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Once again. As Dryden was among the earliest to give the comparative
method its due place in English criticism, so he was the first to make
systematic use of the historical method. Daniel, indeed, in a remarkable
essay belonging to the early years of the century, had employed that
method in a vague and partial manner. [Footnote: _A Defence of Ryme_
(1603). It was written in answer to a pamphlet by Campion (1602), of
which the second chapter "declares the unaptness of Rime in
Poesie".--Ancient Critical Essays, ii. t64, &c.] He had defended rhyme
on the score of its popularity with all ages and all nations. Celts,
Slavs, and Huns--Parthians and Medes and Elamites--are all pressed
into the service. [Footnote: "The Turks, Slavonians, Arabians,
Muscovites, Polacks, Hungarians ... use no other harmony of words. The
Irish, Britons, Scots, Danes, Saxons, English, and all the inhabiters
of this island either have hither brought, or here found the same in
use."--Ib. p. 198.] That is, perhaps, the first instance in which
English criticism can be said to have attempted tracing a literary
form through the various stages of its growth. But Daniel wrote without
system and without accuracy. It was reserved for Dryden--avowedly
following in the steps of the French critic Dacier--to introduce the
order and the fulness of knowledge--in Dryden's case, it must be
admitted, a knowledge at second hand--which are indispensable to a
fruitful use of the historical method. In this sense, too--as in his
use of the comparative method, as in the singular grace and aptness
of his style--Dryden was a pioneer in the field of English criticism.
III. Over the century that parts Dryden from Johnson it is not well
to linger. During that time criticism must be said, on the whole, to
have gone back rather than to have advanced. With some reservations
to be noticed later, the critics of the eighteenth century are a
depressing study. Their conception of the art they professed was barren;
their judgments of men and things were lamentably narrow. The more
valuable elements traceable in the work of Dryden--the comparative and
the historical treatment--disappear or fall into the background. We
are left with little but the futile exaltation of one poet at the
expense of his rivals, or the still more futile insistence upon faults,
shortcomings, and absurdities. The _Dunciad_, the most marked critical
work of the period, may be defended on the ground that it _is_ the
Dunciad; a war waged by genius upon the fool, the pedant, and the
fribble. But, none the less, it had a disastrous influence upon English
criticism and English taste. It gave sanction to the habit of
indiscriminate abuse; it encouraged the purely personal treatment of
critical discussions. Its effects may be traced on writers even of
such force as Smollett; of such genius and natural kindliness as
Goldsmith. But it was on Johnson that Pope's influence made itself
most keenly felt. And _The Lives of the Poets_, though not written
till the movement that gave it birth had spent its force, is the most
complete and the most typical record of the tendencies that shaped
English literature and gave the law to English taste from the
Restoration to the French Revolution: a notable instance of the fact
so often observed, and by some raised to the dignity of a general law,
that both in philosophy and in art, the work of the critic does not
commonly begin till the creative impulse of a given period is exhausted.
What, then, was Johnson's method? and what its practical application?
The method is nothing if not magisterial. It takes for granted certain
fixed laws--whether the laws formulated by Aristotle, or by Horace,
or the French critics, is for the moment beside the question--and
passes sentence on every work of art according as it conforms to the
critical decalogue or transgresses it. The fault of this method is
not, as is sometimes supposed, that it assumes principles in a subject
where none are to be sought; but that its principles are built on a
miserably narrow and perverted basis. That there are principles of
criticism, that the artist's search for beauty must be guided by some
idea, is obvious enough. It can be questioned only by those who are
prepared to deny the very possibility of criticism; who would reduce
the task both of critic and of artist to a mere record of individual
impressions. It need hardly be said that the very men who are most
ready to profess such a doctrine with their lips, persistently, and
rightly, give the lie to it in their deeds. No creative work, no
critical judgment, either is or can be put forward as a mere impression;
it is the impression of a trained mind--that is, of a mind which,
instinctively or as a conscious process, is guided by principles or
ideas.
So far, then, as he may be held to have borne witness to the need of
ideas, Johnson was clearly in the right. It was when he came to ask,
What is the nature of those ideas, and how does the artist or the
critic arrive at them? that he began to go astray. Throughout he assumes
that the principles of art--and that, not only in their general bearing
(proportion, harmony, and the like), but in their minuter details-are
fixed and invariable. To him they form a kind of case-law, which is
to be extracted by the learned from the works of a certain number of
"correct writers", ancient and modern; and which, once established,
is binding for all time both on the critic and on those he summons to
his bar. In effect, this was to declare that beauty can be conceived
in no other way than as it presented itself, say, to Virgil or to Pope.
It was to lay the dead hand of the past upon the present and the future.
More than this. The models that lent themselves to be models, after
the kind desired by Johnson, were inevitably just those it was most
cramping and least inspiring to follow. They were the men who themselves
wrote, to some degree, by rule; in whom "correctness" was stronger
than inspiration; who, however admirable in their own achievement,
were lacking in the nobler and subtler qualities of the poet. They
were not the Greeks; not even, at first hand, the Latins; though the
names both of Greek and Latin were often on Johnson's lips. They were
rather the Latins as filtered through the English poets of the preceding
century; the Latins in so far as they had appealed to the writers of
the "Augustan age", but no further; the Latins, as masters of satire,
of declamation, and of the lighter kinds of verse. It was Latin poetry
without Lucretius and Catullus, without the odes of Horace, without
the higher strain of the genius of Virgil. In other words, it was
poetry as conceived by Boileau or Addison-or Mr. Smith. [Footnote: See
Johnson's extravagant eulogy of this obscure writer in the Lives of
the Poets. Works, x. i.]
Yet again. In the hands of Johnson--and it was a necessary consequence
of his critical method--poetry becomes more and more a mere matter of
mechanism. Once admit that the greatness of a poet depends upon his
success in following certain models, and it is but a short step--if
indeed it be a step--further to say that he must attempt no task that
has not been set him by the example of his forerunners. It is doubtless
true that Johnson did not, in so many words, commit himself to this
absurdity. But it is equally true that any poet, who overstepped the
bounds laid down by previous writers, was likely to meet with but
little mercy at his hands. Milton, Cowley, Gray--for all had the
audacity to take an untrodden path in poetry-one after another are
dragged up for execution. It is clear that by example, if not by
precept, Johnson was prepared to "make poetry a mere mechanic art";
and Cowper was right in saying that it had become so with Pope's
successors. Indeed John--son himself, in closing his estimate of Pope,
seems half regretfully to anticipate Cowper's verdict. "By perusing
the works of Dryden, he discovered the most perfect fabrick of English
verse, and habituated himself to that only which he found the best.
... New sentiments and new images others may produce; but to attempt
any further improvement of versification will be dangerous. Art and
diligence have now done their best, and what shall be added will be
the effort of tedious toil and needless curiosity". [Footnote: _Life
of Pope_. Johnson's Works, xi. pp 194, 195.] But Johnson failed to see
that his own view of poetry led inevitably to this lame and impotent
conclusion.
To adopt Johnson's method is, in truth, to misconceive the whole nature
of poetry and of poetic imagination. The ideas that have shaped the
work of one poet may act as guide and spur, but can never be a rule--far
less a law--to the imagination of another. The idea, as it comes to
an artist, is not a law imposing itself from without; it is a seed of
life and energy springing from within. This, however, was a truth
entirely hidden from the eyes of Johnson and the Augustan critics. To
assert it both by word and deed, both as critics and as poets, was the
task of Coleridge, and of those who joined hands with Coleridge, in
the succeeding generation. Apart from the undying beauty of their work
as artists, this was the memorable service they rendered to poetry in
England.
It remains to illustrate the method of Johnson by its practical
application. As has already been said, Johnson is nothing if not a
hanging judge; and it is just where originality is most striking that
his sentences are the most severe. If there was one writer who might
have been expected to win his favour, it was Pope; and if there is any
work that bears witness to the originality of Pope's genius, it is the
imitations of Horace. These are dismissed in a disparaging sentence.
There is no adequate recognition of Congreve's brilliance as a
dramatist; none of Swift's amazing powers as a satirist. Yet all these
were men who lived more or less within the range of ideas and tendencies
by which Johnson's own mind was moulded and inspired.
The case is still worse when we turn to writers of a different school.
Take the poets from the Restoration to the closing years of the American
war; and it is not too much to say that, with the exception of
Thomson--saved perhaps by his "glossy, unfeeling diction"--there is
not one of them who overstepped the bounds marked out for literary
effort by the prevailing taste of the Augustan age, in its narrowest
sense, without paying the price for his temerity in the sneers or
reprobation of Johnson. Collins, it is true, escapes more lightly than
the rest; but that is probably due to the affection and pity of his
critic. Yet even Collins, perhaps the most truly poetic spirit of the
century between Milton and Burns, is blamed for a "diction often harsh,
unskillfully laboured, and injudiciously selected"; for "lines commonly
of slow motion"; for "poetry that may sometimes extort praise, when
it gives little pleasure". [Footnote: Johnson's Works, xi. 270.]The
poems of Gray--an exception must be made, to Johnson's honour, in
favour of the _Elegy_ [Footnote: In the bosom of "the Club" the
exception dwindled to two stanzas (Boswell's Life, ii. 300).] are
slaughtered in detail; [Footnote: Johnson's Works, xi. 372-378. Johnson
is peculiarly sarcastic on the _Bard_ and the _Progress of Poetry_.]
the man himself is given dog's burial with the compendious epitaph:
"A dull fellow, sir; dull in company, dull in his closet, dull
everywhere". [Footnote: Boswell's _Life_, ii. 300. Comp. in. 435.]
But most astonishing of all, as is well known, is the treatment bestowed
on Milton. Of all Milton's works, _Paradise Lost_ seems to have been
the only one that Johnson genuinely admired. That he praises with as
little of reservation as was in the nature of so stern a critic. On
_Paradise Regained_ he is more guarded; on _Samson_, more guarded yet.
[Footnote: The two papers devoted to _Samson_ in the _Rambler_ are
"not entitled even to this slender commendation". "This is the tragedy
that ignorance has admired and bigotry applauded" (Johnson's Works,
v. 436).] But it is in speaking of the earlier poems that Johnson shows
his hand most plainly. _Comus_ "is a drama in the epic style,
inelegantly splendid and tediously instructive". [Footnote: Johnson's
Works, ix. 153.] Of _Lycidas_ "the diction is harsh, the rhymes
uncertain, and the numbers un-pleasing" [Footnote: Ib. 159.] As for
the sonnets, "they deserve not any particular criticism. For of the
best it can only be said that they are not bad; and perhaps only the
eighth and twenty-first are truly entitled to this slender
commendation.... These little pieces may be dismissed without much
anxiety". [Footnote: Ib. 160. The two sonnets are those written _When
the assault was intended to the City_, and _On his Blindness_.]
It would be hardly worth while to record these ill-tempered judgments
if they were not the natural outcome of a method which held unquestioned
sway over English taste for a full century--in France for nearly
two--and which, during that time, if we except Gray and his friends,
was not seriously disputed by a single man of mark. The one author in
whose favour the rules of "correct writing" were commonly set aside
was Shakespeare; and perhaps there is no testimony to his greatness
so convincing as the unwilling homage it extorted from the
contemporaries of Pope, of Johnson, and of Hume. Johnson's own notes
and introductions to the separate plays are at times trifling enough;
[Footnote: Compare the assault on the "mean expressions" of Shakespeare
(Rambler, No. 168).] but his general preface is a solid and manly piece
of work. It contrasts strangely not only with the verdicts given above,
but with his jeers at _Chevy Chase_ [Footnote: Ib. x. 139.]--a "dull
and lifeless imbecility"--at the _Nonne Prestes Tale_, and at the
_Knightes Tale_ [Footnote: Ib. ix. 432.]
One more instance, and we may leave this depressing study in critical
perversity. Among the great writers of Johnson's day there was none
who showed a truer originality than Fielding; no man who broke more
markedly with the literary superstitions of the time; none who took
his own road with more sturdiness and self-reliance. This was enough
for Johnson, who persistently depreciated both the man and his work.
Something of this should doubtless be set down to disapproval of the
free speech and readiness to allow for human frailty, which could not
but give offence to a moralist so unbending as Johnson. But that will
hardly account for the assertion that "Harry Fielding knew nothing but
the outer shell of life"; still less for the petulant ruling that he
"was a barren rascal". [Footnote: Boswell's _Life_, ii. 169. Diary and
Letters of Madame D'Arblay, i. 91] The truth is--and Johnson felt it
instinctively--that the novel, as conceived by Fielding--the novel
that gloried in painting all sides of life, and above all in drawing
out the humour of its "lower spheres"--dealt a fatal blow not only at
the pompous canons which the _Rambler_ was pleased to call "the
indispensable laws of Aristotelian criticism", [Footnote: Johnson's
Works, v. 431.] but also at the view which found "human life to be
a state where much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed". It would
be hard to say whether Johnson found more in Fielding to affront him,
as pessimist or as critic. And it would be equally hard to say in which
of the two characters lay the greater barrier to literary insight.
Even Richardson--no less revolutionary, though in a different way,
than Fielding--was only saved so as by fire; by the undying hatred
which he shared with Johnson for his terrible rival. It was rather as
moralist than as artist, rather for "the sentiment" than for the tragic
force of his work, that Richardson seems to have won his way to
Johnson's heart. [Footnote: See the passage referred to in the preceding
note.]
Is not the evidence conclusive? Is it a harsh judgment to say that no
critic so narrow, so mechanical, so hostile to originality as Johnson
has ever achieved the dictatorship of English letters?
The supremacy of Johnson would have been impossible, had not the way
been smoothed for it by a long succession of critics like-minded with
himself. Such a succession may be traced from Swift to Addison, from
Addison to Pope, and--with marked reservations--from Pope to Goldsmith.
It would be unjust to charge all, or indeed any, of these with the
narrowness of view betrayed in Johnson's verdicts on individual writers.
To arrive at this perfection of sourness was a work of time; and the
nature of Addison and Goldsmith at least was too genial to allow of
any approach to it. But, with all their difference of temperament, the
method of the earlier critics is hardly to be distinguished from that
of Johnson. There is the same orderliness of treatment--first the
fable, then the characters, lastly the sentiment and the diction; the
same persistency in applying general rules to a matter which, above
all others, is a law to itself; the same invincible faith in "the
indispensable laws of Aristotelian criticism". It is this that, in
spite of its readiness to admire, makes Addison's criticism of _Paradise
Lost_ so dreary a study; and this that, in an evil hour, prompted
Goldsmith to treat the soliloquy of Hamlet as though it were a
schoolboy's exercise in rhetoric and logic. [Footnote: Goldsmith, Essay
xvi. The next essay contains a like attack on Mercutio's description
of Queen Mab.]
And yet it is with Goldsmith that we come to the first dawn of better
things. The carping strain and the stiffness of method, that we cannot
overlook in him, were the note of his generation. The openness to new
ideas, the sense of nature, the fruitful use of the historical method,
are entirely his own. There had been nothing like them in our literature
since Dryden. In criticism, as in creative work, Goldsmith marks the
transition from the old order to the new.
Perhaps the clearest indication of this is to be found in his constant
appeal to nature. In itself, as we have seen, this may mean much or
little. "Nature" is a vague word; it was the battle-cry of Wordsworth,
but it was also the battle-cry of Boileau. And, at first sight, it
might seem to be used by Goldsmith in the narrower rather than in the
wider sense. "It is the business of art", he writes, "to imitate nature,
but not with a servile pencil; and to choose those attitudes and
dispositions only which are beautiful and engaging." [Footnote:
Goldsmith, Essay xiii.] But a glance at the context will show that
what Goldsmith had in mind was not "nature to advantage dressed", not
nature with any adornments added by man; but nature stripped of all
that to man has degrading associations; nature, to adopt the words
used by Wordsworth on a kindred subject, "purified from all lasting
or rational causes of dislike or disgust". It may well be that Goldsmith
gave undue weight to this reservation. It may well be that he did not
throw himself on nature with the unwavering constancy of Wordsworth.
But, none the less, we have here--and we have it worked out in detail
[Footnote: As to oratory, poetry, the drama, and acting, Ib., Essays
iv., xii., xiii.; _The Bee_, no. ii.]--the germ of the principle which,
in bolder hands, gave England the Lyrical Ballads and the Essays of
Lamb.
In an essay not commonly reprinted, Goldsmith, laying his finger on
the one weak spot in the genius of Gray, gives the poet the memorable
advice--to "study the people". And throughout his own critical work,
as in his novel, his comedies, and his poems, there is an abiding sense
that, without this, there is no salvation for poetry. That in itself
is enough to fix an impassable barrier between Goldsmith and the
official criticism of his day.
The other main service rendered by Goldsmith was his return to the
historical method. It is true that his knowledge is no more at first
hand, and is set out with still less system than that of Dryden a
century before. But it is also true that he has a far keener sense of
the strength which art may draw from history than his great forerunner.
Dryden confines himself to the history of certain forms of art;
Goldsmith includes the history of nations also in his view. With Dryden
the past is little more than an antiquarian study; with Goldsmith it
is a living fountain of inspiration for the present. The art of the
past--the poetry, say, of Teutonic or Celtic antiquity--is to him an
undying record of the days when man still walked hand in hand with
nature. The history of the past is at once a storehouse of stirring
themes ready to the hand of the artist, and the surest safeguard against
both flatness and exaggeration in his work. [Footnote: See Essays
xiii., xiv., xx.; _Present State of Polite Learning_, in particular,
chap. xi.] It offers, moreover, the truest schooling of the heart, and
insensibly "enlists the passions on the side of humanity". "Poetry",
Byron said, "is the feeling of a former world, and future"; [Footnote:
Moore's _Life_, p. 483] and to the first half of the statement Goldsmith
would have heartily subscribed. For the historical method in his hands
is but another aspect of the counsel he gave to Gray: "Study the
people". It is an anticipation--vague, no doubt, but still
unmistakable--of the spirit which, both in France and England, gave
birth to the romantic movement a generation or two later.
That zeal for the literature of the past was in the air when Goldsmith
wrote is proved by works so different as those of Gray and Percy, of
Chatterton and MacPherson, of Mallet and Warton. [Footnote: Percy's
Reliques were published in 1765; Chatterton's _Rowley Poems_ written
in 1769; MacPherson's _Ossian_ (first instalment) in 1760; Mallet's
_Northern Antiquities_ in 1755; and Warton's _History of English
Poetry_--a book to the learning and importance of which scant justice
has been done--from 1772 to 1778. To these should be added a work,
whose fine scholarship and profound learning is now universally
admitted, Tyrwhitt's _Chaucer_ (1775-78). It will be noticed that all
these works fall within the space of twenty years, 1755-1775] But it
may be doubted whether any one of them, Gray excepted, saw the true
bearing of the movement more clearly than Goldsmith, or did more to
open fresh springs of thought and beauty for the poetry of the next
age, if not of his own. It would be unpardonable to turn from the
writers of the eighteenth century with no notice of a book which,
seldom now read, is nevertheless perhaps the most solid piece of work
that modern Europe had as yet to show in any branch of literary
criticism. This is Burke's treatise _On the Sublime and the Beautiful_.
Few will now be prepared to accept the material basis which Burke finds
for the ideas of the imagination. [Footnote: Burke traces our ideas
of the sublime to the sense of physical pain; our ideas of the beautiful
to that of physical pleasure; identifying the former with a contraction
or tension, and the latter with a relaxation of the muscles. Against
this theory two main objections may be urged: (1) As, on Burke's own
showing, the objects of the imagination, at least as far as poetry is
concerned, are, and must be, presented first to the _mind_, it is (in
the strictest sense of the term) preposterous to attribute their power
over us to a purely muscular operation (2) The argument, taken by
itself, is barely relevant to the matter in hand. Even where a physical
basis can be proved--as it can in the case of music, painting, and
sculpture (and of poetry, so far as rhythm and harmony are an essential
element of it) it is extravagant to maintain that the physiologist or
the "psycho physicist" can explain the whole, or even the greater part,
of what has to be explained Beyond the fraction of information that
purely physical facts can give us, a vast field must be left to
intellectual and imaginative association. And that is the province not
of physiology but of psychology, and of what the Germans call
_Aesthetik_ This province, however, is but seldom entered by Burke.
What, then, was it that drove Burke to a position so markedly at
variance with the idealism of his later years? In all probability it
was his rooted suspicion of reasoning as a deliberate and conscious
process. Other writers of the century--Addison, for instance--had
spoken as if men reasoned from certain abstract ideas (proportion,
fitness, and the like) to individual instances of beauty, deciding a
thing to have beauty or no, according as it squared or failed to square
with the general notion This, as Burke points out, is more than
questionable in itself, and it was certain to affront a man who, even
thus early, had shown an almost morbid hatred of abstractions. In his
later years, as is well known, he sought refuge from them in instinct,
in "prejudice", in the unconscious working of the "permanent reason
of man". In earlier days--he was still well under thirty--he found
escape by the grosser aid of a materialist explanation (Burke's treatise
was published in 1756 The _Laocoon_ of Lessing, a work which may be
compared with that of Burke and which was very probably suggested by
it, appeared in 1766.)] But none can deny the skill with which he works
out his theory, nor the easy mastery with which each part is fitted
into its place. The speculative power of the book and the light it
throws on the deeper springs of the imagination are alike memorable.
The first is not unworthy of the _Reflections_ or the _Appeal from the
New to the Old Whigs_; the second shows that fruitful study of the
Bible and the poets, English and classical, to which his later writings
and speeches bear witness on every page.
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