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If the originality and depth of Burke's treatise is to be justly
measured, it should be set side by side with those papers of Addison
which Akenside expanded in his dismal _Pleasures of the Imagination_.
The performance of Addison, grateful though one must be to him for
attempting it, is thin and lifeless. That of Burke is massive and full
of suggestion. At every turn it betrays the hand of the craftsman who
works with his eye upon his tools. The speculative side of criticism
has never been a popular study with Englishmen, and it is no accident
that one of the few attempts to deal seriously with it should have
been made at the only time when philosophy was a living power among
us, and when the desire to get behind the outward shows of things was
keener than it has ever been before or since. But for Burke's treatise,
a wide gap would have been left both in the philosophy and the criticism
of the eighteenth century; and it is to be wished that later times had
done more to work the vein which he so skilfully explored. As it is,
the writers both of France and Germany--above all, Hegel in his
_Aesthetik_--have laboured with incomparably more effect than his own
countrymen, Mr. Ruskin excepted, upon the foundations that he laid.

IV. Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_ was the last word of the school
which the Restoration had enthroned; the final verdict of the supreme
court which gave the law to English letters from the accession of Anne
to the French Revolution. Save in the splenetic outbursts of Byron--and
they are not to be taken too seriously--the indispensable laws of
Aristotelian criticism fell silent at Johnson's death. A time of anarchy
followed; anarchy _plus_ the policeman's truncheon of the _Edinburgh_
and the _Quarterly_. [Footnote: The first number of the _Edinburgh_
appeared in 1802; the _Quarterly_ was started in a counterblast in
1809.]

The ill-fame of these Reviews, as they were in their pride of youth,
is now so great that doubts may sometimes suggest themselves whether
it can possibly be deserved. No one who feels such doubts can do better
than turn to the earlier numbers; he will be forced to the conclusion
that, whatever their services as the journeymen of letters and of party
politics, few critics could have been so incompetent to judge of genius
as the men who enlisted under the standard of Jeffrey or of Gifford.
There is not, doubtless, in either Review the same iron wall of reasoned
prejudice that has been noted in Johnson, but there is a plentiful
lack of the clear vision and the openness to new impressions which are
the first necessity of the critic. What Carlyle says of Jeffrey and
the _Edinburgh_ may be taken as the substantial truth also about Gifford
and the _Quarterly_, and it is the most pregnant judgment that has yet
been passed upon them.

"Jeffrey may be said to have begun the rash, reckless style of
criticising everything in heaven and earth by appeal to Moliere's maid:
'Do _you_ like it?' '_Don't_ you like it?' a style which, in hands
more and more inferior to that sound-hearted old lady and him, has
since grown gradually to such immeasurable length among us; and he
himself is one of the first that suffers by it. If praise and blame
are to be perfected, not in the mouth of Moliere's maid only but in
that of mischievous, precocious babes and sucklings, you will arrive
at singular judgments by degrees." [Footnote: Carlyle, _Reminiscences_
n 63, 64 ]

Carlyle has much here to say of Jeffrey's "recklessness", his defiance
of all rules, his appeal to the chance taste of the man in the crowd.
He has much also to say of his acuteness, and the unrivalled authority
of his decrees. [Footnote: "Jeffrey was by no means the supreme in
criticism or in anything else, but it is certain there has no critic
appeared among us since who was worth naming beside him and his
influence for good and for evil in literature and otherwise has been
very great. Nothing in my time has so forwarded all this--the 'gradual
uprise and rule in all things of roaring, million headed &c Demos'--
"as Jeffrey and his once famous _Edinburgh Review_'--Ib ] But he is
discreetly silent on their severity and short-sightedness. [Footnote:
"You know", Byron wrote in 1808 "the system of the Edinburgh gentlemen
is universal attack. They praise none, and neither the public nor the
author expects praise from them."--Moore's _Life_, p 67.]

Yet this is the unpardonable sin of both Reviews: that mediocrity was
applauded, but that, whenever a man of genius came before them, the
chances were ten to one that he would be held up to ridicule and
contempt. The very first number of the _Edinburgh_ lays this down as
an article of faith. Taking post on the recent appearance of _Thalaba_,
the reviewer opens fire by a laboured parallel between poetry and
religion. [Footnote: _Edinburgh Review_, No. 1, pp 63, &c ] With an
alteration of names it might have been written by a member of the
English Church Union, or of the Holy Inquisition.

"The standards of poetry have been fixed long ago by certain inspired
writers, whose authority it is no longer lawful to call in question.
Many profess to be entirely devoted to poetry, who have no _good works_
to produce in support of their pretensions. The Catholic poetical
Church too . . . has given birth to an infinite variety of heresies
and errors, the followers of which have hated and persecuted each other
as heartily as other bigots."

Then, turning to business, the writer proceeds to apply his creed to
Southey and all his works, not forgetting the works also of his friends.
"The author belongs to a sect of poets that has established itself in
this country within these ten or twelve years"--it would be hard to
say for whose benefit in particular this date was taken--"and is looked
upon as one of its chief champions and apostles". "The doctrines of
this sect"--the Reviewer continues, with an eye upon the Alien Act--"are
of German origin, or borrowed from the great apostle of Geneva".
Rousseau is then "named" for expulsion, together with a miscellaneous
selection of his following: Schiller and Kotzebue (the next number
includes Kant under the anathema), Quarles and Donne, Ambrose Phillips
and Cowper--perhaps the most motley crew that was ever brought together
for excommunication. It is not, however, till the end of the essay
that the true root of bitterness between the critic and his victims
is suffered fully to appear. "A splenetic and idle discontent with the
existing institutions of society seems to be at the bottom of all their
serious and peculiar sentiments." In other words, the _Edinburgh_ takes
up the work of the _Anti-Jacobin_; with no very good grace Jeffrey
affects to sit in the seat of Canning and of Frere.

So much for the "principles" of the new venture; principles, it will
be seen, which appear to rest rather upon a hatred of innovation in
general than upon any reasoned code, such as that of Johnson or the
"Aristotelian laws", in particular. On that point, it must be clearly
realized, Carlyle was in the right. It is that which marks the essential
difference of the Reviewers--we can hardly say their advance--as against
Johnson.

We may now turn to watch the Reviewers, knife in hand, at the
dissecting-table. For the twenty-five years that followed the foundation
of the _Edinburgh_, England was more full of literary genius than it
had been at any time since the age of Elizabeth. And it is not too
much to say that during that period there was not one of the men, now
accepted as among the chief glories of English literature, who did not
fall under the lash of one, or both, of the Reviews. The leading cases
will suffice.

And first, the famous attack--not altogether undeserved, it must be
allowed--of the _Edinburgh_ upon Byron. "The poetry of this young lord
belongs to the class which neither gods nor men are said to permit",
and so on for two or three pages of rather vulgar and heartless
merriment at the young lord's expense. [Footnote: _Edinburgh Review_,
xi. 285. It is uncommonly hard to find any trace of poetic power, even
of the imitative kind, in the _Hours of Idleness_. It is significant
that the best pieces are those in the heroic couplet; an indication--to
be confirmed by _English Bards_--of Byron's leaning towards the past.]
The answer to the sneer, as all the world knows, was _English Bards
and Scotch Reviewers_. The author of the article had reason to be proud
of his feat. Never before did pertness succeed in striking such
unexpected fire from genius. And it is only fair to say that the Review
took its beating like a gentleman. A few years later, and the
_Edinburgh_ was among the warmest champions of the "English Bard".
[Footnote: See the article on _The Corsair_ and _Bride of Abydos_, Ib.
xxiii. 198. After speaking of the "beauty of his diction and
versification, and the splendour of his description", the reviewer
continues: "But it is to his pictures of the stronger passions that
he is indebted for the fulness of his fame. He has delineated with
unequalled force and fidelity the workings of those deep and powerful
emotions.... We would humbly suggest to him to do away with the reproach
of the age by producing a tragic drama of the old English school of
poetry and pathos." The _amende honorable_ with a vengeance. The review
of _The Giaour_, Byron thought, was "so very mild and sentimental that
it must be written by Jeffrey in _love_".--Moore's _Life_, p. 191.]
It was reserved for Southey, a pillar of the _Quarterly_, to rank him
as the "Goliath" of the "Satanic school".

Let us now turn to the _Quarterly_ upon Keats. _Endymion_, in spite
of the noble self-criticism of its preface, is denounced as "Cockney
poetry" [Footnote: The phrase was also employed by _Blackwood_, vol.
iii. 519-524.]--a stupid and pointless vulgarism--and is branded as
clothing "the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language".
The author is dismissed with the following amenities: "Being bitten
by Leigh Hunt's insane criticism, he more than rivals the insanity of
his poetry"; and we are half-surprised not to find him told, as he was
by _Blackwood_, to "go back to the shop, Mr. John; back to the plasters,
pills, and ointment-boxes". [Footnote: _Quarterly Review_, xix. 204.
See _Blackwood_, vol. iii. 524; where the Reviewer sneers at "the calm,
settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy of _Endymion_".]

With this insolence it is satisfactory to contrast the verdict of the
_Edinburgh_: "We have been exceedingly struck with the genius these
poems--_Endymion_, _Lamia_, _Isabella_, _The Eve of St. Agnes_,
&c.--display, and the spirit of poetry which breathes through all their
extravagance. . . . They are at least as full of genius as absurdity."
Of _Hyperion_ the Reviewer says: "An original character and distinct
individuality is bestowed upon the poet's mythological persons. . . .
We cannot advise its completion. For, though there are passages of
some force and grandeur, it is sufficiently obvious that the subject
is too far removed from all the sources of human interest to be
successfully treated by any modern author". [Footnote: Edinburgh Review,
xxxiv. 203.] A blundering criticism, which, however, may be pardoned
in virtue of the discernment, not to say the generosity, of the
foregoing estimate.

It would have been well had the _Edinburgh_ always written in this
vein. But Wordsworth was a sure stumbling-block to the sagacity of his
critics, and he certainly never failed to call forth the insolence and
flippancy of Jeffrey. Two articles upon him remain as monuments to the
incompetence of the _Edinburgh_; the first prompted by the Poems of
1807, the second by the _Excursion_.

The former pronounces sentence roundly at the very start: "Mr.
Wordsworth's diction has nowhere any pretence to elegance or dignity,
and he has scarcely ever condescended to give the grace of correctness
or dignity to his versification". From this sweeping condemnation four
poems--_Brougham Castle_, and the sonnets on Venice, Milton, and
Bonaparte--are generously excepted. But, as though astonished at his
own moderation, the reviewer quickly proceeds to deal slaughter among
the rest. Of the closing lines of _Resolution and Independence_ he
writes: "We defy Mr. Wordsworth's bitterest enemy to produce anything
at all parallel to this from any collection of English poetry, or even
from the specimens of his friend, Mr. Southey". Of the stanzas to the
sons of Burns, "never was anything more miserable". _Alice Fell_ is
"trash"; _Yarrow Unvisited_, "tedious and affected". The lines from
the _Ode to Duty_.

"Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,
And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong,"

are "utterly without meaning". The poem on the _Cuckoo_ is "absurd".
The _Ode on Immortality_ is "the most illegible and unintelligible
part of the whole publication". "We venture to hope that there is now
an end of this folly." [Footnote: _Edinburgh Review_, xi. 217, &c.]

But the hope is doomed to disappointment. The publication of the
_Excursion_ a few years later finds the reviewer still equal to his
task. "This will never do", he begins in a fury; "the case of Mr.
Wordsworth is now manifestly hopeless. We give him up as altogether
incurable and beyond the power of criticism." The story of Margaret,
indeed, though "it abounds, of course, with mawkish sentiment and
details of preposterous minuteness, has considerable pathos". But the
other passage which one would have thought must have gone home to every
heart--that which describes the communing of the wanderer with nature
[Footnote: _Excursion_, book i.]--is singled out for ridicule; while
the whole poem is judged to display "a puerile ambition of singularity,
grafted on an unlucky predilection for truisms". [Footnote: _Edinburgh
Review_, xxiv. I, &c. It is but just to add that in the remainder of
the essay the Reviewer takes back--so far as such things can ever be
taken back--a considerable part of his abuse.]

It would be idle to maintain that in some of these slashing verdicts--
criticisms they cannot be called--the reviewer does not fairly hit the
mark. But these are chance strokes; and they are dealt, as the whole
attack is conceived, in the worst style of the professional swash-
buckler. Yet, low as is the deep they sound, a lower deep is opened
by the _Quarterly_ in its article on Shelley; an article which bears
unmistakable marks of having been written under the inspiration, if
not by the hand, of Southey.

It is impossible to know anything about Southey without feeling that,
both in character and in intellect, he had many of the qualities that
go to make an enlightened critic. But his fine nature was warped by
a strain of bigotry; and he had what, even in a man who otherwise gave
conclusive proof of sincerity and whole-heartedness, must be set down
as a strong touch of the Pharisee. After every allowance has been made,
no feeling other than indignation is possible at the tone which he
thought fit to adopt towards Shelley.

He opens the assault, and it is well that he does so, by an
acknowledgment that the versification of the _Revolt of Islam_, the
_corpus delicti_ at that moment under the scalpel, is "smooth and
harmonious", and that the poem is "not without beautiful passages,
free from errors of taste". But the "voice of warning", as he himself
would too generously have called it, is not long in making itself
heard. "Mr. Shelley, with perfect deliberation and the steadiest
perseverance, perverts all the gifts of his nature, and does all the
injury, both public and private, which his faculties enable him to
perpetrate. . . .He draws largely on the rich stores of another mountain
poet, to whose religious mind it must be matter of perpetual sorrow
to see the philosophy, which comes pure and holy from his pen, degraded
and perverted by this miserable crew of atheists and pantheists."

So far, perhaps, the writer may claim not to have outstepped the
traditional limits of theological hatred. For what follows there is
not even that poor excuse. "If we might withdraw the veil of his private
life and tell what we now know about him, it would be indeed a
disgusting picture that we should exhibit, but it would be an
unanswerable comment on our text. . .Mr. Shelley is too young, too
ignorant, too inexperienced, and too vicious to undertake the task of
reforming any world but the little world within his own breast."
[Footnote: Quarterly Review, xxi. 460, &c.] For the credit of both
Reviews it must be said that it would be difficult to find another
instance of so foul a blow as this: [Footnote: Except in the infamous
insinuations, also a crime of the _Quarterly_,]

Non ragioniam di _lui_, ma guarda e passa.

[Footnote: against the character of Currer Bell. See also the scurrilous
attack on the character of Leigh Hunt in _Blackwood_, vol III 453]

Apart from their truculence, the early numbers of the _Edinburgh_ and
_Quarterly_ are memorable for two reasons in the history of English
literature. They mark the downfall of the absolute standard assumed
by Johnson and others to hold good in criticism. And they led the way,
slowly indeed but surely, to the formation of a general interest in
literature, which, sooner or later, could not but be fatal to their
own haphazard dogmatism. By their very nature they were an appeal to
the people; and, like other appeals of the kind, they ended in a
revolution.

Of the men who fixed the lines on which this revolution was to run,
four stand out taller from the shoulders upwards than their fellows.
These are Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and Carlyle. The critical work of
all four belongs to the first thirty years or so of the present century;
[Footnote: Some of the dates are as follows Lamb's _Specimens of English
Dramatic Poets_ was published in 1808, his _Essays of Elia_ began to
appear in the _London Magazine_, 1820, Coleridge's first Course of
Lectures (on English poets) was delivered in 1808, his second Course,
in 1811-12, his _Biographia Literana_ in 1817 Hazlitt's _Characters
of Shakespeare's Plays_ was published in 1817, his _Lectures on the
English Poets_ in 1818, and on _The English Comic Writers_ in 1819
Carlyle's Essays began to appear (in the _Edinburgh_ and other Reviews)
in 1827, that on Diderot--the last notable essay of a literary cast--in
1833 Hazlitt died in 1830, Coleridge and Lamb in 1834 By that time
Carlyle had turned to history and kindred subjects] and of the four
it is probable that Carlyle, by nature certainly the least critical,
had the greatest influence in changing the current of critical ideas.
Space forbids any attempt to treat their work in detail. All that can
be done is to indicate what were the shortcomings of English criticism
as it came into their hands, and how far and in what manner they
modified its methods and its aims.

Till the beginning of the present century, criticism in England had
remained a very simple thing. When judgment had once been passed, for
good or evil, on an individual work or an individual writer, the critic
was apt to suppose that nothing further could reasonably be expected
of him. The comparative method, foreshadowed but only foreshadowed by
Dryden, had not been carried perceptibly further by Dryden's successors.
The historical method was still more clearly in its infancy. The
connection between the two, the unity of purpose which alone gives
significance to either, was hardly as yet suspected.

It may be said--an English critic of the eighteenth century would
undoubtedly have said--that these, after all, are but methods; better,
possibly, than other methods; but still no more than means to an end--
the eternal end of criticism, which is to appraise and to classify.
The view is disputable enough. It leaves out of sight all that
criticism--the criticism of literature and art--has done to throw light
upon the dark places of human thought and history, upon the growth and
subtle transformations of spiritual belief, upon the power of reason
and imagination to mould the shape of outward institutions. All these
things are included in the scope of the historical and comparative
methods; and all of them stand entirely apart from the need to judge
or classify the works of individual poets.

But, for the moment, such wider considerations may be put aside, and
the objection weighed on its own merits. It must then be answered that,
without comparison and without the appeal to history, even to judge
and classify reasonably would be impossible; and hence that, however
much we narrow the scope of criticism, these two methods--or rather,
two aspects of the same method--must still find place within its range.
For, failing them, the critic in search of a standard--and without
some standard or criterion there can be no such thing as criticism--is
left with but two possible alternatives. He must either appeal to some
absolute standard--the rules drawn from the "classical writers", in
a sense wider or narrower, as the case may be; or he must decide
everything by his own impression of the moment, eked out by the "appeal
to Moliere's maid". The latter is the negation of all criticism. The
former, spite of itself, is the historical method, but the historical
method applied in an utterly arbitrary and irrational way. The former
was the method of Johnson; the latter, of the _Edinburgh_ and the
_Quarterly_. Each in turn, as we have seen, had ludicrously broken
down.

In the light of recent inventions, it might have been expected that
some attempt would be made to limit the task of the critic to a mere
record of his individual impressions. This, in fact, would only have
been to avow, and to give the theory of what the _Edinburgh_ and the
_Quarterly_ had already reduced to practice. But the truth is that the
men of that day were not strong in such fine-spun speculations. It was
a refinement from which even Lamb, who loved a paradox as well as any
man, would have shrunk with playful indignation.

It was in another direction that Coleridge and his contemporaries
sought escape from the discredit with which criticism was threatened.
This was by changing the issue on which the discussion was to be fought.
In its most general form, the problem of criticism amounts to this:
What is the nature of the standard to be employed in literary judgments?
Hitherto--at least to the Reviewers--the question may be said to have
presented itself in the following shape: Is the standard to be sought
within or without the mind of the critic? Is it by his own impression,
or by the code handed down from previous critics, that in the last
resort the critic should be guided? In the hands of Coleridge and
others, this was replaced by the question: Is the touchstone of
excellence to be found within the work of the poet, or outside of it?
Are we to judge of a given work merely by asking: Is it clearly
conceived and consistently carried out? Or are we bound to consider
the further question: Is the original conception just, and capable of
artistic treatment; and is the workmanship true to the vital principles
of poetry? The change is significant. It makes the poet, not the critic,
master of the situation. It implies that the critic is no longer to
give the law to the poet; but that, in some sense more or less complete,
he must begin, if not by putting himself in the place of the individual
writer as he was when at work on the individual poem, at least by
taking upon himself--by making his own, as far as may be--what he may
conceive to be the essential temperament of the poet.

This, indeed, is one of the first things to strike us in passing from
the old criticism to the new. The _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly_ plunge
straight into the business of the moment. From the first instant--with
"This will never do"--the Reviewer poses as the critic, or rather as
the accuser. Not so Coleridge and Hazlitt. Like the _Edinburgh_ and
_Quarterly_, they undertake to discourse on individual poets. Unlike
them, each opens his enquiry with the previous question-a question
that seems to have found no lodgment in the mind of the Reviewers--What
is poetry? Further than this. Hazlitt, in a passage of incomparably
greater force than any recorded utterance of Coleridge, makes it his
task to trace poetry to the deepest and most universal springs of human
nature; asserts boldly that it is poetry which, in the strictest sense,
is "the life of all of us"; and calls on each one of us to assert his
birthright by enjoying it. It is in virtue of the poet latent in him,
that the plain man has the power to become a critic.

Starting then from the question as just stated: Is it within the mind
of the individual poet, or without it, that the standard of judgment
should be sought?--neither Coleridge nor Hazlitt could have any doubt
as to the answer. It is not, they would tell us, in the individual
work but in the nature of poetry--of poetry as written large in the
common instincts of all men no less than in the particular achievement
of exceptional artists--that the test of poetic beauty must be
discovered. The opposite view, doubtless, finds some countenance in
the precepts, if not the example, of Goethe. But, when pressed to
extremes, it is neither more nor less than the impressionist conception
of criticism transferred to the creative faculty; and, like its
counterpart, is liable to the objection that the impression of one
poet, so long as it is sincerely rendered, is as good as the impression
of another. It is the abdication of art, as the other is the abdication
of criticism.

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