English Literary Criticism - Charles Edwyn Vaughan (best biographies to read TXT) 📗

rivals the insanity of his poetry"; and we are half-surprised not to find him told, as he was by Blackwood, to "go back to the shop, Mr. John; back to the plasters, pills, and ointment-boxes". [Footnote: Quarterly Review, xix. 204. See Blackwood, vol. iii. 524; where the Reviewer sneers at "the calm, settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy of Endymion".]

With this insolence it is satisfactory to contrast the verdict of the Edinburgh: "We have been exceedingly struck with the genius these poems—Endymion, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, &c.—display, and the spirit of poetry which breathes through all their extravagance. . . . They are at least as full of genius as absurdity." Of Hyperion the Reviewer says: "An original character and distinct individuality is bestowed upon the poet's mythological persons. . . . We cannot advise its completion. For, though there are passages of some force and grandeur, it is sufficiently obvious that the subject is too far removed from all the sources of human interest to be successfully treated by any modern author". [Footnote: Edinburgh Review, xxxiv. 203.] A blundering criticism, which, however, may be pardoned in virtue of the discernment, not to say the generosity, of the foregoing estimate.

It would have been well had the Edinburgh always written in this vein. But Wordsworth was a sure stumbling-block to the sagacity of his critics, and he certainly never failed to call forth the insolence and flippancy of Jeffrey. Two articles upon him remain as monuments to the incompetence of the Edinburgh; the first prompted by the Poems of 1807, the second by the Excursion.

The former pronounces sentence roundly at the very start: "Mr. Wordsworth's diction has nowhere any pretence to elegance or dignity, and he has scarcely ever condescended to give the grace of correctness or dignity to his versification". From this sweeping condemnation four poems—Brougham Castle, and the sonnets on Venice, Milton, and Bonaparte—are generously excepted. But, as though astonished at his own moderation, the reviewer quickly proceeds to deal slaughter among the rest. Of the closing lines of Resolution and Independence he writes: "We defy Mr. Wordsworth's bitterest enemy to produce anything at all parallel to this from any collection of English poetry, or even from the specimens of his friend, Mr. Southey". Of the stanzas to the sons of Burns, "never was anything more miserable". Alice Fell is "trash"; Yarrow Unvisited, "tedious and affected". The lines from the Ode to Duty.

  "Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,
  And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong,"

are "utterly without meaning". The poem on the Cuckoo is "absurd". The Ode on Immortality is "the most illegible and unintelligible part of the whole publication". "We venture to hope that there is now an end of this folly." [Footnote: Edinburgh Review, xi. 217, &c.]

But the hope is doomed to disappointment. The publication of the Excursion a few years later finds the reviewer still equal to his task. "This will never do", he begins in a fury; "the case of Mr. Wordsworth is now manifestly hopeless. We give him up as altogether incurable and beyond the power of criticism." The story of Margaret, indeed, though "it abounds, of course, with mawkish sentiment and details of preposterous minuteness, has considerable pathos". But the other passage which one would have thought must have gone home to every heart—that which describes the communing of the wanderer with nature [Footnote: Excursion, book i.]—is singled out for ridicule; while the whole poem is judged to display "a puerile ambition of singularity, grafted on an unlucky predilection for truisms". [Footnote: Edinburgh Review, xxiv. I, &c. It is but just to add that in the remainder of the essay the Reviewer takes back—so far as such things can ever be taken back—a considerable part of his abuse.]

It would be idle to maintain that in some of these slashing verdicts— criticisms they cannot be called—the reviewer does not fairly hit the mark. But these are chance strokes; and they are dealt, as the whole attack is conceived, in the worst style of the professional swash- buckler. Yet, low as is the deep they sound, a lower deep is opened by the Quarterly in its article on Shelley; an article which bears unmistakable marks of having been written under the inspiration, if not by the hand, of Southey.

It is impossible to know anything about Southey without feeling that, both in character and in intellect, he had many of the qualities that go to make an enlightened critic. But his fine nature was warped by a strain of bigotry; and he had what, even in a man who otherwise gave conclusive proof of sincerity and whole-heartedness, must be set down as a strong touch of the Pharisee. After every allowance has been made, no feeling other than indignation is possible at the tone which he thought fit to adopt towards Shelley.

He opens the assault, and it is well that he does so, by an acknowledgment that the versification of the Revolt of Islam, the corpus delicti at that moment under the scalpel, is "smooth and harmonious", and that the poem is "not without beautiful passages, free from errors of taste". But the "voice of warning", as he himself would too generously have called it, is not long in making itself heard. "Mr. Shelley, with perfect deliberation and the steadiest perseverance, perverts all the gifts of his nature, and does all the injury, both public and private, which his faculties enable him to perpetrate. . . .He draws largely on the rich stores of another mountain poet, to whose religious mind it must be matter of perpetual sorrow to see the philosophy, which comes pure and holy from his pen, degraded and perverted by this miserable crew of atheists and pantheists."

So far, perhaps, the writer may claim not to have outstepped the traditional limits of theological hatred. For what follows there is not even that poor excuse. "If we might withdraw the veil of his private life and tell what we now know about him, it would be indeed a disgusting picture that we should exhibit, but it would be an unanswerable comment on our text. . .Mr. Shelley is too young, too ignorant, too inexperienced, and too vicious to undertake the task of reforming any world but the little world within his own breast." [Footnote: Quarterly Review, xxi. 460, &c.] For the credit of both Reviews it must be said that it would be difficult to find another instance of so foul a blow as this: [Footnote: Except in the infamous insinuations, also a crime of the Quarterly,]

Non ragioniam di lui, ma guarda e passa.

[Footnote: against the character of Currer Bell. See also the scurrilous attack on the character of Leigh Hunt in Blackwood, vol III 453]

Apart from their truculence, the early numbers of the Edinburgh and Quarterly are memorable for two reasons in the history of English literature. They mark the downfall of the absolute standard assumed by Johnson and others to hold good in criticism. And they led the way, slowly indeed but surely, to the formation of a general interest in literature, which, sooner or later, could not but be fatal to their own haphazard dogmatism. By their very nature they were an appeal to the people; and, like other appeals of the kind, they ended in a revolution.

Of the men who fixed the lines on which this revolution was to run, four stand out taller from the shoulders upwards than their fellows. These are Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and Carlyle. The critical work of all four belongs to the first thirty years or so of the present century; [Footnote: Some of the dates are as follows Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets was published in 1808, his Essays of Elia began to appear in the London Magazine, 1820, Coleridge's first Course of Lectures (on English poets) was delivered in 1808, his second Course, in 1811-12, his Biographia Literana in 1817 Hazlitt's Characters of Shakespeare's Plays was published in 1817, his Lectures on the English Poets in 1818, and on The English Comic Writers in 1819 Carlyle's Essays began to appear (in the Edinburgh and other Reviews) in 1827, that on Diderot—the last notable essay of a literary cast—in 1833 Hazlitt died in 1830, Coleridge and Lamb in 1834 By that time Carlyle had turned to history and kindred subjects] and of the four it is probable that Carlyle, by nature certainly the least critical, had the greatest influence in changing the current of critical ideas. Space forbids any attempt to treat their work in detail. All that can be done is to indicate what were the shortcomings of English criticism as it came into their hands, and how far and in what manner they modified its methods and its aims.

Till the beginning of the present century, criticism in England had remained a very simple thing. When judgment had once been passed, for good or evil, on an individual work or an individual writer, the critic was apt to suppose that nothing further could reasonably be expected of him. The comparative method, foreshadowed but only foreshadowed by Dryden, had not been carried perceptibly further by Dryden's successors. The historical method was still more clearly in its infancy. The connection between the two, the unity of purpose which alone gives significance to either, was hardly as yet suspected.

It may be said—an English critic of the eighteenth century would undoubtedly have said—that these, after all, are but methods; better, possibly, than other methods; but still no more than means to an end— the eternal end of criticism, which is to appraise and to classify. The view is disputable enough. It leaves out of sight all that criticism—the criticism of literature and art—has done to throw light upon the dark places of human thought and history, upon the growth and subtle transformations of spiritual belief, upon the power of reason and imagination to mould the shape of outward institutions. All these things are included in the scope of the historical and comparative methods; and all of them stand entirely apart from the need to judge or classify the works of individual poets.

But, for the moment, such wider considerations may be put aside, and the objection weighed on its own merits. It must then be answered that, without comparison and without the appeal to history, even to judge and classify reasonably would be impossible; and hence that, however much we narrow the scope of criticism, these two methods—or rather, two aspects of the same method—must still find place within its range. For, failing them, the critic in search of a standard—and without some standard or criterion there can be no such thing as criticism—is left with but two possible alternatives. He must either appeal to some absolute standard—the rules drawn from the "classical writers", in a sense wider or narrower, as the case may be; or he must decide everything by his own impression of the moment, eked out by the "appeal to Moliere's maid". The latter is the negation of all criticism. The former, spite of itself, is the historical method, but the historical method applied in an utterly arbitrary and irrational way. The former was the method of Johnson; the latter, of the Edinburgh and the Quarterly. Each in turn, as we have seen, had ludicrously broken down.

In the light of recent inventions, it might have been expected that some attempt would be made to limit the task of the critic to a mere record of his individual impressions. This, in fact, would only have been to avow, and to give the theory of what the Edinburgh and the Quarterly had already reduced to practice. But the truth is that the men of that day were not strong in such fine-spun speculations. It was a refinement from which even Lamb, who loved a paradox as well as any man, would have shrunk with playful indignation.

It was in another direction that Coleridge and his contemporaries sought escape from the discredit with which criticism was threatened. This was by changing the issue on which the discussion was to be fought. In its most general form, the problem of criticism amounts to this: What is the nature of the standard to be employed in literary judgments? Hitherto—at least to the Reviewers—the question may be said to have presented itself in the following shape: Is the standard to be sought within or without the mind of the critic? Is it by his own impression, or by the code handed down from previous critics, that in the last resort the critic should be guided? In the hands of Coleridge and others, this was replaced by the question: Is the touchstone of excellence to be found within the work of the poet, or outside of it? Are we to judge of a given work merely by asking: Is it clearly conceived and consistently carried out? Or are we