CRITICISM AT DRYDEN’S DEATH—BYSSHE’S ‘ART OF ENGLISH POETRY’—GILDON—WELSTED—DENNIS—ON RYMER—ON SHAKESPEARE—ON “MACHINES”—HIS GENERAL THEORY OF POETRY—ADDISON—THE ‘ACCOUNT OF THE BEST KNOWN ENGLISH POETS’—THE ‘SPECTATOR’ CRITICISMS—ON TRUE AND FALSE WIT—ON TRAGEDY—ON MILTON—THE “PLEASURES OF THE IMAGINATION”—HIS GENERAL CRITICAL VALUE—STEELE—ATTERBURY—SWIFT—‘THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS’—THE ‘TALE OF A TUB’—MINOR WORKS—POPE—THE ‘LETTERS’—THE SHAKESPEARE PREFACE—SPENCE’S ‘ANECDOTES’—THE ‘ESSAY ON CRITICISM’—THE ‘EPISTLE TO AUGUSTUS’—REMARKS ON POPE AS A CRITIC, AND THE CRITICAL ATTITUDE OF HIS GROUP—PHILOSOPHICAL AND PROFESSIONAL CRITICS—TRAPP—BLAIR—THE ‘LECTURES ON RHETORIC’—THE ‘DISSERTATION ON OSSIAN’—KAMES—THE ‘ELEMENTS OF CRITICISM’—CAMPBELL—THE ‘PHILOSOPHY OF RHETORIC’—HARRIS—THE ‘PHILOLOGICAL ENQUIRIES’—“ESTIMATE” BROWN: HIS ‘HISTORY OF POETRY’—JOHNSON: HIS PREPARATION FOR CRITICISM—‘THE RAMBLER’ ON MILTON—ON SPENSER—ON HISTORY AND LETTER-WRITING—ON TRAGI-COMEDY—“DICK MINIM”—‘RASSELAS’—THE SHAKESPEARE PREFACE—THE ‘LIVES OF THE POETS’—THEIR GENERAL MERITS—THE ‘COWLEY’—THE ‘MILTON’—THE ‘DRYDEN’ AND ‘POPE’—THE ‘COLLINS’ AND ‘GRAY’—THE CRITICAL GREATNESS OF THE ‘LIVES’ AND OF JOHNSON—MINOR CRITICISM: PERIODICAL AND OTHER—GOLDSMITH—VICESIMUS KNOX—SCOTT OF AMWELL.

The death of Dryden punctuates, with an exactness not often attainable in literary history, the division between seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature in England.^[552] Criticism at Dryden’s death. In general letters 426it is succeeded—not at all immediately—by the great school of Queen Anne men. In criticism^[553] one of the greatest of these, a special pupil of Dryden, takes up the running at this interval, and others a little later; but the succession is steadily maintained. Dennis, an unhappily belated person, continues his exercitations; but has very much the worse fortune, critical as well as pecuniary, in his later days. And in the very year of the death there appears an egregious work—extremely popular, maleficently powerful beyond all doubt throughout the eighteenth century, and now chiefly known to non-experts in our days by the humorous contradiction which gave its author’s name to Shelley, and by the chance which made a literary connection, towards the very end of its period of influence, between three such extraordinarily assorted persons as Afra Behn, Bysshe himself, and William Blake.^[554]

Edward Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry^[555] puts the eighteenth-century theory of this art with a rigour and completeness which can only be attributed either to something like genius, or to a wonderful and complete absence of it. Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry. His Rules for Making English Verse are the first part of the book in order, but much the least in bulk. Then follow, first a collection of “the most natural and sublime thoughts of the best English poets,” or, in other words, an anthology, reasoned under headings, from poets of the seventeenth 427century, extending to about four hundred and fifty pages; and last a Dictionary of Rhymes. The “best English poets” may be useful to give in a note.^[556] The Dictionary is preceded by a few prefatory remarks, including one important historically, “Rhyme is by all allowed to be the chief ornament of versification in the modern languages.” The killing frost which had fallen on the flowers of Elizabethan poetry had killed one weed at any rate—the craze against rhyme.

The Rules are preceded by a partly apologetic Preface, which disclaims any wish to furnish tools to poetasters, and puts the work “under the awful guard of the immortal Shakespeare, Milton [note that this was before Addison’s critique], Dryden, &c.” The keynote is struck, in the very first sentence of the text, with that uncompromisingness which makes one rather admire Bysshe. “The Structure of our verses, whether blank or in rhyme, consists in a certain number of syllables; not in feet composed of long and short syllables, as the verse of the Greeks and Romans.” And he adds that, though some ingenious persons formerly puzzled themselves in prescribing rules for the quantity of English syllables, and composed verses by the measure of dactyls and spondees, yet that design is now wholly exploded. In other words, he cannot conceive classical feet without classical arrangement of feet.

“Our poetry admits, for the most part, of but three sorts of verses, those of 10, 8, and 7 syllables. Those of 4, 6, 9, 11, 12, and 14 are generally employed in masks and operas.” But 12 and 14 may be used in Heroic verse with grace. Accent must be observed; and the Pause must be at or near the middle, though in Heroics it may be at the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, or 7th syllable, determined by the seat of the accent. Still, pauses at the 3rd and 7th must be used sparingly. The 2nd and 8th “can produce no true harmony”; and he seems to have refused 428to contemplate anything so awful as a pause at the 1st or 9th. After decasyllables, octosyllables are commonest. As for lines of 9 and 11 syllables, “with the accent on the last [i.e., anapæstic measures], the disagreeableness of their measure has wholly excluded them from serious subjects.” The refining effected since the days of Chaucer, Spenser, and other ancient poets consists especially in the avoidance of the concourse of vowels and in the rigid elision of the article, the contraction of preterperfect tenses (“amaz’d,” not “amazed”), the rejection of alliteration (an instance in Dryden is apologised for), of splitting words closely connected at the end of a verse, and of polysyllables.

And a very large number of minute rules follow, the one guiding principle of which is to reduce every line to its syllabic minimum, never allowing trisyllabic substitution.

The book, base and mechanical as it may seem, is of the first historical importance. It will be seen, even from these few extracts, that the excellent Bysshe has no doubts, no half-lights. The idea, which we have seen crystallising for a century and a half, that English poetry is as strictly and inexorably syllabic as French, and much more so than Greek or Latin, is here put in its baldest crudity. Bysshe will have no feet at all: and no other division within the line but at the pause, which is to be as centripetal as possible, like the French cæsura. It follows from this that, except the feminine or double ending, which is allowed ostensibly as a grace to rhymes, though also in blank verse, nothing extra to the ten, the eight, or whatever the line-norm may be, is permitted on any account. Articles, prepositions that will stand it, pronouns, are to be rigidly elided; weak or short syllables in the interior of words must be slurred out. There is (only that Bysshe will not have even the name of foot) no room for a trisyllabic foot anywhere, in what he equally refuses to call iambic or trochaic verse.

But what is more startling still is that trisyllabic feet disappear, not merely from the octosyllable and the heroic, but from English prosody, or are admitted only to “Compositions for Musick and the lowest sort of burlesque.” Dryden might have written, “After the pangs of a desperate lover”; Prior 429might be writing “Dear Chloe, how blubbered is that pretty face”: but Bysshe sternly averts his face from them.

Now, if this astonishing impoverishment of English poetry had been the isolated crotchet of a pedant or a poetaster, it would at most deserve notice in a note. But it was nothing of the kind. “He,” this insignificant person, “said it”: they went and did it. It expressed the actual poetic practice of serious poets from Pope to Goldsmith: and it expressed the deliberate theoretic creed of such a critic as Johnson. The contrary practice of the great old poets was at best a “licence,” at worst a “fault.” What had actually happened to French—that it had been reduced to the iamb—what Gascoigne had lamented and protested against, long before, was here threatened—or rather, with bland ignoring, even of threat, laid down—as the unquestioned and unquestionable law of English. The whole eighteenth century did not, indeed, go the entire length of Bysshe. Prior—it is his everlasting glory in English poetical history—took care of that, and not only saved anapæstic cadence for us, but made it more popular than ever. But the eighteenth century continued, charmingly as it wrote them, to be a little ashamed of its anapæsts, to write them affectedly as a relaxation, if not even a derogation—to indulge in them (just as it might indulge in leap-frog with wig and long-skirted coat laid aside) avowedly for a frolic. And about the decasyllable—not quite so rigidly about the octosyllable—it accepted Bysshe almost without a protest. All the infinite variety of true English prosody, all the gliding or melting trochees, all the passion and throb which trisyllabic feet give to iambic verse, were sacrificed, all freedom of pause was relinquished, and the decasyllable tramped, the octosyllable tripped, as regularly and as monotonously as a High Dutch grenadier or a Low Dutch clock.

Bysshe had been frankly formal; it is not a small merit in him that he knew what he had to do and did it: but persons who were little if at all above him in taste or in intellect affected to despise him for this, and Mr Charles Gildon in his Complete Art of Poetry,^[557] published a few 430years later, is very high and mighty with Bysshe. Gildon. As for himself he does not think that Poetry consists even in “colouring,” but in Design: and he hashes up his French originals into some would-be modish dialogues, in which ladies of fashion attack and defend poetry on the old lines, before he comes to minuter recommendations. These differ chiefly from Bysshe’s in that they are wordier, less peremptory, and given to substitute the vagueness of the journalist for the precision of the schoolmaster. Nor was this by any means Gildon’s only contribution to criticism. Among the others perhaps the most interesting is an anonymous and undated, but apparently not doubtful, rifacimento of Langbaine,^[558] which is curious as an example of peine du talion. Gildon (who has employed his own or some other “careful hand” to give himself an ingeniously, because not extravagantly, complimentary notice in the Appendix) serves Langbaine in Langbaine’s own fashion; and, not contented with reversing his judgments, indulges freely in such phrases as “Mr Langbain mistakes,” “those scurrilous and digressory remarks with which Mr Langbain has bespattered him [Dryden],” &c. The book is in the main bibliographic and biographic rather than critical.

A name which has something to do with criticism, and which associates itself naturally with those of Dennis and Gildon in the regiment of Pope’s victims, is that of Leonard Welsted, who in 1712 published a translation of Longinus, “with some remarks on the English Poets.” Welsted. Welsted’s translation, whether made directly from the Greek or not,^[559] is readable enough, and his alternative title, “A treatise on the Sovereign Perfection of Writing,” is not unhappy. Neither are his Preface and his appended “Remarks” contemptible. He can appreciate not merely Milton but Spenser; is (how unlike Rymer!) transported with Othello, and 431especially with its conclusion; and if he is not superior to others in scorning “Latin rhymes,” at least has sufficient independence to be very irreverent to Buchanan.

But there was a contemporary of Bysshe’s, more famous than either Gildon or Welsted, whose soul was equally above mere prosodic precept, and to whom, as it happens, Gildon himself pays a compliment, as to a denizen of Grub Street, of whom Grub Street could not but feel that he did it some honour by herding with its more native and genuine population.population. Of him we must say something—not, as we might almost have said it, in juxtaposition with the great poet and critic whom he had earlier admired, but before coming to the lesser, but still great, successors of Dryden, with whom he came into collision in his evil days.

If John Dennis had been acquainted with the poetry of Tennyson (at which he would probably have railed in his best manner, in which he would certainly have detected plagiarisms from the classics), he too might have applied to himself the words of Ulysses, “I am become a name.” Dennis. Everybody who has the very slightest knowledge of English literature knows, if only in connection with Dryden, Addison, and Pope, the surly, narrow, but not quite ignorant or incompetent critic, who in his younger and more genial days admired the first, and in his soured old age attacked the second and third. But it may be doubted whether very many persons have an acquaintance, at all extensive, with his works. They were never collected; the Select Works of John Dennis^[560] mainly consist of his utterly worthless verse. Much of the criticism is hidden away in prefaces which were seldom reprinted, and the original editions of which have become very rare. Even good libraries frequently contain only two or three out of more than a dozen or a score of separate documents: and though the British Museum itself is well furnished, it is necessary to range through a large number of publications to obtain a complete view of Dennis as a critic.

That view, when obtained, may perhaps differ not a little from those which have, in a certain general way, succeeded each 432other in current literary judgment. During the reign of Pope and Addison, the scurrilous assailant of the first, and the more courteous but in part severe censor of the second, was naturally regarded as at best a grumbling pedant, at worst a worthless Zoilus. The critics of the Romantic school were not likely to be much attracted by Dennis. More recently, something of a reaction has taken place in his favour; and it has become not unusual to discover in him, if not exactly a Longinus or a Coleridge, yet a serious and well-equipped critic, who actually anticipated not a little that after-criticism has had to say.^[561]

That this more charitable view is not entirely without foundation may be at once admitted. On Rymer. As compared with Rymer, in whose company he too often finds himself in modern appreciation, Dennis shows, indeed, pretty well. He very seldom—perhaps nowhere—exhibits that crass insensibility to poetry which distinguishes “the worst critic who ever lived.” One of his earliest and not his worst pieces, The Impartial Critic of 1693, is an answer to Rymer himself, points out with acuteness and vigour that “Tom the Second” would ruin the English stage if he had his way, and even approaches the sole causeway of criticism across the deep by advancing the argument that the circumstances of the Greek drama were perfectly different from those of the English.^[562] Yet already there are danger-signals. That the piece (which includes a Letter to a Friend and some dialogues) contains a great deal of clumsy jocularity, does not much matter. But when we find Dennis devoting some of this jocularity to Antigone’s lamentation over her death unwedded, we feel sadly that the man who can write thus is scarcely to be trusted on the spirit of poetry. And the admission that Rymer’s censures of Shakespeare are “in most of the particulars very sensible and just” is practically ruinous.^[563]

433Dennis’s answer to Collier is a little later,^[564] but still earlier than most of his better known work; and it is very characteristic of his manner, which has not often, I think, been exactly described. As elsewhere, so in this tract, which is entitled The Usefulness of the Stage to the Happiness of Mankind, to Government and to Religion, Dennis is uncompromisingly ethical; but he had here the excuse that Collier, to whom he was replying, had taken the same line. There is less, either here or elsewhere, for his method. This is to make a loud clatter of assertions, arranged in a kind of pseudological order, which seems to have really deceived the author, and may possibly have deceived some of his readers, into believing it syllogistic and conclusive. Dennis is very great at the word “must.” “As Poetry is an Art it must be an imitation of nature”^[565] and so forth; seldom shall you find so many “musts” anywhere as in Dennis, save perhaps in some of his modern analogues. Like all who argue in this fashion, he becomes unable to distinguish fact and his own opinion. Collier, for instance, had quoted (quite correctly) Seneca’s denunciation of the Stage. To which Dennis replies, “It is not likely that Seneca should condemn the drama, ... since ... he wrote plays himself.” That the identity of the philosopher and the dramatist is not certain does not matter: the characteristic thing is the setting of probability against fact. But with Dennis hectoring assertion is everything. “It cannot possibly be conceived that so reasonable a diversion as the drama can encourage or incline men to so unreasonable a one as gaming or so brutal a one as drunkenness.” With a man who thinks this an argument, argument is impossible.

The fact is that, though he has, as has been admitted, a certain advantage over Rymer, Lord Derby’s observation that “He 434never knew whether it was John or Thomas who answered the bell” will too often apply here. On Shakespeare. Rymer himself was not ignorant; Dennis, especially in regard to ancient criticism, was still better instructed: and though both were bad dramatists, with, in consequence, a conscious or unconscious bias on dramatic matters, Dennis was not so bad as Rymer. His devotion to Dryden does him credit, though we may suspect that it was not the best part of Dryden that he liked: and, amid the almost frantic spite and scurrility of his later attacks on Pope, he not unfrequently hits a weak place in the “young squab short gentleman’s” bright but not invulnerable armour. Yet Dennis displays, as no really good critic could do, the weaknesses of his time and school both in generals and particulars. It is perfectly fair to compare him (giving weight for genius of course) with Johnson, a critic whose general views (except on port and claret) did not materially differ from his own. And, if we do so, we shall find that while Johnson is generally, if not invariably, “too good for such a breed,” Dennis almost as constantly shows its worst features. He altered The Merry Wives of Windsor into The Comical Gallant^[566]—a most illaudable action certainly, yet great Dryden’s self had done such things before. But he aggravated the crime by a preface, in which he finds fault with the original as having “no less than three actions” [would there were thirty-three!] by remarking that, in the second part of Henry the Fourth, Falstaff “does nothing but talk” [would he had talked so for five hundred acts instead of five!] and by laying down ex cathedra such generalities as that “Humour, not wit, is the business of comedy,” a statement as false as would be its converse. In his Essay on the Genius of Shakespeare^[567] he is not so very far from Rymer himself in the drivelling arbitrariness of his criticism. Shakespeare has actually made Aufidius, the general of the Volscians, a base and profligate villain! Even Coriolanus himself is allowed to be called a traitor by Aufidius, and nobody contradicts! The rabble in Julius Cæsar and other such things “show want of Art,” and there is a painful disregard of Poetical Justice. The same hopeless wrong-headedness and (if 435I may so say) wrong-mindedness appear in a very different work, the Remarks on the Rape of the Lock.^[568] I do not refer to Dennis’s mere scurrilities about “Ap—e” and the like. On “Machines.” But part of the piece is quite serious criticism. Few of us in modern times care much for the “machinery” of this brilliantly artificial poem; but fewer would think of objecting to it on Dennis’s grounds. Machines, it seems, must be—

i. Taken from the religion of the Poet’s country.

ii. Allegorical in their application.

iii. Corresponding though opposed to each other.

iv. Justly subordinated and proportioned.

And Pope’s machines, we are told, fail in all these respects.

Now, putting the fourth ground aside as being a mere matter of opinion (and some who are not fervent Papists think the machines of the Rape very prettily and cleverly arranged in their puppet-show way), one may ask Dennis “Who on earth told you so?” in respect of all the others. And if he alleged (as he might) this or that sixteenth or seventeenth century authority, “And who on earth told him so? and what authority had the authority? Why should machines be taken only from the religion of the country? Why should they be allegorical? Why should Machine Dick on the one side invariably nod to Machine Harry on the other?” And even if some sort of answer be forthcoming, “Why should the poet not do as he please if he succeeds thereby in giving the poetic pleasure?” To which last query of course neither Dennis nor any of his school could return any answer, except of the kind that requires bell, book, and candle.

Nor would he have hesitated to use this, for he is a rule-critic of the very straitest kind, a “Tantivy” of poetic Divine Right. His general theory of Poetry. In his three chief books of abstract criticism^[569] he endeavours to elaborate, with Longinus in part for code, and with Milton for example, a noble, indeed, and creditable, but utterly arbitrary and hopelessly 436narrow theory of poetry as necessarily religious, and as having for its sole real end the reformation of the mind, by a sort of enlarged Aristotelian katharsis as to spirit, and by attention to the strict laws of the art in form. Poetical Justice was a sort of mediate divinity to Dennis: as we have seen, he upbraided Shakespeare for the want of it; he remonstrated, in the Spectator, No. 548, and elsewhere, with Addison for taking too little account of it; part at least of his enthusiasm for Milton comes from Milton’s avowed intention to make his poem a theodicy.

A noble error! let it be repeated, with no hint or shadow of sarcasm or of irreverence; but a fatal error as well. That Poetry, like all things human, lives and moves and has its being in God, the present writer believes as fervently and unhesitatingly as any Platonic philosopher or any Patristic theologian; and he would cheerfully incur the wrath of Savonarola by applying the epithet “divine,” in its fullest meaning, not merely to tragedy and epic and hymn, but to song of wine and of love. But this is not what Dennis meant at all. He meant that Poetry is to have a definitely religious, definitely moral purpose—not that it is and tends of itself necessarily ad majorem Dei gloriam, but that we are to shape it according to what our theological and ethical ideas of the glory of God are. This way easily comes bad poetry, not at all easily good; and it excludes poetic varieties which may be as good as the best written in obedience to it, and better. Moreover, putting Dennis’s notion of the end of Poetry together with his notion of its method or art (which latter is to be adjusted to some at least of the straitest classical precepts), we can easily comprehend, and could easily have anticipated, the narrow intolerance and the hectoring pedantry which he shows towards all who follow not him. In a new sense—not so very different from the old mediæval one, though put with no mediæval glamour, and by an exponent full of eighteenth-century prosaism, yet destitute of eighteenth-century neatness and concinnity—Poetry becomes a part of theology; and the mere irritableness of the man of letters is aggravated into the odium theologicum. Bad poets (that is to say, bad according to 437Dennis) are not merely faulty artists but wicked men; of this Dennis is sure. “And when a man is sure,” as he himself somewhere naïvely observes, “’tis his duty to speak with a modest assurance.” We know, from examples more recent than poor Dennis, that, when a man is thus minded, his assurance is very apt to eat up his modesty, taking his charity, his good manners, and some other things, as condiments to the meal.

Dennis and Addison, though the latter did not escape the absolute impartiality of the former’s carping, were on terms of mutual respect which, considering all things, were creditable to both. Addison. During the latter part of his rather short lifetime Addison, it is hardly necessary to say, enjoyed a sort of mild dictatorship in Criticism as in other departments of literature; and his right to it was scarcely disputed till near the close of the century, though Johnson knew that he was not deep, and tells us that, in his own last days, it was almost a fashion to look down on Addisonian criticism. If, like others, he was displaced by the Romantic revival, he received more lenient treatment than some, in virtue partly of his own general moderation, partly of his championship of Milton. Yet while his original literary gifts recovered high place during the nineteenth century, his criticism has often been considered to possess scarcely more than historic interest, and has sometimes been rather roughly handled—for instance, by Mr Matthew Arnold. But a recent writer,^[570] by arguing that Addison’s treatment of the Imagination, as a separate faculty, introduced a new principle into criticism, has at any rate claimed for him a position which, if it could be granted, would seat him among the very greatest masters of the art, with Aristotle and Longinus among his own forerunners. As usual let us, before discussing these various estimates, see what Addison actually did as a critic.^[571]

His début as such was not fortunate. He was, it is true, only 438three-and-twenty when at “dearest Harry’s” request (that is to say Mr Harry Sacheverell’s) he undertook an Account of the greatest English Poets.^[572] The Account of the Best known English Poets. In 1694 nobody, except Dryden, could be expected to write very good verse, so that the poetical qualities of this verse-essay need not be hardly dwelt upon, or indeed considered at all. We may take it, as if it were prose, for the matter only. And thus considered, it must surely be thought one of the worst examples of the pert and tasteless ignorance of its school. Before Cowley nobody but Chaucer and Spenser is mentioned at all, and the mentions of these are simply grotesque. The lines convict Addison, almost beyond appeal, of being at the time utterly ignorant of English literary history up to 1600, and of having read Chaucer and Spenser themselves, if he had read them at all, with his eyes shut. The Chaucer section reads as if it were describing A C. Merry Tales or the Jests of George Peele. Where Dryden, if he did not understand Chaucer’s versification, and missed some of his poetry, could see much even of that, and almost all the humour, the grace, the sweetness, the “God’s plenty” of life and character that Chaucer has, Addison sees nothing but a merry-andrew of the day before yesterday.^[573] So, too, the consummate art of Spenser, his exquisite versification, his great ethical purpose, and yet his voluptuous beauty, are quite hidden from Addison. He sees nothing but a tedious allegory of improbable adventures, and objects to the “dull moral” which “lies too plain below,” much as Temple had done before him.^[574] Cowley, Milton, and Waller are mentioned next, in at least asserted chronological order. Cowley is “a mighty genius” full of beauties and faults,

“Who more had pleased us had he pleased us less,”

439but who is a perfect “milky way” of brilliancy, and has made Pindar himself “take a nobler flight.” Milton alternately strikes Addison with awe, rapture, and shock at his politics. He

“Betrays a bottom odious to the sight.”

So we turn to Waller, who is not only “courtly” but “moves our passion,” (what a pity that he died too soon to "rehearse Maria’s charms"!) to Roscommon, who “makes even rules a noble poetry,” and Denham, whose Cooper’s Hill “we must,” of course, not “forget.” “Great Dryden” is then, not unhappily, though not quite adequately, celebrated, and the line on his Muse—

“She wears all dresses, and she charms in all,”

is not only neat, but very largely true. When Dryden shall decay, luckily there is harmonious Congreve: and, if Addison were not tired with rhyming, he would praise (he does so at some length) noble Montague, who directs his artful muse to Dorset,

“In numbers such as Dorset’s self might use,”—

as to which all that can be said is that, if so, either the verses of Montague or the verses of Dorset referred to are not those that have come down to us under the names of the respective authors.

To dwell at all severely on this luckless production of a young University wit would be not only unkind but uncritical. It shows that at this time Addison knew next to nothing^[575] about the English literature not of his own day, and judged very badly of what he pretended to know.

The prose works of his middle period, the Discourse on Medals and the Remarks on Italy, are very fully illustrated from the Latin poets—the division of literature that Addison knew best—but indulge hardly at all in literary criticism. It was not till the launching of the Tatler, by Steele and Swift, provided him with his natural medium of utterance, that 440Addison became critical. This periodical itself, and the less known ones that followed the Spectator, all contain exercises in this character: but it is to the Spectator that men look, and look rightly, for Addison’s credentials in the character of a critic. The Spectator criticisms. The Tatler Essays, such as the rather well known papers on Tom Folio and Ned Softly, those in the Guardian, the good-natured puff of Tom D’Urfey, &c., are not so much serious and deliberate literary criticisms, as applications, to subjects more or less literary, of the peculiar method of gently malicious censorship, of laughing castigation in manners and morals, which Addison carried to such perfection in all the middle relations of life. Not only are the Spectator articles far more numerous and far more weighty, but we have his own authority for regarding them as, in some measure at least, written on a deliberate system, and divisible into three groups. The first of these groups consists of the early papers on True and False Wit, and of essays on the stage. The second contains the famous and elaborate criticism of Milton with other things; and the third, the still later, still more serious, and still more ambitious, series on the Pleasures of the Imagination. Addison is looking back from the beginning of this last when he gives the general description,^[576] and it is quite possible that the complete trilogy was not in his mind when he began the first group. But there is regular development in it, and whether we agree or not with Mr Worsfold’s extremely high estimate of the third division, it is quite certain that the whole collection—of some thirty or forty essays—does clearly exhibit that increasing sense of what criticism means, which is to be observed in almost all good critics. For criticism is, on the one hand, an art in which there are so few manuals or trustworthy short summaries—it is one which depends so much more on reading and knowledge than any creative art—and, above all, it is necessary to make so many mistakes in it before one comes right, that, 441probably, not one single example can be found of a critic of importance who was not a much better critic when he left off than when he began.

In Group One^[577] Addison is still animated by the slightly desultory spirit of moral satire, which has been referred to above; and, though fifteen or sixteen years have passed since the Account, he does not seem to be so entirely free as we might wish from the crude sciolism, if not the sheer ignorance, of the earliest period. On True and False Wit. He is often admirable: his own humour, his taste, almost perfect within its own narrow limits, and his good sense, made that certain beforehand. But he has rather overloaded it with somewhat artificial allegory, the ethical temper rather overpowers the literary, and there is not a little of that arbitrary “blackmarking” of certain literary things which is one of the worst faults of neo-classic criticism. The Temple of Dulness is built (of course) “after the Gothic manner,” and the image of the god is dressed “after the habit of a monk.” Among the idolatrous rites and implements are not merely rebuses, anagrams, verses arranged in artificial forms, and other things a little childish, though perfectly harmless, but acrostics—trifles, perhaps, yet trifles which can be made exquisitely graceful, and satisfying that desire for mixing passion with playfulness which is not the worst affection of the human heart.

He had led up to this batch, a few weeks earlier, by some cursory remarks on Comedy, which form the tail of a more elaborate examination of Tragedy, filling four or five numbers.^[578] On Tragedy. Readers who have already mastered the general drift of the criticism of the time before him, will scarcely need any long précis of his views, which, moreover, are in everybody’s reach, and could not possibly be put more readably. Modern tragedies, he thinks, excel those of Greece and Rome in the intricacy and disposition of the fable, but fall short in the moral. He objects to rhyme (except an end-couplet or two), and, though he thinks the style of our tragedies superior to the sentiment, finds the former, especially in Shakespeare, defaced by “sounding phrases, hard metaphors, 442and forced expressions.” This is still more the case in Lee. Otway is very “tender”: but it is a sad thing that the characters in Venice Preserved should be traitors and rebels. Poetic justice (this was what shocked Dennis), as generally understood, is rather absurd, and quite unnecessary. And the tragi-comedy, which is the product of the English theatre, is “one of the most monstrous inventions that ever entered into a poet’s thought.” You “might as well weave the adventures of Æneas and Hudibras into one poem” [and, indeed, one might find some relief in this, as far as the adventures of Æneas are concerned]. Tragedies are not even to have a double plot. Rants, and especially impious rants, are bad. Darkened stages, elaborate scenery and dresses, troops of supers, &c., are as bad: bells, ghosts, thunder, and lightning still worse. “Of all our methods of moving pity and terror, there is none so absurd and barbarous as the dreadful butchering of one another,” though all deaths on the stage are not to be forbidden.

Now, it is not difficult to characterise the criticism which appears in this first group, strengthened, if anybody cares, by a few isolated examples. It contains a great deal of common sense and good ordinary taste; many of the things that it reprehends are really wrong, and most of what it praises is good in a way. But the critic has as yet no guiding theory, except what he thinks he has gathered from Aristotle, and has certainly gathered from Horace, plus Common Sense itself, with, as is the case with all English critics of this age, a good deal from his French predecessors, especially Le Bossu and Bouhours. Which borrowing, while it leads him into numerous minor errors, leads him into two great ones—his denunciations of tragi-comedy, and of the double plot. He is, moreover, essentially arbitrary: his criticism will seldom stand the application of the “Why?” the “Après?” and a harsh judge might, in some places, say that it is not more arbitrary than ignorant.

The Second Group,^[579] or Miltonic batch, with which may be 443taken its “moon,” the partly playful but more largely serious examen of Chevy Chase, is much the best known, and has been generally ranked as the most important exhibition of Addison’s critical powers. On Milton. It is not, however, out of paradox or desire to be singular that it will be somewhat briefly discussed here. By the student of Addison it cannot be too carefully studied; for the historian of criticism it has indeed high importance, but importance which can be very briefly summed up, and which requires no extensive analysis of the eighteen distinct essays that compose the Miltonic group, or the two on Chevy Chase. The critic here takes for granted—and knows or assumes that his readers will grant—two general positions:—

1. The Aristotelian-Horatian view of poetry, with a few of the more commonplace utterances of Longinus, supplies the orthodox theory of Poetics.

2. The ancients, especially Homer and Virgil, supply the most perfect examples of the orthodox practice of poetry.

These things posed, he proceeds to examine Chevy Chase at some, Paradise Lost at great, length by their aid; and discovers in the ballad not a few, and in the epic very great and very numerous, excellences. As Homer does this, so Milton does that: such a passage in Virgil is a more or less exact analogue to such another in Paradise Lost. Aristotle says this, Horace that, Longinus the third thing; and you will find the dicta capitally exemplified in such and such a place of Milton’s works. To men who accepted the principle—as most, if not all, men did—the demonstration was no doubt both interesting and satisfactory; and though it certainly did not start general admiration of Milton, it stamped that admiration with a comfortable seal of official orthodoxy. But it is actually more antiquated than Dryden, in assuming that the question whether Milton wrote according to Aristotle is coextensive with the question whether he wrote good poetry.

The next batch is far more important.

What are the Pleasures of the Imagination? It is of the first moment to observe Addison’s exact definition.^[580] The “Pleasures of the Imagination.” Sight is 444the “sense which furnishes the imagination with its ideas; so that by the ‘Pleasures of the Imagination’ or Fancy, which I shall use promiscuously, I here mean such as arise from visible objects, either when we have them actually in our view, or when we call up their ideas into our minds by paintings, statues, descriptions, or any the like occasion.” We can have no images not thus furnished, though they may be altered and compounded by imagination itself. To make this quite sure, he repeats that he means only such pleasures as thus arise. He then proceeds, at some length, to argue for the innocence and refinement of such pleasures, their usefulness, and so on; and further, to discuss the causes or origins of pleasure in sight, which he finds to be three—greatness, uncommonness, and beauty. The pleasantness of these is assigned to such and such wise and good purposes of the Creator, with a reference to the great modern discoveries of Mr Locke’s essay.

Addison then goes on to consider the sources of entertainment to the imagination, and decides that, for the purpose, art is very inferior to nature, though both rise in value as each borrows from the other. He adduces, in illustration, an odd rococo mixture of scene-painting and reflection of actual objects which he once saw (p. 404). Italian and French gardens are next praised, in opposition to the old formal English style, and naturally trained trees to the productions of the ars topiaria; while a very long digression is made to greatness in Architecture, illustrated by this remark (p. 409), “Let any one reflect on the disposition of mind in which he finds himself at his first entrance into the Pantheon at Rome, ... and consider how little in proportion he is affected with the inside of a Gothic cathedral, though it be five times larger than the other,” the reason being “the greatness of the manner in the one, and the meanness in the other.”

So the “secondary” pleasures of the imagination—i.e., those compounded and manufactured by memory—are illustrated by the arts of sculpture and painting, with a good passage on description generally, whence he turns to the Cartesian doctrine of the association of ideas, and shows very ingeniously how the 445poet may avail himself of this. Next comes a curious and often just analysis of the reasons of pleasure in description—how, for instance, he likes Milton’s Paradise better than his Hell, because brimstone and sulphur are not so refreshing to the imagination as beds of flowers and wildernesses of sweets. Or we may like things because they “raise a secret ferment in the mind,” either directly, or so as to arouse a feeling of relief by comparison, as when we read of tortures, wounds, and deaths. Moreover, the poet may improve Nature. Let oranges grow wild, and roses, woodbines, and jessamines flower at the same time. As for “the fairy way of writing”^[581]—that is to say, the supernatural—it requires a very odd turn of mind. We do it better than most other nations, because of our gloominess and melancholy of temper. Shakespeare excels everybody else in touching “this weak superstitious part” of his reader’s imagination. The glorifying of the imagination, however, is by no means confined to the poet. In good historians we “see” everything. None more gratify the imagination than the authors of the new philosophy, astronomers, microscopists. This (No. 420) is one of Addison’s most ambitious passages of writing, and the whole ends (421) with a peroration excellently hit off.

It is upon these papers mainly that Mr Worsfold^[582] bases his high eulogium of Addison as “the first genuine critic,” the first “who added something to the last word of Hellenism,” the bringer of criticism “into line with modern thought,” the establisher of “a new principle of poetic appeal.” Let us, as uncontroversially as possible, and without laying any undue stress on the fact that Mr Worsfold practically omits Longinus altogether,^[583] stick, in our humdrum way, to the facts.

In the first place, supposing for the moment that Addison uses “imagination” in our full modern sense, and supposing, secondly, for the moment also, that he assigns the appeal to the imagination as the special engine of the poet, is this an original discovery of his? By no means: there are many loci of former 446writers to negative this—there is one that is fatal. And this is no more recondite a thing than the famous Shakespearian description of

“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,”

“Of imagination all compact,”

with what follows. But this is a mere question of property, plagiarism, suggestion; and such questions are at best the exercises of literary holiday-makers, at the worst the business of pedants and of fools.

A more important as well as a more dangerous question is this. Does Addison make “the appeal to the imagination” the test of poetry? It can only be answered that, by his own explicit words, he does nothing of the kind. If he advances anything, it is that the appeal to the imagination is the appeal of art generally—of prose (even of scientific) literary art as well as of poetry, of painting, sculpture, architecture, as well as of literature. In doing this he does a good thing: he does something notable in the history of general æsthetics; but in so far as literature, and especially poetry, is concerned, he scarcely goes as far as Longinus in the well-known passage,^[584] though he works out his doctrine at much greater length, and with assistance from Descartes and Locke.

But the most important and the most damaging question of all is this, “Are not Addison and his panegyrist using words in equivocal senses? Does Imagination in Addison’s mouth bear the meaning which we, chiefly since Coleridge’s day, attach to the word? Does it even mean what it meant to Longinus, much more what it meant to Shakespeare?”

I have no hesitation in answering the two latter questions with an absolute and unhesitating “No!”

It seems indeed extraordinary that, in face of Addison’s most careful and explicit limitations, any one should delude himself into thinking that even the Shakespearian and Addisonian Imaginations are identical—much more that Addison’s Imagination is the supreme faculty, creative, transcending 447Fancy,^[585] superior to fact, not merely compounding and refining upon, but altogether superseding and almost scorning, ideas of sensation, which we mean by the word, and which Philostratus or Apollonius^[586] partly glimpsed. Addison tells us—tells us over and over again—that all the ideas and pleasures of the imagination are pleasures of sense, and, what is more, that they are all pleasures of one sense—Sight. Why he should have limited himself in this singular manner it is hard to say; except that he was evidently full of Locke when he wrote, and, indeed, almost entirely under the influence of the Essay. That he had a contempt for music is elsewhere pretty evident; and this probably explains his otherwise inexplicable omission of the supplies and assistance given to Imagination by Hearing. His morality, as well as old convention, excluded Touch, Taste, and Smell as low and gross, though no candid philosophy could help acknowledging the immense influence exercised upon Imagination by at least the first and the last—Taste, because the most definite, being perhaps the least imaginative of all. But the fact that he does exclude even these senses, and still more rigidly excludes everything but Sense, is insuperable, irremovable, ruthless. Addison may have been the first modern critic to work out the appeal of art to the pleasures and ideas furnished by the sense of sight. He is certainly nothing more.

But is he therefore to be ignored, or treated lightly, because of this strange overvaluation of him? Certainly not. His general critical value.Though by no means a very great critic, he is a useful, an interesting, and a representative one. He represents the classical attitude tempered, not merely by good sense almost in quintessence, but by a large share of tolerance and positive good taste, by freedom from the more utterly ridiculous pseudo-Aristotelianisms, and by a wish to extend a concordat to everything good even if it be not “faultless.” In his Account he is evidently too crude to be very censurable: in his first group of essays much of his censure is just. The elaborate vindication of Milton, though now and for a long 448time past merely a curiosity, is again full of good sense, displays (if not altogether according to knowledge) a real liking for real poetic goodness, and had an inestimable effect in keeping at least one poet of the better time privileged and popular with readers throughout the Eighteenth Century. As for the essay on the Pleasures of the Imagination, the fact that it has been wrongly praised need not in the least interfere with a cordial estimate of its real merits. It is not an epoch-making contribution to literary criticism; it is rather one-sided, and strangely limited in range. But it is about the first attempt at a general theory of æsthetics in English; it is a most interesting, and a very early, example of that application of common-sense philosophy to abstract subjects which Locke taught to the English eighteenth century; and many of its remarks are valuable and correct. Moreover, it did actually serve, for those who could not, or who did not, read Longinus, as a corrective to pure form-criticism, to Bysshe with his rigid ten syllables, to bare good sense and conventional rule. Its Imagination was still only that which supplies Images, and was strangely cramped besides; but it was better than mere correctness, mere decency, mere stop-watch.

Between Addison and Pope, Steele, Atterbury, and Swift call for notice. Steele. Steele has little for us.^[587] There are few things more curious than the almost entire abstinence from any expression, in the slightest degree really critical, to be found in the eulogy of Spenser, which he generously enough inserted in Sp. 540 to express “his passion for that charming author.” The numerous friends whom he has so justly won for himself may perhaps insist that there is criticism of the best in this very phrase; and that the rather rash encomium on the poet’s “old words” as being “all truly English” is balanced by the justice of the reference to his “exquisite numbers.” But the fact is that Steele had neither the knowledge, nor the patience, nor the coolness for critical work.

449Atterbury gives rather more. He was himself a man of great intellectual power, a scholar, an eloquent and delicate writer, and possessed independent taste enough to admire Milton fervently at a time when Addison had not yet made it wholly orthodox to admire that poet at all, and when most Tories detested him. Atterbury. But his observations on Waller^[588] are the very quintessence of pseudodoxy, as to that respectable person; and, by a curious combination, though Waller is a rhymer confirmed and complete, Atterbury joins with his admiration for him an antipathy to rhyme—“this jingling kind of poetry,” “this troublesome bondage, as Mr Milton well calls it.” As for this we need say little; the danger lay not there. But it lay in the direction of such remarks as that “English came into Waller’s hands like a rough diamond; he polished it first,” that, “for aught I know, he stands last as well as first in the list of refiners” [imagine the excellent Waller as be-all and end-all of English!], that “verse before Waller was downright prose tagged with rhyme,” &c., &c. Once more let our impatience of this talk not be ignorant—as is the impatience of those who nowadays cannot see music in Dryden, poetry in Pope, “cry” and clangour now and then even in persons like Langhorne and Mickle. He expressed an opinion; but in expressing it he showed this same ignorance from which we should abstain. Instead of pointing out that Waller introduced a different kind of music, he insisted that Waller substituted music for discord: instead of saying that he introduced a new fashion of cutting the diamond, he would have it that the diamond was merely rough before. This was the culpa, the maxima culpa of eighteenth-century criticism, and Atterbury illustrates and shares it.^[589]

The critical work of Swift^[590] is much more important, and 450though a good deal of it is inextricably mixed up with the work of Pope and of Arbuthnot, the lion’s claw is generally perceptible enough. Swift. The famous Tatler of September 28, 1710, on the conceptions of English style and writing, ought to hold place in every history and course of lectures on the subject, next to Sprat’s passage in the History of the Royal Society forty years before, as the manifesto of a fresh stage in English style-criticism; and it practically precedes everything that Addison, Steele, and Pope published on, or in connection with, the subject. But long before this, in the wonderful volume which first (1704) revealed his genius to the world, Swift had shown how critical the Gods had made him.

The Battle of the Books is one of the most eccentric documents in the whole History of our subject. The Battle of the Books. Directly, and on its face, it may be said to be of the first critical importance; because it shows how very little subject, intention, accuracy to fact, verisimilitude, and half-a-dozen other indispensables according to certain theories, have to do with the goodness of a book. The general characteristics of The Battle of the Books in all these named respects, and some of the unnamed ones, are deplorable. In a tedious and idle quarrel which, at least as it was actually debated, never need have been debated at all, Swift takes the side which, if not the intrinsically wrong one, is the wrong one as he takes it. To represent Bentley, or even Wotton, as enemies of the Ancients might seem preposterous, if it were not outdone by the preposterousness of selecting Temple as their champion. The details are often absurd—from that ranking of “Despréaux” side by side with Cowley as a Modern brigadier, which is probably a slip (perhaps for “Desportes”) of pen or press, to the spiteful injustices on Dryden. The idea of the piece was probably taken from Callières.^[591] Its composition, from the rigid “Ancient” point of view, is sadly lax; and the two most brilliant episodes—the “Sweetness and Light” quarrel of the Spider and the Bee, and the “machine” of the Goddess of Criticism—have little or nothing to do with the action. But yet it is—and one knows it is—a masterpiece; and it is pretty certain from it that in 451certain kinds of destructive criticism, and even in certain kinds of what may be called destructive-constructive, the author will be able to accomplish almost anything that he is likely to try.

Though the Tale of the Tub is less ostensibly bookish, it shows even greater purely critical power: for the power of the Battle is mainly that of a consummate craftsman, who can accomplish by sheer craftsmanship whatsoever his hand findeth to do. The Tale of a Tub.In the Tale the crusade against bad writing and bad writers, which Swift carried on more or less for the whole of his middle and later years, and in which he enlisted Addison and Pope, Arbuthnot and Gay, is all but formally proclaimed, and is most vigorously waged with or without proclamation. In the “Dedication to Somers” the sword is being something more than loosened in the sheath; it flashes out in “The Bookseller to the Reader”; it is doing sanguinary work in the great “Epistle to Prince Posterity;” and it has only momentary rests in the “Preface” and the “Induction”: while there is hardly a section of the main text in which the quarters of Grub Street are not beaten up, and the Conclusion is even as the preludes and the main body.

A shrewd judge could hardly fail to perceive, from these famous twin-books, that a new genius of thoroughly critical character had arisen: but such a judge might well have doubted how far its exercise could be anything but negative. Minor works. His doubts, as we have already hinted, were to be justified. Indirectly, indeed, not merely in the Tatler paper above referred to and elsewhere, but by that almost uncanny influence which he seems to have exerted in so many ways on men only less than himself, Swift had very much to do with the rescuing of Style, by the hands of Addison and the rest, from the vulgarisation which it was undergoing at the close of the seventeenth century, not merely in common writers, not merely in the hands of an eccentric like L’Estrange, but in those of scholars like Collier and Bentley. But even this was a task of destruction rather than of positive construction, and he was always most at home in such tasks. The Meditation on a Broomstick and the Tritical Essay, though every good reviewer should know them by heart, and will have but too many opportunities of using his knowledge, are delivered with the 452backward, not the forward, speech of the critic; the Proposal for correcting the English Tongue, which falls in with the Tatler paper, aims at a sort of stationary state of language and literature alike, at proscriptions and ostracisings; the Letter to a Young Clergyman and the Essay on Modern Education, though both touch on literature, are exceedingly general in their precepts; and though all persons with a true English appreciation of shameless puns and utter nonsense must delight in The Antiquity of the English Tongue, it cannot be called serious criticism. There is more in the Advice to a Young Poet: but even here Swift is rather “running humours” on his subject than discussing it in the grave and chaste manner.

We shall therefore hardly be wrong if, after excepting the literary directions of the universal satiric douche in the Tale of a Tub, and the useful but somewhat rudimentary warnings of the Tatler paper, we see the most characteristic critical work of Swift in Martinus Scriblerus and the Peri Bathous, especially in the latter, which, though it be principally attributed to Arbuthnot and Pope, is as surely Swiftian in suggestion as if the Dean had written and published it alone. Often as it has been imitated, and largely as its methods have been drawn upon, it has never been surpassed as an Art of General and Particular “Slating”: and the sections on the Figures, with the immortal receipt for making an epic poem (the full beauty of which is lost on those who do not know how appallingly close it is to the approved prescriptions of the best neo-classic critics), cannot be too highly praised. But, once more, the critic is here at hangman’s work only: he allows himself neither to admire nor to love.

These principles, put in various ways by writers of more or less genius for half a century, found what seemed to more than two generations (always with a few dissidents) something like consummate expression in certain well-known utterances of Pope. Pope. As expression these utterances may still receive a very high degree of admiration: as anything else it is difficult to believe that any turn of fashion, unless it brings with it oblivion for large districts of noble literature, can restore them to much authority. Pope, though better read than 453he seems in his poems, was by no means a learned man; and it is now pretty generally admitted that his intellect was acute rather than powerful. The obstinate superficiality—the reduction of everything, even the most recondite problems of philosophy, even the most far-ranging questions of erudition, to a jury of “common-sense” persons, decorated with a little of the fashion of the town—which had set in, found in him an exponent as competent to give it exquisite expression as he was indisposed, and probably incompetent, to deepen or extend its scope. He attained early to nearly his full powers, and it does not much matter whether the Essay on Criticism was written at the age of twenty or at that of twenty-two. He could have improved it a little in form, but would hardly have altered it at all in matter, if he had written it thirty years later. The Imitation of the Epistle of Horace to Augustus, which was actually written about that time, is, though superior as verse, almost inferior as criticism, and more “out” in fact. The two together give a sufficient view of Pope as he wished to be taken critically. The Letters. But to be perfectly fair we must add the critical utterances in his Letters,^[592] his Preface to Shakespeare, and (with caution of course) the remarks attributed to him by Spence. The Preface has received much praise; and has deserved some even from those who follow not Pope generally. It would be unfair to blame him for adopting the mixed “beauty and fault” system which had the patronage of great names in antiquity, and found hardly even questioners in his own time. And it is something that he recognises Shakespeare’s power over the passions, the individuality of his characters, his intuitive knowledge of the world and of nature. He is moderate and sensible on the relations of Shakespeare and Jonson; he has practically said all that is to be said, in an 454endless and tiresome controversy, by writing, The Shakespeare Preface. “To judge Shakespeare by Aristotle’s rules is like trying a man by the laws of one country who acted under those of another.” And for such utterances we may excuse, or at least pass over with little or no comment, the remarks that Shakespeare kept bad company, that he wrote to please the populace, that he resembles “an ancient majestic piece of Gothic architecture [so far, so good], where many of the details are childish, ill-placed, and unequal to its grandeur.” The littleness of this patchy, yea-nay criticism beside the great and everlasting appreciation of his master Dryden speaks for itself; it is only fair to remember that the very existence of Dryden’s for once really marmoreal inscription almost inevitably belittled and hampered Pope. He was obliged to be different; and internal as well as external influences made it certain that if he were different he would be less.

The Popiana of Spence^[593] add more to our idea of Pope’s critical faculty, or at least of its exercises; in fact, it is possible to take a much better estimate of Pope’s “literature” from the Anecdotes than from the Works. Spence’s Anecdotes. Although the Boswellian spirit was, fortunately enough for posterity, very strong in the eighteenth century, there was no particular reason why Spence should toady Pope—especially as he published nothing to obtain pence or popularity from the toadying. That rather remarkable collection, or re-collection, of Italian-Latin poetry of the Renaissance,^[594] of which not 455much notice has been taken by Pope’s biographers, would, of itself, show critical interest in a part, and no unnoteworthy part, of literature: and a few of the Spencean salvages bear directly upon this. He need not have been ashamed of his special liking for Politian’s Ambra: and he was right in thinking Bembo “stiff and unpoetical,” though hardly in joining Sadolet with him in this condemnation. We know perfectly well why he did not like Rabelais, for which Swift very properly scolded him: indeed, he tells us himself, twice over, that “there were so many things” in Master Francis, “in which he could not see any manner of meaning driven at,” that he could not read him with any patience. This is really more tale-telling than the constantly quoted passage about Walsh and correctness. For, after all, everybody aspires to be correct: only everybody has his own notions of what is correctness. It is not everybody—and, as we see, it was not the great Mr Pope—who could, or can, appreciate nonsense, and see how much more sensible than sense the best of it is. It would skill but little to go through his isolated judgments: but there are one or two which are eloquent.

Still, it is to the Essay and the Epistle that we must turn for his deliberate theory of criticism, announced in youth, indorsed and emphasised in age. The Essay on Criticism. And we meet at once with a difficulty. The possessor of such a theory ought, at least, to have something like a connected knowledge, at least a connected view, of literature as a whole, and to be able to square the two. All Pope seems to have done is to take the Arts of Horace, Vida, and Boileau, to adopt as many of their principles as he understood, and as would go into his sharp antithetic couplet, to drag their historical illustrations head and shoulders into his scheme without caring for the facts, and to fill in and embroider with criticisms, observations, and precepts, sometimes very shrewd, almost always perfectly expressed, but far too often arbitrary, conventional, and limited. He is most unfortunate of all in the historical part, where Boileau had been sufficiently unfortunate before him. The Frenchman’s observations on Villon and Ronsard had been ignorant enough, and forced enough: but Pope managed to go a little 456beyond them in the Essay, and a great distance further still in the Epistle. The history of the famous passage,

“We conquered France, but felt our captive’s charms,”^[595]

is like nothing on earth but the history-poetry of the despised monkish ages, in which Alexander has twelve peers, and Arthur, early in the sixth century, overruns Europe with a British force, and fights with a Roman Emperor named Lucius. And the sketch of European literature in the Essay, if it contains no single statement so glaringly absurd, is as much a “tissue of gaps” as the Irishman’s coat.

Attempts have been made (including some by persons deserving all respect, and thoroughly acquainted with the subject) to give Pope a high place, on the score of his charges to “follow nature.” Unfortunately this is mere translation of Boileau, of Vida, and of Horace, in the first place: and, still more unfortunately, the poet’s own arguments on his doctrine show that what he meant by “following nature,” and what we mean by it, are two quite different things. He, usually at least, means “stick to the usual, the ordinary, the commonplace.” Just so the legendary King of Siam, had he written an Art of Poetry, would have said “Follow nature, and do not talk about such unnatural things as ice and snow.”

Regarded merely as a manual of the art of Pope’s own poetry, without prejudice to any other, and as a satire on the faults of other kinds, without prejudice to the weaknesses of his own, the Essay is not merely an interesting document, but a really valuable one. Its cautions against desertion of nature in the directions of excess, of the unduly fantastic, are sound to this day: and its eulogies of ancient writers, though perhaps neither based on very extensive and accurate first-hand knowledge, nor specially appropriate to the matter in hand, contain much that is just in itself. One of the weakest parts, as might have been expected, is the treatment of rules, licences, and faults. The poet-critic practically confesses the otiosity of the whole system by admitting that a lucky licence is a rule, and 457that it is possible, as one of his own most famous and happiest lines says,

“To snatch a grace beyond the reach of art.”

And when he paraphrases Quintilian to the effect that you must criticise

“With the same spirit that the author writ,”

and judge the whole, not the parts, he again goes perilously near to jettison his whole system.

In the same way consistency is the last thing that can be claimed for his chapters, as they may be called, on conceit, on language, “numbers” (the most famous and the most ingenious passage of the Essay), extremes, “turns,” the Ancient and Modern quarrel, &c. The passage on Critics is among the best—for here sheer good sense (even in the temporary, much more in the universal, meaning) tells—and the historical sketch of them, though not too accurate, is vigorous.

The much later Epistle is far more desultory, and inevitably tinged by those personal feelings which many years of literary squabble had helped ill-health and natural disposition to arouse in Pope. The Epistle to Augustus. But its general critical attitude is not different. He is angry with the revival of old literature which Watson and Allan Ramsay in Scotland, Oldys and others in England, were beginning, hints sneers even at Milton and the “weeds on Avon’s bank,” is at least as hackneyed as he is neat in his individual criticisms on poets nearer his own day, and defends poetry and literature generally in a patronising and half-apologetic strain. In fact, what he has really at heart is to be politely rude to George II.; not to give any critical account of English literature.

But the Essay on Criticism is too important a thing not to require a little more notice here. Remarks on Pope as a critic, It is extremely desultory; but so is the Epistola ad Pisones, and it is by no means certain that Pope was not wise in falling back upon the Roman method, instead of emulating the appearance of system in the Art Poétique. This latter emphasises faults; Pope’s causerie veils promiscuousness in the 458elegant chit-chat of conversation. A bad critic is a more dangerous person than a bad poet; and true taste is as uncommon as true genius. Bad education is responsible for bad taste, and we must be very careful about our own. Nature is the guide; the “rules” are but methodised nature. We derive them, however, not from nature but from the ancient poets, whom we must study. Even in licences we must follow them. Bad critics are made by various causes, from ignorance and party spirit to personal animus. A good critic is candid, modest, well-bred, and sincere. The sort of history of criticism which concludes the piece makes it specially surprising that Johnson should have been so much kinder to Pope’s learning than he was to Dryden’s; but the author of the actual Essay on Criticism, and the author of the unhappily but projected History of it, were too thoroughly in agreement about poetry, and even about criticism itself, to make the latter quite an impartial judge of the former.

When we pass from generals to particulars Pope’s cleverness at least appears more than ever. The sharply separated, neatly flying, and neatly ringing couplets deliver “one, two” in the most fascinating cut-and-thrust style, not without a brilliant parry now and then to presumed (and never very formidable) objections. The man’s perfect skill in the execution of his own special style of poetry raises, and in this case not delusively, the expectation that he will know his theory as well as his practice. The “good sense,” the “reason,” are really and not merely nominally present. A great deal of what is said is quite undoubtedly true and very useful, not merely for reproof and correction in point of critical and poetical sin, but actually for instruction in critical and poetical righteousness.

But on further examination there is too often something wanting; nay, there is too often no real root of the matter present. The preliminary flourishes are well enough. And certainly no school will quarrel—though each school may take the privilege of understanding the words in its own way—with the doctrine “Follow Nature.” But

“One science only will one genius fit”

459is notoriously false to nature, and if intended as a hint to the critic, can only result in too common mistakes and injustices. So, too, when we pass from the glowing eulogy of Nature, and of her union with Art, to the Rules, there is a most deplorable gap. Those Rules, “discovered not devised,” are “nature methodised.” Very good. This means, if it means anything, a very true thing—that the Rules are extracted from observed works of genius. But how, a most fervent admirer of the Greeks may ask, did it happen that the Greeks discovered all these rules? How, especially, did it happen that they did so, when some kinds of literature itself were notoriously neither discovered nor devised? And when we get a little further, and are bidden to

“Know well each Ancient’s proper character,”

we may, or rather must, reply, “It is most necessary; but you will neglect the Moderns at your peril.”

In short, here as elsewhere, Pope’s dazzling elocution, winged with a distinct if narrow conception of his general purpose, flies right enough in the inane, but makes painfully little progress when it lights on the prosaic ground. The picture of “young Maro,” with a sort of ciphering book before him, “totting up” Homer, Nature, and the Stagirite, and finding them all exactly equivalent, is really far more ludicrous than those flights of metaphysical fancy at which critics of Pope’s school delight to gird; while the very climax of another kind of absurdity is reached by the accordance to the Ancients, not merely of the prerogative of laying down the rule always to be followed, but of the privilege of making the not-to-be-imitated exception. So again, fine as is the Alps passage, the famous doctrine of a “little learning” is an ingenious fallacy. It is not the little learning acquired, but the vast amount of ignorance left, that is dangerous. The admirable couplet,

“True Wit is nature to advantage drest;

What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed,”

though in itself the best thing in the whole poem, is unluckily placed, because this sensation of familiarity beneath novelty is 460constantly given by those very “conceits” which Pope is denouncing. On “Language” and “Numbers” he is too notoriously speaking to a particular brief. And as for his more general cautions throughout, they are excellent sense for the most part, but have very little more to do with criticism than with any other function of life. A banker or a fishmonger, an architect, artist, or plain man, will no doubt be the better for avoiding extremes, partisanship, singularity, fashion, mere jealousy (personal or other), ignorance, pedantry, vice. And if he turns critic he will find these avoidances still useful to him, but not more specially useful than in his former profession.

What then was the critical attitude which was expressed so brilliantly, and which gave Pope a prerogative influence over all the orthodox criticism of his own century in England and even elsewhere? and the critical attitude of his group. It can be sketched very fairly as being a sort of compromise between a supposed following of the ancients, and a real application, to literature in general and to poetry in particular, of the general taste and cast of thought of the time. The following of the Ancients—it has been often pointed out already—was, as the Articles of the Church of England have it, a “corrupt following”: those who said Aristotle meant now nobody more ancient than Boileau, now no one more ancient than Vida, scarcely ever any one more ancient than Horace. The classics as a whole were very little studied, at least by those who busied themselves most with modern literature; and it had entered into the heads of few that, after all, the standards of one literature might, or rather must, require very considerable alteration before they could apply to another.^[596] But Greek and Roman literature presented a body of poetry and of most other kinds, considerable, admittedly excellent, and mostly composed under the influence of distinct and identical critical principles. Very few men had a complete knowledge of even a single modern literature; hardly a man in France knew Old French as a whole, hardly a man in England, except mere antiquaries, knew Old English even as a part. There was 461probably not a man in Europe till Gray (and Gray was still young at Pope’s death) who had any wide reading at once in classical literature and in the mediæval and modern literatures of different countries. Accordingly the principles of ancient criticism, not even in their purity fully adequate to modern works, and usually presented, not in their purity but in garbled and bastardised form, were all that they had to stand by.

This classical, or pseudo-classical, doctrine was further affected, in the case of literature generally, by the ethos of the time, and, in the case of poetry, by the curious delusion as to hard and fast syllabic prosody which has been noticed in connection with Bysshe. Classicism, in any pure sense, was certainly not to blame for this, for everybody with the slightest tinge of education knew that the chief Latin metre admitted the substitution of trisyllabic for dissyllabic feet in every place but one, and most knew that this substitution was even more widely permitted by Greek in a standard metre, approaching the English still nearer. But it had, as we have seen, been a gradually growing delusion, for a hundred and fifty years, in almost every kind of non-dramatic poetry.

As for the general tendency, the lines of that are clear—though the arbitrary extension and stiffening of them remain a little incomprehensible. Nature was to be the test; but an artificialised Nature, arranged according to the fashion of a town-haunting society—a Nature which submitted herself to a system of convention and generalisation. In so far as there was any real general principle it was that you were to be like everybody else—that singularity, except in doing the usual thing best, was to be carefully avoided. Pope, being a man of genius, could not help transcending this general conception constantly by his execution, not seldom by his thought, and sometimes in his critical precepts. But it remains the conception of his time and of himself.

The writers whom we have been discussing, since we parted with Dennis, have all been considerable men of letters, who in more or less degree busied themselves with criticism. Philosophical and Professional Critics. We must now pass to those who, without exactly deserving the former description, undertook the subject 462either, as part of those “philosophical” inquiries which, however loosely understood, were so eagerly and usefully pursued by the eighteenth century, or as direct matter of professional duty. The first division supplies Lord Kames in Scotland and “Hermes” Harris in England. Whether we are right in reserving Shaftesbury, Hume, Adam Smith, &c., from it, so as to deal with them from the Æsthetic side in the next volume, may be matter of opinion.

To the second belong Trapp, Blair, and Campbell. Trapp. Trapp need not detain us very long; but as first occupant of the first literary chair in England, and so the author of a volume of Prælections respectable in themselves, and starting a line of similar work which, to the present day, has contributed admirable critical documents, he cannot be omitted. He was the author of one of the wittiest epigrams^[597] on record, but he did not allow himself much sparkle in his lectures.^[598] Perhaps, indeed, he was right not to do so.

Hugh Blair, half a century later than Trapp, in 1759, started, like him, the teaching of modern literature in his own country. Blair. He had the advantage, as far as securing a popular audience goes, of lecturing in English, and he was undoubtedly a man of talent. The Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres,^[599] which were delivered with great éclat for nearly a quarter of a century from the Chair of their subject, are very far, indeed, from being devoid of merit. They provide a very solid, if a somewhat mannered and artificial instruction, both by precept and example, in what may be called the “full-dress plain style” which was popular in the eighteenth century. They are 463as original as could be expected. The critical examination of Addison’s style, if somewhat meticulous, is mostly sound, and has, like Johnson’s criticisms of Dryden and Pope, the advantage of thorough sympathy, of freedom from the drawback—so common in such examinations—that author and critic are standing on different platforms, looking in different directions, speaking, one may almost say, in mutually incomprehensible tongues. The survey of Belles Lettres is, on its own scheme, ingenious and correct: there are everywhere evidences of love of Literature (as the lover understands her), of good education and reading, of sound sense. Blair is to be very particularly commended for accepting to the full the important truth that “Rhetoric” in modern times really means “Criticism”; and for doing all he can to destroy the notion, authorised too far by ancient critics, and encouraged by those of the Renaissance, that Tropes and Figures are not possibly useful classifications and names, but fill a real arsenal of weapons, a real cabinet of reagents, by the employment of which the practitioner can refute, or convince, or delight, as the case may be.

But with this, and with the further praise due to judicious borrowings from the ancients, the encomium must cease. The Lectures on Rhetoric. In Blair’s general critical view of literature the eighteenth-century blinkers are drawn as close as possible. From no writer, even in French, can more “awful examples” be extracted, not merely of perverse critical assumption, but of positive historical ignorance. Quite early in the second Lecture, and after some remarks (a little arbitrary, but not valueless) on delicacy and correctness in taste, we find, within a short distance of each other, the statements that “in the reign of Charles II. such writers as Suckling and Etheridge were held in esteem for dramatic composition,” and later, “If a man shall assert that Homer has no beauties whatever, that he holds him to be a dull and spiritless writer, and that he would as soon peruse any legend of old knight-errantry as the Iliad, then I exclaim that my antagonist is either void of all taste,” &c. Here, on the one hand, the lumping of Suckling and Etherege together, and the implied assumption that not merely Suckling, but Etherege, is a worthless dramatist, gives 464us one “light,” just as the similar implication that “an old legend of knight-errantry” is necessarily an example of dulness, spiritlessness, and absence of beauty, gives us another. That Blair lays down, even more peremptorily than Johnson, and as peremptorily as Bysshe, that the pause in an English line may fall after the 4th, 5th, 6th, or 7th syllable, and no other, is not surprising; and his observations on Shakespeare are too much in the usual “faults-saved-by-beauties” style to need quotation. But that he cites, with approval, a classification of the great literary periods of the world which excludes the Elizabethan Age altogether, is not to be omitted. It stamps the attitude.

These same qualities appear in the once famous but now little read Dissertation on Ossian.^[600] The Dissertation on Ossian. That, in the sense of the word on which least stress is laid in these volumes, this “Critical Dissertation” is absolutely uncritical does not much matter. Blair does not even attempt to examine the evidence for and against the genuineness of the work he is discussing. He does not himself know Gaelic; friends (like Hector M’Intyre) have told him that they heard Gaelic songs very like Ossian sung in their youth; there are said to be manuscripts; that is enough for him. Even when he cites and compares parallel passages—the ghost-passage and that from the book of Job, Fingal’s “I have no son” and Othello—which derive their whole beauty from exact coincidence with the Bible or Shakespeare, he will allow no kind of suspicion to cross his mind. But this we might let pass. It is in the manner in which he seeks to explain the “amazing degree of regularity and art,” which he amazingly ascribes to Macpherson’s redaction, the “rapid and animated style,” the “strong colouring of imagination,” the “glowing sensibility of heart,” that the most surprising thing appears. His citations are as copious as his praises of them are hard to indorse. But his critical argument rests almost (not quite) wholly on showing that Fingal and Temora are worked out quite properly on Aristotelian principles by way of central action and episode, and that there are 465constant parallels to Homer, the only poet whom he will allow to be Ossian’s superior. In short, he simply applies to Ossian Addison’s procedure with Paradise Lost. The critical piquancy of this is double. For we know that Ossian was powerful—almost incredibly powerful—all over Europe in a sense quite opposite to Blair’s; and we suspect, if we do not know, that Mr James Macpherson was quite clever enough purposely to give it something of the turn which Blair discovers.

The charge which may justly be brought against Blair—that he is both too exclusively and too purblindly “belletristic”—cannot be extended to Henry Home, Lord Kames. Kames. Johnson, whom Kames disliked violently, and who returned the dislike with rather good-natured if slightly contemptuous patronage, dismissed the Elements of Criticism, 1761,^[601] as “a pretty Essay, which deserves to be held in some estimation, though much of it is chimerical.”^[602] The sting of this lies, as usual, in the fact that it is substantially true, though by no means all the truth. The Elements of Criticism is a pretty book, and an estimable one, and, what is more, one of very considerable originality. Its subtlety and ingenuity are often beyond Johnson’s own reach; it shows a really wide knowledge of literature, modern as well as ancient; and it is surprisingly, though not uniformly, free from the special “classical” purblindness of which Johnson and Blair are opposed, but in their different ways equal, examples. Yet a very great deal of it is “chimerical,” and, what is worse, a very great deal more is, whether chimerical or not in itself, irrelevant. It presents a philosophical treatise, vaguely and tentatively æsthetic rather than critical, yoked in the loosest possible manner to a bundle of quasi-professorial exercises in Lower and Higher Rhetoric. The second part might not improperly be termed “Critical Illustrations of Rhetoric.” The first could only be properly entitled “Literary Illustrations of Morals.”

Of course this excellent Scots lawyer and ingenious 466“Scotch metaphysician” had strong precedents to urge for making a muddle of Moral Philosophy and Literary Criticism. The Elements of Criticism. It has been pointed out that Aristotle himself is not a little exposed to the same imputation. But Kames embroils matters to an extent never surpassed, except by those, to be found in every day, who are incapable of taking the literary point of view at all, and who simply treat literature as something expressing agreement or disagreement with their moral, political, religious, or other views. He seems himself to have had, at least once, a slight qualm. “A treatise of ethics is not my province: I carry my view no farther than to the elements of criticism, in order to show that the fine arts are a subject of reasoning as well as of taste.”^[603] If this was his rule he certainly gives himself the most liberal indulgence in applying it. His First Chapter is devoted to “Perceptions and Ideas in a Train”; the second (an immensely long one, containing a good third of the first volume) to “Emotions and Passions”; while the whole of the rest till the end of the seventeenth chapter is really occupied by the same class of subject. Kames excels in that constantly ingenious, and often acute, dissection of human nature which was the pride and pleasure of his century and his country, but which is a little apt to pay itself with clever generalisations as if they were veræ causæ. In one place we find a distribution of all the pleasures of the senses into pain of want, desire, and satisfaction. In another^[604] the philosopher solemnly informs us, “I love my daughter less after she is married, and my mother less after a second marriage; the marriage of my son or my father diminishes not my affection so remarkably.” An almost burlesque illustration of the procedure of the school is given in the dictum,^[605] “Where the course of nature is joined with Elevation the effect must be delightful; and hence the singular beauty of smoke ascending in a calm morning.” When one remembers this, and comes later^[606] to the admirable remark, “Thus, to 467account for an effect of which there is no doubt, any cause, however foolish, is made welcome,” it is impossible not to say “Thou sayest it”; as also in another case, where he lays it down that “Were corporeal pleasures dignified over and above [i.e., beside the natural propensity which incites us to them] with a place in a high class, they would infallibly disturb the balance of the mind by outweighing the social affections. This is a satisfactory final cause for refusing to these pleasures any degree of dignity.”^[607] I am tempted to quote Kames’s philosophy of the use of tobacco^[608] also, but the stuff and method of his first volume must be sufficiently intelligible already.

The second, much more to the purpose, is considerably less interesting. A very long chapter deals with Beauty of Language with respect to Sound, Signification, Resemblance between Sound and Signification, and Metre. It is abundantly stocked with well-chosen examples from a wide range of literature, and full of remarks, generally ingenious and sometimes both new and bold, as where at the outset Kames has the audacity to contradict Aristotle, by implication at least, and lay it down that “of all the fine arts, painting and sculpture only are in their nature imitative.”^[609] But it is not free from the influence of the idols of its time. Of such, in one kind, may be cited the attribution to Milton of “many careless lines”;^[610] for if there is one thing certain in the risky and speculative range of literary dogmatism, it is that Milton never wrote a “careless” line in his life. If his lines are ever bad (and perhaps they are sometimes), they are bad deliberately and of malice. In another and more serious kind may be ranged the predominating determination to confuse the sensual with the intellectual side of poetry. This, of course, is Kames’s root-idea; but that it is a root of evil may be shown sufficiently by the following passage in his discussion of the pause—in relation to which subject he is as wrong as nearly all his contemporaries. He is talking of a pause between adjective and substantive.^[611] What occurs to him is that “a quality cannot exist independent of a subject, nor are they separable even in imagination, because they make 468part of the same idea, and for that reason, with respect to melody as well as to sense, it must be disagreeable to bestow upon the adjective a sort of independent existence by interjecting a pause between it and its substantive.” His examples are no doubt vitiated by the obsession of the obligatory “middle” pause, which makes him imagine one between adjective and substantive in

“The rest, his many-coloured robe concealed,”

where the only real pause, poetic as well as grammatical, is at “rest.” But his principle is clear, and it is as clearly a wrong principle. It ignores the great fact glanced at above, that the pleasure of poetry is double—intellectual and sensual—and that the two parts are in a manner independent of each other. And in the second place, even on its own theory, it credits the mere intellect with too sluggish faculties. In the first line which Kames suggests as “harsh and unpleasant” for this reason,

“Of thousand bright inhabitants of air,”

the pause at “bright” is so slight a one that some might deny its existence. But if it be held necessary, can we refuse to the subtilitas intellectus the power of halting, for the second of a second, to conceive the joint idea of number and brightness, before it moves further to enrich this by the notion of “inhabitants of air”? The mere and literal Lockist may do so; but no other will. The Figures enjoy a space which, without being surprised at it, one grudges; and the Unities are handled rather oddly, while a digression of some fifty pages on Gardening and Architecture speaks for itself. The conclusion on the Standard of Taste is singularly inconclusive; and an interesting appendix on “terms defined and explained” presents the singularity that not, I think, one of the terms so dealt with has anything specially to do with literature or art at all.

Nevertheless, though it is easy to be smart upon Kames, and not very difficult to expose serious inadequacies and errors both in the general scheme and the particular execution, the Elements of Criticism is a book of very great interest and importance, and worthy of much more attention than it has for a long 469time past received. To begin with, his presentation, at the very outset of his book, of Criticism as “the most agreeable of all amusements”^[612] was one of those apparently new and pleasant shocks to the general which are, in reality, only the expression of an idea for some time germinating and maturing in the public mind. Even Addison, even Pope, while praising and preaching Criticism, had half-flouted and half-apologised for it. Swift, a great critic on his own day, had flouted it almost or altogether in others. The general idea of the critic had been at worst of a malignant, at best of a harmless, pedant. Kames presented him as something quite different,—as a man no doubt of learning, but also of position and of the world, “amusing,” as well as exercising himself, and bringing the fashionable philosophy to the support of his amusement.

But he did more than this. His appreciation of Shakespeare is, taking it together (and his references to the subject are numerous and important), the best of his age. His citations show a remarkable relish for the Shakespearian humour, and though he cannot clear his mind entirely from the “blemish-and-beauty” cant, which is ingrained in the Classical theory, and which, as we saw, infected even such a critic as Longinus, he is far freer from it than either Johnson or Blair. In his chapter on the Unities he comes very near to Hurd^[613] (to whom, as the Elements of Criticism preceded the Letters on Chivalry in time, he may have given a hint) in recognising the true Romantic Unity of Action which admits plurality so far as the different interests work together, or contrast advantageously. He has a most lucid and sensible exposure of the difference between the conditions of the Greek theatre and ours. In short, he would stand very high if he were not possessed with the pseudological mania which makes him calmly and gravely write^[614]—“Though a cube is more agreeable in itself than a parallelopipedon,^[615] yet a large parallelopipedon set on its smaller base is by its elevation more agreeable, and hence the beauty of a Gothic 470tower.” But this amabilis insania is in itself more amiable than insane. He wants to admit the Gothic tower, and that is the principal thing. Magdalen, and Merton, and Mechlin may well, in consideration of his slighting in their favour the more intrinsic charms of a cube, afford to let a smile flicker round their venerable skylines at his methodical insistence on justifying admiration of them by calling them large parallelopipeda set on their smaller ends. And the cube can console herself with his admission of her superior intrinsic loveliness.

The faults of Blair and of Kames are both, for the most part, absent, while much more than the merit of either, in method and closeness to the aim, is present, in the very remarkable Philosophy of Rhetoric^[616] which Dr George Campbell began, and, to some extent, composed, as early as 1750; though he did not finish and publish it till nearly thirty years later (1777). Campbell. It may indeed be admitted that this piecemeal composition is not without its effect on the book, which contains some digressions (especially one on Wit, Humour, and Ridicule, and another on the cause of the pleasure received from the exhibition of painful objects) more excrescent than properly episodic. It is, moreover, somewhat weighted by the author’s strictly professional and educational design, in retaining as much of the mere business part of the ancient Rhetoric as would or might be useful to future preachers, advocates, or members of Parliament. Campbell, too, is a less “elegant” writer than Blair; and his acuteness has a less vivacious play than that of Kames. But here concessions are exhausted; and the book, however much we may disagree with occasional expressions in it, remains the most important treatise on the New Rhetoric that the eighteenth century produced. Indeed, strange as it may seem, Whately’s, its principal formal successor in the nineteenth, is distinctly retrograde in comparison.

The New Rhetoric—the Art of Criticism—this is what Campbell really attempts. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. He is rather chary of acknowledging his own position, and, in fact, save in his title, seldom employs the term Rhetoric, no doubt partly from that unlucky contempt of scholastic appellations 471which shows itself in his well-known attack on Logic. But his definition of “Eloquence”—the term which he employs as a preferred synonym of Rhetoric itself—is very important, and practically novel. The word “Eloquence, in its greatest latitude, denotes that art or talent by which the discourse is adapted to its end.” Now this, though he modestly shelters it under Quintilian’s scientia bene dicendi and dicere secundum virtutem orationis, asserting also its exact correspondence with Cicero’s description of the best orator as he who dicendo animos delectat audientium et docet et permovet, is manifestly far more extensive than the latter of these, and much less vague than the former. In fact Rhetoric, new dubbed as Eloquence, becomes the Art of Literature, or in other words Criticism.

It has been allowed that this bold and admirable challenge of the whole province—for “discourse” is soon seen to include “writing”—is not always so well supported. After an interesting introduction (vindicating the challenge, and noting Kames more especially as one who, though in a different way, had made it before him), Campbell for a time, either because he is rather afraid of his own boldness, or to conciliate received opinions on the matter (or, it has been suggested, because the book was written at different times, and with perhaps slightly different ends), proceeds to discuss various matters which have very little to do with his general subject. Sometimes, as in the Chapter, before referred to, on “The Nature and Use of the Scholastic Art of Syllogising,” he wrecks himself in a galley which he had not the slightest need to enter. The longer discourse on Evidence which precedes this is, of course, fully justified on the old conception of Rhetoric, but digressory, or at least excursory, on his own. The above-mentioned sections on Ridicule, and on the æsthetic pleasure derivable from painful subjects, are excursions into the debatable kinds between literature and Ethics, though much less extravagant than those of Kames, and perhaps, as excursions, not absolutely to be barred or banned; while chapters vii.-x., which deal with the “Consideration of Hearers,” &c., &c., are once more Aristotelian relapses, pardonable if not strictly necessary. But not quite a third part of the whole treatise is occupied by this First Book of 472the three into which it is divided; and not a little of this third is, strictly or by a little allowance, to the point. The remaining two-thirds are to that point without exception or digression of any kind, so that the Aristotelian distribution is exactly reversed.

Notes in this chapter

Note 1 · An interesting monograph on our subject, before and after 1700, is Herr Paul Hamelius’s Die Kritik in der Engl. Literatur des 17 und 18 Jahr Note 2 · The excessively rare Parliament of Critics (London, 1702), a copy of which has been kindly lent me by Mr Gregory Smith, is more of what it c Note 3 · See Mr Swinburne’s William Blake, p. 130 note, for the sortes Bysshianæ of Blake and his wife.Note 4 · My copy is the Third Edition, “with large improvements,” London, 1708. Some put the first at 1702, not 1700. Before Bysshe, Joshua Poole, a Note 5 · Addison, Atterbury, Beaumont and Fletcher, Afra Behn, Blackmore, Tom Brown, Buckingham, Cleveland, Congreve, Cowley, Creech, Davenant (2), D Note 6 · London, 1718.Note 7 · The Lives and Characters of the English Dramatic Poets, &c., First begun by Mr Langbain, improved and continued down to this time by a Caref Note 8 · I hope the passing suspicion is not illiberal. But why should he call the Palmyrene “Zenobie” in English? Cela sent furieusement son Françai Note 9 · 2 vols., London, 1718.Note 10 · See, among others, Herr Hamelius, op. cit. Yet it is interesting to find that the passage of Dennis to which his panegyrist gives the single Note 11 · Had Dryden let his Cambridge admirer see the Heads? (v. supra, pp. 373, 397 notes.)Note 12 · Although Dennis’s fun is heavy enough, there are some interesting touches, as this: “Port [then a novelty in England, remember] is not so we Note 13 · It appeared in the very year of the Short View (1698). I have a reprint of it, issued many years later (1725), but long before Dennis’s deat Note 14 · This is from the Advancement and Reformation, which contains its author’s full definition of Poetry itself—not the worst of such definitions Note 15 · London, 1702.Note 16 · London, 1712.Note 17 · London, 1728.Note 18 · The Advancement and Reformation of Poetry, 1701; A Large Account of the Taste in Poetry, next year; and Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, 1704 Note 19 · Mr W. Basil Worsfold in his Principles of Criticism (London, 1897). I hope that nothing which, in a politely controversial tone, I may have Note 20 · The most convenient edition of Addison’s Works is that of Bohn, with Hurd’s editorial matter and a good deal more (London, 6 vols., 1862).Note 21 · It is fair to say that he never published this, and that, as Pope told Spence, he used himself to call it “a poor thing,” and admitted that Note 22 · “In vain he jests in his unpolished strain, And tries to make his readers laugh in vain.”Note 23 · “His moral lay so bare that it lost the effect” (Ess. on Po., iii. 420, ed. cit. sup.) Indeed it has been suggested that Addison’s debt to T Note 24 · He proposes to give an account of “all the Muse possessed” between Chaucer and Dryden; and, as a matter of fact, mentions nobody but Spenser Note 25 · In the last paragraph of Sp. 409. The whole paper has been occupied by thoughts on Taste and Criticism: it contains the excellent comparison Note 26 · Sp. 58-63.Note 27 · Sp. 39, 40, 42, 44, 45.Note 28 · These began in Sp. 267, and were the regular Saturday feature of the paper for many weeks. References to Milton outside of them will be foun Note 29 · Sp. 411, ed. cit., iii. 394.Note 30 · This phrase is originally Dryden’s (dedication to King Arthur, viii. 136, ed. cit.), who, however, has “kind” for “way”.Note 31 · Op. cit., pp. 93-107, and more largely pp. 55-93.Note 32 · Students of the Stagirite may be almost equally surprised to find Aristotle regarded as mainly, if not wholly, a critic of Form as opposed t Note 33 · See vol. i. p. 165 sq.Note 34 · It would be unfair to lay too much stress on his identification of Imagination and Fancy; but there is something tell-tale in it.Note 35 · See vol. i. p. 118 sq.Note 36 · Herr Hamelius, op. cit. sup., p. 103, and elsewhere, thinks much more highly of Steele than I do, and even makes him a “Romantic before Roma Note 37 · In his Preface to the Second Part of the Poems (1690).Note 38 · Of course he might, to some extent, have sheltered himself under Dryden’s own authority for all this.Note 39 · I have thought it useless to give references to particular editions of the better known writings of Swift and Pope, as they are so numerous.Note 40 · V. inf., p. 553 note.Note 41 · The most important of these is the sentence on Crashaw (with whom Pope has some points of sympathy), that he is wanting in “design, form, fa Note 42 · Spence (whose Anecdotes were printed partly by Malone, and completely by Singer in 1820, reprinted from the latter edition in 1858, and re-s Note 43 · Selecta Poemata Italorum qui Latine Scripserunt. Cura cujusdam Anonymi anno 1684 congesta, iterum in lucem data, una cum aliorum Italorum op Note 44 · Ep. to Aug., l. 263.Note 45 · Pope, v. supra, p. 454, actually admitted this as regards Aristotle and Shakespeare; yet the admission practically revokes most of the Essay Note 46 · Individual preference, in the case of the famous pair of epigrams on the books and the troop of horse sent by George I. to Cambridge and to Note 47 · Prælectiones Poeticæ, London, 3rd ed., 1736. The first of the first batch was printed as early as 1711, and an English translation (not by t Note 48 · The first ed. is that of Edinburgh, 1783: mine is that of London, 1823.Note 49 · I have it with The Poems of Ossian, 2 vols., London, 1796. Blair had taken Macpherson under his wing as early as 1760.Note 50 · It had reached its eighth edition in 1807, the date of my copy. Perhaps some may think that Kames, as being mainly an æsthetician, ought to Note 51 · Boswell, Globe ed., p. 132. He was elsewhere more, and less, kind.Note 52 · Vol. i. chap. iii., on “Beauty”; i. 195 ed. cit.Note 53 · i. 77.Note 54 · i. 26.Note 55 · i. 288, note. Kames had just before, in his chapter on “Motion and Force” (i. 250-255), referred complacently to his own indulgence in this Note 56 · i. 359.Note 57 · i. 405, 410, 411, 416, 417.Note 58 · ii. 3.Note 59 · ii. 163.Note 60 · ii. 129.Note 61 · i. 33.Note 62 · Hurd is reserved for the next volume.Note 63 · ii. 457.Note 64 · Kames has this spelling, which is indeed so universal that any other may seem pedantic. Yet it is needless to say that the word so spelt is Note 65 · I use the Tegg edition, London, 1850.