 1729, ii. 3 {Aveyt. stir UAn Poetique). Cf. Demogeot, "Hist, de la Litt. Francaise," ed. 5% p. 4^0. The latter writer, however, makes judicious reservations, though undui> ignoring other critics. HISTORIC PHASES, 31 glancing into such a book as the Jesuit ^ Le Moyne's "Art both of Writing and Judging of History," trans- lated into English in 1694, in which the same unpro- gressive and pedantic view is taken of historiography as we have seen taken of poetry. It is gravely discussed whether the historian should tell the truth ; and the affirmative conclusion is come to. With regard, how- ever, to some things recorded of Charles V. it is asked " what need that future ages should be made acquainted, so Religious an Emperor was not always Chast ? " = and it is warmly contended that History in general had better " suppress the Vices of the Great than publish them;" Suetonius' "Lives of the Caesars" being reprobated as an " Infamous School of Vice," dangerous to the morals of readers, male and female ; and the translation of it into French as a scandal.^ Of any philosophic notion of history there is of course no sign ; but there is careful consideration of the question when and to what extent the historian should introduce, that is, invent, ** harangues," after the classic and neo- classic manner. It is a relief to find so much of the play of free ideas as is contained in a story of an old man punished for reading madrigals by being *' con- demn'd by universal Consent to the reading an //ara/^o^w^ in Guiccardin" '* But we are still under the reign of the " harangue " — tempered by epigrams. ' The number of clerics who took to criticism is remarkable. Bouhours was a Jesuit, so was Rapin ; and Segrais, "the Voiture of Caen " (highly praised by Dr>'den), like Fontenelle and Diderot was taught by the Jesuits. Bossu was a canon ; Du Bos and Batteux abbes ; and Vida a bishop. ' Pp. 71-2. 3 Pp. 107, 116. * P. 180. 32 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. t. With the generation after that of Boileau, however, there begins in France a movement as recognizably scientific as that of the Scotch criticism which comes later>a The Abbe Du Bos, who caught Hume's eye with his basic proposition that the human mind is always striving to escape the tedium of inanition ; and ^ whom Hume pronounced ^ one of "the few critics who have had some tincture of philosophy," came on the i scene as Boileau was leaving it, and in his ** Reflexions Critiques sur la Peinture et sur la Poesie " (1719) in- troduces a newjmetliiid , marked by alertness and curiosity ; ^ychologigaJLand analytic where the pre- vious habit hsTd^een pedantic and prescriptive ; one of the first breaths of the great critical movement which was to work such a tremendous change ere the century closed, 'ffiu Bos is to this day good reading enough. He goes straight to a number of central positions'; making it a datum\ that poetry always has been and always will be>read for the sake of pleasure and not of \ instruction ; ^ that style-value is that which counts (or most and best endures;^ that it is "poetry of style" and not of measure that makes the srreat difference between I verse and prose ; 4 that dogmatic poetry is at a perm.a- nent disadvantage as beside elegiac and " bucolic," since \i[e_wilL-alwavs be-'^QSl: rnoved- hy_thatjkind of poetry whose subject matter is most moving.5 He is "iflot-aped'ant, Though he is a scTTolaTT-arrdjh^ malces no ^ Essay "Of Tragedy." =" "Reflexions Critiques," ed. Utrecht, 1732, i. -^6 (sec. 9), 159 (sec. 34). 3 i. 153-7 (sec. 33) and 159. * P. 156. 5 i. 34 (sec. 8). HISTORIC PHASES. 33 cJaJm, as did the too famous Bouhours,^ to-convey an artj)f forming a right judgment on all literary matters; being contend to analyse and reason on general prin- cipjesr^But he is admitted to have influenced Lessing by his discussion of the relations of poetry and paint- ing; and his fresh resort to and explication of aesthetic impressions forecasts Diderot and still more modern types of critic. He too, however, collapses signifi- cantly enough over the attempt to settle a standard of taste, desperately affirming » that " La posterit6 n*a jamais blam6 comme de mauvais poemes ceux que les contemporains de TAuteur avoient lou6s comme excellents. . . . Nous ne voyons pas de po6me qui ait ennui6 les contemporains du Poete, parvenir jamais k une grande reputation ; " for which last generalization ' p he quotes the earlier one of Curtius : ** Tantumdem ' quoque posteri credunt, quantum praesens aetas spopon- derit." To mention Diderot and Lessing is to enter at a stride on that strictly modern time to which the creative work of the old critical period is itself ' It is only jnct t^ ^^j pf ^Hh"'"^ howpvpr. tliat he is a much more / ^ helpful TTtTtinhan Bossu and Kapin, bringmg'^rfcwNJ and supple judgment to bear on the Ic^ic of expression, instead of grinding out rules and formulas. His taste is not ours, but it is n\\t in its kind. His " Maniere de Bien Penser " is still very readable ; though he seems likely to l)e known in future, at least in English literature, mainly by Carlyle's citation of his once very pertinent question as to whether a German could possibly liave esprit. Addison learned from him ; and so, I think, did Pope. M. Demogeot seems to me to commit an oversight when, not once naming Bouhours, he gives to Boileau the credit of first bringing discrimination into the literary judgment of the time. ' ii. 20S (2« partie, sec. 26). 4 SCtEJiVE I^ GKiTtCtSM. **clatssic**: but classic under llie modmi resciratioa of vnivcRal i%^t of lejadlgiiiCDt, (^ strong tpss the of andqiiiib^ stUUtiuit i^lioaalist Fi but at the same time ignoring what had been done in critical science in the previous centur}^ We are con- fronted by a body of critical statement obviously apart from and more important than the work of the Jeffreys, the Smiths, and the Wilsons, and of course more signi- ficant than that of Scott ;,_ bu t we are still far from the I all-round jfreedom, the eager analysis and* the artistic I initjatiyfi-.of Diderot and Lessing. Carl}le's work in practical philosophy speaks for itself; but his demon- stration against religious orthodoxy never gets well beyond a feint ; and Macaulay's business-like discrimi- nation between Church and State was perhaps the more important demonstration of the two, though he too can be seen to have kept silence on many things ; while Hallam only indirectly worded certain of his oppugnancies. For the rest, well-judged as is much of the criticism of all three writers, it rernailis substjjati- ^\L^i^)^I^^^ iP-^kJi^-^itt!^ attempt at argumentative persuasion in matters of taste, and, in Carlyle's case, none too much in other regards. With them, wejire still in the generation before the great campaign of science ; and Buckle, who marks the transition, sinks on his march, leaving us to gather from his compendious though brief display of catholic appreciation, a baffled notion of what is possible to a really catholic culture. I He is still our one distinguished writer who had ; mastered alike history, literature, and science. It is specially significant of modern developments, however, that Macaulay, HaUam, and Cai'Iyl^rthe three HISTORIC PHASES, 39 <^ most considerable English critics (after WordsworthW/f Lamb, and Coleridge), of th^ ^rst ha|f of i;h^ century^ are all histori ans. W e have definitely come, it is plain, to a point of view from which all human phenomena are to be reconsidered ; and if_ En glish c on ygntiQ i^ bring s it about^J Lhat three writers of such authority 'pfi^ro ijf fvgdf mftUrrr T^f thn mnnt fnn^?mf^ntnl im- portance, which in the previous century had been dis- cussed abroad and even at home with freedom, on the other hand they illustrate Jh e^practical p hilosophy of life, a mong them, copiously enough. It is perhaps not superfluous just now to claim for Macaulay, with all his irritating shortcomings, an endowment of humane knowledge and strong understanding that have made him perhaps -^s valuable a force for good in his nation as the differeiftly gifted and more searchingly yet more jperversely thinkinggadyle. Neither can be called the ideal cntic ; -and yet nobody of equal influence has taken up criticism in England since their time of activity. Carlyle and Macaulay are at this moment among our most popular writers : Mr. Arnold is not. •CfimpAredjkviilnhe work^ the three critic -historians \ aforesaid, indeed, that of the critics of the next gene- l ration seems at first sight restricted and unenergetic ; "1 Mr* jA rnold. Mr. Leslie Stephen, Mr. Dowden, and Mr. ] I John Mprley, having^ amailed to take high hferary'rank by any one eminently important critical or historical per- formance; but the difference of range is only apparent. T here is no narrowing of the sphere of critical activity : the writers in question — and the generalization holds 40 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM, good of many more, as Emerson, Poe, Mr. Lowell, Mr. Harrison, the late W. R. Greg, and Walter Bagehot — treat of ethics, politics, history, philosophy, belles lettres, and theology, with, in most cases, proportioned attentipii. The new generation is abandoning the conventi ons of its pr edecessor; and already Mr. Greg, Mr. Arnold, Mr. Stephen, Mr. Harrison, and Mr. Morley have in their turn taken " unpopular" courses, and found them, as of old, not so unpopular as had been supposed. So strong and so general, indeed, has been the interest in the deeper questions of human faith and destiiiyj__§iace. the general forward reaction that partly bega n_with Str auss, was reinforced by Mill, and was__solLdifi£d-at-©ft€e— by-Spencer, by Buckle, and by Darwin, — that pure belles lettres^ or at least the simple criticism3?"'fe/^|r5^£S, no longer jeceives relatively so much consideration jLS it jdidJji-llie_tinae of Hazlitt and CampbelJ. But on the other hand the belletrist_ essays of Mr. Lowell have had a wide public ; and there has arisen a movement of- aesthetic speciahsm^ involving elaborate study of particular poets, which if it has not ,' been marked by effective criticism atr^tcast -shows that 1 method is being brought to bear on the ^tudy of i^imaginative literature as on other matters, j^ In detail, indeed, this movement has appeared to hinder criticism, fostering on the contrary a kind of sectarian enthusiasm' ijyhich allows of no just discrimination pf merit in._tlie 'given author, and still less any comprehensive view of literary relativity. That, however^^cannot be a per- raanerit culture phase; and criticism must supervene HISTORIC PHASES. 41 i n due time, a ll the more effectively becau^ ^Q of the inte rlude^ of fan aticism. This fanaticism is in a sense, indeed, an outcome of and a protest against inadequate criticism. In that department the c ompara tive method has yet to be ap- plied; and the conflict of notions is at first sight quite sufficient to raise doubt of the value of any. As the strifes of apriorism drove men to phenomena, so the collisions of dicta on literature repel them to the books, with a kind of horror, for a time, of all general judg- ments whatsoever, and a lothness even to confess that anything displeases themiL^hat must come, of course,\ is a new process of judgment, in which^ if the study have been comprehensive enough, the conclusions will ^ _belogicaIlyrelated to many established trains of ideas^ aVP the pPrcya*^jyA i/iVfno r^f nnnnV^nn, in^any b^dy jjf opinions gives a p teir^^gew^ ral tru thr-^nd the next test their consistenc y ^ it ||i other processes nf thought ; the criterion always being that iiniversal logic by whichVj facts and principles are settled in naturai,..-^ience. Now, criticism has hitherto at most sought to secure consistency of dictum within an arbitrarily limited area of impressions ; such being the achievement of the classicist system of the seventeeth and eighteenth centuries ; and mode rn English critic ism^ with its much wider outlook^as not even circumspectly aimed_at _consist^cy_in comparative aesthetics ; while the 'further-reaching consistencies of aesthetic and sociolo- gical opinion have come still more badly off. On the \ > and,will thus ha VP the pPr«tya«^iv*» i/ir»iio r^f nnnriVtnnnyj ^ / That 7^trri^"t'* in^any b^dy jjf opinions gives a pr I lie T 42 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM, I one hand, inferior poetry has been praised because of I agceptance of its teaching : on the other, rejection of i teachings has led to indiscriminate blame of their ^artistic expression. Faults in esteemed authors have -beejDLDDt- merely slurred over but extolled as beauties ; ethic^^tandards^ have been applied at random ; and the inevitable obstacles of conservative aversion to the new, and customary esteem of the old, have been present in every department of literary criticism as in social action ^n^rally. It is not that criticism is any more anarcKlc than politics ; but in the latter department there is (certainly not more consistency ! but) a more obvious sequence of cause and effect in categories of opinion, so that men get to accept strife of social judgment as exhibiting law rather than negating it. _^_cjiticism, motives vary so much more minutely_a_s_jto seem un- traceable" arid inexplicablel and whereas nobody in practice denies the posslbilify "oT^oiitical science be- cause of the strenuous hostilities of parties, or of biolo- gical science because of disputes {a) among evolutionists and (6) between evolutionists and supernaturalists, Pyrrhonism in matters literary is often more or less explicitly avowed. The reasonable attitude is, of course, not that of pyrrhonism but that of research. In our own time, this attitude has been prescribed. Twenty-eight years ^ ago, discussing translations of Homer, Mr. Mathew Arnold took occasion to affirm that although the main effort of the European intellect in general had for many years been a critical effort, *^ the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge, theology. HISTORIC PHASES. philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object as in itself it really is," yet ** almost the last thing for which one would come to English literature is just that very thing which now Europe most desires — criticism." ^ Of this general judgment, as later reiterated, Mr. Herbert Spencer has forcibly controverted a good many items ; ^ and even as regards literary criticism Mr. Arnold exaggera ted the na^ig na l defpr t in the gr oss> thoug h he mrj^HT well compl ain of t he rc:.trictcdncs s of Eng lish mticlsm~iir'5ome4^*^^*^° "^ — directions in which he himself later inconsistently sought to restrict it — and of the lack of scientific disinterestedness or open-minded- ness in what criticism there was. Since then there has certainly been progress in these regards, there being now a number of non-partisan reviews of high-standing. There is still lacking, however, ..ibffct-m caou r e of -eooiz-^ 4ift«ttTomhat might be expected to be attained in literary criticism, in view of the extent to which it has been carried in other studies ; and Mr. A rnnld*§ ftW° perf orjnan ce may wi thout jnalice be said to have c ome short of its.^avQW f^^ ^*"^ The very undertaking to sec " the object as in itself it really is " was ominous to begin with ; because ** the object as in itself it really is *' is strictly a chimaera. We can but know the thing ^ as it is to our minds — to given orders of mind ^ and.,^ / whatJxS2Pens in science is the, ^gradual agreemen t among (jfy^Tr>TrdMfr^gr] mind that on inves tigation Lectures on Translating Homer, 1861, p. 64. Cf. *' Essays in Ciriticism," ** The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," ad init. The Study of Sociology," 1873, pp. 217-236. 4^ 44 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. things are so and so. What the critic may ho pe to do is similarly to persuade given orders of mind, by comparison, and reasoning, that things "are so and so,"^ and to explain to them why it is that to other orders-oF mijid they are otherwise. Doubtless Mr. x^rnold" did this to a considerable extent, his gift of persuasion indeed outrunning his gift of demonstration ; but he was too little given to scrutinizing and comparing his own impressions ever to realize aright the relativity of notions, or, consequently, to make good the coherence of his own. He thus provoked as much dissent as any critic of his time, while doing singularly little to resolve dissent by analytic argument. But he has left to criticism the legacy of an example of admirable temper, an urbanity so nearly perfect as at once to win assents almost without proof and to atone to the verge of possibility for logical perversity and failure. And, needless to say, failure to stamp science on criticism is not specially to be charged against Mr. Arnold. Foreign critics with much more show of scientific method have provoked scepticism enough, and the greatest has not grappled with the scientific problem. It does not appear that Sainte-Beuve ever answered the question put to him by Flaubert on his adverse review of " Salammbo " : — '' Etes-vous bien sur, d'abord, — dans votre jugement general, — de n'avoir pas obei un peu trop a votre impression nerveuse ? " His Parisianly courteous reply to Flau- bert's keen counter-criticism might signify either a consciousness that the "impression nerveuse" had been unduly influential in his review, and that the HISTORIC PHASES. 45 most convenient amends would be the printing of the rejoinder along with it; or that, the romance being still in his opinion a failure, though he had been caught tripping in his archaeological objections, it would be a friendly service to Flaubert to let the defence be made the most of. However that was, he dismissed his friend's challenge with ** J'avais tout dit ; vous r^pondez : les lecteurs attentifs jugeront." Now, Sainte-Beuve, ** the very genius of observation, discre- tion, and taste," as Mr. Henry James sums him up, must have felt the pertinence of Flaubert's query ; and his omission to take up the critical problem it raised was a regrettable evasion of the most important question the critic can ask himself. If he were partly or fully conscious that he had — as what critic has not sometimes? — allowed a nervous revulsion to prejudice his judgment, he of all men had least need to shrink from the avowal ; and if he felt he could clear himself, who could put the case more lucidly ? Th e bes t criticism^ being thus unrelieved of an impu- tatioi^^f^n^l arbitrariness and inconclusiveness, it is not difficult to make oul a^plausible^case for critical Pyrrhonism by a free citation, of-the failures of the wo rst; and when a uthors, as they well may, print in contrastthfi.iTuitually annihilatiyejudgments sometimes P^^Sfid^onJheiHbQoks by different newspapers ; or when a comparison is made of newspaper judgments on con- temporary pictures, the^ha nces of cr itical science look _&niall enoui^h. Herice more than one elaborate con- tention that criticism is but a cumbering of the ground. That proposition we must now examine. 11. RECENT NIHILISM. Nihilism, rather than pyrrhonism, seems the right description of the professed thesis, as distinct from the actual exposition, of the recent volume entitled " Shakspere as a Dramatic Artist," by Mr. R. G. Moulton, the able advocate of University Extension. Though, as we shall see, Mr. Moulton's practice is in itself a negation of his theory, he formally and energe- tically_^repudiates all criticism whatever, in ihe ordinary sense of the term; claiming to substitute an "inductive " •criticism which, in theory, is not in the ordinary sense criticism at all, but description ; yet in his own per- formance is found to be no more inductive and no less deductive than any other. Rather in respect of its undertaking than of its execution, his work calls for detailed examination. It is one of Mr. Moulton's convenient assumptions that the "judicial critic" — that is, the critic who. praises and blames — is by his very attitude partly disabled for appreciation. Perhaps, however, Mr. Moulton would allow that in " criticizing " what RECENT NIHILISM, 47 professes to be a scientific treatise, the need for coming to a position either of agreement or of disagreement is so imperious as to make the judicial attitude in that case comparatively venial. In any event, one can but avow that one went to his book hoping to find some- thing satisfying, not at all unprepared to agree, but expecting only to 4DLj}lS--J^^^3.^^^^iL kj the tests of universal logic ;_ and that one nevertheless found -'incomplete observation, spurious analysis, and unsound argument. In such a case one can but propose to oneself a conscientious effort at an understanding of the position objected to, tr}'ing to see the problem as the protagonist saw it, and to settle not only whether he is wrong but how he went wrong — admittedly the only decisive settlement of any such issue. Mr. Moulton, then, as I take it, started from the ordinary perception that critical literature is in large part made up of conflicting judgments ; that these judgments are often arbitrary and unexplained ; and that people obscure art hopelessly by persisting in forming and uttering such opinions in the old style. In particular he noted how critics had framed hier- archies of merit, and how even some whose judgment he felt to be generally good had fallen into absurdity in this process. From these data Mr. Moulton seems to have passed at a stride to the singular conclusion that it is a blunder to pass judgments on merit at all, though each step of his own reasoning in the matter consisted in such an act of judgment. Where he had a gleam of light, if I may so express myself, was in his 48 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. feeling that formal criticism should rest on analysis ; but at that stage, I fear, the light went out. Mr. Moulton incontinently decided that the process of analysis could be entirely separated from that of judgment ; and proceeded to call the former " inductive criticism" and "science," and the latter "judicial criticism," otherwise, something anti-scientific. There is a quite startling simplicity in Mr. Moulton's way of reaching these conclusions. To show that "judicial criticism " — the criticism which praises and blames — is always non-inductive and always non-scientific, he selects certain old critical judgments which he regards, and knows to he generally regarded , as absurdly wrong. These he exhibits as sample cases of judicial criticism, saying nothing of the judicial criticism which has condemned them, but describing the survival of the contrary opinion as a case of " defeat of criticism " by " science," or by " authors." Let us check Mr. Moulton's account of the single case of Shakspere, which he takes (p. ii) as " only the most illustrious example of authors triumphing over the criticism that attempted to judge them." The history of Shakspere-criticism, he asserts (p. 8), "is made up of wave after wave of critical opposition, each retiring further before the steady advance of Shakspere's fame." One is staggered by such an allegation in the forefront of an exposition which claims to be above all things attentive to factual data. In point of fact the history of Shakspere-criticism begins with an immense volume of contemporary and posthumous applause, including RECENT NIHILISM. 49 the unparalleled panegyrics of Jonsonand Milton; and it is not till two generations after the poet's death that any considerable signs of reaction are seen. Even Dryden, whom Mr. Moulton oddly cites only as cavilling against Shakspere, honoured him in terms as reverently enthusiastic and as emphatic as those of Jonson and Milton ; and it is only on the part of the extreme disciples of Boileau and Rapin, as Rymer, that one finds anything like unqualified dispraise. Now, even if Rymer's denunciation had set the fashion for his whole generation ; even if there had not flourished throughout the Restoration and " Augustan " period, as we know there did, a stedfast Shakspere-worship alongside of a different taste, the phenomenon would still be only one of a temporary change of fashion ; and Rymer's verdict would be no more typical of ** judicial criticism *' than the applause of Jonson, Milton, and Dryden.' Given, then, such a transient fashion, what should * Rymer did not have it all his own way even among the French school in England. The translator of Bossu on the Epic not only takes occasion in his preface to cite Dryden on behalf of Milton, whom Rymer had ignored in a notice of English heroic poetry (discussing only Spenser, D'Avenant, and Cowley), but explicitly decries Rymer : — *' Among the English, there have been but few that merit the Name of Critick, in that Sense I take the Word. Most of them are only CritUks in the worst Sense ; that is, such as expose the Faults^ but take no notice of the Excellencies of Authors. The /niicious Rymer, who seems to have a particular Talent for Criticising, yet in my Opinion falls short of being a true Critick : And if he will still dis- pute that title with the World, yet he must be contented with being reckon'd one of the meaner Sort ; since 'tis more difficult and honourable to discuss and commend the Excellencies, than 'tis to find out and expo-^e t.ie Failings of Shaiespear, Fletcher, or any other Author." Mr. Moulton is thus somewhat astray in assuming (p. 8) that Rymer was '* accepted in his own day as the champion of * regular ' criticism." 5 50 SCIFNCE IN CRITICISM. be the attitude of the scientific critic towards it ? Here it is that the incoordinate character of Mr. Moulton's doctrine fully betrays itself. He has been good enough to admit (p. 21) that while judicial criticism is '* outside science altogether," it is literature in itself. " It would be false to the principles of induction not to recognize that the criticism of taste has long since established its position as a fertile branch of literature" — which surely amounts to saying that it is subject matter for inductive critical science. But just when, on his own principles, he should be merely registering phenomena without praise or blame, Mr. Moulton is passing "judicial criticism " of the most Rhadamanthine order, praising and blaming the critics, past and present, for their virtues and vices, and pronouncing the miscarriages of Addison ^ and Johnson, oddly enough, " odd anachron- ^ It is a singular blunder on Mr. Moulton's part, by the way, to pillory Addison (p, 16) as " constructing an order of merit for English poets with Cowley and Sprat at the head " — that is, if the reference be, as lN(;ancy it must, to Addison's juvenile " Account of the Greatest English Poets," a set of college verses. The reference to Sprat is as follows : — " Blest man ! [Cowley] who now shall be for ever known In Sprat's successful labours and thy own." It is an awful couplet ; but it was written in the poet's green and salad youth [April, 1694]; and in any case the allusion is to Sprat's /r^j^ Life of Cowley, not to his poetry. Nor does the praise of Cowley represent Addison's mature judgment, according to which Cow ley was the greatest exemplar of " mixt wit " — that is, of " wit " only half-way between the false and the true — ^and inferior both as wit and poet to Dryden [Spectator, No. 62). See too the warm championship of Shakspere in No. 592, at the end. Even in the crude "Account" there are glimmerings of the later admiration of Milton. It may be noted, by the way, that Pope was wont to call Sprat "a worse, Cowley." Perhaps this may have something to do with Mr. Moulton's statement. RECENT NIHILISM, 51 isms," when one would think that was the one thing they were not. False characterization apart, these judgments are of course only too natural, since to characterize critical judgments at all is to speak of them judicially. Only in terms of critical judgment are they perceptible moral phenomena. Mr. Moulton's logical suicide is committed in good company — that of Bacon, for one, of whom one of his editors has confessed that in " censuring intermediate propositions " he ** appears to have been unaware that he was condemning the only forms through which reason or inference can manifest itself, and lecturing mankind on the futility of an \u\ instrument which he was employing in every page of his book.'* But looking to Mr. Moulton's purpose and preparation, his fallacy is, to use his own phrase, an odd anachronism. If we take his account of the general movement of modern criticism, it is found to make his self-destruc- tion, if possible, still more complete. ** Between the Renaissance and the present day," he sums up (p. 18), " criticism, as judged by the methods actually followed by critics, Aas slowly changed from the form of laying down laws to ant Jwrs into the form of receiving laws from authors. In its first stage the conception of criticism was bounded by the notion of comparing whatever was^produced with the masterpieces and trying it by the ideas of Greek and Roman literature,^* Why what is this last but the very thing Mr. Moulton says it is not — receiving laws from authors ? One is at a loss how to dispute with a_writer jt who thus unconsciously confutes himself in thevgixl/ 52 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM, statement of his case : you cannot be sure that terms are to him what they are to you. Setting Mr. Moulton and his confusions for a moment aside, we may perhaps best progress by constating a little more lucidly the phenomena he seems to have in view. Criticism always did, and probably always will, to a certain extent, ** re- ceive laws from authors," not literally or mechanically, but by deduction and insight, since it is from authors that the critic must have gathered, mediately or im- mediately, his notions of excellence. Authors, it is obvious, similarly " receive laws " from their prede- cessors, originality only consisting in bettering one's teaching. And the whole critical problem is, From what authors are laws at a given moment receivecl, what laws in particular, and why these ?Tif15hakspe*fe^s6wn""da}% his product was spontaneously accepted on the strength of its immediate attraction, only a minority censo- riously testing it by the models of antiquity. What happened later was that a movement of French in- fluence, involving a short-sighted resort to classic standards, helped to cause a partial reaction, in which he was condemned in whole or in part. These censures were in terms of laws " received from authors " — other authors ; but because they have since been reversed Mr. Moulton calls them "judicial criticism," and "out- side of science." In point of fact they were just re- versed by judicial critlcrsm'of'ah opposTfe~dfiTf,'Tepre- senting the lapse of the French and pseudo-classic taste, and the partial return to the Elizabethan ; and now the laws were received from the authors in favour. RECENT NIHILISM. 53 But it was not because the new critics were more inductive or more scientific than their predecessors, tliough perhaps they were so : jt^ was that fnr ^0^^ causCj remaining to be t raced, their leanings were dl ferent ; and^ th^y ^gQftr4in gly praised and blamed as ze alously as the oth TR hafi tii^nt) W ^i^ff^'^^ ^'^Tt On Mr. Moulton*s ostensible principle, however, the formulation of ** laws '* at all is an absurdity ; and yet another aspect of his logical self-annihilation is his process of deducing from a single author * * laws " which , on his own view, are never to be applied. In his ** Sur- vey of Dramatic Criticism as an Inductive Science " he professes to analyse the technique of Shakspere alone. Something might be said on the pretensions of such an analysis as his to be in any case either dramatic criticism or dramatic science even on the limited scale of his professed inquiry, which only ** en- deavours to find convenient headings under which to set forth its observations of Shakspere's plays *' (p. 230) ; but it is_eno ugh that by his ow n account he can deduce from Sh ak s pr ^ the la^s jorjHakspSFe only. If, as his argument asserts if it asserts anything, jj jticism is .io dis cover f rom every author the "laws" ofhisjwork, and to lay down none lor tiim from previous authors, Mr. Moulton has no more right to derive " laws of drama " from Shakspere than the French school had to derive them from Aristotle or the classic practice. Shak- spere, he tells us (p. 231), "must afford a specimen of literary tendencies in general, and that particular modi- fication of them we call Elizabethan." But why ? 54 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. Already we had been told (p. 3) that Jonson ''by the * cross-fertilization ' of two existing literary species '* ** added to literature a third including features of both ; '* and " founded a school of treatment of which the law is caricature." Besides, *' inductive treatment knows nothing about higher or lower, which lie outside the domain of science." Jonson, then, is as much Drama as Shakspere. And it will not do to say here that in- ductive criticism is to keep a ledger in which accounts, so to speak, are to be separately posted with the view of ultimately arriving at generalizations. On Mr. Moulton's principle there can never be any generaliza- tion, because every new author brings his " laws " with him, and these are — not indeed better or worse than those already ledgered, since inductive criticism is to *' know nothing" of better or worse — but just as truly laws as the conceivably quite different methods of the other writers. Yet here have we presented to us, as data of scientific dramatic criticism, a set of formulas supposed to describe or diagraph the dramatic practice of Shakspere. Is it that Shakspere's methods are all the while assumed to be exemplary ? I cannot but think that this is the clue to Mr. Moulton's procedure, even though he professes to repudiate any attempt at settling precedence as between Shakspere and Jonson. " No one," he declares in his preface, *' needs assis- tance in order to perceive Shakspeare's greatness ; but an impression is not uncommonly to be found, especially amongst English readers, that Shakspeare's greatness lies mainly in his deep knowledge of human nature, while RECENT NIHILISM, c 5 as to the technicalities of Dramatic Art, he is at once careless of them, and too great to need them. / have en- deavoured to combat this impression by a series of studies of Shakspeare as a Dramatic Artist. They are jgill^y occupied with a few masterstrokes of art. . . ."[( ^ow Mr. Moulton can say such things in the name oJoil^uc/v tive criticism, and then proceed to declare that iWtK> '^>; tive criticism " knows nothing of high or low," and h^^^. ** notjiingja ^o with me rit, r elative o r at^^^lntft" (p. 22), I am unable to understand. But that he should through- out his book indulge in judicial criticism is intelligible ^nnncrh K^n^j^g^ all f>r;|i/*i ^m is judjcjal, and what he I calls specifically induction is at all times a part of the ' judicial process. From one point of view he has the merit, always i mportant in a critic" of prompting \ readers tg f^nd reasons fnr their judgments, by resorting to analysis of a kind ; but even this merit is in part dis- counted by the obvious fact that he is determined to see only wisdom in the methods he e.xplores. His every step / of plot-analysis, for example, amounts to the assertion ' not only that This is so, but that This is admirable ; just as Rymer would say, This is execrable. In the very act of protesting against the criticism which praises and blames and frames hierarchies, Mr. Moulton exultingly announces that ** Finally criticism comes round entirely to Shakspere '* — that is, puts him at the top of the hierarchy, as does Mr. Moulton, who pronounces him (p. 40) " the great master of the Romantic Drama." If the statement as to modem criticism be meant literally, it is not true ; for even in our own day Mr. 56 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM, Arnold has with general ao^reement protested that some of the writing in ''Macbeth" is execrable; Air. Lewes has with tolerably widespread assent declared ^ that "Hamlet" is a gravely faulty play ; and Lord Acton has, perhaps not entirely without countenance, pro- nounced the poet to be flagrantly insular.^ And for two generations at least Hallam has certainly had with him a multitude of thoughtful readers in his ascription to Shakspere of some " hasty half-thoughts." 3 As against all such attempts at discrimination, Mr. Moulton proceeds on the Schlegelian principle of find-' ing good reasons for an^ subtle judgment behind every- thing Shakspere did.4 To what this principle may lead in darkening of counsel and actual perversion of fact may be seen from several passages in Mr. Moulton's chapters on the " Merchant of Venice." As these : — I. The dramatist is credited (p. 54) with special scrupulosity and propriety in writing '* You that choose not by the view, Chance as fair and choose as true," and not ^' more fair," and ''more true" [i.e. than the other suitors]. The remark shows a complete miscon- ception of the passage, which means " may you always chance as fair and choose as true." Bassanio J/J chance ^ " Actors and Acting," p. 131. ^ Art. on George Eliot, Nineteenth Century^ March, 1885, p. 471. 3 " Introd, to Lit. of Europe," Pt. iii. c. 6, § 40. ^ It is right, however, to give Mr. Moulton credit for his intelligent sug- gestion (p. 61, note) that the line *' How like a fawning publican he looks" wa^ originally an aside of Antonio, not part of the speech of Shylock ; and for his interpretation of the term " human kindness" (pp. 149-50). RECENT NIHILISM, $7 more fair than the others : " chance as fair " means " chance as wisely *' or " as luckily " ; and he did "choose more true*': "choose as true" means "choose so as to get what you want." Mr. Moulton's reading would imply that Shakspere either forgot that the dead father could not tell which casket was to be opened first, or, in crediting him with second-sight, forgot that Bassanio does not know anything of the previous choosings. 2. Shakspere is praised (pp. 54-5) in that " as if to warn us against " looking for the key to the suitor's fates "in the trains of reasoning they go through" instead of in their characters, he " contrives that we never liear the reasotiings of the successful suitor. By a natural touch Portia, who has chosen Bassanio in her heart, is represented as unable to bear the suspense of hearing him deliberate, and calls for music to drown his meditations ; it is only the conclusion to which he has come that we catch as the music closes." In point of fact the interrupting song is ten lines long and the heard soliloquy thirty-five ; and the latter contains at least thirty lines of analogical reasoning as against not more than five which turn on character. " Of Bassanio's soliloquy," says Mr. Moulton (p. 56), " we hear enough to catch that his pride is the pride of the soldier;" and he quotes for this merely the three lines on the " meagre lead." Can it be that he did his exegesis from stage recollection ? 3. Shakspere is throughout credited with inventing the casket mottoes. A circumspect critic would gravely 58 SCIE.^'CE IN CRITICISM. doubt whether they had not been framed or suggested in some previous manipulation of the Ges^a story, which had three mottoes to begin with.^ A reasonable criti- cism would be that at least the first is badly framed. The chooser of the gold casket " gains" nothing. 4. Shakspere is expressly declared to have *' improved the story in the telling " in that (p. 66) he " retains the traditional plea as to the blood, but puts it into the mouth of one known to his audience to be a woman playing the lawyer for the nonce ; " and again ** follows up the brilliant evasion by a sound legal plea," and so "contrives to secure both alternatives" {sic!) of "choosing between {\} a course of procedure which shall be highly dramatic but leave a sense of injustice, and one that shall be sound and legal but comparativel}^ tame." As a matter of fact the blood plea is put in the mouth of the woman playing the lawyer in the Pecorone ; ^ and it is at least as likely as not that the "sound legal plea" had been laid down in the previous play of *'The Jew," alluded to by Gosson in his " School of Abuse." 3 It is hinted at in the declamation of the Christian in the dispute between Jew and Christian in "■The Or ator "of Silvayn. in the remark that in Rome it was forbidden to imprison men for debt when the Commonwealth was found to suffer from the practice.4 5. Mr. Moulton praises Shakspere (p. 66) as having *' improved his two stories [of caskets and bond] by so » See Mr. W. C. Hazlitt's ed. of " Shakspere's Library," Pt. i. vol. i. p. 364. "" Id., pp. 343-7- 3 Arber's reprint, p. 40. * "Shakspere's Librar}'," i. 359. RECENT NIHILISM, 59 weaving them together that they should assist one another's effect." But even in the Pecorone novel we have the conjunction of the story of the winner of the lady of Belmont and that of the bond to the Jew by his godfather; just as in the ballad of the "The Northern Lord *' ' the naif rhymer combines the motives of the stolen ring and the ill-used wife with that of the pound of flesh ; and there is good reason to assume that the stories of the casket-choice and the pound of flesh were already woven together in ** The Jew,** which, as Gosson notes, represented " the greedi- nesse of worldly chusers, and bloody mindes of Usu- rers.** These are just the sort of points that a truly ** inductive " criticism would carefully look to in esti- mating merit and awarding praise; but Mr. Moulton overlooks precisely the material on which fresh induc- tion should found.* 6. Yet again, he praises the dramatist (p. 72) for bringing the play ** into conformity with the laws of mental working ** by causing the episode of the rings to- afford a relief of reaction from the tension of the Trial Scene, so that " the effect of the reaction is to make the serious passion more keen because more healthy." In point of fact the same relief is found in the Pecorone story, where the ring episode occurs in the same way, save that there is only one.^ Yet Mr. * "Shakspere's Library," p. 367. * In his' treatment of Richard III. he confidently assumes for Shakspere the whole plan and conduct of the play. Few careful students will follow him. 3 As cited, p. 350. 6o SCIENCE IN CRITICISM Moulton confidently ends his chapter with the claim that '' in this particular case the combination of tales so opposite in character must be regarded as one of the leading points in which Shakspere has improved the tales in the telling." 7. By way of magnifying Shakspere's sense of sym- metry, we are told that " Jessica and her husband are the messengers who bring the sad tidings " of Antonio's peril, and " thus link together the bright and gloomy elements of the play." They are not the messengers. The messenger is Salerio, who, Lorenzo tells, " did entreat me, past all saying nay, to come with him along," when they met " by the way." Once more, was Mr. Moulton writing on recollections of the theatre ? 8. The poet is credited (as by Gervinus) with having planned in "Macbeth" a perfect arch of rise and fall, with a turning-point at the centre, in the murder of Banquo. No note is taken of the fact that HoHnshed had said : "After the contrived slaughter of Banquo, nothing prospered with the foresaid Makbeth." g. The apologetic purpose works many flat contra- dictions. As thus : — {a) " Shakspere is never wiser than the age he is pourtraying " in the matter of super- naturalism (p. 131). On p. 1S5 Lady Macbeth's *' the sleeping and the dead are but as pictures " is taken as giving a clue to a whole life history of inquiry and speculation, since she " must have started with the superstitions of her age." Here, when Shakspere is very much wiser than the age, we learn that it is only RECENT NIHILISM. 6i the character who is so.^ (6) Of Lady Macbeth it is stated (p. 155) that ** in the kingdom of her personal experience her will is unquestioned king." On the next page we learn that " Lady Macbeth's career in the play is one long mental civil war.'* Words are used for rhetorical effect, in disregard of meaning and consistency. 10. But the crassest of the confusions thus created by m idnlntr'^v'^ff*' ^PP^^/'i^_*r..fJIlJi'^'''!_^.^^^J^ ^^ ^^^ following passage : — ** In the case of personages de- manded by the necessities of the story rather than intro- duced for their own sake, Shakspere has a tendency to double the number of such personages for the sake of getting effects of contrast.** ^ In support of this egregious pro- position Mr. Moulton cites the two unsuccessful suitors in " The Merchant of Venice,'* the two wicked daughters in ** Lear,*' and the two princes in " Richard the Third." To say nothing — as indeed nothing adequate can well be said — of the remarkable theorem that Shakspere tends to double for the sake of effect the num- ber of personages ** demanded by the necessities of the story *' (a piece of doctrine which is in some ways typical of Mr. Moulton's general drift), it is enough to point out that in the three cases in question the doubling is not Shakspere's at all. There are two unsuccessful suitors in " The Merchant " because there are two wrong caskets, and probably because there were two such * Compare p. 47 : — ** Antonio must be understood as a perfect character: for we must read the play in the light of its age, and intolerance was a mediaeval virtue." What then of Lady Macbeth's scepticism? » P. 240. i 62 scie:;ce in criticism. suitors in the previous play; there are two wicked daughters in " Lear " because that was the legend ; and two princes in " Richard " because that was the historical fact. Mr. Moulton seems to. attain s heer hallucination in his idolatry. Thus he declares of Lorenzo that ** to the depth of his passion for music and for the beauty of nature we are indebted (!) for some of the noblest passages in Shakspere ; " he decides that the blood-plea must have been " Portia's happy-thought," not Belario's — "certainly it was not this doctor who hit upon this idea of the blood being omitted;" and he discovers that *'we must see the calibre of Lorenzo's character through the eyes of Portia, who selects him at first sight as the representa- tive to whom to commit her household in her absence " — this by way either of vindicating Shakspere's power of characterization or of vindicating a supposed actual Lorenzo. Such are some of the phases of pseudo-interpr.£tatipn and ^gurious knpii^Jedge arrived at by Mr. Moulton's (/«as/-inductive method, and presented by him as a contribution to popular culture.^ He has-4a:id it do^wi (p. 25) that literary interpretation is of the nature of a ^ I can but hope that these comments will serve as an answer in part to the contrary dictum of Professor Dowden [AcadejJiy, Aug. 29, 1885, p. 127) that "Mr. Moulton is an excellent and original critic, bringing admirably to light new depths of the riches of both the wisdom and knowledge of Shakspere." This very high eulogy Mr. Dowden supports by no example whatever ; and the rest of the criticism is so inconsistent as to make the whole more inconclusive than an average newspaper notice. It is to be regretted that critics of standing should add to the confusion of judgment by such obviously offhand and ill-considered deliverances. RECENT NIHILISM. 63 icientific hypothfisiSr the truth of which is tested by the3egreeof completeness with which it explains the details of the literary work as they actually stand.** We have seen how Mr. Moulton's " hypothesis " ex- plains ** The Merchant of Venice." Much might be added as to the perversity of some of his ethical teaching, as when he says of Jessica (whom on p. 85 he describes as, like Lorenzo, a " negative character," shortly after declaring (p. 84) that "all with whom she comes in contact feel her spell ") that her giving the turquoise ring for a monkey is *' a carelessness of money which mitigates our dislike (!) of the free hand Jessica lays upon her father's ducats and jewels '* — this when Shakspere takes care to tell us that the ring was a love-gift of her mother to her father in their young days. After all, however, perversities of the " criticism of taste ** may be committed by any man, whether or not he professes to be scientifically induc- tive. The distinctive and fatal miscarriage of Mr. Moulton is in his handling of theory ; in his confu- sion of terms and of ideas ; jndeclaring that inductive C rlHr^km Jcnmys nnthinor of lligher._QJllower while s ub- ' suming special excellence in giv en subject-matter; in asserting (p. 3) that induction " takes objection to the word * decay * as suggesting condemnation," while {a) making it an axiom (p. 37) " Thai literature is a thing of development,'* (b) stating (pref.) that Shakspere made certain dramatic methods ** obsolete," and (c) proposing (p* 39) to " leave a dead judicial criticism to bury its dead authors ; " and in professing to know no laws of 64 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM, art save those which are to be deduced singly from individual authors, while explicitly assuming (p. io6) certain perennial "demands of art,'* and .ii:n|)licitly reasoning from first to last on that assumption. It is a harrowing spectacle, in whichThe pathos of failure is dashed by a sense of the Icarian presumption which would neither hesitate to blame nor stay to calculate difficulties. Enough of the result. III. THE PROBLEM STATED. One plank floats from the wreck of Mr. Moulton's enter- prise — the reasonable proposition, namely, from which he started, that literary judpjments tend in general to be arbitrary and in pa?rn:ni!af"to"te conservative . It is not, as he puts it (p. 2), that "judicial criticism has a mission to watch against variations from received canons ; ** the idea of any such mission being as wild a chimaera for the most "judicial " of critics as it is from the point of view of sane induction ; but that the human mind is as slow to accept new art as to accept new truth.' Those who will take the trouble to learn for themselves what the history and the progress of science really are, instead of adopting the declamations of rhetorical scientists or ill-informed dilettantists, \yill find that new scientific doctrine has had just about ' Goldsmith (to go no further back) had long ago protested that " there never was an unbeaten path trodden by the poet that the critic did not endeavour to reclaim him, by calling his attempt innovation" ("Polite Learning," ch. ix.) ; and had incontinently proceeded to illustrate the truth by condemning the use of blank verse for light themes. The fallacy here lies in putting ** the critic " for '* critics." Conservatism operates in every field of human action ; but not more in literature than in morals, religion, and politics. And a familiar episode in Goldsmith's own career showed that '• the critic " can at times welcome an innovation. 6 66 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. as uphill a fight, against the "judicial " temper so- called, as new literature. In science as in art, great names reign ; habits of thinking ossify, prejudice blinds ^ ; and new theory and practice are suspect. Religion determines men's attitude towards palaeon- tology and psychology ; Bibliolatry sets them perverting the geological record ; and a new theory in physics may still fight for acceptance for a generation against mere inertia — till the old and middle-aged men are dead, in fact — just as may a new form of verse or a new method in fiction. Doubtless a new scientific theory is now discussed with a greater degree of truly judicial or scientific method than an innovating work of literature, proper; but for this there are reasons which leave it clear that the disorder in literary criticism is not a result of any inevitable shortcoming in literary critics, but of conditions of special difficulty in their task, and of special defect in their normal preparation. At worst, they are not further from agreement than politicians, ethicists, and sociologists.^ ^ *' I see no reason to doubt that if Sir Charles Lyell could have avoided the inevitable corollary of the pithecoid origin of man — for which, to the end of his life, he entertained a profound antipathy — he would have advocated the efficiency of causes now in operation to bring about the condition of the organic world, as stoutly as he championed that doctrine in inorganic nature" (Prof. Huxley on *' The Reception of the ' Origin of Species'" in "Life of Darwin," ii. 193). But note Pmfessor Huxley's whole account of the first outcry against Darwin in t^icscientific camp as well as outside. ** ^ It has to be observed, too, that lay ignorance confers the title of "science" where the expert does not claim it. "In itself," observes Professor Schmidt, " the history of development does not as yet exce^ithe rank of a merely descriptive branch of erudition " (" The Dc^pPB of Descent and Darwinism," 1875, P- ^o)- Professor Huxley, again, some- THE PROBLEM STATED. 67 In science, however, the slowly developing attitude of receptiveness is the necessary accompaniment of the immense activity which has in a century reconstructed the scientific notions of the human race. So clearly has it been seen that the wisdom of antiquity was mostly ' common- places of the schools. But not only is there this sanction as against the still operant forces of habit and prejudice, rooted in the physical apparatus of thinking ; there is the further advantage in matters of natural science that the facts and the data are measurable, tangible, and constant. Usage, indeed, largely restricts] the word " science '* to departments of knowledge of) which this can be said ; so that it tends to cover for us just the permanent properties of matter and the physical phenomena of life — the concrete or objective environ- ment, in short, as distinguished (so far as may be) from the more purely subjective experience. Precisely as we seek to include under the term the less verifiable classes of facts and impressions, the greater becomes the pro- portion of dissidence to agreement in the literature of each class ; so that ** moral science " is still a matter of habitually hostile schools, and a " historical science " has been declared by a living historian ' to be impos- sible. Now, literary science, supposing there to be such a thing, must needs lie under the drawbacks alike what confusingly allows the designation of "science " to the *' Summa" of Thomas Aquinas. ' See Mr. Froude's " Short Studies on Great Subjects," ed. 1878, vol. i. *' The Science of History." 68 ^ SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. ^ of historical and of moral science in the matter of i ncalculable personal equation, with the further burden^ \ of the vaguely vast personal equations of 3estnetics.| In the physical sciences, the personal equation is trifling^ as a source of inveterate dissent : in the science of literature it is such an immense part of the dispute that it is hardly an extravagance to say the business comes to be just the science of the personal equation. All this perhaps savours of commonplace ; but that may be so much the better for our inquiry. Suppose we say that the business of literary criticism is the science df the personal equation : on that view we are \ at least m full sight of our problem, of which the first j step would then be the survey of the personal equation. I What is it ? Briefly, our notional and opinional relation I to the total environment,|^oz^r criticism of life, in short. ' So that our opinion of books is just what modern criticism has w^ith something like unanimity declared the totality of books to be. As it was put by Hume, '* All polite letters are nothing but pictures of human life in various attitudes and situations ; " ^ or, as it is later put by Mr. Arnold,^ all literature is " criticism of life." Our criticism of the book is thus just as natural \ a thing as the book itself: nay, our criticism is precisely, I in the strict sense of the^orH^ our appreciation or / appraisement — it is our estimate of the value, interest, / or accuracy of the criticism presented to us^; praise * " Inquir}' Concerning Human Understanding," sec. i. (" Essays," td. 1825, ii. 7). - Introduction to "The English Poets," edited by Mr. Ward, and else- where. THE PROBLEM ST A TED, 69 being thus as much a matter of judicial criticism as blame. Now, to a^ that this estimate should be left off would plainl y be to p^ ^cyf^j g"^ cnntraf^fntinn in nat ure, such as eating without tastin g or seeing with- out perceiving, or suffering without pain. Nobody can ask this : what then can be sanely meant when we are asked to judge unjudicially? Evidently that we should avoid taking our simple likes and dislikes, our assents ^ and dissents, for a true measure of things ; just as we should remember that while we may find olives exec- rable, or bananas nauseous, other people find them delectable. And in so far as o ur.** ta stes " in literature. mil j- can_be_§LS£n^ clearly to vary according to jjLs ome nat ive bias, (2) degree of knowledge or expertness, and (3) didactic training, this can be readily agreed to. the difference between the physical and the lite taste, varying as both do in the same particulars [for palatic taste is a matter of native bias, length of habit, and inculcatory, belike painful, preparation] is just that between a mediate and an immediate perception, of > , which the latter i « pnt "'^*^*^'' for a nalysis or j udgment, while ^hp ferjlfif i^' Xhus_Lc^^i!^^^^^y influence or b e influenc ed by another judgment onthe question "oT-^ the reasonableness of a plot, or the verisimilitude of a dialogue, or the wording of a verse ; while nothing but \ constitutional change, perhaps producible by sedulous habit, can alter my conscious attitude to olives. The possibility of change in the former case rests on contingent ideas, which are successively alterable. I may be made to see something I had overlooked, to \ 70 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. learn something I did not know, to correct a misconcep- tion of terms : all processes which readjust judgment ; and the possibilities of persuasion open to criticism in these regards are endless. ""■^^Jore than half Jhe actual work of criticism in the wider sense, indeed, consists of attempts to persuade opinion on matters on which, in the long run, there is practical prospect of agreement. When and how the Hebrew books were written and manipulated ; whether Gibbon is right in this or that statement on Roman administration or Christian beginnings ; whether Lewes properly represents Kant ; how far Comte's law of the three stages and his classification of the sciences are empirically and jatippallys,o]ur]4 ; whether Pliny's letter or Tacitus' passage on the Christians is genuine ; what measure of solidity there is in Mr. Gladstone's theory of Greek mythology or in Professor Miiller's applica- tions of the solar key to myth ; how far phrenology is verified ; what force there is in Mr. Butler's criticism of Darwin — these are all matters of " criticism," ,which we shall hesitate to divide into " higher " or " lower '* when we remember the work of Niebuhr and of Sainte- Beuve, of Bentley and of Baur, and the kind of faculty that went to doing it. In such matters as these there is perhaps no more formidable personal equation to be got over than entered into the dispute of Dr. Tyndall and Dr. Bastian as to their tests for spontaneous generation ; though in the various cases persuasion may be variously delayed. And even where, as over a question cf the relative m.erits of novelists, there are THE PROBLEM ST A TED, 7 1 sources of dispute not reducible to the tests of evidence and inference which apply in the matters above glanced at, there is st ill much room for the use of argument and the clearing up'of disagreements! We might at this stage of the argument take philosophic stand on the final position that criticism (like philosophy) is in the long run the assertion of our 1 personality in that struggle for survival which goes on among opinions as among organisms ; but seeing ' that the survival depends on persuasion, and that the impulse to the struggle is the notion of persuadibility, the natural course is to postpone the fatalistic clash to the irreducible or ultimate ground of the native bias. In so far as we canjixfluence ^ach othe r^s judgments we jo so. And to that end there is needed a simple classifi- cation of the phases of literature in regard to which there i§„^ub=lQfiacal difference of judgment. ^[Assuming the general position that all literature is the expression of human relations to or notions of things, then, we may say that it is discussible under, three aspects : (i) its account of things actual or things imagined, this including all correction or impeachment of any kind of misstatement ; (2) its presentation of the writer's mind ; (3) the charm or merit of its expression in respect of language. Equivalent heads would be : j What the writer sees or thinks; what he is; and how j he speaks ; or, yet again, (i) the objective purport, (2) j the subjective purport, and (3) the medium.^ Let the \ reader choose a classification to his " taste " : each set will serve. Criticism is thus seen to be in itself criticable ; P{'^ n SCIENCE IX CRITICISM. literature, even where it is most closely restricted to ■y^udgment on books ; and of course it always tends to go further ; but for our purposes it mainly differentiates as an immediate rather than a mediate expression of ideas, apropos of other or mediate expressions. Now, on each of the three heads of the division there is obvious possibility of variation of opinion in terms of the three aforesaid forces of bias, expertn sss, . and y^l cssoninc^ ; that is to say, I pronounce on an author's picture of life or account of facts, on his personality, and on his style, in the light of the three dispositions of her^dJJLaix Jeaning , teaching, and hability ; being {a) rather loose or rather precise in my observation, rational or passionate in my tendency of thought, by force of cast of brain and nerves ; (h) prepared to look for merit or demerit according as I have been taught or per- suaded ; (c) appreciative or unappreciative of skill or crudity .according as more or less familiarity with many ^performances has let me know whether a given effect is easy or difficult, commonplace or subtle. ) I fear all this anatomy and arithmetic will be found repellent ; but perhaps I may without raising further protest add the old factor (" enveloping action," we might call it, to borrow a phrase from Mr. Moulton) ^f.Jiidi3ddual nervous variation from day to-day ; in respect of which I may one day find tedious a description of scener}' which on another would interest me ; or now be moved to incipient hysteria where anon I should simply cognize pathos. Given the other forms of variation as part of the subject matter of critical science, this last might for THE PROBLEM STATED, 73 comparative purposes be technically termed the personal equation proper ; though in a sense it is about a^ lable as the rest, and though most practised crittc^pro- bably make some allowance for it in their work. \^0 Thus far we are in a position to partly expl given conflict of judgment — say the difference Rymer's view of Shakspere and Coleridge's or our" own. Seeing that hability in or familiarity with a given style or form affects our appreciation of it, change of style appears as a necessary movement, in which either an author modifies his manner, as Shakspere progressed in concision and complexity, or Keats towards form ; or a new writer's peculiarity of note pleases by novelty ; or men consciously avoid a manner which has grown to seem to them laboured or affected. Thus verse style would and will change as inevitably as that of music, costume, or architec- ture. But after Shakspere there happened also social, political, and religious changes which eventuated at one period in a certain conscious precision and sophis- tication of manners, particular ways of thinking on conduct and bearing, a fashionable philosophy of life, and a special conventional pitch and measure of dic- tion; so that many people in the period in question found the Shaksperean pictures of life wild and the Shaksperean style barbarous. It only needed that -the reigning conventions should in turn pall, and come to seem cheap and mechanical, in order that new judgments should be framed and old forms and ideas be returned to with gradual avidity ; and in so 74 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. far as these forms are still preferred to those of the interregnum, the simplest explanation is that the former are the more effectively, related to the ten- dencies of a freely developing literature and society, assuming our literature to be now developing more freely, in respect of social pressure or class taste, than that of the Restoration and " Augustan " period. We class the literary interregnum, in short, as a variation that did not persist ; and looking from our point of view at life and destiny, we satisfy ourselves that, while it did a service as an interregnum, we can see in its jejune reasoning and consciously arti- ficial key and style a kind of ineptitude of thought and speech, amounting to a falling off in total vitality which it was well to have got past. Beyond this, criticism need not go ; but thus far, on the assump- tions made, it must go. If the Pope school strikes charmlessly on our sense to-day, we must needs ask ourselves why ; and if, relatively to our pulse and philosophy, it is thus shallow and sapless, there is nothing for it but to so rank it in our literary cosmos, because that cosmos must have ourselves for its centre. But it does not follow that we shall either dismiss it from our ken or fail to see in it an important chapter in literary development. Some taste, some preference of our own we must needs have : we must either wear wigs and powder and swords or not, stiff collars or not ; and we have collectively abandoned wigs and powder and swords, though mostly holding piously to stiff collars. Yet we can recognize in the wigs and THE PROBLEM STATED. 75 frills and swords a certain grace and decorum, not without fascination ; just as, while we prefer waltzing, we discover that the minuet was in its way a difficult dance enough, calling for physical poise and command of carriage ; and thus add critical applause to our pleased sense of its careful grace. So, while choosing for ourselves a_/reer play o.f muscle and nerve, we 'can look in o n the old m iiRir.rnnmj with its straitened insonorous instruments, and applaud the visible skill of plifase* an3 measure, a little less patronizingly per- haps than does the poet in listening to ** a toccata of Galuppi's," but with the same sense of looking back on a withered world, living on in faint fragrances. Indeed^ in our classjfic^tion^jof aspects of literature, . we should keep room for the strictly historic or technico-historic ini past art form to those interested in art. Liking or disliking a given style, we still read to see how they wrote in those days. Does all this Rnnnd gjhitrarv and i]jg[fathn1in ? Or other than " scientific!* ? At least there is no oblivion of the relativity of the judgment ; a ^^f^ the ^ue recog - j nit ion of_^ this relati y . ity^ ^ we ^€;j}tatjvelY_assumfidJto j secure the rprii^rti.-.n of pur rritjri^^n^ tp fhf» ^cigntiPr-j form. I cannot in the . nature of things be a good ' eighteenth-century Popean and a good Tennysonian. H I "may liiclihe''fb~*s;iispect that Pope's total cerebration would compare very well with Tennyson's — the cere- bration of leading poets giving a very doubtful clue to the average cerebration of their periods — but in 76 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. the matter of art and language, rhythms and music, I cannot choose but prefer the modern, for the same reasons that make me prefer Shakspere to the Popeans on the points in question. The fashion may change, of course : social evolution may yet take paths parallel to those followed before and after the Restoration ; in which case nothing may convince the generation on these paths that to-day's taste is more healthily related to progress than that which we now describe as non- viable. In which view, if haply some of our seniors still challenge us in the names alike of Pope and Byron, there is a common ground in philosophy for all. If my senior thinks Byron a finer poet than Tennyson, or Pope a greater than either, saying nothing of Shakspere, I formally account to myself for his views on the score of his education and usage ; while he may account for my aberration in terms of a variation destined to be abortive. If each is inconvincible ; if he cannot learn to see futUity^ in Byron's rhetoric and awkwardness in his verse, and to hear thinness in Pope's cadences, while I remain mostly obdurate to the spells of the heroic couplet and the Byronic stanza, blank verse, and character- type, our " criticism " remains just a matter for others to decide upon. But .if time prove to be on my side, as I of course suspect will be the case, the residual fact will be that my "taste" was nearer the main line of eyglut^n than his. We have spoken of " total cerebration," implying a kind of test different from the strictly artistic — the THE PROBLEM STATED. 77 criticism, in short, of the writer's presentment of life and of his own personality, the two first orders of our classification of the phases of literature as dis- tinguished from the third — or rather estimating the last in terms of the others. In judging of these, as before noted, all three forces of individual variation come into play, just as in our estimate of literary and artistic form. As thus. If the question is of Ben Jonson, my personal bias as regards taste for ** naturalist " truth and ** observed ** characterization will determine the degree of pleasure or displeasure with which I read " Every Man " and ** Volpone," or «' Catiline " and " Sejanus." It will make little diffe- rence — unless I am more obtuse than the average reader — whether or not I bethink me of Mr. Moul- ton's view that ** Jonson founded a school of treat- ment of which the law is caricature ; " for I have my notions as to what is good caricature. In point of fact, there is no reason for holding that Jonson meant caricature * any more in " Epicoene '* than in " Bartholomew Fair," though there is a wide diffe- rence in the kinds of effect produced by these two plays. The word is vague ; and some people might be disposed to call the " Fair " caricature and " Epicoene '* idealized comedy. In point of fact the * Mr. Moulton, while agreeing as to the caricature, attributes the charge to the "judicial criticism" which censures Jonson. It is very unlikely, however, that the criticism in question denied the possibility of merit in caricature : the notion presumably was and is that Jonson's characters merely misrepresent humanity in the attempt to represent or satirize it. Satire, as Mr. Brooke urges, *' must be true up to a certain point ; " and this was doubtless what the judicial critic meant to enforce. 78 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. former comes home to us as reporting much obser- vation, while the latter suggests certainly some ob- servation and, with much motiveless fantasy, some caricature. A probably acceptable definition of the last term would be, "humorous exaggeration of observed ^^ character," since this view alone would square with its important pictorial application ; and in this sense it can no more be applied to such a play as " Volpone" than to a Senecan tragedy. These personified vices, 1 virtues, passions, and foibles, baldly labelled as such, ' f are painted from nothing and resemble nothing : they edify at best as one is edified by the ugliest of the freakish " caricatures " of Da Vinci, in which faces drop humanness without becoming recognizably bestial, as in the demons of mediaeval art generally. Falstaff, if you will, is a caricature, the raciest ever drawn, known as such by the facts that (i) he moves mirth in a cultured reader, which Jonson, broadly speaking, never does ; and (2) he can be readily conceived in any Shaksperean group of English characters, joining congruously in talk and action, though always in the burlesque key. Jonson's types, on the other hand, Yare [^unthinkable in their own or any other environ- ment. A true and verifiable account of his comedies •"J would be that he simply framed plots and personages y suited to the cruder taste, always abundantly repre- I sented, of the English audience, which to this day delights in plots made up of accidents, and persons made up of one phase. It is one of Mr. Moulton's ^«^as/-propositions (p. 3) THE PROBLEM STATED. / ^^^ 1^9 /•^^^ that if Jonson's '* new species " be an " easier form of art, it does not on that account lose its claim to be analysed." The half admission as to th^ ** easier form " is significant : it concedes the vital pomt urged by Heine ' as against those who preferred Schiller's high-toned types to the subtly natural transcriptions of Goethe — that it takes a rarer and more complex menta l process to conylnfiingly^reproduce nature than/ tQ project el o£uent phantoms ; yfa icl) is a plain dis- i ^imination of higher ^jLPd* l ow ef ? -But, setting that aside, what sliall we make of the " claim to be analysed " ? Who ever denied it ? What did the hostile "judicial " critics do but analyse in order to reach their conclusions that Jonson did not draw human beings, and that he is in a measure "respon- sible for the decay of the English drama " ? ' They analysed, doubtless, in a different way from Mr. Moulton, who hopes to enforce the greatness of Shakspere by analyses which, even if true, only sug- gest greatness after you have made up your mind that whatever you will find in Shakspere is great. They presumably analysed plots, motives, diction, and dialogue, and found the mechanism and the trappings consistently unsatisfying. Despite Dryden's singular eulogy of ** The Silent Woman " ^ for almost un- broken adherence to the unities, for oneness of action, and for ** great and noble " intrigue, they perhaps • "Die romantische Schule," Erstes Buch. (" Werke," Ausg. in 12 Banden, iii. 152.) =* " Essay on Dramatic Poesy. Works, Scott's, ed. xv. 354-361- 8o SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. decided that the only unity observed in the piece is that of time; that, as in most of Jonson's plays, there are several extraneous actions ; that what Dryden calls the aim is only the denoument ; that of the several intrigues there is not one within a thousand miles of greatness and nobilit}- ; and that, in short, the only deserved part of Dryden's praise is the re- mark that " the conversation of gentlemen in the persons of Truewit and his friends is described with more gaiety, air, and freedom than in the rest of Jonson's comedies." These, be it observ^ed, are matters easily settled in the estimation of any room- ful of educated men or dramatic critics : the unity of an action is not a " question of taste" for the majority of instructed people. And, again, despite Coleridge's^ inclusion of the " Alchemist " in a list of the three best plots in literature >vith the ** (Edipus " and " Tom Jones " r the judicial critics may have ventured to think that the want of vitality and continuity in the virtuous or successful interest is rather ruinous — that a play of v/hich the main strength runs so much to the '•>^ exposure of rogues that the final success of the honest ■^ folk is insignificant and fortuitous — that this is neither ■^ strong comedy nor perfect plot. In the other plays the *' judicial " analysis may have been similarly damaging. Over Jonson as over Pope, however, artistic dis- satisfaction is not all-absorbing, and does not exclude artistic approbation. Both write^j^like -alLjnen im- ^ " Table Talk," July 5, 1834. THE PROBLEM ST A TED. 8 1 portant_jrL their day, are permanently interesting in themselves,;.-and, like all powerful performers, both are interesting in-respect of their method and their special gifts. I f Jonson as a dr amatisLia..tllfi--iaa^-"^i&re« \r^ presented Ijfier ^iis misrepresentation is energetic and s_triking; and in his muscular ^ tvle he at times rings a true note of expression even in the dramas; while in his other verse and in his criticism he is one of the most memorable of writers. As a tragic dramatist he is a singular case of strennon s nnsiirrpss ; and yet he is massive in his very futility. Hazlitt's praise of " Sejanus " as an ** admirable piece of ancient mosaic" is fatally suggestive; and his further rhetoric no less so. " The principal character,'* says the facile eulo- ^ gist, ** gives one the idea of a lofty column of solid granite, nodding to its base from its pernicious height (sic) and dashed in pieces by a breath of air, a word of its creator — feared, not pitied, scorned, unwept, and forgotten.'' Is it so with granite pillars, then ? And then, who is the principal figure ? Sooth to say, all are granite pillars together — of that particular order. It is a tragedy without action; with hardly more than V one tolerable situation, that of Drusus striking Sejanus ^^r^ at the end of Act i. The second female figure, Livia, is deplorably handled, appearing only to discuss her fucuses, and reaching no individuality ; Sejanus does ' ••*~^ not even die on the stage ; and the one touch of real pathos, the story of the children, is also undramatized, ^ and blotted out by moralizing. We are outraged too,/-C on the side of style, by Jonson*s execrable fashion 7 82 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. of putting the severed halves of a word in two lines : ^ *' Pray Augusta, then, That for her own, great Caesar's, and the pub- ^^ Lie safety, she be pleased to urge these dangers " (ii. 2). And yet there lives in the memory the cry of old Silius : " O, ye equal gods Whose justice not a world of wolf-turn'd men Shall cause me to accuse, howe'er provoked " (iii. i) ; and such a touch as Arruntius' picture of Tiberius '* Acting his tragedies with a comic face, Amidst his rout of Chaldees" (iii. 5), brings us in contact with a vir^s^ judgment, realizing in its way the drama of antiquity. The same forceful personality comes on us in the " Ode to Himself" in the '* Underwoods " ; and in the Epigram on Inigo Jones : "The Lybian lion hunts no butterflies." — " Thy forehead is too narrow for my brand." And at times the^burlx.muscles achieve acim^usgrace, as in the familiar " Drink to me only with thine eyes ; " in that other song in " The Forest," " That Women are but Men's Shadows;" in the "Charm" and the echo-song in the " Masque of Blackness ; " in such a flash as this in " The Vision of Delight " : " How better than they are, are all things made, By Wonder 1 " ^ Compare the Epistle to Master Colby, in " Underwoods," and the Expostulation with Inigo Jones. THE PROBLEM STATED. 83 and in such a strain as this in ** The Masque of Beauty " : ** So Beauty on the waters stood When Love had sever'd earth from flood ! So when he parted air from fire He did with concord all inspire ! And then a motion he them taught, That elder than himself was thought, Which thought was, yet, the child of earth, For Love is elder than his birth." Well, one passes judicial criticism on Jonson to the effect that his was on \\^i^ \Y^/^i** ^t^ "nff^rtunrit^ literary, variation, ir v itself and in respect of its consequences ill-related to the mental and neural life of to-day; and we say this with a conscious eye to what seem to us the elements of eternal fitness in Shakspere. Yet we re- main fully alive to the strong interest of Jonson's mind, character, and work, and recommend him not only to the literary student as a great figure in the history of technique, but to the general reader as affording lights on the intellectual and art life of the Shaksperean period which are not to be got in Shakspere. That sufficiently said, judicijJLcritici&m has, broadly speaking, done its j\(yprk with him* And some such process of discrimination, I would say, is really a matter of course in any sort of criticism which deals with the matter ; even Mr. Moulton obviously framing his own cosmos and hierarchy while demurring to those of other people. In Jonson's case our residual impression, being one of a very considerable total cerebration, may leave him 84 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. bulking really largely in our mental vista of historic figures ; _and the circumstance suggests plainly enough thaj^a scientific criticism should classify or conceive of relative intellectual importance with an eye to other than merely literary importance. When an erudite and enthusiastic critic, such as Mr. Swinburne, is found habitually dividing writers into classes of gods and demigods, or gods and giants (Jonson, I think, is one of the giants in this cosmology), one feels, besides the turgidity of the diction, a certain professional limitation in the^naive narrowin g of ^^ aJ ^QUtlook to ju st those forms of literary art which consist in rendering thought on things human in verse or prose with an artistic as distinct from a scientific purpose. In the celestial hierarchy of this order of criticism, verbal art escapes all test of comparison with other forms of energy : Chaucer is unneighboured by Roger Bacon, Shakspere by Verulam (who takes rank by his lighter labours), or Jonson by Gilbert. You do homage to Milton with no category-confusing thought of Cromwell or Newton ; you frame your English galaxy without Boyle or Berkeley, Marlborough or Peterborough ; you give Hugo his godlike honours while contentedly leaving Darwin and Napoleon for other people's firmaments, in which belike Hugo is but a speck in the nebulse. The belletrist ^ may answer, of course, that his plain busi- ness is with belles lettres ; that he has ji p cal l whatever ^ A word of excuse is needed for this term, which, in the adjective form of " belletristic," has brought on Mr. Arnold some objurgation. One can but say that it is borrowed from the Germans ; and that there is no alter- native between it and a periphrasis. THE PROBLEM STATED, 8$ tQ,jo_a nything but classify his own bo dy^f phenorQ^na ; and that if you go about to discuss literature with a preparation in physical science your tests will probably be a mere scandal to the trained literary sense. Quite so ; but the question is whether his habit of seeing only the chapters on aesthetic literature in the history of mind does not mak e his very li terary criticism imj;ig.r« manent , in view of_ the necessary synt hesis of_th^__ ** criticismo f_ life.** TOranted — nay, insisted — that literary art is a specialty like another, to be judged of by specialists, does it not follow that inasmuch as imaginative literature, besides being art, is criticism of life, the critic's critiri«;pi ^hmilH 1)^ informed by a |/ c atholic and not a specialized relation ta Jiie-i | \y^ My proposition is twofold. It is that mere belletrist criticism of belles lettres tends not only (i) to magnify the human importance (as measured by the language which serves all human purposes) of the performance j and the performers in question, but (2) to misrepresent, \ for normally cultured intelligences, the very literary values of the given performance^ ^ inasmu ch as the sense ^ even relative literary value shifts with the widfii-or narrower development of brain faculty. Let us take the two points separately. As to the varj'ing conceptions of the human impor- tance of personages, let us consider these observations of Professor Tyndall concerning Thomas Young : — *• Let Newton stand erect in his age, and Young in his. Draw a straight line from Newton to Young, tangent to the heads of both. This line would slope downwards from Newton to Young, because Newton was 86 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. certainly the taller man of the two. But the slope would not be steep, for the difference of stature was not excessive [sic). The line would form what engineers call a gentle gradient from Newton to Young. Place underneath this line the biggest man born in the interval between both {sic). It may be doubted whether he would reach the line ; for [sic) if he did he would be taller intellectually than Young, and there was probably none taller." ^ Put such a deliverance (style apart) beside a literary schema of gods, demigods, and giants, and the two remain wholly unrelated, a perplexity to the student ^ho is framing his philosophy of life, or worse than a perplexity — a lead in the direction of a chaotic view of categories, involving the sub-conscious notion that life is a matter of blind departmentalism, in which educa-^ tion only means variety of idiosyncrasy. On these lines mankind can never learn. Each specialist will but gather up for his clique the results of his life's work, and the general cukure that should r^suU from their collective labours remains the dream of the philanthropist, all-round life becoming actually further- oiff than in the days before science. But not only does the inveterate specialist fail to relate himself to the general course of things: he positively becomes incompetent qua specialist. His data are no longer to him what they are to other people : he now cannot see the wood for the trees, and every tree has become for him a world, in which he notes, Jiot the laws that relate it to the organic and the inorganic cosmos, but the variations of leaf shape and size; variations w^hich he relishes as objective facts, * " On Light," 3rd ed. pp. 49-50. Cf. the speaker's citation from Helmholtz :— '* He [Young] was one of the most profound minds that the world has ever seen." THE PROBLEM ST A TED, . \ CS7 never seeking for the new law which reduces them to intellectual order. That new law comes suddenly from without, from the f^erminal idca_of somebody who has been looking at the processes of thjings in their masses and tendenci^Sp perhaps without even readihg^lTiH' specialist's literature of microscoped minutiae. Now, the inevitable critical test of such a specialist's total importance is his relation to the main mental moycz. ment ; and in so far as hiFwork consists in empirical collections of data it will drop even out of the literature of his specialty. Analogies of categories, however, are never conclusive ; and it is as well to urge plainly the charge against the literary criticism which is absorbed in belles lettres. It ^rows enam oured not merely of art for art's sake, thus narrowing the critic's activity, but of all the waste matter which i sa mere record o f artisti^Jaihjrei..thus warping his ju dgment. Tenderly^conning every vestige of old conventions, devoutly ready to take in earnest every new deliverance which assumes the old manner, he becomes a specialist in verbiage, a kind of artistic Talmudist, living in a world of word-begotten thoughts, the mere spectra of ideas. One test of the validity of his attitude is its result in his own practice. Now, even such a genius as Lamb, the most exquisite of essayists and the rarest of souls, profoundly original as a stylist and as a critic, whose essay on " Shakspere's Tragedies " is one of the great documents of critical literature — even he can set us asking, by his imitative efforts, whether it is really worth a man's while to 88 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM, thumb for years the shelved salvage of the Elizabethan drama— or, if that study be a tolerable hobby for a man of genius, whether he does well to ask the reading world to ride it with him. German graduates, one learns from catalogues, write studies on the use of the preposition *' of" in " Paradise Lost ; " and it may be, though the point is dark, that the work is for them personally a good gymnastic, on the principle that it is well to know " everything of something ; " but at least there is little doubt about the social futility o f the publication of the gross result. _Dead drama is cer- tainly not so inorganic as the literature of prepositions ; yet here too the question arises whether it is a profitable gymnastic compared with the possibilities of the time. One says flatly of these Elizabethan and Caroline obscurities that their total intellectual value — their accomplishment in W elt-W eisheit and blank verse — is inferior, as measured by probabl£_£.er£ bration or co air parative rarity of gift, to the accomplishment and endowment of scores of workers in other directions whose names the critic barely knows, — chemists, mathematicians, physicists, biologists, historians, in- ventors. Well, if that be so, the primary problem before the student of criticism is evidently this : \ViU coming^ literature, or will it not, hold in its blood the results of these scientific performers' labours as well as those of the mere performer in words and rhythms, whose addition to the sum of human ideas is inappre- ciable ? If the answer be Not^ why then our Talmudist is in a fair way to be as immortal as anybody, and may THE PROBLEM STATED. 89 cheerfully continue to heap his superlatives on successes -oi phrase and cadence equivalent in cerebral cost to the last patent pencil-sharpener. In the case supposed, literalture is ^n a line of evolution to some extent parallel with that taken by it in old Byzantium, whose literature was the Talmudism of Greek. To the glazing Byzantine eye, the Byzantine commentating was of course lifelike enough ; and to those on the hypothetic line of similar literary evolution to-day the things around them will similarly tend to appear satis- factory. But if on the other hand the literature of the -future, as the present argument will assum e^ is to ha ve in its veins a blood digested from all the pabulum of the omnivorous modern intelligence, why then the purely belletrist criticism of our time will one day look quriousIynByzantine to such historians as are called upon to give some account of it to a rationally educated generation that will no more dream of reading it as it stands than of repeating the abortive experiments of early alchemy. Let us summarize the argument thus far. Literature, we said, is judged of under three categories-|-its picture or crrncTsm of life (criticism by representation, in large part, as in fiction and drama, but also in large part by assertion and criticism proper)^ts presentment of the writer's personality, 3and its form or style ; and these categories are severally filled up in terms of three sorts of individual variation — that of heredity and acquired bias, that of special ^exper tness, that of education. Next, it has been sought to show that our estimate of 90 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. criticism of life, and even our estimates of style, ~all_ depend upon the comprehensiveness of our relatjon to .^ life and knowledge, which may be held to be an outcome \^ of general bias and of education. In these regards, then, conflict in criticism is reducible to terms of the general conflict of ideals and opinions, and is no more factitious a phenomenon than strife in politics. Further, the criticism of all the phases of literature may vary with what we may empir ically term fashion ; a particular convention of tone and style involving the opinion that another and more vital tone and style are primitive. This we may call error of education, when we hold it to be transient ; but where it merges into nationalism in taste it has just to be reckoned with like national genius of speech or temperament. Further, the habit of the specialist, which in literature involves a pro- nouncing of 5'WflSi-comprehensive judgments, may lead to loss of the normal sense of proportion, and conse- quently to criticism that will not appeal to a true normal intelligence on any of the three points of our analysis of literature. This w^e may call vice of bias, arising partly out of expertness. But here arises the question, Granted that a theoretically just or permanent estimate of an author's view of life, and ofjie iiiipor tance of his personality f depends on the comprehensiveness of the antic's relation to life^what is the true or healthy functional sphere of the specialism that is to decide on the art or style value of an author's "work ? Of the inadequacies likely to be charged thus far against the foregoing exposition, perhaps the most AA^i THE PROBLEM S TA TED, 9 1 generally felt will be the little notice yet given to the great principle of ^Bgautj^ pointed at in the last of the three phases in which literature is envisaged. That slightness of notice, however, did not come of slight appreciation of the greatness of the issues, though what has been said of the aberrations of expert taste might seem to make light of literary art as distinct from or additional to criticism of life and character revelation. [Let us hasten to restore the balance by advancing the doctrine that such art, seen in beauty or power of speech, is one of the most vital things in literature ; so jnuc!^ so that i t may keep alive, or vividly related to an evolving society, criticism of life so effete and pe rverted_as to repel even through the beauty of s^yle_which allures the reader, or give an undying charm to picture&.ofiife-an4 maimers in themselves of doubt- ful documentary value, an d void of th ejiterary^npjg.of , personality. Styje ]s of course very intimately bound up with niatter ; and valid beauty of style must always I involve immediate congruity (as distinct from rightness or wisdom, which is an extended congruity) of thinking; but as mere immediate congruity of thinking is common enough, the essence of style can easily.be seen to be a / matter of verbal artTj One of the most commonplace of / human reflections in all ages, for instance, is as to the impossibility of taking our possessions ** with us " when we die, but a Horace can chance to put the immemorial thought in a phrase which to such an artist as Arnold ^ may be a perpetual possession : — • Sec Fortnightly Reviro}^ August, 18S7, p. 299. 92 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. " Linquenda tellus, et domus, et placens Uxor ; neque harum, quas colis arborum, Te, praeter invisas cupressos, Ulla brevem dominum sequetur." * Of this elusive quality of beauty, then, who is to be _the judge ? Nothing is more instantly obvious than the fact thai tjie_ perception of beauty must vary, as we said othei judgments did, with native endowment, general educa^ tion or prejudice, and special expertness; that is to say the faculty is^o m and m ade, and must be held to reach its highest potential, on the side of literature, in th( case of personal gift cultivated by a literary life. But granted the gift, convention may give it an unfortunate turn, as in the last century (to our present-day sensed every verse-maker, whatever his cerebral faculty, tendec to be kept to one or two forms. Yet again, as above noted, specialism may breed 'morbidity, as so man} painters appear to develop disease of the colour-sense and the fine natural gift may evolve on a line o variation alien to the tendencies of normal life. Ho\^ decide, then, whether a given body of judgment? represents a doomed variation, as the criticism o Rymer,^r a durable reaction against an impermaneni variation, as (apparently) Wordsworth's protest againsi Pope ? Here, I suspect, we are near the psychological bed- rock, just as we are when the supernaturalist, availin° himself of Hume, asks the man of science what ulti- ^ Odes, ii. 14. THE PROBLEM STATED. 93 mate grounds he has for his belief in scientific doc- trines. On the instant, there can be little question, '"^ ^ea ch critic rn u st figh^^ fo r his own hand, g iving his hh reasons for the faith that is in him ; and that faith and p^ these reasons will become part of the stream of tendency, s /^ either making or not making an effective eddy, telling (^^ on the banks. Here our problem becomes part of the f-^ general problem of history, and i^s no more and no less '{^ soluble than that. The science of criticis m e yes no ^-^ further: but science in criticism remains to every critic 'T^ who^cares to mefhodicaTly question his ow flLconsistency l and the practical question comes to be whether or not, in a given case, he can not only offer an estimate of a performance which shall be broadly congruous with a considerable body of instructed opinion, but give a persuasive explanation of such differences of instructed opinion as leave many cultu red peojle, perplexed. It is as Mill said of economists : the working test of competence should be (if we can agree on anything) the abilit y to exp lain in terms of sequence of causes a given economic situation. » He who gives the coherent and j plausible account is presumptively in the right : there | is no further economic science till somebody impairs J that explanation, checks and restates the phenomena, * and produces an explanation more congruous to the general sense; just as the undulatory theory of light superseded the corpuscular. The critic, like the philo|^^ sopher, can do no more than convince his generation^ Nor is the difficulty of gaining an effective body, of * *• Essays on some Unsettled Questions of Polit. Econ.," 2nd ed. p. 158. -I 94 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. agreement much greater in critjcism than in economics, which last, despite reactions and dissensions, ranks as a province of science. It is safe to say, for instance, that Mr. Lowell's essays on Chaucer, Dryden, and Pope ; Mr. Leslie Stephen's on Johnson or Crabbe ; Mr. F. W. Myers' on Marcus Aurelius ; Mr. Nettle- ship's on Catullus ; Sainte-Beuve's on — almost any- body, but say, his series on Chateaubriand ; Poe's on Mrs. Browning ; Professor Dowden's on Landor ; Mr. Henry James's on Trollope and Balzac, will elicit from the world of English-speaking bookmen something not far short of und^mmou^ general ^^J^voh^ indicating wide community of tastes, with only unimportant dif- ferences on points of detail. Here there is question at once of criticism of life, estimate of personality, and opinion of style. But if we narrow the issue to style, assumed^ bxjis to be on the whole the least calculable mode of excellence, it will 1 think be found that tlie mass of competent readers — the people who have read the documents and know the general lay of the land — can really be got to a very general agreement on fairly complex issues. JWe get rid speedily of the pathetic mass of judgment which cannot know complex beauties because of sheer inexperience — the tastes to which at best Dickens and Macaulay, not to say Dr. Farrar and Mr. Haggard, present the perfection of verbal art ; to which, say, Mr. Bret Harte's " Melons " is difficult, Mr. Edmund Gurney's criticism too close to be readable, and George Eliot apt to be unintelligible. Such votes disallowed, THE PROBLEM STATED, 95 there remains, { lappily^ a body of ^ualjfj&d. opinion that jTiay_confidenUy bejppjk§.d Jo to maintain with unanimity the right attitudes of nose to the delicate.fragrance^of Xamb and the ammoniacal rhetoric of the Archdeacon of Westminster. Within the lim i ts of thi s franchise, there is, I think, substantial agreement that the prose style of Mr. Pater is beautiful but apt to be overposed and overdone ; Mr. John Morley*s strong and penetrat- ing but too uniformly metallic, like a powerfully-played Broadwood piano ; Mr. Lowell's admirably felt and choicely sententious, but a little perilously inclined to concetti; Mr. Swinburne's at least as maddening^as Professor Dowdeh once hinted of it ; ' Mr. James's, in criticism, notably skilful and fortunate ; Mr. Howells's, in fiction, exquisitely accomplished ; Mr. Stephen's gentlemanly in its felicities and in its laxities ; the late Mr. Arnold's incomparably limpid and •perfectly chaste at its best, falling sometimes to a dallying air of being consciously irresistible ; Mr. Lang's often delightful with the charm of Dundreary's stammer; Mr. Steven- son's pretty well perfect in grace and nerve even when straining a trifle under the eye of the world ; Mr. Rus- kin's — well, the most comprehensive instrument in the orchestra, and so in early days capable of very vicious imitations of the organ, as in later days of noble strains of melody and strange raptures of cry. Not only would instructed judgments be found thu^^T]", tending to unanimity, but they would tend to rest them- I ' selves, if not explicitly yet implicitly, on the funda- ' » Academy^ Jan. 3, iSSo, p. 2. 96 SCIENCE IX CRITICISM. mental test of which Mr. Spencer's law of economy ^ is a partial exposition, but one pointing the way plainly to the complementary truths. It is possible to make diversity of critical taste in style seem very much rnore hopeless than it really is by collecting inexpert or random opinions. Thus the species of symposium instituted some time ago with the best intentions by the editor of the Fortnightly Review ^ yielded dubious counsels because the inquiry was suffered to be changed from a request for perfect passages into one for merely favourite passages — a very different thing. This need not have been. People asked to name " the one passage in all poetry " and " the one passage in all prose which appears of its kind the best,'' might well recoil ; but they might have been with more wisdom asked to name a passage in prose and one in verse which seemed to them artistically perfect, or several passages which seemed perfect in different manners. This would have had instructive results. Indeed it is instructive to bring together even a number of passages that have chanced to catch the fancy and remain in the memory of different people ; but in the latter case the gain to criticism is only indirect, since everybody knows that many passages, like tunes, fix themselves in the memory without satisfying the canons of perfection. Thus it comes about that we learn of the satisfaction with which Earl Granville listens to " Therefore with * See the essay on "The Philosophy of Style " in vol. i. of *' Essays, Scientific, Political, and Speculative." ' See the numbers for August-November, 1SS7. THE PROBLEM STATED, 97 Angels and Archangels " in the Prayer Book, and *' The quality of mercy is not strained " in Shakspere ; the interest with which Mr. Llewellyn Davies cons one of the disquisitions in " Paracelsus," some hundred and fifty lines long; and the profit Dr. Richardson has derived from the teachings of the poets in general. Beyond this, however, there is a considerable collation of passages held to be artistically perfect, many of which have, but many of which have not, conquered, and probably will not conquer, the competent vote above indicated. In regard to these one feels that the selectors are, some of them, not very good readers ; and t hat in man y casjga-A-lJttle^CQniparative discussion would lead to i^ite unanimous admissions of the unfit- ness of the specimens. Thus, while the Earl of Car- narvon has hit the mark in prose with the fourteenth chapter of Isaiah (though the credit here is to an inde- finite extent due to the translation), his selection of " II Penseroso," avowedly only one of many favourite poems, leaves us asking whether there are not richer and lovelier kinds of poem than this, admirable as it is in its own kind ; nay, whether the one or two touches of the fanciful manner of the period even in this admirable texture do not slightly detract from entire perfection. ^a^these heads technical agreement might surely be attained. Then when Mr. Thomas Hardy cTtes Byron's three stanzas on ** clear placid Leman " as unsur- passed in descriptive poetry, the students of poetry are surely quick to agree that these verses are much too lacking in fluidity of movement to be credited with 8 98 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. excellence. And while his prose passages from Carlyle are much better, Mr. Hardy perhaps would not de- liberately maintain that the Carlylean manner is en- tirely winning or successful in the first. Again, when Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. Theodore Watts, and Mr. Frederic Harrison pitch on Sir Ector's eulogy of the dead Sir Lancelot, it is plain that they are impressed by its old-world pathos rather than by the literary power of its composition, which is much too naively artificial, too artlessly artful, to be called perfect. As for Mrs. Lynn Linton's citations of Shakspere's twenty- ninth sonnet and Herrick's ** To Anthea," these are but chance indications of satisfaction, giving no help towards a critical code ; since the pieces named plainly cannot claim to be perfect in beauty of poetic idea, rhythm, or phrase. But perhaps the most aggressively unsatisfactory selection is that made by Mr. George Meredith from " Henry VHL ; " and here again, I take it, there will be no difficulty in getting an overwhelming negative vote from those who are at once students of Shakspere and students of poetry. If ever the hand of Fletcher can with absolute certainty be traced in the *' Henry VHL," it is in Katherine's speeches: "After m}' death I wish no other herald," and " In which I have commended to his goodness;" and if ever the inferiority of Fletcher's versification to Shakspere's was demonstrated, it is in these cloying successions of weak endings. The tune is monotony itself, and the sickly melody much less endurable than the movement of any fair specimen of Jonson. Such a choice from THE PROBLEM STATED, 99 such a writer is surprising, though perhaps not inex- plicable by the principle of complementaries. An every way more competent selection from Shakspere is that made by Mr. Swinburne from "Antony and Cleopatr the dialogue between Antony and Eros in Act. iv./p^. 14, from " Sometime we see a cloud that's dragoni to ** Ourselves to end ourselves." Here we have,' not Shakspere at his noblest and beautifullest — that have in the speech of Prospero, also cited by Mr. Swin- burne, and in the " O Proserpina," suggested by Mr. Augustine Birrell — certainly an admirable sample of his in^fisciihablp pregnancy and vividness of thought, feeling, and phrase ; as we have again in Hamlet's soliloquy ** How all occasions do inform against me," Mr. Swinburne's third example. But must we not protest that the critic is somewhat led astray by the pride of his discovery of power in the little-read *' Pericles," when he puts also in the ** very front rank " those imperfectly pathetic speeches of the husband : " Thou God of this great vast, rebuke those surges," and " A terrible childbed hast thou had, my dear," the first of which some of us can still doubt to be Shakspere's at all, either in cadence or phrase ? No less desirable than a direction of choice to pas- sages held to be artistically perfect as well as pregnant, would have been a restriction of samples to English literature. Even in dealing with modern foreign languages, of which the shades of meaning are com- paratively easily grasped, there is risk of grave miscal- culation of stylistic merit; witness the persistent eulogy loo SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. of Byron on the Continent. The fallacy of Goethe's verdict on that poet is well known ; but down to our own day the same erroneous estimate is often made abroad for the same reason — failure to appreciate the finer shades of style value. It is plainly difficult for even good readers to escape such risks in dealing with a foreign literature. But whereas the numerous con- tributors to the Fortnightly anthology, going as they did outside their own tongue, might have been expected to go to the familiar fields of French literature, and to choose from the treasures of German poetry, of which the genius is so closely akin to that of our own, the latter is barely once glanced at, and even French gets little notice ; while there are Greek references by the dozen, and a number to Virgil and Dante. Mr. F. W. H. Myers need hardly have complained (p. 594) of in- difference to antiquity on the part of the contributors, though they did ignore Lucretius (all save Lady Dilke and Mr. Herbert Warren) and Catullus, and though Byron had more admirers than Horace. Were there not references enough to Homer, Plato, ^schylus, Sophocles, Euripides, not to speak of Simonides, Theo- critus, and Aristophanes; and did not Tacitus have several votes, and Juvenal and Persiusfind encomiasts? The Greek and Latin selections were sometimes trans- lated, sometimes not : in the first case all style value had of course evaporated ; in the second, one was left speculating on the value of modern judgments on ancient style of three epochs. We can be tolerably sure we are safe in counting Goethe's " Ueber alien THE PROBLEM STATED. loi Gipfeln" perfect: we may even venture to think, in England, that we can be sure there is no element of inferior rhetoric in *' Die Sonne tont nach alter Weise;'* but can Madame Darmesteter and the Dean of Wells and the President of Magdalen be equally sure of the specific perfection of style in long stretches of Sophocles ? One ventures to think, not considering the difficulty of persuading some people that Byron's sublimity is second-rate ; and considering that Mr. F. \V. H. Myers, an excellent critic, is capable of putting Blanco White's charmless and beautiless sonnet ** Night and Death ** (doubtless on the strength of its idea) beside Tennyson's splendid verses " To Virgil ; " and these beside the didactic and half-successful " Voyage." Yet, if Mr. Alfred Austin went too far in declaring (p. 717) that some contributors *' cited passages for our admiration which no human being could possibly admire, provided he really knew why he admires the poems and passages mankind have for generations agreed in thinking admirable," much might be done by a really circumspect selection to settle at least what can be admirable to_alJ-Jn§tructed^readsj:s. Many of those passages actually submitted, as already noted, are either perfect or (perfection being after all only a theoretic possibility) so nearly so a s to be sure of classi caljty ; and whereas there ^are different l^inds oi admirablen ess, it would perhaps not be hard to decide, in terms o Cneurap experience , why we rank t he^fogr- teentji of Isaiah higher jhan^Carlyb' s passa ge on the Oak; and " Lycidas " higher than "II Penseroso " or I02 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. Lovelace's lyrics. We could accept Mr. Arnold' sentence from Bossuet as a snatch of very good prose from Mr. Hardy, Teufelsdrockh's night thoughts — bu why not also the " So has it been from the beginning so will it be to the end " in the same book, and th^ " Why should the living venture thither " at th^ beginning of the Cromwell ? The extract given b;; Mrs. Linton from Ruskin is so marvellously rich, S( consummately skilful, as to make it sound presump tuous even to ask whether there is not an air o manufacture over the whole, a^sense of lon^ lab^u and manipulation, that constitutes a drawback. j&vei here, as is certainly the case in the passages citei from the same master of prose-poetry by Mr. Willian Sharp. On Mr. Meredith's citation from " Villette, again, there would probably be general agreement ii a literary committee that perfection is there missed b_; reason of stress and spasm of expression ; and to Mrs . Butler it might be pointed out, as regards her \on\ \ ;';,. citation from "Paradise Lost," that we. may hav '\ power and greatness without perfection ; which con sists in some such combination of merits as she founi in her selections from the " Mill on the Floss," thoug] these are perhaps not unsurpassed in George Eliot' work. From Mr. Birrell we may well accept the las paragraph from Sir Thomas Browne's " Fragment oi Mummies ; " but why not also the two immediatel; preceding ? The magic of the second has been mad widely known by Emerson, who perhaps sent Mi Birrell, like some of the rest of us, to the whole frag THE PROBLEM STATED, 103 ment, absent as it oddly is from the Bohn edition, though the paragraphs referred to are really Browne's high-water mark in harmony. ** Kubla Khan," Keats* ** Ode to a Nightingale,*' the last stanza of the ** Ode to Melancholy," the " Belle Dame Sans Merci," Wordsworth's " Highland Reaper," Shelley's " Cloud " and ** Stanzas Written in Dejection " — these we can all agree to, with few reservations, among lyric verse ; Othello's last speech and Claudio's on death, with the other things above cited from Shakspere, and Arnold's lines on the Oxus at the close of ** Sohrab and Rustum," we can equally accept in blank verse — noting that the passage cited by Mr. Gosse from ** Paradise Regained" for technical masterliness is unsatisfactory precisely because it lacks su stained JIqw and beauty, which are as much a matter of choice craftsmanship as is variety of rh ythm — and there vWll be general agreement, too, on the varying excellences of many of the prose ex- tracts, as Johnson's letter to Chesterfield, Macaulay on the Catholic Church, Sydney Smith on the defence of prisoners (passage cited by Mr. Traill, p. 601), the Master of Marlborough's extract from Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America ; Sir Rowland Blenner- hasset's page from Bossuet (with detraction on the score of pulpit diffuseness) ; some of the passages cited from Landor, and from Thackeray ; and some of those culled from Newman (with a caveat against the extra- vagances of faith, which impair by their violence the effects of phrase an d cadence) . ^11 thes e passages throw permanent light on the laws of literary art ; and I04 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. of none of them is it possible to sa}^ that it is astonish- ing to find cultured men admiring it, as might 4)e said of Napier's account of a Peninsular battle cited by the Master of Eton, with its saugreiiu spread-eagleism. A few more safe citations could readily be made in verse and prose ; in verse from Heine and Burns, as ** Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam," and " Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doune " in its original form (which is much nearer perfection than " My luve is like a red, red rose," cited in part by Mr. Ernest Rhys) ; from Arnold (strangely ignored by every contributor in the Fortnightly) and from the " Scottish Probationer " Davidson : in prose from Lamb, e.g., the two closing paragraphs from the " Child Angel ; " from Emerson ; from (if we are to go abroad) Renan, as the dedication of the " Vie de Jesus ; " from Heine ; and from Fouque, as the passage in which Undine tells of the sprite world to her mortal spouse ; from several of our living prose writers, as Mr. Myers, Mr. Pater (cited not at his very best by Mr. Sharp), Professor Dowden, and Mr. Stevenson; and from the too early dead Edmund Gurney. Jn short, a few hands in council might com- pile a copious anthology, whicli sTioiild leave all cordial, and over which no man should raise an eyebrow. IV. PRINCIPLES OF PRACTICE. The fact that there exists this wide agreement as to the beauty and successfulness of certain samples of writing, is in itself a proof that there are bases for a criticism which shall be scientific, or reducible to con- nected steps of reasoning from verifiable data, as against that which is but the random expression of an aberrant opinion, born of ignorance, haste, or perversity. And- what is really wanted in literary criticism js that thej e > should b e this statement of data and process of proof, the demand for that much being exactly what arose generations or even centuries ago in the case of the physical sciences. The modern scientific movement, often unduly associated with Bacon but really traceable to other and earlier thinkers as well as to him, may be summed up as a process of asking IV hv do you think so ?. of every notionist in turn. Give us, the inquirers began to ask, data ajid laws in place of notions and references ; ' your own testimony extracted from nature, and not i simply what Aristotle and Galen say. Right or w rong, give us your reasons, and let us compare notes. In essentially the same way Yatrdnarism has appealed from io6 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. alleged revelation to reason in history and morals, after Protestantism had appealed from Papal authority tc its alleged documents. In the criticism of belles lettres the process is again the same. At the end of last century the leading idea as to criticism in England (as indeed in France) was one of authority — a matter ol what Dr. Johnson or the wits thought, though by that time there had been abundant unsettlement of authorit}; in religion. But already the forces of change were at work. Addison had invited his readers to follow his criticism critically ; Goldsmith's practice was no less stimulating; Hume was acutely analytic; and John- son's dogmatism was but the expression of his peculiar personality. \As social, philosophical, and scientific change continued, it was simply inevitable that the temper of challenge and question should spread more and more in the discussion of things literary ; and it must needs generate the habit of analysis and the attitude of propaganda. Thus, while the robust hand- to-mouth politicians are seen in the Edinbiirghf the Quarterly J and Blackwood, producing a slightly-reasoned statement of their bias and prejudice, the ever-analytic Coleridge is seen habitually giving himself his reasons, felicitously or at least suggestively where his mind played freely, perversely and benightedly where his theological and other sub-rational prepossessions were uppermost ; while the strenuous Carlyle, wor^ 5«o, seeks to relate his literary judgments to his incomplex philo- sophy of things, badly deflected as it is at one point by the solar attraction of Goethe. Everywhere a fresh PRIACIPLES OF PRACTICE. 107 study is seen goin^ on : Wordsworth, Lamb, Coleridge, and Hazlitt, all think and speak for themselves, though Hazlitt is unoriginal beside the other three: Hallam, Macaulay, and Thackeray in turn never hesitate to reconsider a case, though they have the ex cathedra tone for their own part ; and in America Poe and Emerson, in their very different ways, criticize the criticism of the old country and speak with a new security of personal conviction, Poe as a born critic, Emerson as a born eclectic. It is in Arnold among ourselves, but much more satisfyingly, I think, in Mr. Lowell among our kin beyond seas, that we begin to find the effectual expression of the habit of analysis and reasoning in matters of comparative literature. Hitherto criticism had affirmed or denied : these begin to p ersuade, the former guided a good deal, It may be, by that French criticism which in Sainte-Beuve had reached an admirable development of catholicity and discrimination ; the latter, though the wider and harder reader of the two, expressing rather a jiaiiiOi-Jieii&li- of appreciation and faculty of choice. The critique on Swinburne's Tragedies marks, broadly speaking, a new literary period. The next development, so far as one can see, must needs be an extension of the p ractice of judicial re ason- ^(ingj p the comparison of competin g iiid °^ments. a step / attempted by Mr. Swinburne almost alone among prominent critics, and thus likely to secure to him in the future that deserved credit for judicial faculty which is so apt to be impaired by the spectacle of the vices pC^a 1 08 SCJE.VCE IN CRITICISM. of his poetic style, fatally emphasized as they are by the atrocious superfoetations of his prose. Least in- fluenced among our recent poets, apparently, by the j^^;t>*science in the air, he is in more ways than one, with all his atavism , the most genuinely a child of the scientific age, carrying his rationalism furthest, and outrunning in much of his practice the influence of his chosen standards. What ^JfeTfias" done forcibly but fitfully, unmethodically, passionately, scientific criticism must do circumspectly and with patience. In no other branch of human inquiry does discussion go on from day to day and generation to generation without a > matter-of-course reference to and reconsideration of the work of the different inquirers. In belles lettres alone does the new treatise proceed as far as possible inde- pendently (iT all others, each critic apparently thinking it beneath mm to make more than a passing reference I to the differing judgment of anybody else. jWhat the / reading world may well ask of the judges is that they / should compare their opinions and at least try to account for their differences if they cannot resolve them. And perhaps the fittest conclusion to the pre- sent excursus will be an attempt to formulate briefly the principles on which a critic should go to work. If, then, our analyses of the judicial process and its subject matter hold good, and the iteration be not become odious, we say that th e critic ^pjiears as viewing X literature under three broad aspects, himself represent- ing possibilities of personal variation of opinion which also may conveniently be reduced to three sorts. He PRINCIPLES OF PRACTICE, 109 has to estimate, in a given book, the validity of its representation of facts, or its direct or indirect ** criticism of life ; *' its importance or comparative interest as a presentment of mind, irrespective of accuracy; and its relative success or value as a piece of literary art. And his ^personal judgment or taste^ which is for him the standard of appraisement (this even if he be but a journalist trj-ing to be "safe " — for he must still judge for himself wrhat is truly safe) is a function of >ilc natnrQ^ p^''^^^, hjf' c ducatioi ) or pr ejudi c^gs, and his special famiH arity with th e, matters in hand. So that, if he would be conscientious and fairly secure of a hearing from the good readers, he must watch over himself on all heads. (i). If it be his immediate business, say, to criticize fiction on its merits, he is bound to ask himself — as Flaubert asked Saint^^Beuve — whether his impression in a given case is likely to stand the tests of change of nervous condition and of widening experience of life ; and further, whether or not it represents what he can detect to be a mere tendency to " Hke " t his or that theme or m ethod. rather than a true comparative estimate. If, say, he is conscious of findinj:^ Mr. Howells more enjoyaBle reading than P - i ; ■. \ wl^-lc \ct feeling that the latter grapples with the harder taiiks, he will not allow himself to criticize in terms of his superficial sense of pleasantness, but will take pains to estimate total values. And when, in the work of a master, he is conscious of less than usual satisfaction, he will do his ^ 1 lo SCIENCE IN CRITICISM, best to make clear to himself precisely why he is less satisfied. There are plenty of instructive illustrations of the difficulty. Mr. Henry James ^ and Mr. George Saintsbury,^ for instance, have each criticized the works of Flaubert ; and, while agreeing as to the remarkable powers and achievement of the novelist, have arrived at almost absolutely contrary opinions on one or two of his books. " Madame Bovary " they both pronounce a masterpiece ; but whereas Mr. James likens the reading of *' L'£du- cation Sentimentale " to "masticating ashes and saw- dust," Mr. Saintsbury, with that judgment before him, not only praises the book in detail, but declares ^ that it " certainly gives him pleasure." Between such judg- ments, is there any way of deciding that is better than casting an arbitrary vote on one side or the other? I ^. think there is. Mr. James is obviously staking every- thing oh his '^impression nerveiise," for he allows that " here the form and method are the same as in * Madame Bovary ; ' the studied skill, the science, the accumulation of material, are even more striking ; " while persisting in his verdict — " but the book is in a single word a dead one." On the face of the matter there is something wrong here. If \vith the same form and method, the same skill, science, and abundance of material, one book is dead and the other living, criticism would seem to be a vain task indeed. Such ^ In his volume of collected essays, " French Poets and Novelists." = In the Fort7iightly Review^ April, 1878. 3 Art. cited, p. 587. OKyTRACJ ijm 4^ PRINCIPLES OK/PRACTICE, i\^ a paradox should be solved, and Mr. James provides no solution. " * Madame Bovary ' was spontaneous and sincere ; hut to read its successor is, to the finer sense, like masticating ashes and sawdust." The antithesis is spurious, because we have just been told that form, method, and art are the same in the two cases. ** * L'Education Sentimentale ' is elaborately and massively dreary." Well, but Mr. James had just said a few pages before, of ** Madame Bovary," that *' anything drearier, more sordid, more vulgar and desolate than the greater part of the subject-matter of this romance it would be impossible to conceive ; " and he speaks of the pain with which one closes the book. Justifying his verdict on the later work he proceeds : — " That a novel should have a certain charm seems to us the most rudimentary of principles, and there is no more charm in this laborious movement to a treache- rous ideal than there is interest in a heap of gravel." But Mr. James had only a moment before had his finger on the fact that charm is a matter of wide individual variation, and had noted that many readers feel towards ** Madame Bovary " just as he feels towards ** L*£ducation Sentimentale." " To many people," he truly says, '* * Madame Bovary' will always be a hard book to read and an impossible one to enjoy. They will complain of the abuse of description, of the want of spontaneity^^ [this just before the ascription of spontaneity by the critic] " of the hideousness of the subject, of the dryness and coldness and cynicism of the tone. Others will contintic to think it a great performance,'* 112 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM, Quite so ; and why not allow as much of "L'£ducation Sentimentale " ? Mr. Saintsbury on his side gives his reasons for esteeming that work. *' There is not a character in the scores which figure in the book that is not in itself a masterpiece. . . . But the greatest attraction of the book is the profusion of observation and knowledge of the intricacies of action and conduct which it displays, and which I do not hesitate to say is not excelled in the work of any contemporary writer." No one, I think, will dispute in detail that statement as to the masterly drawing of the different characters : there is nothing vivider and truer in fiction, though the book as a whole is a study of impotence, incompetence, weakness, and failure. Equally true is the estimate of the human science : as to that Mr. James is in virtual agreement. And yet one cannot escape the sensation on which Mr. James based his verdict : if *' Madame Bovary" is hard y\ reading, the other is very hard indeed. Is that then the final test ? Surely not. It has already become clear »/that the appreciation of these books is a matter of Hjevolution of palate, and that the later is to the earlier what a late sonata of Beethoven is to an early one — closer-packed, more scientific, more difficult, less attractive ; and one decides that Mr. Saintsbury's appreciation comes of his being (as there are other reasons for considering him) the harder reader of the two. One does not say he is as a rule the better critic : Mr. James strikes one as in several respects the saner in taste and philosophy, and one feels his account of~~ PRINCIPLES OF PR A CTICE, 1 1 3 Homais as an " unwholesome compound " to be sounder and truer than that of Mr. Saintsbury, who finds the charlatan likeable, and thinks Flaubert did not mean him to be otherwise. But Mr. Saintsbury may yet be the harder student ; and his defence of " L'£ducation Sentimentale" is so explicable. And so with the dispute over " La Tentation de St. Antoine," which is to Mr. James's sense "what * L'ltducation Sentimentale' is to * Madame Bovary ' — what the shadow (!) is to the substance ; *' while to Mr. Saintsbury it is " my own favourite reading among its author's books. It is the best example of dream literature that I know.** It is the first problem over again. Now, the whole question here is, whether a novel which such a good reader as Mn James finds unbearably scientific can well be reckoned as on the line of evo lution — whether the enjoyment of Mr. Saintsbury is not a case of lopsided development. The analogy of Beethoven's sonatas — or of music in general — will probably ser\*e to check haste in decision. We are most of us diffident about pronouncing against a piece of music which we feel to be for the time beyond us; and this not merely because of our cowardice about admitting our musical illiteracy — though that operates to an extent not quite agreeable to think of — but because we remember how we have developed in the past. jVith that in vievy^ we shall be slow to say that^yen_J>lr-_^ James's impression is decisive^"' We may feel as he does, and yet come to 9 114 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. change Qur attitude — as may he. Air. Saintsbury tells Tiow he read *' Salammbo " for the first time with effort and perplexity, though fascinated ; but that on a ^ later reading there was no effort, but only enjoyment. So it is with much music ; andJs-ajOQxelnever to need _a^second^ reading ? It must be granted that *' L'£ducation Sentimentale," permanently and powerfully as it impresses us in detail, arouses in the reader many strong objections : that it seems, in reading, ill-combined, straggling, lacking in that effect ofwholenes§,..jyhich we so instinctively crave for in all art. Nay, let us remember that Flaubert himself laid his finger on the very considerable artistic defect of " Salammbo " — the fact, Y^ namely, that " the pedestal is too large for the statue." May not the later book then be found permanently faulty in construction, and permanently repellent on that ground ? We have to remember yet further the pecu\pRr personal development of Flaubert, the early hint of epilepsy and the permanent weakness of health, the gradual increase in his toil relatively to the quantitative result, and the fact that his manuscript finally came to be an unintelligible medley of deletions. May this not have been just a development on untenable lines ? ^ Well, but what of Beethoven ? __AlLthings considered, one is driven to vote with Mr. Saintsbury, wHoTs after all a sanely constituted mind ^ See the important and painfully interesting account of Flaubert's physical history, and the apparent arrest of his development, in the *' Souvenirs Litteraires " of M. Maxime du Camp, Paris, 1882. PRINCIPLES OF PRA CTICE. 1 1 5 enough. The reasonable presumption is that as we get older [Mr. James was fairly young when he wrote his essay] we shall better relish the dry wine of Flaubert ; and that cultured posterity will have less difficulty than we in relishing it. And with this presuni ption before us we are bound to £rongunce Mr. n/ Saintsbury's the better criticism of the two. Mr. ^ James, even if he was convinced of the social validity of his impression, ought to have viewed such a problem all round, and ought to have given us an explanation 1 of the _ca5e_ instead of leaving us with a dogmatic I paradox. Mr. Saintsbury, contradicting Mr. James, did not fully explain the case either ; but he posited the unquestionable merits of the book, and his critical defence of it left the full explanation clearly in view. (ii.) Here variation of opinion can be reduced to the 1 - causes of (i) l ^asty ac gfiptanrf! of_!VnervousJmpression,** I ' and (2) degree of expertness or development. In many I cases, of course, conflict comes of wtratwe^iway call the natural bias reinforced by habit, as when Mr. Swin- burne, in a critique inconsistent in itself at various points, has finally the air of making out Charlotte Bronte a greater mind and a greater novelist than George Eliot, on the strength partly of the first writer's capacity for tempestuous emotion and partly of an asserted capacity for ** creating " true characters. Let us take his most precise all-round judgment : — " In knowledge, in culture, perhaps in capacity for knowledge and culture, Charlotte Bronte was no more comparable to George Eliot than George Eliot is comparable to Charlotte Bronte in purity of passion, )^ ii6 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. in depth and ardour of feeling, in spiritual force and fervour of forthright inspiration. It would be rather a rough and sweeping than a loose and inaccurate di\'ision which should define the one as a type of genius distinguished from intellect, the other of intellect as opposed to genius. But it would, as I venture to think, be little or nothing more or less(!) than accurate to recognize in George Eliot a type of intelligence vivified and coloured by a vein of genius ; in Charlotte Bronte a type of genius directed and moulded by the touch of intelligence." ^ Here we have genius treated (i) as a thing not only o\ er and above but different from intelligence, and (2) as consisting in specifically emotional or passionate I processes of ideation, such as, say, many of Mr. Swin- / bume's own. Now, genius is. plainly enough just-an / energetic perfection of intelligence in a given direction-i^ I in any more limited sense the word becomes an \ unintelligent and needless epithet for a habit of nervous perturbation, or for mere special capacity in one of the fine arts. Newton, to the eye of human science, is just as much a genius as Shelley ; Lessing in a way as truly as Heine or as Ruskin. Even if genius be held to consist in that movement of thought past conscious induction or choice to apparent intuition, which people often seem to have in view in using the term, it would still be demonstrably represented in the hypotheses of Newton, Kepler, and Laplace, and in the criticism (as distinct from the other performance) of Lessing and of Lamb. To call, as some would do, Marlowe a genius and Sainte-Beuve a man of intel- ligence, thus giving the fir st a k ind of halo to mark him off'fronniTe mere mortality of the second — this is only to express a very limited view of life and the frame ' *' A Note on Charlotte Bronte," 1877, pp. 19-20. Jf PRINCIPLES OF PRACTICE, 117 of things. Thus seen, humanity has more geniuses than great thinkers ; and the rarer development takes the lower rank. As against such caprice, shall we not say that Hume is as important a genius as Wordsworth, the scientist Young as Coleridge ; and that if Carlyle had a genius for vivid presentment, Mill had as surely a genius for justice ? Mr. Swinburne, one says, is naively applying the bias of what some are pleased to term theJlcreatiueJl ^rtiatjto the discrimination of two personalities and two bodies of work ; and he errs, to the sense of some of us, alike in his estimates of the work in itself and of the personalities behind it. Note, to begin with, the clash between his and Mr. Leslie Stephen's opinion of Charlotte Bronte's Rochester as a study of mascu- line character, and of the effectiveness of the character of Paul Emanuel. To Mr. Swinburne,* Rochester is a " wonderful and incomparable figure," and ** one of the only two male figures of wholly truthful work- manship and virtually heroic mould ever carved and coloured (!) by a woman's hand," ^ the other being Paul Emanuel. To Mr. Stephen, on the other hand» as to many of us, Rochester is not a truly masculine character at all, and is very far from creating a heroic impression.3 Mr. Swinburne, declaring ^ that " Edward ' P. 87. = Pp. 27-8. 3 Let me, however, formally dissent from the astonishing remark of Mr. Stephen that if Rochester "had proposed to [Jane] to ignore the existence of the mad Mrs. Rochester, he would have acted h'ke a rake,"" though not like a sneak. Surely Mr. Stephen had been conning the two command- ments of Mrs. Grundy before thus publishing a judgment which casts sus- picion on his fitness to discuss ethics with rational men. '* P- 7« ii8 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM, Rochester^nd-PauiSfflanuel are. oreations," as against simple " constructions " like Adam Bede and Tito Melema, confidently intimates that " the inevitable test or touchstone of this indefinable difference is the immediate and enduring impression set at once and engraved for ever on the simplest orthe__suhtlesi (!) mind of the most careless or the most careful student." Similarly, over Jane Eyre's answer to her lover, " To the finest fibre of my nature, sir," Mr. Swinburne decides ^ that we all " feel to the finest fibre of our own that these are no mere words." Now, the chances are that if a poll could be taken of the instructed and experienced readers, both of these verdicts would be annulled ; that Rochester would be pronounced a sen- timental portrait, probably based on actual and mis- conceiving observation of a weak but blusterous man ; that Jane Eyre would be voted a sentimental figure alike in the above-quoted answer and in many other phases ; and that Mr. Swinburne's rapturous eulogy would be classed as a reminiscence of the age when we are all sentimentalists; that is, in the words of Mr. James, when we " prefer a contemplation of the I surface to a knowledge of the internal spring." ^ If those who turn away from Rochester were to pursue the method of Mr. Swinburne, they would indulge in a quantity of raging execration of the character, as he does in the case of Stephen Guest, 'Pp. 16-17. - Article on Sainte-Beuve, North Ainerica7i Reviezo, January, 1880, p. 60. PRINCIPLES OF PRA CTICE. 1 19 or of rowdy derision of the misadventures of its delineator, as he does with regard to George Eliot. ^ His uncalculating wrath at the idea of a superior woman being fascinated by an inferior man — a kind of naif nervous re coil which is bound to deflect critical judgment — is the pretext for a torrent of clotted dam- nation of novel and novelist alike ; though it comes with the preface that ** we must regretfully and respect- fully consider of what quality and what kind may be the faults which deform the best and ripest work " ^ of Charlotte Bronte's rival. On the other hand, while some of Charlotte's own failures are admitted frankly enough, all deductions are kept out of the total esti- mate; and we have one of Mr. Swinburne's iterative disquisitions on the edacity of jnere intelligence to l^Junder to an ihfimte extent while erring genius can nevcT'go vcry.Jar wrong. These theses are at least doomed to the category of J:he aberrations of genius. George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte have alike failed in many things, ^s even great artists in all a ges h ave tended^ to fa ij— as Shakspere sometimes failed, as Goethe failed, as Balzac failed, as Da Vinci failed, — simply beca use the a rtistic like_every other fnrm j^>f^^m»pnj^f>y^P«> /^pnnftt hf* at ,aILJL^JTif'° and on all Jhemes e qually instructed and pquallv competent. ' The allusion to *' the pitiful and unseemly spectacle of an Amazon thrown sprawling over the crupper of her spavined and spur-galled Pegasus" (" Note," p. 25) will probably be held to justify the alxjve stricture. It might perhaps even be conceived to warrant— it certainly suggests — a reflection on the paddle-wheel paces of the foaming quadruped which has borne Mr. Swinburne over so many windy leagues of verse. ^ P. 28.. I20 SCIENCE JN CRITICISM. Both women projected characters that were largely sentimentalized and only partially observed — for in all cases there must be some basis of observation in Active work. Mr. Swinburne, after declaring that Rochester and Paul are " creations," finds (p. d>y) that for the latter the novelist " must have had some kind of model, however transfigured and dilated by the splendid influence of her own genius." Quite so. Paul is a living character for us just because we feel him to have been taken from the life. And when Mr. Stephen, in this connection, goes on to argue that " such a test admittedly implies an erroneous theory of art ; " and that " in fact, the in- tense individuality of Paul Emanuel is, in a different sense, the most serious objection to him," we are driven to an analysis of Mr. Stephen's theory of art. The result, briefly put, is the discovery that he has reasoned fallaciously from accepted dicta as to the inferiority of that painting or sculpture which labo- riously reproduces minute detail and yet misses living truth. There is no real analogy ; for M. Paul is not a faulty production in that sense ; and indeed that kind of fault is not one to which English fictional art has ever yet been found to be prone. Its specific failing is that of " doing, it from nothing," as the artists say — putting forward types in which lax imagi- nation slurs and confuses the lineaments of living character till nothing is left but a purposive dream, purposive yet fluctuant and inconsequent as dreams are. To compare Paul with Uncle Toby and Don PRINCIPLES OF PRACTICE. 121 Quixote to the disadvantage of the first, as Mr. Step hen does in confutation of M r. Swinburne, js to compar e performances of essentially diferent kin d, as well as of different epoch, of which one set, besides, is judged more or less conventionally while the other is discussed on a spontaneous impression. A theory thus arr ived ^, to the effect that so-called type-drawing in ficHon Is a higher order oi work than pa inting from the life, hasnone of the characteristics of a scientific proposi- iiQa4-and may in this conriec'fiori'^e" dismissed with a square challenge to any one to show why Moliere is to be pronounced a higher order of artist than Ibsen, or Sterne than Tourguenief. The true test of coeval fictive art, surely, fs \\\^\ its congruity with ripe experience ; and the tests for Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot must needs be the same. It is nakedly irrational to rank the admitted character-successes of the latter lower than the verbal success of a fine poetic figure in the diary of Louis Moore, admittedly a " woman in breeches." Artists must be totalled, if at all, in re spert nf ^e^jc ^^rr^r^ re n rh and rftmj 'irtrnrf* : and the reach of George Eliot is, almost in the terms of Mr. Swinburne's own con- trast, greater than that of Charlotte Bronte. Her successes simply lie on different lines : her failures (to the general sense) are proportionally not more numerous, and are certainly not more consummate. The difference is that whereas both women too often "did it from nothing," working partly from vague reminiscence but mostly from fancy, Miss Bronte in 122 SCIEACE IN CRITICISM. default of true study sentimentalized, while George Elior~sermonized ; and if we must discriminate in artistic mistakes, surely the moralizing of a compre- hensive and trained intellect is more instructive than the romancing of an impulsive mind, highly gifted indeed, but not comprehensive, and very imperfectly trained. I do not know whether I shall not be un- warrantably following in the wake of Mr. Swinburne if I speak of Charlotte Bronte as having a vivid imagination and great fictive faculty grafted on the philosophy of a spirited governess ; but I trust I shall h ave th e p-eneral verdict "'=' jpy ^^'^^'^ rpf^ as to ^he m- sufficiency of her grasp of humai ijife. Here I have pronounced an opinion at once on an author and on her performance, cursorily estimating her criticism of life and at the same time her intellec- tual importance. And some will doubtless say, some- what as Mr. Moulton has said, or as Mr. Howells has more recently said with some point and emphasis, that it is not the critic's business to do these things, or at least the last. _Miv-Howells, I take it, would taboo, any l^-^otal or general criticism of a book. " It is hard for him," he says of the professional critic, " to understand that it is really his business to classify and analyse the fruits of the human mind as the nntnrai;5j_ _classifies th e objects of his study, r ather than to prais e or blame them ; that there is a measure of the same absurdity in his trampling on"a poem, a novel, or an essay that does not please him, as in the botanist's grinding a plant underfoot because he does not find it pretty. He does not conceive that it is his business rather to id entify the s^ecie ^ and then explain hoiu and 7uhere the specimen is imperfect and irre^ulaz. "Let him conceive of'an author as not in any wise on trial before him, but as a reflection of this or that aspect of life, and he will not be tempted to browbeat or bully him." " The critic . . . must perceft-e, if he will \% PRINCIPLES OF PRACTICE. 123 question himself more carefully, that his office is mainly to ascertain facts and traits of l iterature, not to invent or denounce th^ffl r to'lltscover"'^ pnnciples, noi T(r~BsnilSTisK them; jn rfrpn^rt, nnt tn rrpnff>" («< F.rlifm'g Study " section in Harper's Magazine, June, 1887, pp. 156-7). Some maladroit criticisms doubtless provok^d*^t)ies6 ' propositions ; but, taken as they must need\^(J3e 6% their dialectic merits, Ihey constj tu^p a thanry ni^^i-iti- '\\^ cism that^-x apnot stand analysi s. It is surely v^^/^; plain that Mr. Hovvells here (save in the somewhat inconsistent passage italicized, and in so far as he simply demands courtesy of tone) is denying to the critic one of the most important of individual rights ;>x, a right, too, which it is his own special function to exercise. Mr. Howells' novels are, in their degree, cr iticism of life by the representation of it ; that is to • say, he gives us what purport to be views of persons and society, saying in eftect. This is how things go. Now, it is no special prerogative of the artist so-called to tell his fellows how things go : it is equally the right of the moralist, the historian, the politician, the philosopher, the critic — the preacher, if you will ; and to say that any one of these is not free to contradict the artist is no more reasonable than to say that the members of any one class may not contradict each Smother, or members of the other classes ; which would be a sufficiently idle dictum. All philosophy is neces- sarily criticism of philosophy ; all politics criticism of politics ; ,jLjQd.-if the critics find Mr ^_ji^wf;]]s givino- whatthexxo^sidef nHsleadmg-vieNvs o| life, why should 1 1 - they not put forward their opinion just as they would 124 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. on the arguments of Strauss or the historic doctrines of Mommsen ? One is at a loss to see on what grounds an artist can justify to himself a protest against such criticism pcv sc. In his novels he does but present his view of things, as Schopenhauer in his philosophy does his : different natures express themselves in diffe- rent ways ; and,,is -aver^^body to have his say_ but the " critic " so-called ? "^ Such a veto quashes itself: Mr. Howells is criticizing the critics, eifectively enough sometimes, in the act of protesting against the critic's criticism. And it will be idle for him to say that the critic began ; because the proposition in dispute is that the novelist began by i\ criticizing that contemporary life in which the critic is " a unit, andlhat the critic is simply spokesman Jo£his fellows — or himself. The capable novelist may well protest against the incompetence and unfairness of hostile judgments of his work : such error is sure to abound ; but surely he is not a solitary sufferer. Let a scholar start a new theory of the Acts of the Apostles, or a moralist a new standard of conduct, and he becomes the bete noir of whole sanhedrims of respectable people, who are as satisfied of his perniciousness as he can be of theirs. What is to happen ? Simply a struggle of opinion, in which persistence tells ; final persistence for . the most part, however, being happily in the. ratio of validity of logical and factual basis. If indeed Mr. Howells should simply appeal to the conscientiousness of the critics, he would be very clearly within his right. It stands to reason that of the PRINCIPLES OF PRACTICE. 125 hundreds of critiques written on every expert novelist, the majority must be inexpert ; such being probably the rule in such simple matters as the making of coats and shoes, as it certainly is in bookbinding. But let Mr. Howells remember that we who vex him are exercising our craft also on other novelists, who in their way are generally as incompetent as we; and he will surely hesitate to say that we have less title to characterize books than his unfit fellow-craftsmen have to represent people. His part is just to make his appeal (or deliver his shot) and take his chance ; for there must and will be written criticisrn^o long as readers like and dislike. The most conscientious critic can but keep before him the risks of error and injustice. What of most weight there is in Mr. Howells' sub- stantially ill-judged deliverance lies in the plea for temperance of tone aiid_^voi(iailCfi._oL5Jiimus-jQi:.^i»e scjeritific- ASL_cgnU;asted__witl^ fl He has doubtless good reason to protest on this head, alike against American and English critics. But his criticism here strikes himself as well as us. He is not only guilty of keeping up, with certain Saturday Reviewers here, the absurd Anglo-American wrangle, in which trivial national animosity becomes a critical standard, each side imputing literary incapacity to the other nation's writers or critics in the lump ; he has further disfigured his fiction by the same kind of pre- judice, which is of all artistic vices the least to be excused in a novelist. Mr. Howells, alike as morali- zing novelist (vide "A Modern Instance") and as sufferer lU J- ^-t>* V 126 SCIENCE IN CRITICISM. from fits of Anglophobia, may well bethink himself of his own cure — he, the physician. The critic's case is in comparison less pressing, since here Mr. Howells exaggerates the disease. Discourtesy, brutality, vul- garity — these are always nefarious ; but, as we have seen, Mr. Howells misconceives his just grievance to the extent of denying to the critic the right of even a temperate and impersonal condemnation of a novelist's treatment of life ; ^miparing the critical function to that of the student of natural and non-moral pheno- 1 mena ; whereas that kind of treatment of books, if , possible, would not be criticism at all, but mere descrip- ! tion....The critic aims and must aim at influencing both ^ art and conduct ; and just because he is an explicit teacher, and as such not an artist, it is for him to con- demn where it is for the artist simply to represenL,.lt is Mr. Howells who should " handle his frog as if he loved him : " the critic's method is inevitably different. -^ Something of the naturalist's moral aloofness the true. "a^ critic indeed must have, else he will run endless risk of misappreciation ; and he rnust as certainly be capable of reviewing literature as a field of natural phenomena, reducible to classification and "law,"else his judgments will habitually lack correlation, proportion, comparative justice. Needless to say, he must regard lit_eratjare as N/ a process of evolution. And here I am driven regret- fuily to say that few critics have ever sinned more flagrantly against that basic principle than Mr. Howells has done in certain critical remarks on Edgar Poe, Not content with passing one of the usual perverse fp^ PRINCIPLES OF PRACTICE. 127 American ^ judgments on Poe's work all round, the denier of the right of criticism proceeds to say : — " He [Poe] was of his time, and his tales and poems remain a part of literary history ; but if they were written to-day most of them could not be taken seriously." Supposing this were true, which it assuredly is not, could there be a more grossly uncritical, a more unscientific, a more unjust species o?~test than that suggested? I take it that Poe's best work — verse or prose — will bear the test of time a century hence rather better than Mr. Howells' best ; but on Mr. Howells* test, no work ever written could finally bear the test of time at all. If the " Pro- metheus Bound," or ** Daphnis and Chloe," or the ** Novum Organum," or " Hamlet," or " Le Misan- thrope," or the " Vicar of Wakefield," or " The Scarlet Letter," or Descartes' " Sur la Methode " were written to-day, could they be ** taken seriously " ? If it be answered that Keats' " Ode to a Nightingale " could be so taken, I answer that to critics who have studied their business perhaps a little more carefully than Mr. Howells has done, Poe's ** Dreamland," ** For Annie," " To Helen," " The Haunted Palace," " The City in the Sea," ^rp qR Tna