Books: English literary criticism
V >>
Various >> English literary criticism
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 | 6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22
Yet Hazlitt also--for, leaving Coleridge, we may now confine ourselves
to him--is open to attack. His fine critical powers were marred by the
strain of bitterness in his nature. And the result is that his judgment
on many poets, and notably the poets of his own day, too often sounds
like an intelligent version of the _Edinburgh_ or the _Quarterly_. Or,
to speak more accurately, he betrays some tendency to return to
principles which, though assuredly applied in a more generous spirit,
are at bottom hardly to be distinguished from the principles of Johnson.
He too has his "indispensable laws", or something very like them. He
too has his bills of exclusion and his list of proscriptions. The
poetry of earth, he more than suspects, is for ever dead; after Milton,
no claimant is admitted to anything more substantial than a courtesy
title. This, no doubt, was in part due to his morose temper; but it
was partly also the result of the imperfect method with which he
started.
The fault of his conception--and it was that which determined his
method--is to be too absolute. It allows too much room to poetry in
the abstract; too little to the ever-varying temperament of the
individual poet. And even that is perhaps too favourable a statement
of the case. His idea of poetry may in part be drawn--and its strength
is to have been partly drawn--direct from life and nature. But it is
also taken, as from the nature of the case it must be with all of us,
from the works of particular poets. And, in spite of his appeal to
Dante and the Bible, it is clear that, in framing it, he was guided
too exclusively by his loving study of the earlier English writers,
from Chaucer to Milton. The model, so framed, is laid with heavy hand
upon all other writers, who naturally fare ill in the comparison. Is
it possible to account otherwise for his disparagement of Moliere, or
his grudging praise of Wordsworth and of Coleridge?
It was here that Carlyle came in to redress the balance. From interests,
in their origin perhaps less purely literary than have moved any man
who has exercised a profound influence on literature, Carlyle was led
to quicken the sense of poetic beauty, and by consequence to widen the
scope of criticism, more than any writer of his day. He may have sought
German literature more for its matter than for its artistic
beauty--here, too, he brought a new, if in some ways a dangerous,
element into criticism--but neither he nor his readers could study it,
least of all could they study the work of Goethe, without awakening
to a whole world of imagination and beauty, to which England had
hitherto been dead. With all its shortcomings, the discovery of German
literature was a greater revelation than any made to Europe since the
classical Renaissance.
The shock--for it was nothing less--came at a singularly happy moment.
The blow, given by Carlyle as critic, was closely followed up by the
French _Romantiques_, as creative artists. Nothing could well have
been more alien to English taste, as understood by the _Edinburgh_ and
_Quarterly_, than the early works, or indeed any works, of Hugo and
those who owned him for chief--if it were not the works of Goethe and
the countrymen of Goethe. Different as these were from each other,
they held common ground in uniting the most opposite prejudices of
Englishmen against them. The sarcasms of Thackeray on the French writers
speak to this no less eloquently than the fluent flippancies of De
Quincey upon the Germans. [Footnote: See Thackeray's _Paris Sketch
Book_, especially the chapters on _Madame Sand and the New Apocalypse_
and _French Dramas and Melodramas_. See also De Quincey's Review of
Carlyle's translation of _Wilhelm Meister_. Works, vol. xii.] Yet, in
the one case as in the other--thanks, in no small measure, to Matthew
Arnold and Mr. Swinburne--genius, in the long run, carried the day.
And the same history has been repeated, as the literatures of Russia
and of Scandinavia have each in turn been brought within our ken.
These discoveries have all fallen within little more than half a century
since Carlyle, by the irony of fate, reviewed Richter and the _State
of German Literature_ in the pages of the _Edinburgh_. And their result
has been to modify the standards of taste and criticism in a thousand
ways. They have opened our eyes to aspects of poetry that we should
never otherwise have suspected, and unveiled to us fields of thought,
as well as methods of artistic treatment which, save by our own fault,
must both have widened and deepened our conception of poetry. That is
the true meaning of the historical method. The more we broaden our
vision, the less is our danger of confounding poetry, which is the
divine genius of the whole world, with the imperfect, if not misshapen
idols of the tribe, the market-place and the cave.
Of this conquest Carlyle must in justice be reckoned as the pioneer.
For many years he stood almost single-handed as the champion of German
thought and German art against the scorn or neglect of his countrymen.
But he knew that he was right, and was fully conscious whither the
path he had chosen was to lead. Aware that much in the work of Goethe
would seem "faulty" to many, he forestalls the objection at the outset.
"To see rightly into this matter, to determine with any infallibility
whether what we call a fault _is_ in very deed a fault, we must
previously have settled two points, neither of which may be so readily
settled. First, we must have made plain to ourselves what the poet's
aim really and truly was, how the task he had to do stood before his
own eye, and how far, with such means as it afforded him, he has
fulfilled it. Secondly, we must have decided whether and how far this
aim, this task of his accorded--not with _us_ and our individual
crotchets, and the crotchets of our little senate where we give or
take the law--but with human nature and the nature of things at large;
with the universal principles of poetic beauty, not as they stand
written in our text-books, but in the hearts and imaginations of all
men. Does the answer in either case come out unfavourable; was there
an inconsistency between the means and the end, a discordance between
the end and the truth, there is a fault; was there not, there is no
fault." [Footnote: Carlyle on Goethe: _Miscellanies_, i. 295]
Nothing could ring clearer than this. No man could draw the line more
accurately between the tendency to dispense with principles and the
tendency to stereotype them, which are the twin dangers of the critic.
But it is specially important to note Carlyle's relation, in this
matter, to Hazlitt He insists with as much force as Hazlitt upon the
need of basing all poetry on "human nature and the nature of things
at large"; upon the fact that its principles are written "in the hearts
and imaginations of all men". But, unlike Hazlitt, he bids us also
consider what the aim of the individual poet was, and how far he has
taken the most fitting means to reach it. In other words, he allows,
as Hazlitt did not allow, for the many-sidedness of poetry, and the
infinite variety of poetic genius. And, just because he does so, he
is able to give a deeper meaning to "nature" and the universal
principles of imagination than Hazlitt, with all his critical and
reflective brilliance, was in a position to do. Hazlitt is too apt to
confine "nature" to the nature of Englishmen in general and, in his
weaker moments, of Hazlitt in particular. Carlyle makes an honest
attempt to bound it only by the universal instincts of man, and the
"everlasting reason" of the world. Thus, in Carlyle's conception, "it
is the essence of the poet to be new"; it is his mission "to wrench
us from our old fixtures"; [Footnote: Carlyle on Goethe: _Miscellanies_,
i. 291.] for it is only by so doing that he can show us some aspect
of nature or of man's heart that was hidden from us before. The
originality of the poet, the impossibility of binding him by the example
of his forerunners, is the necessary consequence of the infinity of
truth.
That Carlyle saw this, and saw it so clearly, is no doubt partly due
to a cause, of which more must be said directly; to his craving for
ideas. [Footnote: See p. xciv.] But it was in part owing to his hearty
acceptance of the historical method. Both as critic and as historian,
he knew--at that time, no man so well--that each nation has its own
genius; and justly pronounced the conduct of that nation which "isolates
itself from foreign influence, regards its own modes as so many laws
of nature, and rejects all that is different as unworthy even of
examination", to be "pedantry". [Footnote: _Miscellanies_, i. 37, 38.]
This was the first, and perhaps the most fruitful consequence that he
drew from the application of historical ideas to literature. They
enlarged his field of comparison; and, by so doing, they gave both
width and precision to his definition of criticism.
But there is another--and a more usual, if a narrower--sense of the
historical method; and here, too, Carlyle was a pioneer. He was among
the first in our country to grasp the importance of studying the
literature of a nation, as a whole, and from its earliest monuments,
its mythological and heroic legends, downwards to the present. The
year 1831--a turning-point in the mental history of Carlyle, for it
was also the year in which _Sartor Resartus_ took shape "among the
mountain solitudes"--was largely devoted to Essays on the history of
German literature, of which one, that on the _Nibelungenlied_, is
specially memorable. And some ten years later (1840) he again took up
the theme in the first of his lectures on Heroes, which still remains
the most enlightening, because the most poetic, account of the primitive
Norse faith, or rather successive layers of faith, in our language.
[Footnote: See _Lectures on Heroes_, p. 20; compare _Corpus Poeticum
Borealt_, i. p. ci. ] But what mainly concerns us here is that Carlyle,
in this matter as in others, had clearly realized and as clearly defines
the goal which the student, in this case the student of literary
history, should set before his eyes.
"A History ... of any national Poetry would form, taken in its complete
sense, one of the most arduous enterprises any writer could engage in.
Poetry, were it the rudest, so it be sincere, is the attempt which man
makes to render his existence harmonious, the utmost he can do for
that end; it springs, therefore, from his whole feelings, opinions,
activity, and takes its character from these. It may be called the
music of his whole manner of being; and, historically considered, is
the test how far Music, or Freedom, existed therein; how the feeling
of Love, of Beauty, and Dignity, could be elicited from that peculiar
situation of his, and from the views he there had of Life and Nature,
of the Universe, internal and external. Hence, in any measure to
understand the Poetry, to estimate its worth and historical meaning,
we ask, as a quite fundamental inquiry: What that situation was? Thus
the History of a nation's Poetry is the essence of its History,
political, economic, scientific, religious. With all these the complete
Historian of a national Poetry will be familiar; the national
physiognomy, in its finest traits and through its successive stages
of growth, will be dear to him: he will discern the grand spiritual
Tendency of each period, what was the highest Aim and Enthusiasm of
mankind in each, and how one epoch naturally evolved itself from the
other. He has to record the highest Aim of a nation, in its successive
directions and developments; for by this the Poetry of the nation
modulates itself; this _is_ the Poetry of the nation." [Footnote:
Carlyle, _Miscellanies_, iii. 292, 293.]
Never has the task of the literary historian been more accurately
defined than in this passage; and never do we feel so bitterly the
gulf between the ideal and the actual performance, at which more than
one man of talent has since tried his hand, as when we read it. It
strikes perhaps the first note of Carlyle's lifelong war against
"Dryasdust". But it contains at least two other points on which it is
well for us to pause.
The first is the inseparable bond which Carlyle saw to exist between
the poetry of a nation and its history; the connection which inevitably
follows from the fact that both one and the other are the expression
of its character. This is a vein of thought that was first struck by
Vico and by Montesquieu; but it was left for the German philosophers,
in particular Fichte and Hegel, to see its full significance; and
Carlyle was the earliest writer in this country to make it his own.
It is manifest that the connection between the literature and the
history of a nation may be taken from either side. We may illustrate
its literature from its history, or its history from its literature.
It is on the necessity of the former study that Carlyle dwells in the
above. And in the light of later exaggerations, notably those of Taine,
it is well to remember, what Carlyle himself would have been the last
man to forget, that no man of genius is the creature of his time or
his surroundings; and, consequently, that when we have mastered all
the circumstances, in Carlyle's phrase the whole "situation", of the
poet, we are still only at the beginning of our task. We have still
to learn what his genius made out of its surroundings, and what the
eye of the poet discovered in the world of traditional belief; in other
words, what it was that made him a poet, what it was that he saw and
to which all the rest were blind. We have studied the soil; we have
yet to study the tree that grew from it and overshadows it. [Footnote:
Perhaps the most striking instances of this kind of criticism, both
on its strong and its weak side, are to be found in the writings of
Mazzini. See _Opere_, ii. and iv.]
In reversing the relation, in reading history by the light of
literature, the danger is not so great. The man of genius may, and
does, see deeper than his contemporaries; but, for that very reason,
he is a surer guide to the tendencies of his time than they. He is
above and beyond his time; but, just in so far as he is so, he sees
over it and through it. As Shakespeare defined it, his "end, both at
the first and now, was and is... to show the very age and body of the
time his form and pressure". Some allowance must doubtless be made for
the individuality of the poet; for the qualities in which he stands
aloof from his time, and in which, therefore, he must not be taken to
reflect it. But to make such allowance is a task not beyond the skill
of the practised critic; and many instances suggest themselves in which
it has, more or less successfully, been done. Witness not a few passages
in Michelet's _Histoire de France_, and some to be found in the various
works of Ranke. [Footnote: As instances may be cited, Michelet's remarks
on Rabelais (tome viii. 428-440) and on Moliere (tome xiii. 51-85):
or again Ranke's _Papste_, i. 486-503 (on Tasso and the artistic
tendencies of the middle of the sixteenth century): _Franzosische
Geschichte_, iii. 345-368 (the age of Louis XIV.).] Witness, again,
Hegel's illustration of the Greek conception of the family from the
_Antigone_ and the _Oedipus_ of Sophocles; or, if we may pass to a
somewhat different field, his "construction" of the French Revolution
from the religious and metaphysical ideas of Rousseau. [Footnote:
Hegel, _Phanomenologie des Geistes_, pp. 323-348, and pp. 426-436.]
So far as it employs literature to give the key to the outward history
of a nation or to the growth of its spiritual faith, it is clear that
the historical method ceases to be, in the strict sense of the word,
a literary instrument. It implies certainly that a literary judgment
has been passed; but, once passed, that judgment is used for ends that
lie altogether apart from the interests of literature. But it is idle
to consider that literature loses caste by lending itself to such a
purpose. It would be wiser to say that it gains by anything that may
add to its fruitfulness and instructiveness. In any case, and whether
it pleases us or no, this is one of the things that the historical
method has done for literature; and neither Carlyle, nor any other
thinker of the century, would have been minded to disavow it.
This brings us to the second point that calls for remark in the
foregoing quotation from Carlyle. Throughout he assumes that the matter
of the poet is no less important than his manner. And here again he
dwells on an aspect of literature that previous, and later, critics
have tended to throw into the shade. That Carlyle should have been led
to assert, and even at times to exaggerate, the claims of thought in
imaginative work was inevitable; and that, not only from his
temperament, but from those principles of his teaching that we have
already noticed. If the poetry of a nation be indeed the expression
of its spiritual aims, then it is clear that among those aims must be
numbered its craving to make the world intelligible to itself, and to
comprehend the working of God both within man and around him. Not that
Carlyle shows any disposition to limit "thought" to its more abstract
forms; on the contrary, it is on the sense of "music, love, and beauty"
that he specially insists. What he does demand is that these shall be
not merely outward adornments, but the instinctive utterance of a
deeper harmony within; that they shall be such as not merely to "furnish
a languid mind with fantastic shows and indolent emotions, but to
incorporate the everlasting reason of man in forms visible to his
sense, and suitable to it". [Footnote: Miscellanies, i. 297.] The
"reason" is no less necessary to poetry than its sensible form; and
whether its utterance be direct or indirect, that is a matter for the
genius of the individual poet to decide. _Gott und Welt_, we may be
sure Carlyle would have said, is poetry as legitimate as _Der Erlkonig_
or the songs of Mignon.
In this connection he more than once appeals to the doctrine of Fichte,
one of the few writers whom he was willing to recognize as his teachers.
"According to Fichte, there is a 'divine idea' pervading the visible
universe; which visible universe is indeed but its symbol and sensible
manifestation, having in itself no meaning, or even true existence
independent of it. To the mass of men this divine idea of the world
lies hidden; yet to discern it, to seize it, and live wholly in it,
is the condition of all genuine virtue, knowledge, freedom; and the
end, therefore, of all spiritual effort in every age. Literary men are
the appointed interpreters of this divine idea; a perpetual priesthood,
we might say, standing forth, generation after generation, as the
dispensers and living types of God's everlasting wisdom, to show it
in their writings and actions, in such particular form as their own
particular times require it in. For each age, by the law of its nature,
is different from every other age, and demands a different
representation of the divine idea, the essence of which is the same
in all; so that the literary man of one century is only by mediation
and reinterpretation applicable to the wants of another." [Footnote:
Ib., p. 69. There is a similar passage in the _Lectures on Heroes_
(Lec. v.), p. 145. In each case the reference is to Fichte's Lectures
_Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrten_ (1805), especially to lectures i.,
ii., and x,; Fichte's Werke, vi. 350-371, 439-447.]
The particular form of Fichte's teaching may still sound unfamiliar
enough. But in substance it has had the deepest influence on the aims
and methods of criticism; and, so far as England is concerned, this
is mainly due to the genius of Carlyle. Compare the criticism of the
last century with that of the present, and we at once see the change
that has come over the temper and instincts of Englishmen in this
matter.
When Johnson, or the reviewers of the next generation, quitted--as
they seldom did quit--the ground of external form and regularity and
logical coherence, it was only to ask: Is this work, this poem or this
novel, in conformity with the traditional conventions of respectability,
is it such as can be put into the hands of boys and girls? To them
this was the one ground on which the matter of literature, as apart
from the beggarly elements of its form, could come under the cognizance
of the critic. And this narrowness, a narrowness which belonged at
least in equal measure to the official criticism of the French,
naturally begot a reaction almost as narrow as itself. The cry of "art
for art's sake", a cry raised in France at the moment when Carlyle was
beginning his work in England, must be regarded as a protest against
the moralizing bigotry of the classical school no less than against
its antiquated formalities. The men who raised it were themselves not
free from the charge of formalism; but the forms they worshipped were
at least those inspired by the spontaneous genius of the artist, not
the mechanical rules inherited from the traditions of the past. Nor,
whatever may be the case with those who have taken it up in our own
day, must the cry be pressed too rigorously against the men of 1830.
The very man, on whom it was commonly fathered, was known to disavow
it; and certainly in his own works, in their burning humanity and their
"passion for reforming the world", was the first to set it at defiance.
[Footnote: See Hugo's _William Shakespeare_, p. 288.]
The moralist and the formalist still make their voice heard, and will
always do so. But since Carlyle wrote, it is certain that a wider, a
more fruitful, view of criticism has gained ground among us. And, if
it be asked where lies the precise difference between such a view and
that which satisfied the critics of an earlier day, the answer must
be, that we are no longer contented to rest upon the outward form of
a work of art, still less upon its conventional morality. We demand
to learn what is the idea, of which the outward form is the harmonious
utterance; and which, just because the form is individual, must itself
too have more or less of originality and power. We are resolved to
know what is the artist's peculiar fashion of conceiving life, what
is his insight, that which he has to teach us of God and man and nature.
"Poetry", said Wordsworth, "is the breath and finer spirit of all
knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance
of all Science." [Footnote: Preface to _Lyrical Ballads_ by Wordsworth:
Works, vi. 328.] And Wordsworth is echoed by Shelley. [Footnote: "Poetry
is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference
of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to
which all science must be referred."--Shelley, _Defence of Poetry_,
p. 33.] But it is again to Carlyle that we must turn for the explicit
application of these ideas to criticism:--
"Criticism has assumed a new form...; it proceeds on other principles,
and proposes to itself a higher aim. The grand question is not now a
question concerning the qualities of diction, the coherence of
metaphors, the fitness of sentiments, the general logical truth, in
a work of art, as it was some half-century ago among most critics;
neither is it a question mainly of a psychological sort, to be answered
by discovering and delineating the peculiar nature of the poet from
his poetry, as is usual with the best of our own critics at present:
[Footnote: A striking example of this method, the blending of criticism
with biography, is to be found in Carlyle's own Essay on Burns. The
significance of the method, in such hands as those of Carlyle, is that
it lays stress on the reality, the living force, of the poetry with
which it deals. It was the characteristic method of Sainte-Beuve; and
it may be questioned whether it did not often lead him far enough from
what can properly be called criticism;--into psychological studies,
spiced with scandal, or what a distinguished admirer is kind enough
to call "indiscretions". See M. Brunetiere, _L'Evolution des Genres_,
i. 236. This book is a sketch of the history of criticism in France,
and cannot be too warmly recommended to all who are interested in such
subjects,] but it is--not indeed exclusively, but inclusively of those
two other questions--properly and ultimately a question on the essence
and peculiar life of the poetry itself. The first of these questions,
as we see it answered, for instance, in the criticisms of Johnson and
Kames, relates, strictly speaking, to the _garment_ of poetry: the
second, indeed, to its _body_ and material existence, a much higher
point; but only the last to its _soul_ and spiritual existence, by
which alone can the body... be _informed_ with significance and rational
life. The problem is not now to determine by what mechanism Addison
composed sentences and struck out similitudes; but by what far finer
and more mysterious mechanism Shakespeare organized his dramas, and
gave life and individuality to his Ariel and his Hamlet? Wherein lies
that life; how have they attained that shape and individuality? Whence
comes that empyrean fire, which irradiates their whole being, and
pierces, at least in starry gleams, like a diviner thing, into all
hearts? Are these dramas of his not verisimilar only, but true; nay,
truer than reality itself, since the essence of unmixed reality is
bodied forth in them under more expressive symbols? What is this unity
of theirs; and can our deeper inspection discern it to be indivisible,
and existing by necessity, because each work springs, as it were, from
the general elements of all thought, and grows up therefrom into form
and expansion by its own growth? Not only who was the poet, and how
did he compose; but what and how was the poem, and why was it a poem
and not rhymed eloquence, creation and not figured passion? These are
the questions for the critic." [Footnote: Miscellanies, i. 60, 61
(1827).] And, a few pages later: "As an instance we might refer to
Goethe's criticism of Hamlet.... This truly is what may be called the
poetry of criticism: for it is in some sort also a creative art; aiming,
at least, to reproduce under a different shape the existing product
of the poet; painting to the intellect what already lay painted to the
heart and the imagination." [Footnote: Ib. p. 72.]
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 | 6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22