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A HISTORY OF CRITICISM
AND LITERARY TASTE

Ignorantium temeraria plerumque sunt judicia.

—Polycarp Leyser.

A History of Criticism

AND

LITERARY TASTE IN EUROPE

FROM THE EARLIEST TEXTS TO THE PRESENT DAY

BY

GEORGE SAINTSBURY

M.A. Oxon.; Hon. LL.D. Aberd.

PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

IN THREE VOLUMES

VOL. III.

MODERN CRITICISM

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS

EDINBURGH AND LONDON

MCMIV

PREFACE.

In the first volume of this History we had to summarise the critical work of nearly two thousand years; in the second, that of two whole centuries, with the major part of that of the third. In this we have had the apparently more manageable task of considering the whole work of the nineteenth century only, with the remanets (left over, not by accident but design) from the eighteenth and earlier. Yet it would be a poor compliment to the reader’s intelligence to waste time in explaining to him that the weight of the task is very little lightened by the lessened number of the years with which we have to deal. And the actual congestion of the volume ought all the less to be increased by repetition of things already said in former Prefaces, or by single-stick play with reviewers. Some points, which seemed to be really worth handling, I have dealt with in the text; the others I must let alone. I have little fear that many impartial and competent critics will dispute my claim to have surveyed the matter with the actual documents in hand, and not (save in the rare cases specified) from comments and go-betweens, from abstracts and translations; while such critics may even grant my “mass,” as some indeed have in their kindness granted it already, a fair share of “agitating mind,” under the conditions and with the limitations specified in the original preface. I may at least hope that I shall not be charged with

“la fretta

Che l’onestade ad ogni atto dismaga,”

in regard to a book which has been the actual work and companion of seven years in its composition, the result of more than seven-and-twenty in direct or indirect preparation.

After all it is, as Dante says elsewhere, for knowledge “not to prove but to set forth its subject,” and I do not see any further necessity to argue against the notion that Criticism, alone of the departments of literary energy, is to be denied a simple and straightforward History of its actual accomplishments. That is what I set myself to give. If other people want other things, let them go and do them. When the next History of Criticism is written it will doubtless be, if the author knows his business, a much better book than mine; but I may perhaps hope that his might be worse, and would certainly cost him more time and labour, were it not for this.

One final point I think it may be well to take up. A friend who is at once friendly, most competent, and of a different complexion in critical thought, objected to me that I “treat literature as something by itself.” I hastened to admit the impeachment, and to declare that this is the very postulate of my book. That literature can be absolutely isolated is, of course, not to be thought of; nothing human can be absolutely isolated from the general conditions of humanity, and from the other functions and operations thereof. But in that comparative isolation and separate presentation which Aristotle meant by his caution against confusion of kinds, I do thoroughly believe. With which profession of faith, and with all renewed acknowledgments to friends and helpers, especially to Professors Elton, Ker, and Raleigh for their kindness in reading the proofs of this volume, I must leave the book to its fate.[^[1]]

GEORGE SAINTSBURY.

Holmbury St Mary, Lammas 1904.

ADDENDA AND CORRIGENDA.

VOLUME I.

P. 63, note. “Ludhaus” should be “Sudhaus.” I received from Professor Gudeman of Cornell University, along with the notice of this misprint, and some other minor corrections which I gratefully acknowledge, a large number of much more important animadversions, for noticing which generally I may make it a pretext. I have the highest respect for their author: and it is quite natural that to him, as a professed and professional classical philologist, my treatment should in many respects seem superficial, or amateurish, or even positively wrong. But on at least one point we are, I fear, irreconcilable. Professor Gudeman thinks that Kaibel has “settled once for all” the question of the Περὶ Ὕψους,—has “given incontrovertible proof” that it cannot be later than the first century. Now, as an old student of Logic and of Law, and as a literary critic of thirty years’ standing, I absolutely deny the possibility of “settling once for all,” of “incontrovertible proof,” in this matter as in many others. The evidence is not extant, if it is existent. It may turn up, but it has not turned up yet. On this point—the point as to what constitutes literary evidence and what does not—I am well aware that I am at issue, perhaps with the majority, at any rate with a large number, of scholars in the ancient and modern languages; but I am quite content to remain so. As to another protest of Professor Gudeman’s against my neglect of the latest editions, I might refer him to Schopenhauer (v. infra, p. 567); but I will only say that for my purpose the date of an edition is of very little importance, and the spelling of “Gnæus” or “Cnæus,” “iuris” or “juris,” of no importance at all. I am sorry to appear stiff-necked in reference to criticisms made with many obliging expressions, but Ich kann nicht anders, as also in reference to Theophrastus, the Alexandrians, and others, whose substantive works are lost, but with whom Mr Gudeman would like me to deal in the usual manner of conjectural and inferential patchwork.

P. 280. I had not observed (oddly enough) that Clæris had crept into text and headings, where it has no business, and that “Fabius” was misprinted “Falinus,” till Professor Gudeman kindly brought both to my notice.

Pp. 410, 411. I owe to Dr Sandys (in Hermathena, vol. xii. p. 438) the removal of certain ignorances or forgetfulnesses here. “Solymarius,” as I most assuredly ought to have remembered, seeing that the information is in Warton, was a poem on the Crusades by Gunther, the author of the better known Ligurinus on Barbarossa, and the “Guntero” to whom I myself, in [vol. ii. p. 96], alluded in connection with Patrizzi. “Paraclitus” and “Sidonius” were two poems by Warnerius of Basle. I am even more indebted to Dr Sandys for a sheaf of privately communicated annotations on vol. i., of many of which I hope to avail myself in a future edition—if such a thing is called for.

VOLUME II.

P. 23 sq. A reference of Hallam’s (Literature of Europe, iii. 5, 76, 77) to the Miscellanies of Politian has led some critics, who apparently do not know the book itself, and have not even read Hallam carefully, to object to its omission here. Their authority might have saved them; for he very correctly describes these Miscellanies as “sometimes grammatical, but more frequently relating to obscure customs and mythological allusions.” In other words, the book—which I have read—is hardly, in my sense, critical at all.

P. 29, note 3, l. 3, for “ii.” read “i.” (The first vol. of Pope.)

P. 30, for “with his two great disciples” read “between his master Horace and his pupil Boileau.”

P. 38, note, for first sentence read: “But most of this latter part had been written in 1548-49, and all must have been before 1550, when T. died.”

P. 51, l. 7 from bottom, for “Rote” read “Rota.”

P. 67, l. 4, for “prose” read “poor.”

P. 80, note. When I wrote on Castelvetro I was not aware that the Commentary on Dante (at least that on Inf., Cantos i.-xxix.) had been recovered and published by Signor Giovanni Franciosi (Modena, 1886) in a stately royal 4to (which I have now read, and possess), with the owl and the pitcher, but without the Kekrika, and without the proper resolution in the owl’s countenance. This may be metaphysically connected with the fact that the editor is rather unhappy about his author, and tells us that he was long in two minds about sending him out at last to the world. He admires Castelvetro’s boldness, scholarship, intellect; but thinks him sadly destitute of reverence for Dante, and deplores his “lack of lively and cheerful sense of the Beautiful.” If it were not that my gratitude to the man who gives me a text seals my mouth as to everything else, I should be a little inclined to cry “Fudge!” at this. Nobody would expect from any Renaissance scholar, and least of all from Castelvetro, “unction,” mysticism, rapture at the things that give us rapture in Dante. All the more honour to him that, as in the case of Petrarch, he thought it worth while to bestow on that vernacular, which too many Renaissance scholars despised, the same intense desire to understand, the same pains, the same “taking seriously,” which he showed towards the ancients. This is the true reverence: the rest is but “leather and prunella.”

P. 87, l. 5, for “ideals” read “idols.”

P. 107. Some time after vol. ii. was published I came across (in the catalogues of Mr Voynich, who might really inscribe on these documents for motto

“Das Unzulängliche

Hier wird’s Ereignis”)

quite a nest of Zinanos, mostly written about that year 1590, which seems to have been this curious writer’s most active time; and I bought two of them as specially appurtenant to our subject. One is a Discorso della Tragedia, appended (though separately paged and dedicated) to the author’s tragedy of Almerigo; the other Le Due Giornate della Ninfa overo del Diletto e delle Muse, all printed by Bartholi, at Reggio, and the two prose books or booklets dated 1590. The Discorso is chiefly occupied with an attack on the position that Tragedy (especially according to Aristotle) ought to be busied with true subjects only. The Giornate (which contain another reference to Patrizzi) deal—more or less fancifully, but in a manner following Boethius, which is interesting at so late a date—with philosophy and things in general, rather than with literature.

P. 140, l. 3 from bottom, delete “of” before Catullus.

P. 162, l. 17. “Thomas” should have been “George,” as it appears correctly elsewhere: and “fourth” in the note should be “quarto” (“4th,” “4to”).

P. 191. “Topmost Verulam” should, of course, be “large-browed Verulam”—a curious instance of the tricks played by memory. I know The Palace of Art so well as to see it all printed before me; but the treacherous mind’s eye must have slipped from the epithet of the first line, “topmost oriels,” to the name of the third.

P. 248. In the line beginning O, débile raison! “lors” has been misprinted for “ores,” thereby spoiling the metre.

P. 263, l. 12, for “Beni—Pacius” read “Beni and Pazzi (Pacius) as well as of Heinsius.”

P. 301, note, “Grands Écrivains Français” should be “G. E. de la France.”

P. 319, note. Gibert is, it seems, appended to some edd. of Baillet.

P. 322, bk. IV. chap. i. I ought, perhaps, to have noticed in this context a book rather widely spread—Sorel’s De La Connaissance des Bons Livres, Paris, 1671. It contains some not uninteresting things on literature in general, on novels, poetry, comedy, &c., on the laws of good speaking and writing, on the “new language of French.” But it is, on the whole, as anybody acquainted with any part of the voluminous work of the author of Francion would expect, mainly not disagreeable nor ignorant chat—newspaper work before the newspaper.

P. 350. The opposition of the two “doctors” is perhaps too sharply put.

P. 376, note, for “Schenck” read “Strunk.”

P. 436. I should like to add as a special “place” for Dennis’s criticism, his comparatively early Remarks on Prince Arthur and Virgil (title abbreviated), London, 1696. It is, as it stands, of some elaboration; but its author tells us that he “meant” to do things which would have made it an almost complete Poetic from his point of view. It is pervaded with that refrain of “this ought to be” and “that must have been” to which I have referred in the text; and bristles with purely arbitrary preceptist statements, such as that Criticism cannot be ill-natured because Good Nature in man cannot be contrary to Justice and Reason; that a man must not like what he ought not to like—a doctrine underlying, of course, the whole Neo-classic teaching, and not that only; almost literally cropping up in Wordsworth; and the very formulation, in categorical-imperative, of La Harpe’s “monstrous beauty.” The book (in which poet and critic are very comfortably and equally yoked together) is full of agreeable things; and may possibly have suggested one of Swift’s most exquisite pieces of irony in its contention that Mr Blackmore’s Celestial Machines are directly contrary to the Doctrine of the Church of England.

P. 449, l. 1, for “is more curious” read “gives rather more.”

P. 478, l. 12 from bottom, for “and in some cases” read “in the lady’s case.”

P. 546. Denina. This author is a good instance of the things which the reader sometimes rather reproachfully demands, when the writer would only too fain have supplied them. I could write more than a page with satisfaction on Denina’s Discorso sopra le Vicende della Litteratura, which, rather surprisingly, underwent its second edition in Glasgow at the Foulis press (1763), and which not only deals at large with the subject in an interesting manner, but accepts the religio loci by dealing specially with Scottish literature. But, once more, this is for a fourth volume—or even a fifth—things belonging to the Thinkable-Unthinkable.

P. 550, note. Something like “pie” has been made of this. It should read: “This Gallicism was not universal. As Mr Ticknor,” &c.

P. 554, l. 3. For the Paragone see the present volume under Conti, Antonio.

VOLUME III.

P. 152, [note], l. 6 from bottom, for “condenses” read “condemns.”

P. [173], l. 11, for “he” read “Spenser.”

P. [208], ll. 1, 2, for “moonlight” read “moonshine.”

P. 254, [note], add, “as well as sometimes on Southey.”

P. [267, l. 4]. I am glad to know that Blake’s poems at least, and at last, are being edited more than competently.

P. 283, [note 2]. I accepted too hastily the statement that T. Wright contributed to the Retrospective Review proper. Dates (see Index) will show that he could not have done so, though he might to the so-called “Third” series.

P. [308], l. 8 from bottom, for “Mestre” read “Maistre.”

P. [312], l. 24, for “nor” read “or.”

P. [357], for “Walder” read “Wälder.”

P. 357, [sidenote], for “Geschmack” read “Geschmacks.”

P. [471], l. 1, for “more” read “so.”

P. [488]. Perhaps the most remarkable example of this parody-criticism is Aytoun’a Firmilian, an astonishing satire-judgment, not merely of the actual “Spasmodics,” but of the long-subsequent class, all over Europe, of whom Dr Ibsen is the chief.

CONTENTS.

BOOK VII.

THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY AND RETROSPECTIVE.

CHAPTER II.

THE RALLY OF GERMANY—LESSING.

CHAPTER III.

THE ENGLISH PRECURSORS.

CHAPTER IV.

DIDEROT AND THE FRENCH TRANSITION.

CHAPTER V.

ÆSTHETICS AND THEIR INFLUENCE.

CHAPTER VI.

THE STUDY OF LITERATURE.

BOOK VIII.

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF CRITICISM.

CHAPTER I.

WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE: THEIR COMPANIONS AND ADVERSARIES.

CHAPTER II.

MIL-HUIT-CENT-TRENTE.

CHAPTER III.

GOETHE AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.

CHAPTER IV.

BOOK IX.

THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY.

CHAPTER I.

THE SUCCESSORS OF SAINTE-BEUVE.

CHAPTER II.

BETWEEN COLERIDGE AND ARNOLD.

CHAPTER III.

ENGLISH CRITICISM—1860-1900.

CHAPTER IV.

LATER GERMAN CRITICISM.

CHAPTER V.

REVIVALS AND COMMENCEMENTS.

CONCLUSION.

APPENDIX I.

THE OXFORD CHAIR OF POETRY.

APPENDIX II.

AMERICAN CRITICISM.

BOOK VII
THE DISSOLVENTS OF NEO-CLASSICISM

“May there not be something in the Gothic Romance peculiarly suited to the views of a genius and to the ends of poetry? And may not the philosophic moderns have gone too far in their perpetual ridicule and contempt of it?”—Hurd.

“Quelquefois un besoin de philosopher gâte tout.”—Joubert.

CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY AND RETROSPECTIVE.

[SCOPE OF THE VOLUME]—[THE TERM MODERN]—[THE ORIGINS]—[NEED OF CAUTION HERE]—[CASE OF BUTLER ON RYMER, DENHAM]—[AND BENLOWES]—[OF ADDISON AND OTHERS]—[OF LA BRUYÈRE AND “TOUT EST DIT”]—[OF FÉNELON AND GRAVINA]—[OF DRYDEN AND FONTENELLE]—[THE MORE EXCELLENT WAY].

Scope of the volume.

The present volume takes the work of no more than one century, the nineteenth, as a whole; but, according to our plan, casts back to the eighteenth, and even earlier, in order to deal with those dissidents or pioneers who then laid the foundation of the chief critical performances of the nineteenth itself.

The term Modern.

For this work—foundation and superstructure—there is no more convenient and suitable appellation than “Modern,” used neither in the complimentary and rather question-begging sense which has recently been attached to it,[^[2]] nor in the more slighting one of Shakespeare, but with a merely accurate and chronological connotation. Some would call this criticism “Romantic”; but that term, in addition to a certain vagueness, has the drawbacks both of question-begging and of provocation. There is no other that has the slightest claim to enter into competition, though we may have in passing to refer to such pretenders as “Æsthetic,” “Dogmatic,” “Scientific,” and what not.

The term “Modern” has, moreover,—so long as it is dissociated from any such futile belittling of “Ancient” as was implied in its use during the Quarrel,—the great advantage of keeping a secondary, but very convenient and in no way objectionable, opposition to “Ancient” itself. We have seen that, with much intelligent and judicious, there was more unintelligent and corrupt, following of the ancients during the period which we surveyed in the last volume: and that there was a still more dangerous and hurtful tendency to disfranchise modern literature as an equal source with ancient for the discovery of critical truths. Now, if there is a point wholly to be counted for righteousness, to at least the better part of the criticism which has prevailed for the last hundred years, and was a militant force for at least fifty years earlier, it is this taking into consideration of “Modern” literature, not to the exclusion of “Ancient,” but on even terms with it. It is no doubt much easier to say nullo discrimine habebo[^[3]] than to carry it out, especially as a man grows older. But it is the cardinal principle of “Modern” criticism that the most modern of works is to be judged, not by adjustment to anything else, but on its own merits—that the critic must always behave as if the book he takes from its wrapper might be a new Hamlet or a new Waverley,—or something as good as either, but more absolutely novel in kind than even Waverley,—however shrewdly he may suspect that it is very unlikely to be any such thing.

The origins.

The actual investigation of the last volume brought us down to (and in La Harpe’s case a little beyond) the close of the eighteenth century itself, and showed us the final stages of the Neo-Classic dynasty, which still, in all European countries except Germany, reigned, and even appeared to govern; but which, not merely in Germany but to some extent also in England, was on the point of having the sceptre wrenched out of its hands. We had traced this critical system from its construction or reconstruction by the Italians of the sixteenth century onwards; we saw its merits and its defects. And we saw likewise that, in the usual general, gradual, incalculable way, opposition to it, conscious or unconscious, began to grow up at different times and in different places. This opposition was a plant of early but slow and fitful growth in England, rather later but more vigorous and rapid in Germany; while in the Southern countries it hardly grew at all, and in France was cruelly attacked and kept down, if not exactly extirpated, by the weeding-hook of authority.

Need of caution here.

But it does not follow that we can put the finger on this and that person as having “begun” the new movement. Such an opinion is always tempting to not too judicious inquirers, and there has been no lack of books on Le Romantisme des Classiques and the like. The fact, of course, simply is that everything human exists essentially or potentially in the men of every time; and that you may not only find books in the running brooks but (what appears at first more contradictory) dry stones in them: while, on the other hand, founts of water habitually gush from the midst of the driest rock. Indagation of the kind is always treacherous, and has to be conducted with a great deal of circumspection.

Case of Butler on Rymer, Denham,

It would be difficult to find an author who illustrates this danger and treachery better than Butler, whom some may have been surprised not to find in the last volume. The author of Hudibras was born not long after Milton, and nearly twenty years before Dryden, who outlived him by the same space. His great poem did not give much room for critical utterances in literature; but the Genuine Remains[^[4]] are full of it in separate places, both verse and prose. Take these singly, and you may make Butler out to be, not merely a critic, but half a dozen critics. In perhaps the best known of his minor pieces, the Repartees between Cat and Puss, he satirises “Heroic” Plays, and is therefore clearly for “the last age,” as also in the savage and admirable “On Critics who Judge Modern Plays precisely by the Rules of the Ancients,” which has been reasonably, or certainly, thought to be directed against Rymer’s blasphemy of Beaumont and Fletcher, published two years before Butler’s death. The satirist’s references and illustrations (as in that to “the laws of good King Howel’s days”) are sometimes too Caroline to be quotable; but the force and sweep of his protest is simply glorious. The Panegyric on Sir John Denham is chiefly personal; but if Butler had been convinced that Cooper’s Hill was the ne plus ultra of English poetry he could hardly have written it: and though the main victim of “To a Bad Poet” has not been identified,[^[5]] the lines—

“For so the rhyme be at the verse’s end,

No matter whither all the rest does tend”—

could scarcely have been written except against the new poetry. The “Pindaric Ode on Modern Critics” is chiefly directed against the general critical vice of snarling, and the passages on critics and poets in the Miscellaneous Thoughts follow suit. But if we had only the verse Remains we should be to some extent justified in taking Butler, if not for a precursor of the new Romanticism, at any rate for a rather strenuous defender of the old.

and Benlowes.

But turn to the Characters. Most of these that deal with literature are in the general vein which the average seventeenth-century character-writer took from Theophrastus, though few put so much salt of personal wit into this as Butler. In “A Small Poet” the earlier pages might be aimed at almost anybody from Dryden himself (whom Butler, it is said, did not love) down to Flecknoe. But there is only one name mentioned in the piece; and that name, which is made the object of a furious and direct attack, lightened by some of the brightest flashes of Butler’s audacious and acrid humour, is the name of Edward Benlowes.[^[6]] Now, that Benlowes is a person taillable et corvéable à merci et à miséricorde by any critical oppressor, nobody who has read him can deny. He is as extravagant as Crashaw without so much poetry, and as Cleveland without so much cleverness. But he is a poet, and a “metaphysical” poet (as Butler was himself in another way), and an example, though a rather awful example, of that “poetic fury” which makes Elizabethan poetry. Yet Butler is more savage with him than with Denham.

The fact is that Butler’s criticism is merely the occasional determination of a man of active genius and satiric temper to matters literary. Absurdities strike him from whatever school they come; and he lashes them unmercifully whensoever and whencesoever they present themselves. But he has no general creed: he speaks merely to his brief as public prosecutor of the ridiculous, and also as a staunch John Bull. If he had been writing at the time when his Remains were first actually published, it is exceedingly probable that he would have “horsed” Gray as pitilessly as he horses Benlowes; if he had been writing sixty years later still, that he would have been as “savage and Tartarly” to Keats and Shelley, or seventy years later, to Tennyson, as the Quarterly itself. This is not criticism: and we must look later and more carefully before we discern any real revolution in literary taste.

Of Addison and others.

It is even very unsafe to attempt to discover much definite and intentional precursorship in Addison, who was born sixty years after Butler. There is no need to repeat what has been said of what seems to me misconception as to his use of the word Imagination: nor is this the point which is principally aimed at here. But the more we examine Addison’s critical utterances, whether we agree with Hurd or not that they are “shallow,” we shall, I think, be forced to conclude that any depth they may have has nothing to do with Romanticism. Addison likes Milton, no doubt, because he is a sensible man and a good critic, as a general reason. But when we come to investigate special ones we shall find that he likes him rather because he himself is a Whig, a pupil of Dryden, and a religious man—nay, perhaps even because he really does think that Milton carries out the classical idea of Epic—than because of Milton’s mystery, his “romantic vague,” his splendour of diction and verse and imagery. So, too, the admiration of Chevy Chase is partly a whim or a joke, partly determined by the fact that at that time the Whigs were the “Jingoes,” and that Chevy Chase is very pugnacious and very patriotic. Nowhere, from the articles on True and False Wit to the Imagination papers, do we find any real sense of unrest or dissatisfaction with the accepted theory of poetry. There is actually more in Prior, with all his profanation of the Nut-browne Maid and his distortions of the Spenserian stanza.

Of La Bruyère and “Tout est dit.”

So if we look backward a little, and a little southward, we shall, despite the praise which we were able to accord to some critical dicta of La Bruyère, find very little reason to regard that admirable master of Addison himself as a “Romantic before Romanticism.” He is a sensible man with a fairly catholic taste: but that is all. Nay, his principle of Tout est dit, though not quite irresistibly in practice, almost certainly leads to the conclusion that the oldest writers are likely to be the best, and to the habit of extending to new writers, or to the mass of precedent writing, a rather lukewarm welcome and a distinctly prejudiced criticism. In a certain sense, no doubt, all has been said long ago—in gist, in matter, in subject. But then in literature, and especially in poetry, there is so much which is beside the gist, that is superadded to the matter, that does not depend upon the subject! The thoughts suggested by birth and death, by dawn and sunset, by a blush and a smile, by the red wine when it moveth itself aright in the glass, and the green sea stretching from the white cliff-foot, and the “huge and thoughtful night,” will always be at bottom and in essence the same. But he must be a blind person who does not see that at any moment any poet who can may give them an entirely new form and cast and presentation. In this sense—and it is the sense of the best “modern” criticism—“tout est à dire.”

Of Fénelon and Gravina.

We may seem to have got into an impasse: nor will such excellent persons as Fénelon, and to go to yet another country, Gravina,[^[7]] help us out of it. Fénelon indeed had, as we saw, some striking resipiscences, some individual pronouncements which, if they were as unaccompanied by others as they are disconnected from them, would be very promising indeed. But this very company that they do not keep disestates them unluckily: and you cannot doubt, as you read Télémaque, that if the world had had to depend upon its author for leadership in the migration from the critical House of Bondage, it would never have got over the Red Sea, if it had even started on the journey. Gravina, to that general perspicacity and equity which distinguishes all these doubtful cases, added an unusually early and thorough appreciation of Greek, and the advantage, peculiar to an Italian, of having an actual classical period of modern literature extending over four entire centuries: of all which he made good use. But it is at least very difficult to discover, either in his original work or in the general trend of his critical utterances, any dissatisfaction with the prevailing direction of criticism in his time, or any determination to take a wider outlook.

Of Dryden and Fontenelle.

Indeed, putting aside Dryden (whose method led straight to the Promised Land, and whose utterances show that he occasionally saw it afar off) as one who came too early to feel any very conscious desire of setting out on the pilgrimage of discovery, Fontenelle is perhaps the very earliest critic of distinction who shows a decided restlessness. And he, as we have sufficiently set forth, has too much of the critical Puck about him to be a safe guide for the wayfaring man. In fact, “Lord! what fools these mortals be!” is an exclamation which is always hovering on the door of his lips, and sometimes all but escapes it.

The more excellent way.

But this history must have been told to very little purpose if readers still expect sharp and decided turns, assignable to definite hours and particular men, in the evolutions of criticism. Rather has it been one of our special lessons—it would be uncritical to say our special objects—to prove that these things are not to be expected. It is a part of the Neo-Classic error itself to assume some definite goal of critical perfection towards which all things tend, and which, when you have attained it, permits you to take no further trouble except of imitation and repetition. Just as you never know what new literary form the human genius may take, and can therefore never lay down any absolute and final schedule of literary kinds, and of literary perfection within these kinds, so you can never shape the set of the prevalent taste, and you can never do much more than give the boat the full benefit of the current by dexterous rowing and steering. Indeed, as we have seen, the taste in criticism and the taste in creation unite, or diverge, or set dead against each other in a manner quite incalculable, and only interpretable as making somehow for the greater glory of Literature. Somewhere about the time to which we have harked back—the meeting of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or a little later, or much later, as the genius of different countries and persons would have it—a veering of the wind, an eddy of the current, did take place. And it is of this that we have to give account in the present Book—of the consequences of it that we have to give an account in the present volume.

[1]. For uniformity’s sake I have kept the title “to the present day.” That day, however, was the day of the first volume, 1900; and should the book reappear it will read “to the end of the nineteenth century.”

[2]. Especially in the phrase “the Modern Spirit”—a Geist who seems to have received the blessing of a good opinion of himself, and to have no inclination to “deny” it.

[3]. As I have known this quotation challenged, I may observe that there is a Tenth book of the Æneid as well as a First.

[4]. Published, not entirely, by Thyer of Manchester in 1759 (2 vols.). A handsome reprint of 1827 gives only a few of the prose “Characters”: more of these, but not the whole, were given by Mr H. Morley in his Character-Writing of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1891). The verse remains may be found in Chalmers or in the Aldine (vol. ii., London, 1893).

[5]. A blank rhyme indicates “Howard”—whether Edward or Robert does not matter. But another blank requires a trisyllable to fill it.

[6]. Benlowes is a warning to “illustrated poets.” It pleased him to have his main book (Theophila, or Love’s Sacrifice: London, 1652, folio) splendidly decorated by Hollar and others; and the consequence is that copies of it are very rare, and generally mutilated when found. I congratulate myself on having first read Benlowes and William Woty, a minor poet of a century later, on the same day. To study Theophila and The Blossoms of Helicon in succession is quite a critical gaudy.

[7]. I do not make Vico my Italian example, for the same reasons which induced me to postpone him to this volume. See inf., chap. v.

CHAPTER II.
THE RALLY OF GERMANY—LESSING.

[STARTING-POINT OF THIS VOLUME]—[NEO-CLASSIC COMPLACENCY AND EXCLUSIVENESS ILLUSTRATED FROM CALLIÈRES]—[BÉAT DE MURALT]—[HIS ATTENTION TO ENGLISH]—[AND TO FRENCH]—[GERMAN CRITICISM PROPER]—[A GLANCE BACKWARD]—[THEOBALD HOECK]—[WECKHERLIN AND OTHERS]—[WEISE, WERNICKE, WERENFELS, ETC.]—[SOME MUTINEERS: GRYPHIUS AND NEUMEISTER]—[GOTTSCHED ONCE MORE]—[BODMER AND BREITINGER]—[THE ‘DISKURSE DER MALER’]—[GRADUAL DIVERGENCE FROM THEIR STANDPOINT; KÖNIG ON “TASTE”]—[MAIN WORKS OF THE SWISS SCHOOL]—[BREITINGER’S ‘KRITISCHE DICHTKUNST,’ ETC.]—[BODMER’S ‘VON DEM WUNDERBAREN,’ ETC.]—[SPECIAL CRITICISMS OF BOTH]—[BODMER’S VERSE CRITICISM]—[THEIR LATER WORK IN MEDIÆVAL POETRY, AND THEIR GENERAL POSITION]—[THE “SWISS-SAXON” QUARREL]—[THE ELDER SCHLEGELS: JOHANN ADOLF]—[JOHANN ELIAS]—[MOSES MENDELSSOHN]—[LESSING]—[SOME CAUTIONS RESPECTING HIM]—[HIS MORAL OBSESSION; ON ‘SOLIMAN THE SECOND’]—[THE STRICTURES ON ARIOSTO’S PORTRAIT OF ALCINA]—[‘HAMLET’ AND ‘SEMIRAMIS’]—[THE ‘COMTE D’ESSEX,’ ‘RODOGUNE,’ ‘MÉROPE’]—[LESSING’S GALLOPHOBIA]—[AND TYPOMANIA]—[HIS STUDY OF ANTIQUITY MORE THAN COMPENSATING]—[AND ESPECIALLY OF ARISTOTLE]—[WITH WHOM HE COMBINES DIDEROT]—[HIS DEFICIENCIES IN REGARD TO MEDIÆVAL LITERATURE]—[THE CLOSE OF THE ‘DRAMATURGIE’ AND ITS MORAL]—[MISCELLANEOUS SPECIMENS OF HIS CRITICISM]—[HIS ATTITUDE TO ÆSCHYLUS AND ARISTOPHANES]—[FREDERIC THE GREAT]—‘[DE LA LITTÉRATURE ALLEMANDE]’.

Starting point of this volume.

It should not be necessary to make much further observation of the linking kind between this volume and the last; but a few more words may be desirable on the fact that from a very early period of the eighteenth century itself there were perceptible underground mutterings of revolt; and that, steadily or fitfully, another current of criticism, fed likewise by springs underground, Neo-Classic complacency and exclusiveness illustrated from Callières. made its appearance side by side with, but running counter to, the orthodox, yet almost entirely neglected by orthodoxy. Orthodoxy indeed, in its special home, would have specially emphasised the scornful question, “Can any good thing come out of Germany?” The locus of Bouhours is hackneyed, and has been quoted already (ii. 315). But nothing can better show the state of complacent fatuity to which Neo-Classicism, plus national conceit, had reduced the French at the close of the seventeenth century, than the “Laws of Apollo,” which, in the twelfth book of the treatise which has the honour to have given suggestions to Swift, Callières[^[8]] represents the god as promulgating to appease the strife of Ancients and Moderns. Les trois nations polies are the French, the Italians, and the Spaniards: all others are more or less barbarians. These barbarians (including not only the Germans, but the nation which had to its credit Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden, with others who, if lesser than these, were the equals of the two or three best of France) may be allowed to write Latin as a concession to the literary incompetence of their own tongues; but the polished nations should not do so. Homer is the greatest of all poets, and Virgil the second; the third place had better remain vacant. No witchcraft or romance of chivalry is to be admitted into poetry. Acrostics and anagrams are to be banished from it. Et patati et patata. Apollo himself could at the time hardly have got into the head of Callières, not merely academician but diplomatist as he was, what an utterly ridiculous figure he would cut to all but the most philosophical and tolerant of posterity. Yet be it remembered that Gottsched held no different creed nearly fifty years after in Germany itself, and La Harpe no very different one more than a hundred years after in France; while among ourselves, and halfway between these two, even such iconoclasts in other ways as Adam Smith and David Hume would have made very little difficulty about accepting it. The overthrow of a belief of such prevalence, such toughness, such duration, cannot have been achieved but by agencies widespreading, patient, various: and it is these agencies that we must now investigate.

The Béat de Muralt.

Not very many years later than the Histoire Poétique there was written, in French also, but not by a Frenchman, a document curiously different in tenor, though by no means ostensibly, or indeed to any great extent really, breaking with Neo-Classicism. The Swiss—as their peculiar position, not merely politically in the midst of Europe, but racially as overlapping and overlapped by France, Germany, and Italy, made almost necessary—had begun early to take a sort of bystander-view of European Literature. The excellent essay of Herr Hamelius[^[9]] was perhaps the first recent document to attract much attention to the Lettres sur les Anglois et sur les Francois of Béat Louis de Muralt. Muralt was a French-writing but a German-speaking Swiss; he says (rather to his disadvantage as a critic, but usefully on this head) that “Houmour” is “ce que nous appellons Einfall,” and what the French mean by “dire de bons mots,” from which we can at least see that the excellent M. de Muralt had not the faintest notion of what Humour specifically is. He travelled in England during the last decade of the seventeenth century; but his Letters upon us and the French were not published till 1727, in 12mo, with no imprint of place. They acquired, after the fashion of the time, a sort of “snow-ball” increment of comment by apologists (a “Lord,” of course, for England), and are chiefly valuable as symptoms. His attention to English, Muralt is, as we should expect, much more occupied with manners than with letters; and in fact, as regards English, deals in detail with hardly any literary kind save comedy. Here (as the orbis terrarum often remarks of our alter orbis) he thinks that we have too good an opinion of ourselves: “Sur toutes sortes de sujets il faut qu’ils se préfèrent au reste du monde.” He thinks Corneille and Molière (whom he would specially avenge) ill-treated by the English dramatists who borrow from them. He accuses Dryden—not by name, but transparently and truly as “the most famous of their poets”—of stealing from Corneille and abusing him; neither of which articles is just. On the other hand, he is certainly too complimentary (though Saint-Evremond[^[10]] was responsible for the exaggeration) in calling Shadwell “one of the most famous” of the same poets; and we may abandon The Miser to his arrows. He admits that our literature outside the theatre is “full of good sense and originality,” but says little about it. He has himself the good sense to object to Louis Quatorze dress, for Romans and Carthaginians, on both stages.

and to French.

He is much more copious on French Literature; and his judgments here are more interesting, because he is at a more original angle. Much of his outlook is purely Neo-Classic. He has a thorough belief in Kinds; he has abundance to say “in the aibstract” about bon sens and bel esprit; and for one writing so late he is surprisingly copious on Voiture and Sarrasin and Balzac. He thinks Rabelais quite “beneath humanity,”—having indeed, here and elsewhere, a good deal of solid German morals about him. The most surprising thing is his attitude to Boileau, whom he pronounces to have plenty of sense and art, but no great genius. This attitude, and the taking of English literature into serious literary consideration for almost the first time on the Continent, since Lilius Giraldus,[^[11]] are the things which, from the literary side, deserve most note in Muralt.[^[12]] And the latter—not by any means merely from that point of view of “preferring ourselves to others”—is the most important of all. So long as general critical attention to modern literature was confined to French, Italian, and Spanish, all intimately connected with and indebted to each other, and all descended from Latin, no real “fermentation” could take place. The English yeast set it going at once, in Germany as elsewhere.

Muralt, however, was an exceptional and cosmopolitan sort of person, and the note which he sounded was not immediately taken up, though it is very noteworthy that when it was, it was again in Switzerland.

German Criticism proper.

The account which we gave of German criticism proper before 1700, and of that part of it which belongs to the Neo-Classic dispensation after that date, was avowedly scanty: the reasons for this apparent stinginess being twofold—the comparative paucity of the materials, and even more the comparative unimportance of almost all those that do exist. But we undertook in a manner to make good the seeming slight; and it is our present business to do so.[^[13]]

A glance backward.

We saw that up to the eighteenth century, and indeed nearly up to the end of its first quarter, German criticism had done very little, and that it was never to do much in the direction of “correctness.” Indirectly, however, in the later half of the seventeenth century, when the furia of the Thirty Years’ War had in a manner sunk to rest, something was done in the way of preliminary fermentation both by the late inoculation of Germany with the Euphuist-Marinist-Gongorist measles, which is there identified chiefly with the names of Lohenstein and Hoffmanswaldau, and by reaction against this,[^[14]] while something further has, at least by some, been considered to have been done by Gottsched himself.

Theobald Hoeck.

The works of this period are not, I believe, very common even in Germany, but the unwearied intelligence with which the British Museum has been managed for the last two generations has supplied English readers with a very fair, though not yet quite satisfying, proportion of the most important. The earliest of these authors—a predecessor of Opitz even, who might, and perhaps should, have been mentioned in the last volume—was Theobald Hoeck, or as he is called on the title-page of his quaintly-named Poems,[^[15]] Othoblad Oeckhe. Hoeck makes the nineteenth chapter of his “Fair Field of Flowers” an ode of fourteen five-lined stanzas, Von Art der Deutschen Poeterey, which perhaps ranks next to, and certainly marks the new departure from, the vernacular Meister-song Arts referred to above.[^[16]] But the style and the gist of the piece are, I think, fairly enough shown in the following stanza—

“Warumb sollen wir denn unser Teutsche Sprache[n]

In gwisse Form und Gsatz nit auch mögen machen,

Und Deutsches Carmen schreiben,

Die Kunst zu treiben

Bey Mann und Weiben?”

But it is hard for the poet when he has both metre and rhyme to look to—when

“Mann muss die Pedes gleich so wol scandiren

Den dactylum und auch Spondaeum rieren,”

and at the same time see that his rhymes are proper. The thing is interesting as exhibiting modern German poetry in the go-cart with laudable anxiety on the part of the infant to go rightly.

Weckherlin and others.

The chief ferment, however, of German poetic and criticism of a kind did not come till towards the middle of the century and when the Thirty Years’ War was dying down (though it is thought to have been to some extent determined by the sojourning of at least one German of letters[^[17]] in England quite in the earlier stage of that convulsion): and it took final colour from French rather than from English, partly in the form of Pléiade and Louis Treize ampullæ, partly in that of “correctness” (as far as the Germans could reach it) à la Boileau. The earlier inquirers, such as Schottel, Zesen, Buchner, were painful and estimable rhetoricians, anxious to get German into good scholastic ways. Schottel, in his Teutsche Sprachkunst[^[18]] and other works, is quite of the old fashion in compounding rhetoric-poetic-composition books with dictionary. Zesen’s Hochdeutscher Helikon[^[19]] is an extremely fat little book, the component parts of which are separately paged, and sometimes not paged at all, and which discusses with the utmost care the terms of the art in metre, rhyme, stanza-building, &c., gives rhyming dictionaries first of masculine then of feminine rhymes, supplies plenteous example-verse, and finishes with a De Poetica of a more general kind. Augustine Buchner[^[20]] is still older-fashioned, and reminds one of the sixteenth-century Italians in his little tractate on the office and aim of poetry, its kinds, ornaments, &c.

Weise, Wernicke, Werenfels, &c.

These are hardly at all critical; they are rhetorical-preceptist. But the later men, such as Weise, Wernicke, and Werenfels, exhibit the revolt against the school of conceit and bombast which in the later part of the seventeenth century radiates from France all over Europe. Christian Weise, Professor Poeseos as he called himself, degrades Poetry in his Curiose Gedanken neben Deutschen Versen (1691) to the position of a mere ancilla of Rhetoric, and seems to have anticipated Shaftesbury in making “ridicule the test of truth.” His namesake, Wernicke, in the “Ad Lectorem” of his Poetische Versuche,[^[21]] extols Longinus, and makes “polite” remarks on Lohenstein and Hoffmanswaldau. But the German manifesto against the florid is the Dissertatio de Meteoris Orationis appended to the De Logomachiis Eruditorum of Samuel Werenfels, which appeared at Amsterdam within the eighteenth century,[^[22]] dedicated to no less a person than Gilbert Burnet, but presents the matter of two theses composed fourteen and ten years earlier. The De Logomachiis itself has a certain interest for us, as it hits among other things at frivolous and verbal criticism; but the Dissertatio is all ours. Werenfels, as usual basing himself upon Longinus, without the slightest suspicion that he will be undone by his reliance, distinguishes between ὕψηλα and μετέωρα—our old friends the True and the False Sublime. He admits the importance of Imagination, but will have it strictly ruled by Judgment, and makes another distinction (not without acuteness) between good Figures and bad. He harks as far back as Longolius and the Ciceronians for examples of literary will-worship; but is evidently thinking throughout rather of gorgeousness than of over-precision, and directs his attacks specially at Claudian among the ancients, though he names Gongora among the moderns. His final decision is that Italians, Spaniards, and Germans are all painfully given to the meteoric; the French are saniores.[^[23]]

Some mutineers: Gryphius and Neumeister.

The germaner spirit of Germany, however,—to speak “meteorically” and in character,—was by no means quenched by these douches of correctness, and continued to assert itself at intervals between the practice of the Silesians and the theory of the Swiss. The most considerable German dramatist of the seventeenth century, Andreas Gryphius, not merely neglected the “classical” rules in his plays, but made light of them in prefaces and lectures. Just before the end of the century, Erdmann Neumeister (who was to live sixty years longer and overlap the time of Goethe), enthusiastically recommending the fashionable opera, dismisses the rules with a contemptuous inaccuracy[^[24]] much more humiliating than any polemic.

Without therefore wandering longer in these side-walks, we may say that they form a real approach to the Romantic Revolt of the next century, quite as much as—perhaps more than—they lead to the Gottschedian preciseness. And this should sufficiently justify the notice of them here.

Gottsched once more.

The most important—perhaps one might say the only important—critical document furnished by Gottsched himself to our general history is the Kritische Dichtung, which has been already disposed of,[^[25]] and this is a document of the extremest Neo-Classicism. But he did not reach this point at once: and the successive hardenings of heart by which he did reach it are a curious topsy-turvy document in the other sense—a document of the growth of Romanticism, and its effect in making its enemies the more stubborn. These stages have been traced diligently and clearly, if perhaps with a little unnecessary animus and polemic, by Herr Braitmaier.[^[26]] When the appearance of the Diskurse der Maler (Thev. infra) induced Gottsched (who is allowed by friends and foes to have had a very shrewd literary sense of the journalist’s or publisher’s kind) to imitate them in the periodical entitled Die Vernünftigen Tadlerinnen[^[27]]—“The Intelligent Blamingwomen” or “Carperesses”—his attitude was not at first very different from that of his then friends, Bodmer and Breitinger, in appearance at least. But he proceeded to pay attention (perhaps guided by them) to French criticism: and he henceforward followed it, more and more to do evil in another periodical, the Biedermann, in the successive editions of his Kritische Dichtkunst, with increasing intensity in the important Beiträge zur Kritischen Historie der Deutschen Sprache,[Sprache,] Poesie und Beredsamkeit, which he directed from 1732 to 1744, and lastly, in the pamphlets and articles of the so-called Swiss-Saxon or Leipzig-Zürich war.

As for the claims of Gottsched to be not a mere critical fossil, but a real reformer and even a kind of precursor of the great German literary school, in criticism as well as on creation, from Lessing to Goethe, they were first put forward many years ago by Danzel, and after the usual manner of literary whitewashings of the paradoxical kind, have been accepted by some since. But they never could have commended themselves to impartial and instructed students of literary history: and they have been quite sufficiently disposed of by Herr Braitmaier. One may fully take the view which was put forward towards the end of the last volume about Gottsched’s critical worth, and yet have formed it with full knowledge of the fact that he was an active and well-intentioned worker in that enormous effort towards self-improvement to which justice has there been done. But the notion that he was really a fellow-worker with the Swiss school is, I must repeat, mistaken; and the further notions of his having played the part of Dante, or at least of Du Bellay, towards the purification and exaltation of German language, and almost that of Dryden towards the refashioning of German literature, are but fond things.[^[28]]

Bodmer and Breitinger.

The two Swiss professors, Bodmer and Breitinger, who have already several times been named, form one of the most curious pairs of brothers-in-arms whereof literary story makes mention. They were both born in or near the same town, Zürich; the long lives of both (though Breitinger’s was a little the shorter at both ends) nearly coincided; both were christened John James; and they very early began, and long continued, to qualify themselves for the position of heroes of a new “Legend of Friendship” without even finding it necessary to begin with a fight like Spenser’s Cambel and Triamond. Both pugnacious, they always took the same side in their battles; they prefaced each other’s books alternately, and sometimes finding even this association not close enough, signed them jointly J. J. J. J. In this kind of society it is generally difficult to be certain whether even the writings which appear to belong to one writer only do not contain a good deal of the other’s, and therefore to assign a sharply differential character to either: nor is it really of much importance. The general opinion, I believe, is that Bodmer had more originality and enterprise, Breitinger a sounder judgment, wider learning, and a more philosophical ethos: but in such collaborations the parts are almost always thus distributed. There can, however, be no reasonable question that the pair were—more than any other pair or person—responsible for the Rally of Germany: or rather, to use the phrase of our saner custom, that they mark the turn of the tide which neither they nor any one could have caused. Nor is it surprising to find that this turn is at first almost imperceptible.

The Diskurse der Maler.

The Discourses of the Painters took its title directly from a sort of coterie which Bodmer had founded; and was named, probably after Italian models, but indirectly, as no doubt was the coterie also, from the strong prominence in the founder’s mind of the doctrine ut pictura poesis. Started in 1721, the periodical was one, and the most important, of these imitations of The Spectator which, as has been said, played so great a part not merely in English, but in Continental, and especially German, culture. Like the model, the copy was intended to reform manners and morals, speech and style. In the latter respect Bodmer did not merely follow Addison, but fell back to some extent on the French preceptists of “correctness,” cheerfully echoing Boileau’s recommendations of “nature,” though his eclecticism already appears in admiration of Fontenelle likewise. As Boileau himself had made awful examples of the extravagants of the Louis XIII. time, and as Addison had denounced “false wit,” conceits, and so forth, so did Bodmer take up his parable anew against the bombast and preciousness of the Lohenstein School in German. Like both, he believes thoroughly in “Taste,” though the “German paste” in him is not contented without an attempt at a more philosophical treatment of this than either the Frenchman or the Englishman had thought necessary. He makes something of a theory of Poetry as Imitation of Nature: he refines upon the doctrines about Imagination which he finds in Addison. But in all this there is not very much advance upon Addison himself. Bodmer has only been brought by Addison to the threshold of Milton, and, it would seem, not even to that of Shakespeare,[^[29]] while the divine, the instinctive, the all-saving caution, antiquam exquirite matrem, does not in the case of old German poetry carry him beyond Opitz as yet.

Gradual divergence from their standpoint; König on “Taste.”

For some years, therefore, it was quite possible for Swiss and Saxons to work together. The literature of the Ancient and Modern quarrel had much influence on both; and that odd upshot of it, the Fénelonian and La Mothian dislike to rhyme, was destined to exercise a very great influence in Germany. For a time, however, attention was principally fixed on the general subject of “Taste,”[^[30]] and a dispute, really important in its results, if not exactly in itself, grew up round a short dissertation by the Saxon Poet-Laureate König, and led, among other things, to an exchange of letters between Bodmer and the Italian Conti,[^[31]] on the nature of this much-discussed quality or faculty. König’s work appeared in 1727, two years before the first edition of Gottsched’s Dichtkunst, but in the same year with a treatise on Imagination from the Swiss side, in which may be seen the first sketch of their elaborate dealings with Poetics many years later.

Main works of the Swiss School.

By this time the tendencies of the contending parties—of Bodmer and Breitinger in the Æsthetic-Romantic direction, and of Gottsched in the Classical-Preceptist—had been strengthened and developed, in the one case by study of Milton specially, in the other by that of the French: and the gulf between them was deepened and widened in various writings, especially in the successive editions of Gottsched’s Dichtkunst, and in occasional utterances of his Beiträge. But the great manifestos of the Swiss school—four in number, but it would seem representing a larger and more uniform scheme, of which the Imagination had been the pioneer—did not appear till nearly twenty years after the first publication of the Diskurse. Three of them came out at Zürich in the single year 1740; the fourth, a year later, in 1741. The titles given below require no comment in their exhibition of the odd enlacements of the pair.[^[32]]

Breitinger’s Kritische Dichtkunst, &c.

Of these the Kritische Dichtung is the largest, the most ambitious, and, according to Herr Braitmaier, the most important. It was certainly that which hurt and shocked Gottsched most, and which drew from him the pathetically ludicrous expostulation with its unpractical character, which was quoted in the last volume.[^[33]] And no doubt it must appear so to those who pay most attention to the theory of poetry in general. As the very title shows, Breitinger here nails the poetic-pictorial principle to the mast, and he defends it in the book itself, and in the Dissertation on Similes, which is a sort of tender to it, with no insufficient learning and variety of application, with reinforcements of philosophy from Leibnitz[Leibnitz] and Wolff, even with the sketching of a “Logic of Phantasy,” which is to be regulator and administrator of things poetical.

Bodmer’s Von Dem Wunderbaren, &c.

From my point of view, however, the most important of the four is the Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren by Bodmer, and next to this, the same writer’s elaborate examination, in the Poetische Gemahlde, of Don Quixote, and of that Durchlauchstigste Syrerin Aramena, which is one of the chief German Heroic Romances, and one of the literary achievements of the House of Brunswick, having been written by Duke Anton Ulrich. The generalities of the Kritische Dichtkunst are, no doubt, as one of the characters in Westward Ho! says, “all very good and godly”: but the unfortunate Gottsched, if he had had a little more wit, might so have couched his complaint of their unpracticality that it would not have been ridiculous. “Logics of Phantasy” are all very well: doctrines that the poet must be thus and thus minded are all very well. But we want poems, we want imaginative literature itself; and these were the most difficult things in the world to get in the first half of the eighteenth century. Bodmer, in dealing with prose fiction, recognises, as few critics had recognised, the second greatest division of the imaginative literature of the world—greater even than drama in a way, because it borrows nothing from poetry, but stands on its own merits,—the division which was at last slowly rising from the ocean where it had been so long submerged. And in the Dissertation on the Wonderful he boldly unlocked the tabooed treasury wherein men had been so long forbidden to seek the true riches of poetry.

There was the real labor, the real opus. It is not too much to say that the prevailing doctrine—during the seventeenth century increasingly, and at the beginning of the eighteenth as a recognised orthodoxy—made poetry almost impossible. In spite of the grudging permission of such inadequate safety-valves as furor poeticus, beau désordre, “lucky license,” and the rest, this doctrine was that even the Wunderbar had got to submit itself to the Wahrscheinlich, with a very distinct understanding that it was far the safer way to attend to the Verisimilar and let the Wonderful alone. Even Bodmer himself seems to have been rather led to a sounder creed by his admiration for Milton and his revolt against such things as Voltaire’s condemnation of parts of Paradise Lost,[^[34]] than by a clear, straightforward apperception of the prerogative of Wonder. Even he proceeds rather by extension of “machinery,” by pointing out the capabilities and interest of the use of Angels and the like, than by any thorough-going anticipation of the Coleridgean “suspension of disbelief.” But this was very natural and almost necessary: while it may be pointed out that his attention to the Prose Romance—in which, for this reason or that, the unexpected and the exceptional had always held rather a prominent place—tended in the same direction as his doctrine of the Wonderful in Poetry.

Special criticisms of both.

It is, however, only fair to say that neither Breitinger nor Bodmer fails in that critical examination of actual literature which, as it has been one of the objects of this book to show, is the most fruitful way of the critic. Bodmer’s study of Paradise Lost, which he translated, nay, even that of Opitz, who was edited by the pair, provided perhaps the most important element in his critical education. And whatever gaps there may have been in their literary accomplishment, they knew and used the greatest critics of antiquity. If they did not know or use all its greatest poets, they used what they did know freshly and independently. They knew French and Italian literature fairly, and Breitinger at least had studied the Ancient and Modern Quarrel. They knew something of English besides Milton, though little or nothing of “Sasper,” and their earnest and affectionate study of German literature itself, reaching by-and-by to the treasures of the “Middle High” period, is, to me at least, one of their greatest titles to credit. They may have pushed the picture-poetry notion too far—Lessing was at the door with a veritable “two-handed engine” to cut off any superfluity here. But in their time, and in all times, it could but do more good than harm.

Bodmer’s verse criticism.

With the commentatorial side of their activity may be connected the four verse pieces edited with much care by Herr Baechtold in the Deutsche Literatur-Denkmale.[^[35]] The two last of these, dating from the author’s latest years, when he felt himself among those that knew not Joseph—Untergang der Beruhmten Namen, and Bodmer nicht verkannt—are in hexameters, and are only pathetic curiosities. The first, Character der Teutschen Gedichte, 1734, with an appendix, Versuch einer Kritik über die Deutschen Dichter, and a second but more independent sequel, Die Drollingerische Muse (Drollinger was a poet and friend of Bodmer’s who had just died), have more substantive interest.[^[36]] They are in Alexandrines, duly arranged with masculine and feminine alternation, and contain not a little mostly sound criticism of mostly much-forgotten bards.

Their later work in mediæval poetry, and their general position.

I find myself, perhaps necessarily from the difference of our points of view, again in disagreement with Herr Braitmaier as to the critical importance of Bodmer’s later industry (shared again in part by Breitinger) on older German literature. To me, the mere fact that Bodmer in 1748—that is to say, before the middle of the eighteenth century, and nearly twenty years before the appearance of Percy’s Reliques—published with his faithful double J. J. his Specimens of Old Suabian Poetry, the Middle High German poetry of the thirteenth century; nine or ten years later, and still before Percy, before Hurd, Fabeln aus der Zeiten der Minnesänger; with, later again, parts of the Nibelungenlied and collections of Minnesong itself, is, as perhaps the reader knows by this time, an almost greater claim to importance in the History of Criticism and Literary Taste than his earlier directly critical work, and a much greater one than the more abstract æsthetic inquiries of Breitinger even, still more of Baumgarten and Sulzer and the rest. Taken with these earlier inquiries they give him and his coadjutor a high and most memorable place in the general story of the appreciation of literature. He was certainly not a man of much—and Breitinger does not seem to have been one of any—original poetical power; he does not himself seem to have had even so much as his colleague had of learning or acuteness: and both were echt Deutsch in their long-windedness and want of concinnity. But they did what they could; and it turned out that they had done a great deal.

The “Swiss-Saxon” quarrel.

Of the famous “Swiss-Saxon” quarrel[^[37]] which followed the publication of Breitinger’s Kritische Dichtkunst and Gottsched’s denunciation thereof in a new edition of his own, I shall, according to my previous practice, say little. It has in all the books the usual disproportionate prominence of such things, and its actual importance was even less than usual. A brief but good account of it, and of all the underground jealousies and littlenesses that led up to it, may be found in Braitmaier. These jealousies, especially the general revolt against the sort of tyranny of letters which Gottsched’s skilful management of his periodicals and his pedagogic temper had instituted, were much more noticeable in it than any clear classic-romantic “dependence.” But, on the whole, the revolt against Gottsched was in the direction of revolt against at least Neo-Classicism. By degrees, too, it branched out into an attack on, and a defence of, two particular poets—Haller and Klopstock; and though neither of these is very delectable “to us,” both were distinctly in their time champions of the freedom of the poetic Jerusalem. It was fought out in Gottsched’s Beiträge on his side, and in a kind of periodical entitled Sammlung Kritischer, poetischer, und geistvoller Schriften, which Bodmer brought out in opposition,[^[38]] in divers others,[^[39]] and in numerous pamphlets. The most important critics whom it produced, and these indirectly for the most part, were the elder Schlegels, especially the eldest, Johann Elias, who, from a contributor, though never exactly a partisan, of Gottsched, became one of the objects of his special indignation. Of others, Schwabe, Cramer, Mylius, Pyra, we can but take note in passing here. Gellert has been mentioned in the last volume.[^[40]]

The elder Schlegels: Johann Adolf.

If not every schoolboy, every one with the slightest tincture of letters, is supposed to be aware that there were two persons of the name of Schlegel, who are of very great account in German and in European criticism. Not merely the schoolboy, but the person ordinarily tinged with letters, may perhaps be excused if he does not know that at least[^[41]] four of the name and family have claim to rank here—Johann Elias, his younger brother Johann Adolf, August Wilhelm, and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich, these two last being sons of Johann Adolf. Of these the elder pair concern us in this particular place. And of them it will be most convenient to take Johann Adolf first, not for the sake of his famous offspring, but because his critical work is the less important. He took part in the obscure and uninteresting squabble over the Pastoral school,[^[42]] but his main contribution to our subject is a translation, with notes and elaborate Abhandlungen, of Batteux. In this, published as early as 1751, and reprinted later,[^[43]] he is still an evidence of the domination of French, which his more original brother at least partly rejected. But there are signs and tokens. He is constantly making respectful suggestions and limitations: “This conclusion is too large,” “this is true to a certain extent,” and so forth.

The Abhandlungen show the German tendency to generalisation and abstract disquisition:—On the Origin of Arts, the Building up of Taste, the divisions of Poetry, its foundation in imitation or illusion, its distinction from History, and from Ornate Prose, &c. Schlegel is very much cumbered about Kinds, insists that we must try each new kind and see whether it comes naturally or not. If it does, that is right. The Wonderful has “a natural right to please us, a right founded in the constitution of our souls.” The soul demands novelty, &c. But like his part-master, Gottsched, he is very doubtful about Ariosto and Milton (Death and Sin are such “shadowy persons”!), and I do not think he mentions Shakespeare. He has a considerable position in the list of writers on German versification, a subject which was acquiring much importance from the set against rhyme, mentioned above.

Johann Elias.

His elder brother, Johann Elias, is a much more original and independent person. The very high claims made for him by his editor, Herr von Antoniewicz,[^[44]] and by Herr Braitmaier, may require some deduction when we consider his actual work; but not much. He died (1749) at a little over thirty: and during this short life he had been a diplomatist, a professor, a prolific and remarkable dramatist, and a miscellaneous poet. So that he had not much time to spare for criticism. But his work in it has that rare quality, or combination of qualities, which we have noted in Dryden, the quality of marking and learning the things that a man reads and writes of, and correcting himself by both processes. It is quite astonishing to read his first critical work, a “Letter on Ancient and Modern Tragedy,” and to note, though his actual standpoint is not very advanced, the thoroughness and freshness of appreciation shown by a boy of one-and-twenty, in the very dawn and almost the twilight of the great period of German literature. Other interesting papers lead to the still more remarkable review of Borck’s prose translation of Julius Cæsar, with its parallel between that play and the Leo Armenius of the German seventeenth-century dramatist, Andreas Gryphius. There is, of course, a danger, if this be uncritically read, of our failing to grasp Schlegel’s standpoint in regard to both the subjects, and of the excellent Gryph appearing to us too much in the light in which Shakespeare himself appeared to Voltaire. Moreover, the German Alexandrine is—even to an ear broken to a thousand measures in half a dozen languages—one of the most disagreeable that can be found. But allow for all these things, as criticism demands, and you will have a piece of appreciation such as (so far at least as I know) had not appeared in German before, and one of which, æquatis æquandis, hardly any of the greatest English or French critics since need have been ashamed in his Lehrjahre. The discussions of Imitation,[^[45]] which the lovers of abstract criticism seem to regard as Schlegel’s greatest title to fame, and which are certainly his largest, though very sound and stimulating for their time, and not even obsolete in regard to the “realist” and “naturalist” debates of the latest nineteenth century, are a little scholastic in method. From reading some estimates of Schlegel the student might almost be prepared to find in him a promulgation of one of the last secrets of criticism, the discovery that not only need you not always realise but you nearly always must disrealise—give the things as they are not in nature; and that by no means merely to suppress uglinesses and the like. So far as this I do not think he gets anywhere,[^[46]] but he gets pretty far: and his argument was most valuable at the time when Gottsched was priding himself on having once more based Poetic on a rigid Imitation-principle. But some of the best of Schlegel’s work is to be found in the last example of it, the “Gedanken zur Aufnahme des Dänischen Theaters,” where the good and bad points of both English and French drama, and the imitation or avoidance which they deserve accordingly, are set forth with an insight, a range, and a power of appreciation which do not come much behind Lessing, not to mention an impartiality which Lessing by no means always shows. In the Shakespeare-and-Gryph parallel Johann Elias had practically founded German Shakespeare-study, and in this piece he takes the line necessary to prevent a too one-sided pursuit of it. His actual critical achievement is not, and could not be, large; but it is precious in itself, and it shows that, had he lived, there was almost nothing at all possible in his time that he might not have done in criticism. You could trust him, I think, on the English novel, and you could trust him on German and mediæval poetry, with the certainty that, in the long-run at any rate, he would come

right.

Moses Mendelssohn.

Of the praiseworthy industry of Nicolai we have spoken in the last volume: and the only critic whom it is necessary to mention in any detail before passing to Lessing, who is himself in a way the critical sum and substance as well as the crown and flower of this period—Moses Mendelssohn—belongs rather to the æstheticians pure and simple. He did, however, much solid actual critical work, to a great extent in collaboration with both of the persons just mentioned. Those who are curious about him may consult the very extensive (indeed, I fear it must rather be called the disproportionately extensive) notice of him by Herr Braitmaier, who gives this learned Jew some two-thirds of his second volume, and not much less than one-third of his whole book. Mendelssohn, however, is really an important person in the history of German criticism, and probably counted for something in the development of Lessing, who was his intimate friend. He seems to have had little tincture of classical literature, but was intensely interested in modern; and was for some twenty years a constant reviewer of it. He inclines somewhat to the moral rather than to the purely literary judgment in his notices of English writers, even of Shakespeare, much more of Young and Richardson, and he was not disposed to accept the Wartonian view of Pope. Indeed, with all his merits he seems to me to be further “below proof,” from the literary point of view, not merely than Lessing but than J. E. Schlegel. The actual critical work[^[47]] of this Moses, as shown in his collected writings, leaves us, if not in the depths of the wilderness, at any rate at some distance from the Promised Land. There is a certain amount of criticism in his Letters, and he illustrates eighteenth-century tendencies by writing on Das Erhabene und das Naïve. His general drift is very frankly displayed in the epistles of Aristes to Hylas, on “How the Young should read Old and New Poetry,” where Plutarch’s title[^[48]] is not more closely followed than his spirit. The treatise, though in no way contemptible, is one of those which have been described (no doubt by a reminiscence of Hobbes) as “all -keit and -lung.” And Mendelssohn’s attitude to criticism could not be better indicated than in the following sentence:[^[49]] “We laugh at Regnard’s Le Joueur and avoid being called gamblers; we weep over the English Gamester and are ashamed to be such.” Perhaps so; perhaps also not. But the symptoms, if existent, are quite compatible with the existence of any degree of literary merit in either case, if not also with the existence of none.