Volume 3 / Book 8 — CHAPTER I. WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE: THEIR COMPANIONS AND ADVERSARIES. (continued 3)
Reading edition
His central weakness,
Something, it has been said, will inevitably emerge from these utterances on a tolerably intelligent consideration. Hallam has abundant erudition, much judicial quality, a shrewdness which generally guides him more or less right in points of fact; sense; fairness; freedom from caprice—even (except as regards the Middle Ages, and especially mediæval Latin and its ancestors back to the late Silver Age) a certain power of regarding literature impartially. But he has, as is so often done (he alludes to the fact himself somewhere), spoken his own doom in words which he applies (with remarkable injustice as it happens) to Fontenelle. He has 298“cool good sense, and an incapacity, by natural privation, of feeling the highest excellence in works of taste.”
and the value left by it.
In short, “The Act of God”: and for such acts it is as unreasonable as it is indecent to blame their victims. But at the same time we may carry our forbearance to natural privations too far by accepting blind men as guides in precipitous countries, or using as a bloodhound a dog who has no scent. And therefore it is impossible to assign to Hallam a high place as a critic. He may be—he is—useful even in this respect as a check and a reminder of the views which once were taken by men of wide information, excellent discipline, literary disposition, and (where it was not seared or paralysed) positive taste; but he will not soon recover any other value. Even thus he is to a critic that always critically estimable thing a point de repère, and in the kindred but not identical function of literary historian, the praise which was given to him at the opening of this notice may be maintained in spite of, and not inconsistently with, anything that has been said meanwhile.[564]
Nay, more, Specialism has made such inroads upon us—has bondaged the land to such hordes of robber-barons—that we may not soon expect again, and may even regard with a tender desiderium, the width, the justice, the far-reaching and self-sufficing survey and sovereignty of Hallam.
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