as

with what follows. But this is a mere question of property, plagiarism, suggestion; and such questions are at best the exercises of literary holiday-makers, at the worst the business of pedants and of fools.

A more important as well as a more dangerous question is this. Does Addison make “the appeal to the imagination” the test of poetry? It can only be answered that, by his own explicit words, he does nothing of the kind. If he advances anything, it is that the appeal to the imagination is the appeal of art generally—of prose (even of scientific) literary art as well as of poetry, of painting, sculpture, architecture, as well as of literature. In doing this he does a good thing: he does something notable in the history of general æsthetics; but in so far as literature, and especially poetry, is concerned, he scarcely goes as far as Longinus in the well-known passage,^[584] though he works out his doctrine at much greater length, and with assistance from Descartes and Locke.

But the most important and the most damaging question of all is this, “Are not Addison and his panegyrist using words in equivocal senses? Does Imagination in Addison’s mouth bear the meaning which we, chiefly since Coleridge’s day, attach to the word? Does it even mean what it meant to Longinus, much more what it meant to Shakespeare?”

I have no hesitation in answering the two latter questions with an absolute and unhesitating “No!”

It seems indeed extraordinary that, in face of Addison’s most careful and explicit limitations, any one should delude himself into thinking that even the Shakespearian and Addisonian Imaginations are identical—much more that Addison’s Imagination is the supreme faculty, creative, transcending Fancy,^[585] superior to fact, not merely compounding and refining upon, but altogether superseding and almost scorning, ideas of sensation, which we mean by the word, and which Philostratus or Apollonius^[586] partly glimpsed. Addison tells us—tells us over and over again—that all the ideas and pleasures of the imagination are pleasures of sense, and, what is more, that they are all pleasures of one sense—Sight. Why he should have limited himself in this singular manner it is hard to say; except that he was evidently full of Locke when he wrote, and, indeed, almost entirely under the influence of the Essay. That he had a contempt for music is elsewhere pretty evident; and this probably explains his otherwise inexplicable omission of the supplies and assistance given to Imagination by Hearing. His morality, as well as old convention, excluded Touch, Taste, and Smell as low and gross, though no candid philosophy could help acknowledging the immense influence exercised upon Imagination by at least the first and the last—Taste, because the most definite, being perhaps the least imaginative of all. But the fact that he does exclude even these senses, and still more rigidly excludes everything but Sense, is insuperable, irremovable, ruthless. Addison may have been the first modern critic to work out the appeal of art to the pleasures and ideas furnished by the sense of sight. He is certainly nothing more.

But is he therefore to be ignored, or treated lightly, because of this strange overvaluation of him? Certainly not. His general critical value.Though by no means a very great critic, he is a useful, an interesting, and a representative one. He represents the classical attitude tempered, not merely by good sense almost in quintessence, but by a large share of tolerance and positive good taste, by freedom from the more utterly ridiculous pseudo-Aristotelianisms, and by a wish to extend a concordat to everything good even if it be not “faultless.” In his Account he is evidently too crude to be very censurable: in his first group of essays much of his censure is just. The elaborate vindication of Milton, though now and for a long time past merely a curiosity, is again full of good sense, displays (if not altogether according to knowledge) a real liking for real poetic goodness, and had an inestimable effect in keeping at least one poet of the better time privileged and popular with readers throughout the Eighteenth Century. As for the essay on the Pleasures of the Imagination, the fact that it has been wrongly praised need not in the least interfere with a cordial estimate of its real merits. It is not an epoch-making contribution to literary criticism; it is rather one-sided, and strangely limited in range. But it is about the first attempt at a general theory of æsthetics in English; it is a most interesting, and a very early, example of that application of common-sense philosophy to abstract subjects which Locke taught to the English eighteenth century; and many of its remarks are valuable and correct. Moreover, it did actually serve, for those who could not, or who did not, read Longinus, as a corrective to pure form-criticism, to Bysshe with his rigid ten syllables, to bare good sense and conventional rule. Its Imagination was still only that which supplies Images, and was strangely cramped besides; but it was better than mere correctness, mere decency, mere stop-watch.

Between Addison and Pope, Steele, Atterbury, and Swift call for notice. Steele. Steele has little for us.^[587] There are few things more curious than the almost entire abstinence from any expression, in the slightest degree really critical, to be found in the eulogy of Spenser, which he generously enough inserted in Sp. 540 to express “his passion for that charming author.” The numerous friends whom he has so justly won for himself may perhaps insist that there is criticism of the best in this very phrase; and that the rather rash encomium on the poet’s “old words” as being “all truly English” is balanced by the justice of the reference to his “exquisite numbers.” But the fact is that Steele had neither the knowledge, nor the patience, nor the coolness for critical work.

Atterbury gives rather more. He was himself a man of great intellectual power, a scholar, an eloquent and delicate writer, and possessed independent taste enough to admire Milton fervently at a time when Addison had not yet made it wholly orthodox to admire that poet at all, and when most Tories detested him. Atterbury. But his observations on Waller^[588] are the very quintessence of pseudodoxy, as to that respectable person; and, by a curious combination, though Waller is a rhymer confirmed and complete, Atterbury joins with his admiration for him an antipathy to rhyme—“this jingling kind of poetry,” “this troublesome bondage, as Mr Milton well calls it.” As for this we need say little; the danger lay not there. But it lay in the direction of such remarks as that “English came into Waller’s hands like a rough diamond; he polished it first,” that, “for aught I know, he stands last as well as first in the list of refiners” [imagine the excellent Waller as be-all and end-all of English!], that “verse before Waller was downright prose tagged with rhyme,” &c., &c. Once more let our impatience of this talk not be ignorant—as is the impatience of those who nowadays cannot see music in Dryden, poetry in Pope, “cry” and clangour now and then even in persons like Langhorne and Mickle. He expressed an opinion; but in expressing it he showed this same ignorance from which we should abstain. Instead of pointing out that Waller introduced a different kind of music, he insisted that Waller substituted music for discord: instead of saying that he introduced a new fashion of cutting the diamond, he would have it that the diamond was merely rough before. This was the culpa, the maxima culpa of eighteenth-century criticism, and Atterbury illustrates and shares it.^[589]

The critical work of Swift^[590] is much more important, and though a good deal of it is inextricably mixed up with the work of Pope and of Arbuthnot, the lion’s claw is generally perceptible enough. Swift. The famous Tatler of September 28, 1710, on the conceptions of English style and writing, ought to hold place in every history and course of lectures on the subject, next to Sprat’s passage in the History of the Royal Society forty years before, as the manifesto of a fresh stage in English style-criticism; and it practically precedes everything that Addison, Steele, and Pope published on, or in connection with, the subject. But long before this, in the wonderful volume which first (1704) revealed his genius to the world, Swift had shown how critical the Gods had made him.

The Battle of the Books is one of the most eccentric documents in the whole History of our subject. The Battle of the Books. Directly, and on its face, it may be said to be of the first critical importance; because it shows how very little subject, intention, accuracy to fact, verisimilitude, and half-a-dozen other indispensables according to certain theories, have to do with the goodness of a book. The general characteristics of The Battle of the Books in all these named respects, and some of the unnamed ones, are deplorable. In a tedious and idle quarrel which, at least as it was actually debated, never need have been debated at all, Swift takes the side which, if not the intrinsically wrong one, is the wrong one as he takes it. To represent Bentley, or even Wotton, as enemies of the Ancients might seem preposterous, if it were not outdone by the preposterousness of selecting Temple as their champion. The details are often absurd—from that ranking of “Despréaux” side by side with Cowley as a Modern brigadier, which is probably a slip (perhaps for “Desportes”) of pen or press, to the spiteful injustices on Dryden. The idea of the piece was probably taken from Callières.^[591] Its composition, from the rigid “Ancient” point of view, is sadly lax; and the two most brilliant episodes—the “Sweetness and Light” quarrel of the Spider and the Bee, and the “machine” of the Goddess of Criticism—have little or nothing to do with the action. But yet it is—and one knows it is—a masterpiece; and it is pretty certain from it that in certain kinds of destructive criticism, and even in certain kinds of what may be called destructive-constructive, the author will be able to accomplish almost anything that he is likely to try.

Though the Tale of the Tub is less ostensibly bookish, it shows even greater purely critical power: for the power of the Battle is mainly that of a consummate craftsman, who can accomplish by sheer craftsmanship whatsoever his hand findeth to do. The Tale of a Tub.In the Tale the crusade against bad writing and bad writers, which Swift carried on more or less for the whole of his middle and later years, and in which he enlisted Addison and Pope, Arbuthnot and Gay, is all but formally proclaimed, and is most vigorously waged with or without proclamation. In the “Dedication to Somers” the sword is being something more than loosened in the sheath; it flashes out in “The Bookseller to the Reader”; it is doing sanguinary work in the great “Epistle to Prince Posterity;” and it has only momentary rests in the “Preface” and the “Induction”: while there is hardly a section of the main text in which the quarters of Grub Street are not beaten up, and the Conclusion is even as the preludes and the main body.

A shrewd judge could hardly fail to perceive, from these famous twin-books, that a new genius of thoroughly critical character had arisen: but such a judge might well have doubted how far its exercise could be anything but negative. Minor works. His doubts, as we have already hinted, were to be justified. Indirectly, indeed, not merely in the Tatler paper above referred to and elsewhere, but by that almost uncanny influence which he seems to have exerted in so many ways on men only less than himself, Swift had very much to do with the rescuing of Style, by the hands of Addison and the rest, from the vulgarisation which it was undergoing at the close of the seventeenth century, not merely in common writers, not merely in the hands of an eccentric like L’Estrange, but in those of scholars like Collier and Bentley. But even this was a task of destruction rather than of positive construction, and he was always most at home in such tasks. The Meditation on a Broomstick and the Tritical Essay, though every good reviewer should know them by heart, and will have but too many opportunities of using his knowledge, are delivered with the backward, not the forward, speech of the critic; the Proposal for correcting the English Tongue, which falls in with the Tatler paper, aims at a sort of stationary state of language and literature alike, at proscriptions and ostracisings; the Letter to a Young Clergyman and the Essay on Modern Education, though both touch on literature, are exceedingly general in their precepts; and though all persons with a true English appreciation of shameless puns and utter nonsense must delight in The Antiquity of the English Tongue, it cannot be called serious criticism. There is more in the Advice to a Young Poet: but even here Swift is rather “running humours” on his subject than discussing it in the grave and chaste manner.

We shall therefore hardly be wrong if, after excepting the literary directions of the universal satiric douche in the Tale of a Tub, and the useful but somewhat rudimentary warnings of the Tatler paper, we see the most characteristic critical work of Swift in Martinus Scriblerus and the Peri Bathous, especially in the latter, which, though it be principally attributed to Arbuthnot and Pope, is as surely Swiftian in suggestion as if the Dean had written and published it alone. Often as it has been imitated, and largely as its methods have been drawn upon, it has never been surpassed as an Art of General and Particular “Slating”: and the sections on the Figures, with the immortal receipt for making an epic poem (the full beauty of which is lost on those who do not know how appallingly close it is to the approved prescriptions of the best neo-classic critics), cannot be too highly praised. But, once more, the critic is here at hangman’s work only: he allows himself neither to admire nor to love.

These principles, put in various ways by writers of more or less genius for half a century, found what seemed to more than two generations (always with a few dissidents) something like consummate expression in certain well-known utterances of Pope. Pope. As expression these utterances may still receive a very high degree of admiration: as anything else it is difficult to believe that any turn of fashion, unless it brings with it oblivion for large districts of noble literature, can restore them to much authority. Pope, though better read than he seems in his poems, was by no means a learned man; and it is now pretty generally admitted that his intellect was acute rather than powerful. The obstinate superficiality—the reduction of everything, even the most recondite problems of philosophy, even the most far-ranging questions of erudition, to a jury of “common-sense” persons, decorated with a little of the fashion of the town—which had set in, found in him an exponent as competent to give it exquisite expression as he was indisposed, and probably incompetent, to deepen or extend its scope. He attained early to nearly his full powers, and it does not much matter whether the Essay on Criticism was written at the age of twenty or at that of twenty-two. He could have improved it a little in form, but would hardly have altered it at all in matter, if he had written it thirty years later. The Imitation of the Epistle of Horace to Augustus, which was actually written about that time, is, though superior as verse, almost inferior as criticism, and more “out” in fact. The two together give a sufficient view of Pope as he wished to be taken critically. The Letters. But to be perfectly fair we must add the critical utterances in his Letters,^[592] his Preface to Shakespeare, and (with caution of course) the remarks attributed to him by Spence. The Preface has received much praise; and has deserved some even from those who follow not Pope generally. It would be unfair to blame him for adopting the mixed “beauty and fault” system which had the patronage of great names in antiquity, and found hardly even questioners in his own time. And it is something that he recognises Shakespeare’s power over the passions, the individuality of his characters, his intuitive knowledge of the world and of nature. He is moderate and sensible on the relations of Shakespeare and Jonson; he has practically said all that is to be said, in an endless and tiresome controversy, by writing, The Shakespeare Preface. “To judge Shakespeare by Aristotle’s rules is like trying a man by the laws of one country who acted under those of another.” And for such utterances we may excuse, or at least pass over with little or no comment, the remarks that Shakespeare kept bad company, that he wrote to please the populace, that he resembles “an ancient majestic piece of Gothic architecture [so far, so good], where many of the details are childish, ill-placed, and unequal to its grandeur.” The littleness of this patchy, yea-nay criticism beside the great and everlasting appreciation of his master Dryden speaks for itself; it is only fair to remember that the very existence of Dryden’s for once really marmoreal inscription almost inevitably belittled and hampered Pope. He was obliged to be different; and internal as well as external influences made it certain that if he were different he would be less.

The Popiana of Spence^[593] add more to our idea of Pope’s critical faculty, or at least of its exercises; in fact, it is possible to take a much better estimate of Pope’s “literature” from the Anecdotes than from the Works. Spence’s Anecdotes. Although the Boswellian spirit was, fortunately enough for posterity, very strong in the eighteenth century, there was no particular reason why Spence should toady Pope—especially as he published nothing to obtain pence or popularity from the toadying. That rather remarkable collection, or re-collection, of Italian-Latin poetry of the Renaissance,^[594] of which not much notice has been taken by Pope’s biographers, would, of itself, show critical interest in a part, and no unnoteworthy part, of literature: and a few of the Spencean salvages bear directly upon this. He need not have been ashamed of his special liking for Politian’s Ambra: and he was right in thinking Bembo “stiff and unpoetical,” though hardly in joining Sadolet with him in this condemnation. We know perfectly well why he did not like Rabelais, for which Swift very properly scolded him: indeed, he tells us himself, twice over, that “there were so many things” in Master Francis, “in which he could not see any manner of meaning driven at,” that he could not read him with any patience. This is really more tale-telling than the constantly quoted passage about Walsh and correctness. For, after all, everybody aspires to be correct: only everybody has his own notions of what is correctness. It is not everybody—and, as we see, it was not the great Mr Pope—who could, or can, appreciate nonsense, and see how much more sensible than sense the best of it is. It would skill but little to go through his isolated judgments: but there are one or two which are eloquent.

Still, it is to the Essay and the Epistle that we must turn for his deliberate theory of criticism, announced in youth, indorsed and emphasised in age. The Essay on Criticism. And we meet at once with a difficulty. The possessor of such a theory ought, at least, to have something like a connected knowledge, at least a connected view, of literature as a whole, and to be able to square the two. All Pope seems to have done is to take the Arts of Horace, Vida, and Boileau, to adopt as many of their principles as he understood, and as would go into his sharp antithetic couplet, to drag their historical illustrations head and shoulders into his scheme without caring for the facts, and to fill in and embroider with criticisms, observations, and precepts, sometimes very shrewd, almost always perfectly expressed, but far too often arbitrary, conventional, and limited. He is most unfortunate of all in the historical part, where Boileau had been sufficiently unfortunate before him. The Frenchman’s observations on Villon and Ronsard had been ignorant enough, and forced enough: but Pope managed to go a little beyond them in the Essay, and a great distance further still in the Epistle. The history of the famous passage,

is like nothing on earth but the history-poetry of the despised monkish ages, in which Alexander has twelve peers, and Arthur, early in the sixth century, overruns Europe with a British force, and fights with a Roman Emperor named Lucius. And the sketch of European literature in the Essay, if it contains no single statement so glaringly absurd, is as much a “tissue of gaps” as the Irishman’s coat.

Attempts have been made (including some by persons deserving all respect, and thoroughly acquainted with the subject) to give Pope a high place, on the score of his charges to “follow nature.” Unfortunately this is mere translation of Boileau, of Vida, and of Horace, in the first place: and, still more unfortunately, the poet’s own arguments on his doctrine show that what he meant by “following nature,” and what we mean by it, are two quite different things. He, usually at least, means “stick to the usual, the ordinary, the commonplace.” Just so the legendary King of Siam, had he written an Art of Poetry, would have said “Follow nature, and do not talk about such unnatural things as ice and snow.”

Regarded merely as a manual of the art of Pope’s own poetry, without prejudice to any other, and as a satire on the faults of other kinds, without prejudice to the weaknesses of his own, the Essay is not merely an interesting document, but a really valuable one. Its cautions against desertion of nature in the directions of excess, of the unduly fantastic, are sound to this day: and its eulogies of ancient writers, though perhaps neither based on very extensive and accurate first-hand knowledge, nor specially appropriate to the matter in hand, contain much that is just in itself. One of the weakest parts, as might have been expected, is the treatment of rules, licences, and faults. The poet-critic practically confesses the otiosity of the whole system by admitting that a lucky licence is a rule, and that it is possible, as one of his own most famous and happiest lines says,

And when he paraphrases Quintilian to the effect that you must criticise

and judge the whole, not the parts, he again goes perilously near to jettison his whole system.

In the same way consistency is the last thing that can be claimed for his chapters, as they may be called, on conceit, on language, “numbers” (the most famous and the most ingenious passage of the Essay), extremes, “turns,” the Ancient and Modern quarrel, &c. The passage on Critics is among the best—for here sheer good sense (even in the temporary, much more in the universal, meaning) tells—and the historical sketch of them, though not too accurate, is vigorous.

The much later Epistle is far more desultory, and inevitably tinged by those personal feelings which many years of literary squabble had helped ill-health and natural disposition to arouse in Pope. The Epistle to Augustus. But its general critical attitude is not different. He is angry with the revival of old literature which Watson and Allan Ramsay in Scotland, Oldys and others in England, were beginning, hints sneers even at Milton and the “weeds on Avon’s bank,” is at least as hackneyed as he is neat in his individual criticisms on poets nearer his own day, and defends poetry and literature generally in a patronising and half-apologetic strain. In fact, what he has really at heart is to be politely rude to George II.; not to give any critical account of English literature.

But the Essay on Criticism is too important a thing not to require a little more notice here. Remarks on Pope as a critic, It is extremely desultory; but so is the Epistola ad Pisones, and it is by no means certain that Pope was not wise in falling back upon the Roman method, instead of emulating the appearance of system in the Art Poétique. This latter emphasises faults; Pope’s causerie veils promiscuousness in the elegant chit-chat of conversation. A bad critic is a more dangerous person than a bad poet; and true taste is as uncommon as true genius. Bad education is responsible for bad taste, and we must be very careful about our own. Nature is the guide; the “rules” are but methodised nature. We derive them, however, not from nature but from the ancient poets, whom we must study. Even in licences we must follow them. Bad critics are made by various causes, from ignorance and party spirit to personal animus. A good critic is candid, modest, well-bred, and sincere. The sort of history of criticism which concludes the piece makes it specially surprising that Johnson should have been so much kinder to Pope’s learning than he was to Dryden’s; but the author of the actual Essay on Criticism, and the author of the unhappily but projected History of it, were too thoroughly in agreement about poetry, and even about criticism itself, to make the latter quite an impartial judge of the former.

When we pass from generals to particulars Pope’s cleverness at least appears more than ever. The sharply separated, neatly flying, and neatly ringing couplets deliver “one, two” in the most fascinating cut-and-thrust style, not without a brilliant parry now and then to presumed (and never very formidable) objections. The man’s perfect skill in the execution of his own special style of poetry raises, and in this case not delusively, the expectation that he will know his theory as well as his practice. The “good sense,” the “reason,” are really and not merely nominally present. A great deal of what is said is quite undoubtedly true and very useful, not merely for reproof and correction in point of critical and poetical sin, but actually for instruction in critical and poetical righteousness.

But on further examination there is too often something wanting; nay, there is too often no real root of the matter present. The preliminary flourishes are well enough. And certainly no school will quarrel—though each school may take the privilege of understanding the words in its own way—with the doctrine “Follow Nature.” But

is notoriously false to nature, and if intended as a hint to the critic, can only result in too common mistakes and injustices. So, too, when we pass from the glowing eulogy of Nature, and of her union with Art, to the Rules, there is a most deplorable gap. Those Rules, “discovered not devised,” are “nature methodised.” Very good. This means, if it means anything, a very true thing—that the Rules are extracted from observed works of genius. But how, a most fervent admirer of the Greeks may ask, did it happen that the Greeks discovered all these rules? How, especially, did it happen that they did so, when some kinds of literature itself were notoriously neither discovered nor devised? And when we get a little further, and are bidden to

we may, or rather must, reply, “It is most necessary; but you will neglect the Moderns at your peril.”

In short, here as elsewhere, Pope’s dazzling elocution, winged with a distinct if narrow conception of his general purpose, flies right enough in the inane, but makes painfully little progress when it lights on the prosaic ground. The picture of “young Maro,” with a sort of ciphering book before him, “totting up” Homer, Nature, and the Stagirite, and finding them all exactly equivalent, is really far more ludicrous than those flights of metaphysical fancy at which critics of Pope’s school delight to gird; while the very climax of another kind of absurdity is reached by the accordance to the Ancients, not merely of the prerogative of laying down the rule always to be followed, but of the privilege of making the not-to-be-imitated exception. So again, fine as is the Alps passage, the famous doctrine of a “little learning” is an ingenious fallacy. It is not the little learning acquired, but the vast amount of ignorance left, that is dangerous. The admirable couplet,

though in itself the best thing in the whole poem, is unluckily placed, because this sensation of familiarity beneath novelty is constantly given by those very “conceits” which Pope is denouncing. On “Language” and “Numbers” he is too notoriously speaking to a particular brief. And as for his more general cautions throughout, they are excellent sense for the most part, but have very little more to do with criticism than with any other function of life. A banker or a fishmonger, an architect, artist, or plain man, will no doubt be the better for avoiding extremes, partisanship, singularity, fashion, mere jealousy (personal or other), ignorance, pedantry, vice. And if he turns critic he will find these avoidances still useful to him, but not more specially useful than in his former profession.

What then was the critical attitude which was expressed so brilliantly, and which gave Pope a prerogative influence over all the orthodox criticism of his own century in England and even elsewhere? and the critical attitude of his group. It can be sketched very fairly as being a sort of compromise between a supposed following of the ancients, and a real application, to literature in general and to poetry in particular, of the general taste and cast of thought of the time. The following of the Ancients—it has been often pointed out already—was, as the Articles of the Church of England have it, a “corrupt following”: those who said Aristotle meant now nobody more ancient than Boileau, now no one more ancient than Vida, scarcely ever any one more ancient than Horace. The classics as a whole were very little studied, at least by those who busied themselves most with modern literature; and it had entered into the heads of few that, after all, the standards of one literature might, or rather must, require very considerable alteration before they could apply to another.^[596] But Greek and Roman literature presented a body of poetry and of most other kinds, considerable, admittedly excellent, and mostly composed under the influence of distinct and identical critical principles. Very few men had a complete knowledge of even a single modern literature; hardly a man in France knew Old French as a whole, hardly a man in England, except mere antiquaries, knew Old English even as a part. There was probably not a man in Europe till Gray (and Gray was still young at Pope’s death) who had any wide reading at once in classical literature and in the mediæval and modern literatures of different countries. Accordingly the principles of ancient criticism, not even in their purity fully adequate to modern works, and usually presented, not in their purity but in garbled and bastardised form, were all that they had to stand by.

This classical, or pseudo-classical, doctrine was further affected, in the case of literature generally, by the ethos of the time, and, in the case of poetry, by the curious delusion as to hard and fast syllabic prosody which has been noticed in connection with Bysshe. Classicism, in any pure sense, was certainly not to blame for this, for everybody with the slightest tinge of education knew that the chief Latin metre admitted the substitution of trisyllabic for dissyllabic feet in every place but one, and most knew that this substitution was even more widely permitted by Greek in a standard metre, approaching the English still nearer. But it had, as we have seen, been a gradually growing delusion, for a hundred and fifty years, in almost every kind of non-dramatic poetry.

As for the general tendency, the lines of that are clear—though the arbitrary extension and stiffening of them remain a little incomprehensible. Nature was to be the test; but an artificialised Nature, arranged according to the fashion of a town-haunting society—a Nature which submitted herself to a system of convention and generalisation. In so far as there was any real general principle it was that you were to be like everybody else—that singularity, except in doing the usual thing best, was to be carefully avoided. Pope, being a man of genius, could not help transcending this general conception constantly by his execution, not seldom by his thought, and sometimes in his critical precepts. But it remains the conception of his time and of himself.

The writers whom we have been discussing, since we parted with Dennis, have all been considerable men of letters, who in more or less degree busied themselves with criticism. Philosophical and Professional Critics. We must now pass to those who, without exactly deserving the former description, undertook the subject either, as part of those “philosophical” inquiries which, however loosely understood, were so eagerly and usefully pursued by the eighteenth century, or as direct matter of professional duty. The first division supplies Lord Kames in Scotland and “Hermes” Harris in England. Whether we are right in reserving Shaftesbury, Hume, Adam Smith, &c., from it, so as to deal with them from the Æsthetic side in the next volume, may be matter of opinion.

To the second belong Trapp, Blair, and Campbell. Trapp. Trapp need not detain us very long; but as first occupant of the first literary chair in England, and so the author of a volume of Prælections respectable in themselves, and starting a line of similar work which, to the present day, has contributed admirable critical documents, he cannot be omitted. He was the author of one of the wittiest epigrams^[597] on record, but he did not allow himself much sparkle in his lectures.^[598] Perhaps, indeed, he was right not to do so.

Hugh Blair, half a century later than Trapp, in 1759, started, like him, the teaching of modern literature in his own country. Blair. He had the advantage, as far as securing a popular audience goes, of lecturing in English, and he was undoubtedly a man of talent. The Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres,^[599] which were delivered with great éclat for nearly a quarter of a century from the Chair of their subject, are very far, indeed, from being devoid of merit. They provide a very solid, if a somewhat mannered and artificial instruction, both by precept and example, in what may be called the “full-dress plain style” which was popular in the eighteenth century. They are as original as could be expected. The critical examination of Addison’s style, if somewhat meticulous, is mostly sound, and has, like Johnson’s criticisms of Dryden and Pope, the advantage of thorough sympathy, of freedom from the drawback—so common in such examinations—that author and critic are standing on different platforms, looking in different directions, speaking, one may almost say, in mutually incomprehensible tongues. The survey of Belles Lettres is, on its own scheme, ingenious and correct: there are everywhere evidences of love of Literature (as the lover understands her), of good education and reading, of sound sense. Blair is to be very particularly commended for accepting to the full the important truth that “Rhetoric” in modern times really means “Criticism”; and for doing all he can to destroy the notion, authorised too far by ancient critics, and encouraged by those of the Renaissance, that Tropes and Figures are not possibly useful classifications and names, but fill a real arsenal of weapons, a real cabinet of reagents, by the employment of which the practitioner can refute, or convince, or delight, as the case may be.

But with this, and with the further praise due to judicious borrowings from the ancients, the encomium must cease. The Lectures on Rhetoric. In Blair’s general critical view of literature the eighteenth-century blinkers are drawn as close as possible. From no writer, even in French, can more “awful examples” be extracted, not merely of perverse critical assumption, but of positive historical ignorance. Quite early in the second Lecture, and after some remarks (a little arbitrary, but not valueless) on delicacy and correctness in taste, we find, within a short distance of each other, the statements that “in the reign of Charles II. such writers as Suckling and Etheridge were held in esteem for dramatic composition,” and later, “If a man shall assert that Homer has no beauties whatever, that he holds him to be a dull and spiritless writer, and that he would as soon peruse any legend of old knight-errantry as the Iliad, then I exclaim that my antagonist is either void of all taste,” &c. Here, on the one hand, the lumping of Suckling and Etherege together, and the implied assumption that not merely Suckling, but Etherege, is a worthless dramatist, gives us one “light,” just as the similar implication that “an old legend of knight-errantry” is necessarily an example of dulness, spiritlessness, and absence of beauty, gives us another. That Blair lays down, even more peremptorily than Johnson, and as peremptorily as Bysshe, that the pause in an English line may fall after the 4th, 5th, 6th, or 7th syllable, and no other, is not surprising; and his observations on Shakespeare are too much in the usual “faults-saved-by-beauties” style to need quotation. But that he cites, with approval, a classification of the great literary periods of the world which excludes the Elizabethan Age altogether, is not to be omitted. It stamps the attitude.

These same qualities appear in the once famous but now little read Dissertation on Ossian.^[600] The Dissertation on Ossian. That, in the sense of the word on which least stress is laid in these volumes, this “Critical Dissertation” is absolutely uncritical does not much matter. Blair does not even attempt to examine the evidence for and against the genuineness of the work he is discussing. He does not himself know Gaelic; friends (like Hector M’Intyre) have told him that they heard Gaelic songs very like Ossian sung in their youth; there are said to be manuscripts; that is enough for him. Even when he cites and compares parallel passages—the ghost-passage and that from the book of Job, Fingal’s “I have no son” and Othello—which derive their whole beauty from exact coincidence with the Bible or Shakespeare, he will allow no kind of suspicion to cross his mind. But this we might let pass. It is in the manner in which he seeks to explain the “amazing degree of regularity and art,” which he amazingly ascribes to Macpherson’s redaction, the “rapid and animated style,” the “strong colouring of imagination,” the “glowing sensibility of heart,” that the most surprising thing appears. His citations are as copious as his praises of them are hard to indorse. But his critical argument rests almost (not quite) wholly on showing that Fingal and Temora are worked out quite properly on Aristotelian principles by way of central action and episode, and that there are constant parallels to Homer, the only poet whom he will allow to be Ossian’s superior. In short, he simply applies to Ossian Addison’s procedure with Paradise Lost. The critical piquancy of this is double. For we know that Ossian was powerful—almost incredibly powerful—all over Europe in a sense quite opposite to Blair’s; and we suspect, if we do not know, that Mr James Macpherson was quite clever enough purposely to give it something of the turn which Blair discovers.

The charge which may justly be brought against Blair—that he is both too exclusively and too purblindly “belletristic”—cannot be extended to Henry Home, Lord Kames. Kames. Johnson, whom Kames disliked violently, and who returned the dislike with rather good-natured if slightly contemptuous patronage, dismissed the Elements of Criticism, 1761,^[601] as “a pretty Essay, which deserves to be held in some estimation, though much of it is chimerical.”^[602] The sting of this lies, as usual, in the fact that it is substantially true, though by no means all the truth. The Elements of Criticism is a pretty book, and an estimable one, and, what is more, one of very considerable originality. Its subtlety and ingenuity are often beyond Johnson’s own reach; it shows a really wide knowledge of literature, modern as well as ancient; and it is surprisingly, though not uniformly, free from the special “classical” purblindness of which Johnson and Blair are opposed, but in their different ways equal, examples. Yet a very great deal of it is “chimerical,” and, what is worse, a very great deal more is, whether chimerical or not in itself, irrelevant. It presents a philosophical treatise, vaguely and tentatively æsthetic rather than critical, yoked in the loosest possible manner to a bundle of quasi-professorial exercises in Lower and Higher Rhetoric. The second part might not improperly be termed “Critical Illustrations of Rhetoric.” The first could only be properly entitled “Literary Illustrations of Morals.”

Of course this excellent Scots lawyer and ingenious “Scotch metaphysician” had strong precedents to urge for making a muddle of Moral Philosophy and Literary Criticism. The Elements of Criticism. It has been pointed out that Aristotle himself is not a little exposed to the same imputation. But Kames embroils matters to an extent never surpassed, except by those, to be found in every day, who are incapable of taking the literary point of view at all, and who simply treat literature as something expressing agreement or disagreement with their moral, political, religious, or other views. He seems himself to have had, at least once, a slight qualm. “A treatise of ethics is not my province: I carry my view no farther than to the elements of criticism, in order to show that the fine arts are a subject of reasoning as well as of taste.”^[603] If this was his rule he certainly gives himself the most liberal indulgence in applying it. His First Chapter is devoted to “Perceptions and Ideas in a Train”; the second (an immensely long one, containing a good third of the first volume) to “Emotions and Passions”; while the whole of the rest till the end of the seventeenth chapter is really occupied by the same class of subject. Kames excels in that constantly ingenious, and often acute, dissection of human nature which was the pride and pleasure of his century and his country, but which is a little apt to pay itself with clever generalisations as if they were veræ causæ. In one place we find a distribution of all the pleasures of the senses into pain of want, desire, and satisfaction. In another^[604] the philosopher solemnly informs us, “I love my daughter less after she is married, and my mother less after a second marriage; the marriage of my son or my father diminishes not my affection so remarkably.” An almost burlesque illustration of the procedure of the school is given in the dictum,^[605] “Where the course of nature is joined with Elevation the effect must be delightful; and hence the singular beauty of smoke ascending in a calm morning.” When one remembers this, and comes later^[606] to the admirable remark, “Thus, to account for an effect of which there is no doubt, any cause, however foolish, is made welcome,” it is impossible not to say “Thou sayest it”; as also in another case, where he lays it down that “Were corporeal pleasures dignified over and above [i.e., beside the natural propensity which incites us to them] with a place in a high class, they would infallibly disturb the balance of the mind by outweighing the social affections. This is a satisfactory final cause for refusing to these pleasures any degree of dignity.”^[607] I am tempted to quote Kames’s philosophy of the use of tobacco^[608] also, but the stuff and method of his first volume must be sufficiently intelligible already.

The second, much more to the purpose, is considerably less interesting. A very long chapter deals with Beauty of Language with respect to Sound, Signification, Resemblance between Sound and Signification, and Metre. It is abundantly stocked with well-chosen examples from a wide range of literature, and full of remarks, generally ingenious and sometimes both new and bold, as where at the outset Kames has the audacity to contradict Aristotle, by implication at least, and lay it down that “of all the fine arts, painting and sculpture only are in their nature imitative.”^[609] But it is not free from the influence of the idols of its time. Of such, in one kind, may be cited the attribution to Milton of “many careless lines”;^[610] for if there is one thing certain in the risky and speculative range of literary dogmatism, it is that Milton never wrote a “careless” line in his life. If his lines are ever bad (and perhaps they are sometimes), they are bad deliberately and of malice. In another and more serious kind may be ranged the predominating determination to confuse the sensual with the intellectual side of poetry. This, of course, is Kames’s root-idea; but that it is a root of evil may be shown sufficiently by the following passage in his discussion of the pause—in relation to which subject he is as wrong as nearly all his contemporaries. He is talking of a pause between adjective and substantive.^[611] What occurs to him is that “a quality cannot exist independent of a subject, nor are they separable even in imagination, because they make part of the same idea, and for that reason, with respect to melody as well as to sense, it must be disagreeable to bestow upon the adjective a sort of independent existence by interjecting a pause between it and its substantive.” His examples are no doubt vitiated by the obsession of the obligatory “middle” pause, which makes him imagine one between adjective and substantive in