“dissertations on the Greek and Latin Drama” were not otiose at all, they were absolutely necessary.
But for the most part, as is notorious, Collier is as ethical as Plutarch or Plato. It was desirable that he should be so, and nobody but a paradoxer will ever defend the style of play-writing which produced such things as Limberham, and The Old Bachelor, and even The Relapse—though the first be Dryden’s, and contain some good things in the characters of Prudence and Brainsick, though the second show us the dawn of Congreve’s wit, and though the third contain handfuls of the sprightliest things in the English language. It is in reference to this last, by the way, that Collier chiefly quits the path of ethical criticism, and takes to that of literary, or at least dramatic. There is hardly a sharper and more well-deserved beating-up of the quarters of a ragged dramatic regiment anywhere than that (at p. 212 sq.) on the glaring improbabilities of Vanbrugh’s plot, the absolute want of connection between the title part of it and the real fable—Tom Fashion’s cheating his brother of Hoyden—and the way in which the characters are constantly out of character in order that the author may say clever things. But Collier has serious matters on his mind too much to give us a great deal of this; and the other definitely literary points which I have noted, in a very careful re-reading of the piece for this book, are not numerous. I wish he had not called Love’s Labour’s Lost (p. 125) “a very silly play”; but how many people were there then living who would have thought differently? I wish he had worked out his statement (rather rash from his own point of view) at p. 148, “Poets are not always exactly in rule.” He might have developed his views on the Chorus (p. 150) interestingly. I have some other places; but they are not important. The sum is, that though Collier evidently knew most critical authorities, from Aristotle and Horace, through Heinsius and Jonson, to Rapin, and Rymer, and Dryden himself, very well; though he could (pp. 228, 229) state the Unities, and even argue for them—this was not his present purpose, which was simply to cleanse the stage. His interest in other matters in fact blunted what might have been a keen interest in literature proper. And this is thoroughly confirmed by study of his interesting and characteristic Essays,[532] where, out of more than five hundred pages, exactly four are devoted to literature, and these give us nothing but generalities.
That Collier’s victory was very mainly due to the fact that he struck in at the right moment, as spokesman of an already formed popular opinion, would be a matter of reasonable certainty in any case; but the certainty is here historical. Sir T. P. Blount. One of many proofs at hand is in the curious lighterfull of critical lumber which Sir Thomas Pope Blount launched four (or eight?) years before Collier let his fireship drive into the fleet of the naughty playwrights. In this book,[533] dedicated to Mulgrave, that noble poet himself, Roscommon, Cowley, and the lately published and immensely influential Whole Duty of Man, are quoted to support the argument that “A poet may write upon the subject of Love, but he must avoid obscenity.”[534]
Sir Thomas, however, comes within the inner, and not merely the outer, circle of criticism for his aims and his collections, though certainly not for any critical genius that he displays. His “Remarks upon Poetry,” no less than the “Characters and Censures” which make up the other part of his work, are the purest compilation: and though we are certainly not without compilers in these days (what indeed can a Historian of Criticism do but compile to a great extent?), there are very few of us who are at once honest enough and artless enough to follow the method of Blount. Whether he is arguing that good humour is essentially necessary to a poet (how about the genus irritabile?) or that a poet should not be addicted to flattery, or discussing the “Eglogue, Bucholic [sic], or Pastoral,” whether he is following Phillips and Winstanley and borrowing from both, in compiling a dictionary of poets, he simply empties out his common place-book. “Dryden remarks,” “Rapin observes,” “Mr Cowley tells us,” “Mr Rymer can nowise allow” (this is happy, for it was habitual with Mr Rymer “nowise to allow”), such are the usherings of his paragraphs. He is not uninteresting when he is original (cf. his remarks on Waller); but one is almost more grateful to him for his collections, which put briefly, and together, the critical dicta of a vast number of people. Here we may read, with minimum of trouble, how Julius Scaliger could not see anything in Catullus but what is common and ordinary; how Dr Sprat said that till the time of Henry the Eighth there was nothing wrote in the English language except Chaucer that a man would care to read twice; how Scaliger once more, and Petrus Crinitus, and Johannes Ludovicus Vives, and Eustatius Swartius, thought Claudian quite in the first rank of poets; how Tanneguy le Fèvre shook his head over Pindar as having “something too much the air of the Dithyrambick”; and how Cœlius Rhodiginus was good enough to find that same Dantes Aligerus, who displeased others, a “poet not contemptible.”[535] These things are infinitely pleasant to read, and give one a positive affection for Sir Thomas Pope Blount as one turns them in the big black print of his handy quarto; yet perhaps it would be excessive to call him a great critic. What he does, besides providing this gazophylacium for the connoisseur, is to show how wide the interest in criticism was.
A further turn, and the last in this walk, may be furnished to us by one of his own quotations (p. 137 of the Characters and Censures) of an answer to the question, “Whether Milton and Waller were not the best English poets, and which was the better of the two?” from The Athenian Mercury, vol. v., No. 4. Periodicals: The Athenian Mercury, &c. For this curious and interesting medley of Dunton’s, and Samuel Wesley’s, and others’, was almost the first to provide something in English answering, or that might have answered, to the Journal des Savants and the Mercure Galant. Actually, the Mercury was not very literary. I do not pretend to have examined the original volumes with any very great care. But in the three copious books which were either directly compiled out of it, or composed in imitation—the Athenian Oracle,[536] Athenian Sport, and The British Apollo—literature holds no very large place. The Oracle does indeed give at p. 438 a very elaborate answer to the question, “Whether the Dramatic Poets of the Last Age exceeded those of this?” and the Apollo, besides a versification of the identical query and answer which Blount had quoted, contains a long descant on the Origin of Poetry, and a remarkably shrewd answer to the question, “Which is the best poet—Boileau, Molière, or La Fontaine?” But the time of literary periodicals in England was not yet, though this was the very eve of it: and they must therefore be postponed.[537]
484. The chief critical loci in Milton are all among the best known passages of his work. They are the peremptory anathema on rhyme in the prose note added to Paradise Lost, in what Professor Masson has settled to be the “Fifth Form of the First Edition”; the short Defence of Tragedy, wholly on Italian principles but adapted to Puritan understandings, prefixed to Samson Agonistes; the first description of his own studies in The Reason of Church Government; the more elaborate return upon that subject—a singular mixture of exquisite phrasing and literary appreciation with insolent abuse—in the Apology for Smectymnuus (which is not, as some have thought, the same thing as The [Platonic] Apology) and divers clauses in the Tractate of Education, especially the reference to “Castelvetro, Tasso, and Mazzoni,” whom he credits with “sublime art,” and puts on a level with Aristotle and Horace. We might add a few casual girds, such as that at the supposed cacophony of Hall’s “Teach each” in the Apology for Smectymnuus, which has been compared to Malherbe’s vellications of Desportes (cf. sup., p. 245). A complete critical treatise from him (if only he could have been prevailed upon to write in a good temper) would have been of supreme interest: it is not so certain that it would have been of supreme value, even if he had been in that temper.
485. He has practically given us nothing but a slight apology for sacred verse (common in his time and natural from the author of the Davideis); with a slighter seasoning of the also familiar defence of poetry from being mere “lying,” in the Preface to the folio edition of his Poems; some still slighter remarks on Comedy in that to Cutter of Coleman Street; and hardly more than a glance at literary education in his Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy. In this last we may feel a sort of gust of the same spirit which appears in his disciple Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (v. infra).
486. Both these will be found in Chalmers’ Poets, vi. 349-372. Hobbes’s Answer is also in Molesworth’s ed. of the Works, iv. 443-458. It is there followed by a short literary letter to Edward Howard of the British Princes, the most egregious of Dryden’s egregious leash of brothers-in-law. To these may be added the brief literary passage in the chapter of “Intellectual Virtues” in the First Part of Leviathan (ibid., iii. 58) and the “Brief” of the Rhetoric (referred to supra, vol. i. p. 40); ibid., vi. 416-510. I have a copy of the first edition of this, anonymous and undated, but assigned to 1655-57 by bibliographers. It does not contain the shorter Art of Rhetoric, which follows in Molesworth.
487. This Boojum, I fear, will disturb some of my friends. But I put him under the protection of the Powder of Pimperlimpimp, and of the Equinoctials of Queubus.
488. See the Discourse on Satire—Scott (in the edition revised by the present writer) (London, 1882-93), xiii. 24 sq., or Ker (ed. cit. post), ii. 33 sq.
489. I do not smile so much as some may over “no, not Du Bartas.” But though oases are far from rare in what may seem, to those who know it not, this thirsty land of criticism, I hardly know a more delightful “diamond of the desert” than the refusal to admit somebody else lest you should have to admit Dante, and the subsequent “Dante, Marino, and others.” When the eye is weary of italic print, or of a too closely packed quarto page, or of François Hédelin, Abbé d’Aubignac, in any type or format, it is pleasant half to shut it, and let the dream of these “others” wave before one. I see that they must have written in Italian; but other common measure, other link to bind them both to the Commedia and to the Adone, is yet to seek for me.
490. Lest the last note should lead any one to think that I wish to make inept and ignoble game of Davenant, let me observe that he can write admirable things, worthy a son, in double sense, of Oxford. Could anything be happier than this of Spenser: “His noble and most artful hands”? The mere selection of the epithets is good, the combination of them famously so.
491. This attempt to get Epic as close as possible to Drama—to work all the kinds of Imitation back into one arch-kind—appears more or less fitfully in the whole Neo-Classic school. And we shall never quite understand the much discussed “Heroic Play,” till we take it in conjunction with the “Heroic Poem.”
492. There is, of course, critical matter in Howell’s Letters, and in a score or scores of other places; but it is of the kind that we must now neglect, or select from with the most jealous hand.
493. Of the great critical men of letters of 1800-1850 only Leigh Hunt—the least of them—was just to Dryden; even Hazlitt is inadequate on him. Among our preceptistas of the same or a little later date, Keble (Præl. v.) mildly perstringes Dryden’s inconsistency (“male sibi constat D.”), but rather as poet than as critic. Garbett, his successor and opponent, a great admirer of Dryden’s style, and one who expresses just regret at the want of common knowledge of it, is very severe (Præl. x.) on his want of philosophical profundity and sincerity. But the reverend Professor had found nearly as much fault on this score with Longinus.
494. Dryden made no mistake about Longinus. He calls him, in the Apology prefixed to The State of Innocence, “the greatest critic among the Greeks after Aristotle,” cites him often, and parades and uses a long passage of the Περὶ Ὕψους in the Preface to Troilus and Cressida. The references are conveniently collected in Mr Ker’s index (v. inf.)
495. Dryden’s critical work, which until recently was accessible with ease only in Scott’s elaborate edition of his works, or in Malone’s less bulky, but still bulky and not excessively common, edition of the Prose, has recently been given, with quite admirable editorial matter, by Professor Ker (2 vols., Oxford, 1900). I wish he had included one or two more things, especially the Heads of an answer to Rymer; but it must be admitted that the authenticity of these, though I think not doubtful, is not absolutely certain, and the correct text still less so. See note on Rymer infra, and my edition of Scott, xv. 378 sq., for text and history.
496. Defence of an Essay of Dramatic Poesy. Scott, ed. cit., xi. 295: Ker, i. 113.
497. Preface to Miscellanies, ii.; Scott, ed. cit., xii. 295; Ker, i. 263. I wish that Dryden were alive for many reasons: not least because he would certainly pay the debt that he owes to my friend Mr Ker magnificentissime. No one has vindicated him better against the half-witted blunderers. But I am not quite so much inclined as even Mr Ker is to father his critical style on Chapelain and La Mesnardière, Sarrasin and Scudéry, or on Corneille himself. It is not till Saint-Evremond, perhaps even till Fénelon, that I can find in French the indescribable omne tulit punctum as in him. And both, are his inferiors.
498. I have not thought it necessary to encumber the page with references in the case of the shorter Essays, where any one can discover the passages cited, whether he uses Scott, Malone, the originals, or Mr Ker’s special collection, with no more labour than is good for him and deserved by them. In the case of the longer pieces the references will be given at least sufficiently often to make the locating of the others easy, without turning the lower part of the page into a kind of arithmetical table.
499. As including Invention, Fancy, and Elocution, but in itself merely considered as synonymous with “Wit.” It was probably from this that Addison (see below) started that Imagination theory of his which has been so much overrated.
500. When the present writer began his revision of Scott’s Dryden in the year 1881 there were no separate editions of the Essay since the originals. There are now, of annotated issues of it, either by itself or with more or less of its author’s related work, no less than five known to me,—those of Mr Thomas Arnold (Oxford, 1886), Mr Strunk (New York, 1898), Mr Low (London, n. d.), Mr Nichol Smith (Glasgow, 1900), and Professor Ker’s. The study of English literature in schools and colleges has been much abused, very foolishly talked about by some of its advocates, and no doubt not always wisely directed. But it is at least something to be said for it that it has made such a masterpiece as this known to probably a hundred persons for every one who knew it twenty years ago.
501. One of the very earliest evidences of the interest in dramatic criticism felt in England, immediately after the Restoration, must be Pepys’ note that on September 1, 1660, when he was dining at the Bullhead, there “rose ... a dispute between Mr Moore and Dr Clerke—the former affirming that it was essential to a tragedy to have the argument of it true, which the Doctor denied.” The question, on the very English terms of another dinner and a bet, was to be settled by Pepys himself three days later. He does not tell us whether he read up for it; but on the 4th he decided for the Doctor (Diary, ed. Wheatley, i. 233).
502. Here, to glance at the matter of Dryden and the Spaniards (v. sup., p. 332, and inf., on Spence), is a possible reminiscence of Lope’s Arte Nuevo, 178-180—
503. Scott, xv. 337; Ker, i. 75.
504. In the Discourse on Satire. Scott, xiii. 3; Ker, ii. 17.
505. “I have further to add that I seldom use the wit and language of any romance or play which I undertake to alter; because my own invention, as bad as it is, can furnish me with nothing so dull as what is there.” These invocations of Nemesis are seldom unheard by the acute ears of that satiric Goddess.
506. Lesser, but far from negligible; for the Character of Saint-Evremond is both personally and critically interesting, and the critical biographies of Lucian and Plutarch lead straight to Johnson.
507. “In his Juvenilia ... his rhyme is always constrained or forced.”—Discourse on Satire.
508. Chapelain might like the early romances (v. supra, p. 260). But here Boileau was the spokesman of France.
509. They have deceived the very elect, e.g., M. Rigault, who in not altogether unnatural amazement at the dictum, “Spenser wanted only to have read the rules of Bossu,” classes (Q. des A. et des M., p. 311) Dryden as an ancien enragé. But M. Rigault is at a wrong angle in most of the English part of his book,—so much so as to strike a chill into any one who has to criticise a foreign literature, lest, lacking the grace of the Muses, he too go astray.
510. A phrase of Blake’s.
511. The fact is that the two are parts of the same book; and that a second edition of the first appeared in 1692, just before the first of the second next year.
512. Vol. ii. pp. 107-130 of the 1706 edition of Rapin in English. At p. 113 Rymer says that he will not here examine the various qualities which make English fit above all other languages for Heroic Poesy, “the world expecting these matters learnedly and largely discussed in a particular treatise on that subject.” This apparently important announcement is marginally annotated “Sheringham.” I suppose this was Robert S., a Norfolk man (as his name imports), of Caius College, and Proctor at Cambridge just before the Commonwealth ejection. He is described (see Dict. Nat. Biog.) as an “excellent linguist,” but seems to have been more of an antiquary than of a man of letters. As the D. N. B. says nothing of any such work as Rymer glances at, I suppose the world was disappointed of it by his sudden death in May 1678, four years after Rymer wrote.
513. I do not think that Rymer ever intended to be rude to Dryden, though his clumsy allusions to “Bays” in the Short View naturally rubbed the discrowned Laureate the wrong way for a time.
514. Rymer’s elaborate directions for removing the Romantic offence of this play, and adjusting it to Classical correctness and decorum, are among the most involuntarily funny things in criticism (pp. 19-24).
515. Rymer knew something of Old French. How horrified he would have been if he had come across the lines in Floriant et Florete (2904, 2905)—
516. It has (excluding an appended extract from the Registers of the Parliament of Paris about Mysteries) only 168 pages of perhaps 200 words each; and much of it is quotation. But it is far longer than The Tragedies of the Last Age.
517. Short View, p. 94.
518. Ibid., p. 144.
519. It is curious to read the deliberately stupid misunderstanding of Aristotle by which this is justified.
520. It may be not unamusing to give an instance or two of the way in which Nemesis has made poor Tom speak truth unconsciously,—
“They who like this author’s writing will not be offended to find so much repeated from him” [Shakespeare].—P. 108.
“Never in the world had any pagan Poet his brains turned at this monstrous rate.”—P. 111.
“No Pagan poet but would have found some machine for her deliverance.”—P. 134.
“Portia is ... scarce one remove from a Natural. She is the own cousin-german ... with Desdemona.”—P. 156.
521. His best deed was to elicit from Dryden, in Heads of an Answer to Rymer (Works, xv. 390), the memorable observation that "if Aristotle had seen ours [i.e., "our plays"] he might have changed his mind." One may add that, if Dryden had worked these “Heads” out, he might have solved the whole mystery of criticism as far as in all probability it ever can be solved, or at the very least as far as it could be solved with the knowledge of literature at his disposal.
522. History of the Royal Society, 4to, London, 1667, p. 111 sq. It may be found conveniently extracted at vol. iii. pp. 271, 272 of Sir Henry Craik’s English Prose Selections (London, 1894).
523. It is well known that Thomas Heywood, the dramatist, had planned, if he did not actually execute, a Lives of the Poets very much earlier, and some sanguine souls have hoped that it may yet turn up. But the famous passage about poets’ nicknames, as well as the whole cast of Heywood’s work, suggests that, though biography may have lost something, criticism has not lost much.
524. London 12mo.
525. 8vo, London, 1686.
526. 1691: but pirated earlier.
527. I do not know whether this was cause or consequence of his being a friend of Shadwell. But I am bound to note, though with much surprise, that my friend Mr Sidney Lee finds (D. N. B.) “no malice” in Langbaine.
528. This is the odder, and the more discreditable, because one of the few things to be counted to Langbaine for righteousness is a distinct admiration of Shakespeare.
529. Ed. 1757, vol. iii., pp. 394-501, containing the Poetry, the Ancient and Modern Learning, and the Thoughts upon Reviewing that Essay. Some have charitably found in Temple better knowledge of the Moderns, whom he scorned, than of the Ancients, whom he championed, on the strength of his references to “Runes” and “Gothic Dithyrambics.” I cannot be so amiable. It is all a mere parade of pretentious sciolism varnished by style.
530. Diss., § xvi. My copy is the London ed. of 1817.
531. A Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage. London, 1698. The great popularity of the book caused it to be quickly reprinted: my copy, though of the first year, is the third edition. Collier’s rejoinder to his victims next year contains good things, but is of less importance. And it does not matter much to us whether he originally drew anything from the Prince de Conti’s pietist Traité Sur la Comédie (1667). The Ancients, and the Fathers, and the Puritans were in any case quite sufficient sources.
532. Essays upon Several Moral Subjects (3rd ed., 2 vols., London, 1698). Nor can one make out an entirely good case (though something may be done) for Collier in the matter of that description of Shakespeare, which Mr Browning has maliciously chosen, as a motto for Ferishtah’s Fancies, from the Historical Dictionary: “His genius was jocular, but, when disposed, he could be very serious.”
533. De Re Poetica, or Remarks upon Poetry, &c., 4to, London, 1694. It is even said to have first appeared in 1690.
534. Both Roscommon and Mulgrave were critics in their way, and the former’s Essay on Translated Verse is one of those numerous documents which would have been of the utmost service to us in the last volume, but which cannot receive detailed treatment in this.
535. The remark may with more proportion be made of Cœlius himself, a very worthy Humanist, whom Lilius Giraldus pronounces to be multifariam eruditus, parum tamen in pangendis versibus versatus.
536. The Athenian Mercury (1690-97) ran to twenty volumes. The Oracle, from which the late Mr Underhill made his interesting selection (London, n. d.), was issued in four. I have one (London, 1703), which calls itself an “Entire Collection,” as well as Athenian Sport (London, 1707), and The British Apollo, (3rd ed., London, 1718).
537. An exception may perhaps be made in favour of J. [Cornand] de La Croze’s Works of the Learned, which, translated wholly or mainly by its author from the French, began to appear monthly in August 1691, and was collected before long in a thin quarto volume. Its contents are real reviews in almost every point—down to some sharp remarks by the editor-reviewer on plagiarisms by the Athenian Mercury, and complaints of the absence of indices to lessen the labour of reviewing. The books reviewed are, as a rule, of no great interest; but the summaries of their contents are generally good, and the views advanced are at least sometimes made the subject of passably argumentative discussion.