Volume 3 / Book 9 — CHAPTER III. ENGLISH CRITICISM—1860-1900. (continued 2)
Reading edition
Tertium Quid.
The literary part of The Power of Sound is, however, if not accidental, incidental mainly: not a few of the papers in the second volume of Tertium Quid[1002] deal with literature pure and simple. They are to some extent injured by the fact that many, if not most of them, are merely strokes, or parries, or ripostes, in particular duels or mêlées on dependences of the moment. And, as I have pointed out in reference to certain famous altercations of the past, these critical squabbles seem to me almost invariably to darken counsel—first, by leading the disputants away from the true points, and secondly, by inducing them to mix in their pleadings all sorts of flimsy, ephemeral, and worthless matter. Not the point, but what Jones or Brown has said about the point, becomes the object of the writer’s attention; he wants to score off Brown or Jones, not to score for the truth. So when Mr Gurney contended with the late Mr Hueffer—another literary-musical critic, who did not, as Mr Gurney did, escape the dangers of the double employ—when he contributed not so much a tertium as a quartum quid to the triangular duel of Mr Arnold, Mr Austin, Mr Swinburne about Byron—he did not always say what is still worth reading. And he makes one or two odd blunders, such as that the French are blind to Wordsworth, whereas Wordsworth’s influence on Sainte-Beuve, to name nobody else,[1003] was very great. But he is always sensible,[1004] and he always has that double soundness on the passionate side of poetry and on the peculiar appeal of its form, which is so rare and so distinctive of the good critic.
These qualities should, of course, appear in his essay on the “Appreciation of Poetry”;[1005] and they do. It is, however, perhaps well to note that, while quite sound on the point that there is a right as well as a wrong comparison, he, like 561others, hardly escapes the further danger of “confusing the confusion”—of taking what is really the right comparison for what is really the wrong. The comparison which disapproves one thing because it is unlike another is wrong, not the comparison which is used to bring out a fault, though the unlikeness is not assigned as the reason of the fault at all. But I am here slipping from history to doctrine on this particular point. I think Mr Gurney, right in the main, might have been still righter: but in general I am sure that he had admirable critical qualities, and I only wish he had chosen, or had been forced, to use them more fully and frequently.[1006]
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