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ENGLISH LITERARY CRITICISM

C. E. VAUGHAN

Edited by C H. HERFORD, Litt. D

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY C. E. VAUGHAN

PREFACE.

In the following pages my aim has been to sketch the development of
criticism, and particularly of critical method, in England; and to
illustrate each phase of its growth by one or two samples taken from
the most typical writers. I have in no way attempted to make a full
collection of what might be thought the most striking pieces of
criticism to be found in our literature.

Owing to the great wealth of such writing produced during the last
sixty years, it is clearly impossible to give so complete a picture
of what has been done in this period as in others. I am obliged to
content myself with one specimen of one writer. But that is the writer
who, in the opinion of many, is the most remarkable of all English
critics. For the permission, so kindly granted, to include the Essay
on Sandro Botticelli I desire to offer my sincerest thanks to Messrs.
Macmillan and to the other representatives of the late Mr. Pater.

It may seem strange to close a volume of literary criticism with a
study on the work and temperament of a painter. I have been led to do
so for more than one reason. A noticeable tendency of modern criticism,
from the time of Burke and Lessing, has been to break down the barrier
between poetry and the kindred arts; and it is perhaps well that this
tendency should find expression in the following selection. But a
further reason is that Mr. Pater was never so much himself, was never
so entirely master of his craft, as when interpreting the secrets of
form and colour. Most of all was this the case when he had chosen for
his theme one who, like Botticelli, "is before all things a poetical
painter".

C. E. VAUGHAN.

CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY--

I. An Apology for Poetry

JOHN DRYDEN--

II. Preface to the Fables

SAMUEL JOHNSON--

III. On the Metaphysical Poets

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE--

IV. On Poetic Genius and Poetic Diction

WILLIAM HAZLITT--

V. On Poetry in General

CHARLES LAMB--

VI. On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century VII. On Webster's
_Duchess of Malfi_ VIII. On Ford's _Broken Heart_

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY--

IX. A Defence of Poetry

THOMAS CARLYLE--

X. Goethe

WALTER PATER--

XI. Sandro Botticelli

INTRODUCTION.

In England, as elsewhere, criticism was a late birth of the literary
spirit. English poets had sung and literary prose been written for
centuries before it struck men to ask themselves, What is the secret
of the power that these things have on our mind, and by what principles
are they to be judged? And it could hardly have been otherwise.
Criticism is a self-conscious art, and could not have arisen in an age
of intellectual childhood. It is a derivative art, and could scarcely
have come into being without a large body of literature to suggest
canons of judgment, and to furnish instances of their application.

The age of Chaucer might have been expected to bring with it a new
departure. It was an age of self-scrutiny and of bold experiment. A
new world of thought and imagination had dawned upon it; and a new
literature, that of Italy, was spread before it. Yet who shall say
that the facts answer to these expectations? In the writings of Chaucer
himself a keen eye, it is true, may discern the faint beginnings of
the critical spirit. No poet has written with more nicely calculated
art; none has passed a cooler judgment upon the popular taste of his
generation. We know that Chaucer despised the "false gallop" of
chivalrous verse; we know that he had small respect for the marvels
of Arthurian romance. And his admiration is at least as frank as his
contempt. What poet has felt and avowed a deeper reverence for the
great Latins? What poet has been so alert to recognize the
master-spirits of his own time and his father's? De Meung and Granson
among the French--Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio of the Italians--each
comes in for his share of praise from Chaucer, or of the princely
borrowings which are still more eloquent than praise.

Yet, for all this, Chaucer is far indeed from founding the art of
criticism. His business was to create, and not to criticise. And, had
he set himself to do so, there is no warrant that his success would
have been great. In many ways he was still in bondage to the mediaval,
and wholly uncritical, tradition. One classic, we may almost say, was
as good to him as another. He seems to have placed Ovid on a line with
Virgil; and the company in his House of Fame is undeniably mixed. His
judgments have the healthy instinct of the consummate artist. They do
not show, as those of his master, Petrarch, unquestionably do, the
discrimination and the tact of the born critic.

For this, or for any approach to it, English literature had to wait
for yet two centuries more. In the strict sense, criticism did not
begin till the age of Elizabeth; and, like much else in our literature,
it was largely due to the passion for classical study, so strongly
marked in the poets and dramatists of Shakespeare's youth, and
inaugurated by Surrey and others in the previous generation. These
conditions are in themselves significant. They serve to explain much
both of the strength and the weakness of criticism, as it has grown
up on English soil. From the Elizabethans to Milton, from Milton to
Johnson, English criticism was dominated by constant reference to
classical models. In the latter half of this period the influence of
these models, on the whole, was harmful. It acted as a curb rather
than as a spur to the imagination of poets; it tended to cripple rather
than give energy to the judgment of critics. But in earlier days it
was not so. For nearly a century the influence of classical masterpieces
was altogether for good. It was not the regularity but the richness,
not the self-restraint but the freedom, of the ancients that came home
to poets such as Marlowe, or even to critics such as Meres. And if
adventurous spirits, like Spenser and Sidney, were for a time misled
into the vain attempt to graft exotic forms upon the homely growths
of native poetry, they soon saw their mistake and revolted in silence
against the ridiculous pedant who preferred the limping hexameters of
the _Arcadia_ to Sidney's sonnets, and the spavined iambics of Spenser
to the _Faerie Queene_.

In the main, the worship of the classics seems to have counted at this
time rather for freedom than restraint. And it is well that it was so.
Yet restraint too was necessary; and, like freedom, it was found--
though in less ample measure--through devotion to the classics. There
can be little doubt that, consciously or no, the Elizabethans, with
their quick eye for beauty of every kind, were swayed, as men in all
ages have been swayed, by the finely chiselled forms of classical art.
The besetting sin of their imagination was the tendency to run riot;
and it may well be that, save for the restraining influence of ancient
poetry, they would have sinned in this matter still more boldly than
they did. Yet the chastening power of classical models may be easily
overrated. And we cannot but notice that it was precisely where the
classical influence was strongest that the force of imagination was
the least under control. Jonson apart, there were no more ardent
disciples of the ancients than Marlowe and Chapman. And no poets of
that age are so open to the charge of extravagance as they. It is
with Milton that the chastening influence of the ancients first makes
itself definitely felt. But Milton was no less alive to the fervour
than to the self-mastery of his classical models. And it was not till
the Restoration that "correctness" was recognized as the highest, if
not the only, quality of the ancients, or accepted as the one worthy
object of poetic effort. For more than a century correctness remained
the idol both of poetry and of criticism in England; and nothing less
than the furious onslaught of the Lyrical Ballads was needed to
overthrow it. Then the floodgates were opened. A new era both of poetic
and critical energy had dawned.

Thus the history of English criticism, like that of English literature,
divides itself roughly into three periods. The first is the period of
the Elizabethans and of Milton; the second is from the Restoration to
the French Revolution; the third from the Revolution to the present
day. The typical critic of the first period is Sidney; Dryden opens
and Johnson closes the second; the third, a period of far more varied
tendencies than either of the others, is perhaps most fitly represented
by Lamb, Hazlitt, and Carlyle. It will be the aim of the following
pages to sketch the broader outlines of the course that critical inquiry
has taken in each.

I. The first thing that strikes us in the early attempts of criticism
is that its problems are to a large extent remote from those which
have engrossed critics of more recent times. There is little attempt
to appraise accurately the worth of individual authors; still less,
to find out the secret of their power, or to lay bare the hidden lines
of thought on which their imagination had set itself to work. The first
aim both of Puttenham and of Webbe, the pioneers of Elizabethan
criticism, was either to classify writers according to the subjects
they treated and the literary form that each had made his own, or to
analyse the metre and other more technical elements of their poetry.

But this, after all, was the natural course in the infancy of the
study. All science begins with classification; and all classification
with the external and the obvious. The Greek critics could take no
step forward until they had classified all poems as either lyric, epic,
or dramatic. And how necessary that division was may be seen from the
length at which Plato discusses the nature of the distinction in the
second book of the Republic. Even Aristotle, in this as in other things
the 'master of those who know', devotes no inconsiderable space of the
Poetics to technical matters such as the analysis of vocal sounds, and
the aptness of different metres to different forms of poetic thought.

There is another matter in which the methods of Elizabethan critics
run side by side with those of the early Greeks. In Plato and Aristotle
we are not seldom startled by the sudden transition from questions of
form to the deepest problems suggested by imaginative art. The same
is true of the Elizabethan critics. It is doubtless true that the
latter give a proportionally larger space to the more technical sides
of the subject than their Greek forerunners. They could not reasonably
be expected to write with the width of view that all the world has
admired in Aristotle and Plato. Moreover, they were from the first
confronted with a practical difficulty from which the Greek critics
were so fortunate as to be free. Was rhyme a "brutish" form of verse?
and, if so, was its place to be taken by the alliterative rhythm, so
dear to the older poets, or by an importation of classical metres,
such as was attempted by Sidney and Spenser, and enforced by the
unwearied lectures of Harvey and of Webbe? This, however technical,
was a fundamental question; and, until it was settled, there was but
little use in debating the weightier matters of the law.

The discussion, which might have raged for ever among the critics, was
happily cut short by the healthy instinct of the poets. Against
alliteration the question had already been given by default. Revived,
after long disuse, by Langland and other poets of the West Midlands
in the fourteenth century, it had soon again been swept out of fashion
by the irresistible charm of the genius of Chaucer. The _Tale of
Gamelyn_, dating apparently from the first quarter of the fifteenth
century, is probably the last poem of note in which the once universal
metre is even partially employed. And what could prove more clearly
that the old metrical form was dead? The rough rhythm of early English
poetry, it is true, is kept; but alliteration is dropped, and its place
is taken by rhyme.

Nor were the efforts to impose classical measures on English poetry
more blest in their results. The very men on whom the literary
Romanizers had fixed their hopes were the first to abandon the
enterprise in despair. If any genius was equal to the task of
naturalizing hexameters in a language where strict quantity is unknown,
it was the genius of Spenser. But Spenser soon ranged himself heart
and soul with the champions of rhyme; his very name has passed down
to us as a synonym for the most elaborate of all rhyming stanzas that
have taken root in our verse. For the moment, rhyme had fairly driven
all rivals from the field. Over the lyric its sway was undisputed. In
narrative poetry, where its fitness was far more disputable, it
maintained its hold till the closing years of Milton. In the drama
itself, where its triumph would have been fatal, it disputed the ground
inch by inch against the magnificent instrument devised by Surrey and
perfected by Marlowe.

It was during the ten years preceding the publication of Webbe's
_Discourse_ (1586) that this controversy seems to have been hottest.
From the first, perhaps, it bulked more largely with the critics than
with the poets themselves. Certainly it allowed both poets and critics
sufficient leisure for the far more important controversy which has
left an enduring monument in Sidney's _Apologie for Poetrie_. [Footnote:
The most important pieces of Elizabethan criticism are:--

Gosson's _School of Abuse_, 1579.
Lodge's _Defence of Poetry, Musick, and Stage Plays_, 1579(?).
Sidney's _Apologie for Poetrie_, 1580(?).
Webbe's _Discourse of English Poetrie_, 1586.
Puttenham's _Arte of English Poesie_, 1589.
Harington's _Apologie of Poetrie_, 1591.
Meres' _Palladis Tamia_, 1598.
Campion's _Observations in the Arte of English Poesie_, 1602.
Daniel's _Defence of Ryme_, 1603.]

The historical bearing of Sidney's treatise has been too commonly
overlooked. It forms, in truth, one move in the long struggle which
ended only with the restoration of Charles II.; or, to speak more
accurately, which has lasted, in a milder form, to the present day.
In its immediate object it was a reply to the Puritan assaults upon
the theatre; in its ultimate scope, a defence of imaginative art against
the suspicions with which men of high but narrow purpose have always,
consciously or unconsciously, tended to regard it. It is a noble plea
for liberty, directed no less against the unwilling scruples of
idealists, such as Plato or Rousseau, than against the ruthless bigotry
of practical moralists and religious partisans.

From the first dawn of the Elizabethan drama, the stricter Protestants
had declared war upon the stage. Intrenched within the city they were
at once able to drive the theatres beyond the walls (1575); just as
seventy years later, when it had seized the reins of central government,
the same party, embittered by a thousand insults and brutalities,
hastened to close the theatres altogether. It would be an evident
mistake to suppose that this was merely a municipal prejudice, or to
forget that the city council was backed by a large body of serious
opinion throughout the country. A proof of this, if proof were needed,
is to be found in the circumstances that gave rise to the _Apologie_
of Sidney.

The attack on the stage had been opened by the corporation and the
clergy. It was soon joined by the men of letters. And the essay of
Sidney was an answer neither to a town councillor, nor to a preacher,
but to a former dramatist and actor. This was Stephen Gosson, author
of the _School of Abuse_. The style of Gosson's pamphlet is nothing
if not literary. It is full of the glittering conceits and the fluent
rhetoric which the ready talent of Lyly had just brought into currency.
It is euphuism of the purest water, with all the merits and all the
drawbacks of the euphuistic manner. For that very reason the blow was
felt the more keenly. It was violently resented as treason by the
playwrights and journalists who still professed to reckon Gosson among
their ranks. [Footnote: Lodge writes, "I should blush from a Player
to become an enviouse Preacher".--_Ancient Critical Essays_, ed.
Haslewood, ii. 7.]

A war of pamphlets followed, conducted with the usual fury of literary
men. Gosson on the one side, Lodge, the dramatist, upon the other,
exchanged compliments with an energy which showed that one at least
of them had not in vain graduated in "the school of abuse". "Raw
devises", "hudder mudder", "guts and garbage", such are the phrases
hurled by Gosson at the arguments and style of his opponents; "bawdy
charms", "the very butchery of Christian souls", are samples of the
names fastened by him upon the cause which they defended. [Footnote:
Lodge, in his _Defence of Poetry, Musick, and Stage Plays_ (1579 or
1580), is hardly less scurrilous. "There came into my hand lately a
little (would God a wittye) pamphelet.... Being by me advisedly wayed,
I find it the oftscome of imperfections, the writer fuller of words
than judgement, the matter certainely as ridiculus as serius."--In
_Ancient Critical Essays_, ii. 5.]

From this war of words Sidney turned loftily aside. Pointedly challenged
at the outset--for the first and second pamphlets of Gosson had, without
permission, been dedicated to "the right noble gentleman, Maister
Philip Sidney"--he seldom alludes to the arguments, and never once
mentions the name of Gosson. He wrote to satisfy his own mind, and not
to win glory in the world of letters. And thus his _Apologie_, though
it seems to have been composed while the controversy was still fresh
in men's memory, was not published until nearly ten years after his
death (1595). It was not written for controversy, but for truth. From
the first page it rises into the atmosphere of calm, in which alone
great questions can be profitably discussed.

The _Apologie_ of Sidney is, in truth, what would now be called a
Philosophy of Poetry. It is philosophy taken from the side of the
moralist; for that was the side to which the disputants had confined
themselves, and in which--altogether apart from the example of
others--the interest of Sidney, as man of action, inevitably lay. It
is philosophy as conceived by the mind of a poet. But, none the less,
it pierces to the eternal problems which underlie the workings of all
creative art, and presents them with a force, for the like of which
we must go back to Plato and Aristotle, or look forward to the
philosophers and inspired critics of a time nearer our own. It recalls
the _Phadrus_ and the _Ion_; it anticipates the utterance of a still
more kindred spirit, the _Defence of Poetry_ by Shelley.

Philosopher as he was, Sidney arranges his thoughts in the loose order
of the poet or the orator. It may be well, therefore, to give a brief
sketch of his argument; and to do so without much regard to the
arrangement of the _Apologie_ itself.

The main argument of the _Apologie_ may indeed be called a commentary
on the saying of Aristotle, cited by Sidney himself, that "Poetry is
more philosophical and more studiously serious than History"--that is,
as Sidney interprets it, than the scientific fact of any kind; or
again, on that yet more pregnant saying of Shelley, that "poets are
the unacknowledged legislators of the world". Gosson had denounced
poetry as "the vizard of vanity, wantonness, and folly"; or, in Sidney's
paraphrase, as "the mother of lies and the nurse of abuse". Sidney
replies by urging that of all arts poetry is the most true and the
most necessary to men.

All learning, he pleads, and all culture begin with poetry. Philosophy,
religion, and history herself, speak through the lips of poetry. There
is indeed a sense in which poetry stands on higher ground than any
science. There is no science, not even metaphysics, the queen of all
sciences, that does not "build upon nature", and that is not, so far,
limited by the facts of nature. The poet alone is "not tied to any
such subjection"; he alone "freely ranges within the zodiac of his own
wit".

This, no doubt, is dangerous ground, and it is enforced by still more
dangerous illustrations. But Sidney at once guards himself by insisting,
as Plato had done before him, that the poet too is bound by laws which
he finds but does not make; they are, however, laws not of fact but
of thought, the laws of the idea--that is, of the inmost truth of
things, and of God. Hence it is that the works of the poet seem to
come from God, rather than from man. They stand rather on a level with
nature, the material of all sciences, than with the sciences themselves,
which are nothing more than man's interpretation of nature. In some
sense, indeed, they are above nature; they stand midway between nature
and him who created nature. They are a first nature, "beyond and over
the works of that second nature". For they are the self-revelation of
that which is the noblest work of God, and which in them finds utterance
at its best and brightest.

Thus, so far from being the "mother of lies", poetry is the highest
form of truth. Avowedly so, in what men have always recognized to be
the noblest poetry, the psalms and parables and other writings that
"do imitate the inconceivable excellences of God". To a less degree,
but still avowedly, in that poetry whose theme is philosophy or history.
And so essentially, however men may overlook it, in that poetry which,
professedly dealing with human life as we know it, does not content
itself with reproducing the character of this man or that, but "reined
only with learned discretion, ranges into the divine consideration of
what may be and should be"--of the universal and complete rather than
the individual and imperfect.

But, if truth be the essence of the poet's work, "the right describing
note to know a poet by", it would seem that the outward form of it,
the metre and the ornament, are of little moment. "There have been
many most excellent poets that never versified." And verse is nothing
more than a means, and not the only means, of securing a "fitting
raiment" for their matter and suiting their manner "according to the
dignity of their subject". In this suggestion--that harmonious prose
may, for certain forms of poetic thought, be hardly less suitable than
verse--Sidney is at one with Shelley. And neither critic must be taken
to disparage verse, or to mean more than that the matter, the
conception, is the soul of poetry, and that the form is only of moment
so far as it aids--as undoubtedly it does aid--to "reveal the soul
within". It is rather as a witness to the whole scope of their argument
than as a particular doctrine, to be left or taken, that the suggestion
is most profitably regarded.

Having settled the speculative base of poetry, Sidney turns to a yet
more cherished theme, its influence upon character and action. The
"highest end" of all knowledge, he urges, is "the knowledge of a man's
self, with the end of well doing and not of well knowing only". Now
by no artist is this end served so perfectly as by the poet. His only
serious rivals are the moral philosopher and the historian. But neither
of these flies so straight to his mark as the poet. The one gives
precepts that fire no heart to action; the other gives examples without
the precepts that should interpret and control them. The one lives in
the world of ideas, the other in the world of hard and literal fact.
Neither, therefore, has power to bridge the gulf that parts thought
from action; neither can hope to take hold of beings in whose life,
by its very nature, thought and action are indissolubly interwoven.
"Now doth the peerless poet perform both. For whatsoever the philosopher
saith should be done, he giveth a perfect picture of it in some one,
by whom he presupposeth it was done. So as he coupleth the general
notion with the particular example .... Therein of all sciences is our
poet the monarch."

Once more we feel that Sidney is treading upon dangerous ground. But
once more he saves himself by giving a wider definition both to thought
and action, both to "well knowing and to well doing", than is common
with moralists. By the former most moralists are apt to understand the
bare "precept", thought as crystallized in its immediate bearing upon
action. By the latter they commonly mean the passive rather than the
active virtues, temperance and self-restraint rather than energy and
resolve. From both these limitations Sidney, on the whole, is nobly
free.

To him the "delight which is all the good fellow poet seemeth to
promise", "the words set in delightful proportion and prepared for the
well enchanting skill of music", "the tale which holdeth children from
play and old men from the chimney corner"--all these, its indefinable
and purely artistic elements, are an inseparable part of the "wisdom"
which poetry has to offer. In other words, it is the frame of mind
produced by poetry, the "thought hardly to be packed into the narrow
act", no less than the prompting to this action or to that, which
Sidney values in the work of the poet. And if this be true, none but
the most fanatical champion of "art for art's sake" will dispute the
justice of his demands on poetry. None but such will deny that, whether
by attuning the mind to beauty and nobleness, or by means yet more
direct and obvious, art must have some bearing upon the life of man
and on the habitual temper of his soul. No doubt, we might have wished
that, in widening the scope of poetry as a moral influence, Sidney had
been yet more explicit than in fact he is. We cannot but regret that,
however unjustly, he should have laid himself open to the charge of
desiring to turn poetry into sermons. But it is bare justice to point
out that such a charge cannot fairly be brought against him; or that
it can only be brought with such qualifications as rob it of its sting.

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