I.

In the present Interchapter, as in that at the close of the former volume, it seems desirable to make the summary twofold: in the first place, with reference to the Book which the chapter immediately follows, so as to provide a corresponding view to that given by the Interchapters of the two earlier Books in the volume itself; in the second, surveying the State of Criticism—with a look before and after—at the period which we have reached. This survey is here of even more importance than it was on the former occasion because of the greater—in fact the almost absolute—homogeneity of the subject. But it comes second in order, and for the moment we must busy ourselves only with that portion or side of Eighteenth-Century Criticism itself which has been considered in the last three chapters.

In one way Eighteenth-Century criticism has a very notable advantage over Seventeenth and Sixteenth. In the earliest of the three, as we saw, criticism exists almost without a critic. Its authorities are either men of something less (to speak kindly) than the first rank as men of letters, or else they devote only a slight and passing attention to the subject. In the Seventeenth this is not quite so, for Dryden is a host in himself, and Boileau, to name nobody else, is no common man of letters.

But in the Eighteenth the case is far more altered. English and French, the two leading literatures of Europe, are copiously and intensely critical, if not entirely according to knowledge. Addison, Johnson, Pope, Voltaire, are all dictators of literature, whose fame and authority, in the case at least of the two last, go far beyond their own country—and they are all critics. In another country, though in a division, for reasons, not yet noticed, Goethe, who, if any one, is the representative man of letters in his own nation, is a critic. The second class of names—mentioned or to be mentioned—Vico, Shaftesbury, Lessing, Gray, Buffon, Diderot, and others, approaches very nearly, if it does not sometimes reach, the first rank. Moreover, criticism has enormously multiplied its appearances and opportunities of appearance: it has, in a manner, become popular. The critical Review—the periodical by means of which it is possible, and becomes easy, to give critical account of the literature, not merely of the past but of the present—becomes common. The critic as such is no longer regarded as a mere pedant; he at least attempts to take his place as a literary man of the world. If Italy and Spain fail—even allowing for the remarkable Italian critical group at the beginning of the century—to justify their old reputation, Germany, on the other hand, begins that career of critical hard labour to which she has apparently sentenced herself in perpetuity, and relieves it with more excursions into the fairer letters than of late. The French, though subject more severely than men of any other country to the idols of the time, continue to justify themselves both in the lighter and the severer critical work.

But the contribution of England is the most interesting of all. Our position at the time may be compared, with some advantage and no danger of straining, to that of Spain at a somewhat earlier period (see pp. 338-350). We do not indeed find, in any English critic after Dryden, formal expressions of such weight and pregnancy in the Romantic direction as those which the sharp-sightedness and patience of Señor Menéndez y Pelayo have extracted from the Spanish Preceptists. But the general tendency is even more comprehensive, if not yet catholic. In consequence, very mainly, of Dryden’s own magnificent championship of Shakespeare and Milton, it was, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, felt in England that these two at any rate had to be reckoned with; while Chaucer also had the same powerful recommendation, and Spenser had never lost the affection of the fit, though for a time they might be few. With these four to be somehow or other—by hook or by crook—taken into consideration, it was impossible for the worst harm to be done; and the peculiarities of English character, combined with the more vigorous condition of English creative literature, made the compromise work far better than that which had been in a manner entertained in Spain on the subject of Lope and Calderon. It might have been dangerous if Johnson had written the Lives at the age which was Pope’s when he wrote the Essay on Criticism; but this danger also the Fortune of England—kindest of Goddesses, and most abused in her kindness, yet justified of Fate!—averted.

We shall, it is to be hoped, be able to show in the next volume how these conditions of Classicism in the several countries affected the rise or resurrection of Romanticism. For the present we must confine ourselves to the way in which they affected Classicism itself.

For the purpose we need not repeat, or even recapitulate, what has been said of its fortunes in Germany, Italy, and Spain, save to say that in the first-named country it only appeared to disappear, while in the other two it suffered increasing decrepitude. England and France are much more important and interesting subjects of consideration and comparison.

In both, as we saw, Neo-classicism is undoubtedly the accepted orthodoxy of the time. If that draft confession of Faith, which has been sketched in a former page, had been laid before an assembly of the leading men of letters in both countries, many might have taken exception to its actual form; but as for its spirit, there is hardly a Frenchman who would have refused to accept it, while not many Englishmen would have done so. At the same time—until, towards the later years of the century, the “alarums and excursions” of the Romantic rising recalled the orthodox to strictness—a more searching examination would have revealed serious defections and latitudinarianisms. Pope was perhaps the most orthodox neo-classic, in criticism as in creation, of the greater men of letters of the time; but Pope was fond of Spenser. Addison had never thoroughly cleared his mind up about criticism; but many things in him point the Romantic way, and we know that some of the more orthodox thought him weak and doubtful. Voltaire, at one time, had considerable leanings towards both Shakespeare and Milton; and we have seen how Johnson, though he resisted and recovered himself, was at least once within appreciable distance of that precipice of “judging by the event,” over which, when a Classic once lets himself slip, he falls for ever and for ever through the Romantic void.

Of lesser men we need not speak much—reference to what has been said above of the escapades of Fontenelle and Marmontel, of Steele and Kames, is sufficient. But all these things were as the liberalities of a securely established orthodoxy, estated and endowed, dreading no disturbance, and able to be generous to others—even to indulge itself a little in licence and peccadillo. Everywhere but in England the vast majority of men, and even in England all but a very small minority, had no doubt about the general principles of the Neo-classic Creed. They still judged by Rules and Kinds; they still had the notion that you must generalise, always generalise; they still believed that, in some way or other, Homer and Virgil—especially Virgil—had exhausted the secrets of Epic, and almost of poetry; and, above all, they were entirely unprepared to extend patient and unbiassed judgment to something acknowledged, and acknowledging itself, to be new. On the contrary, they must still be vindicating even things which they liked, but which appeared to them to be novel, on the score of their being so very like the old—as we saw in the case of Blair and Ossian.

The Nemesis of this their Correctness, as far as creation is concerned, in prose to some extent, but still more in verse, has been described over and over again by a thousand critics and literary historians. The highest and most poetical poetry they could not write at all—except when they had, like Collins, and Smart, and Blake, a little not merely of furor poeticus, but of actual insanity in their constitution, or when they violated their own rules by transgressing into pure nature-poetry or into intense realism of anthropology. In their own chosen way they could at best achieve the really poetical rhetoric, but at the same time strictly rhetorical poetry, of Pope, and, in a lower range, of Akenside.^[744] For prose they had the luck to discover, in the Novel, a Kind which, never having been to any great extent practised before, was a Kind practically without rules, and so could make or neglect its rules for itself. In another, not quite so new, their performance gave striking instance of their limitations. The Periodical Essay was a thing of almost infinite possibilities: but because it had happened at first to be written in a certain form by persons of genius, they turned practice into Kind and Rule once more, and for nearly the whole century—not merely in England—went on imitating the Spectator.

In Criticism itself the effects were not wholly different, though of course to some extent apparently dissimilar. We have seen how, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the necessary and ineluctable set of the critical current towards full and free “judging of authors” seems to have been resisted by a sort of unconscious recalcitrance on the part of critics; yet how they are drawn nearer and nearer to it, and, in Dryden’s case at any rate, achieve admirable results. By the eighteenth, in all countries, the tendency becomes irresistible. The interest in literature, the bent and occupations of men of letters great and small, the new institution of periodicals—all combine to strengthen it: and every kind of critical estimate, from the elaborate literary history to the brief review, begins to be written, and is written, ever more copiously.

This was what criticism wanted; and it could not but do good. Yet the results illustrated, as mere abstract treatises never could have done, the deficiencies of the common critical theory. The writers save themselves, as a rule, from the worst mistakes by simply ignoring that of which they are ignorant. But in regard to the things with which they do deal the inadequacy and the hamper of their theory are sufficiently apparent.

Of course the deficiencies of Eighteenth-century criticism are to be easily matched with other, and sometimes opposite, deficiencies in other times. It takes considerably more pains to get at something like a real appreciation of its subject, something more than a bare reference to schedule, than had been the case, either in ancient times or in the two centuries immediately preceding. It is very much better furnished with a critical theory (whether good or bad does not at the moment matter) than has usually been the case with Criticism from the early years of the nineteenth century to the early years of the twentieth. It is not even intentionally ignorant—its ignorance only proceeds from a mistaken estimate of things as worth or not worth knowing; and there is rarely to be found in it the bland assumption that “I like this,” or perhaps rather, “I choose to say I like this,” will settle everything, which has been not entirely unknown later. But it combines, in a fashion already perhaps sufficiently illustrated, the awkwardness of dogmatism and of compromise; and it is perhaps more exposed to those two terrible questions, “Why?” and “Why Not?” which are the Monkir and Nakir of all critics and all criticism, than the criticism of any other period. It is difficult to see how a critic such as Dennis could give any reasons for admiring Shakespeare at all, save ethical ones; and it is quite certain that a persistent Te sequar with the “Why Not?” will dispose of almost all the stock eighteenth-century objections both to Shakespeare and to all other suspected persons. In a certain way La Harpe had the advantage of all his predecessors, for he was at least consistent.

The theory not merely of the authades kallos, the “head-strong beauty,” but of the “monstrous beauty”—the beauty which is beautiful but has no business to be so, the miracle-working power which does work miracles, but is to be forbidden as magia nigra, because it does not work them according to the rules—may seem itself so monstrous as to be a patent reductio ad absurdum. In fact it acted as such. Yet the logic of it is undeniable. It had all along been the unspoken word, but the word that ought to have been spoken, and had to be spoken some day. Nor need we grudge the admission that it was in a certain sense better than the practice (which had been often resorted to before, and which has not seldom been resorted to since) of absolutely denying the beauty altogether, with the possible result of being, after a time, honestly unable to see it.

A certain number of points, affecting the criticism and the taste of the Eighteenth century in particular, remains to be noticed briefly before we pass to the consideration of the Neo-classic Dispensation generally.

In the first place, both could not fail to be influenced most powerfully by the constant growth of literature in volume; by the appearance, almost for the first time in large numbers, of the man of letters by profession; and, lastly, by certain changes in general education, and so in the quality of writers and readers. To say that the general reader first made his appearance about 1660, in what were to be thenceforward the two great literary countries of Europe, would be an exaggeration, but only an exaggeration, of the truth. He certainly increased and multiplied in both thenceforward; and, by an inevitable consequence, at once created the vocation of the writer and determined the cast and quality of the things written. Matters like the continued engouement of the French court and French society for literature, and the alternate exaltation and depression, the Secretaryships of State and the Grub Street kennels, for it in England, only concern us indirectly; but they do concern us. Prosperity and patronage enticed the literary man to work; poverty and contempt drove him to it, if only to hack-work. Influences came, too, from the subdivision of Kinds, the specialisation of study required, the reduction of mere erudition among those who were not specialists. I should suppose that, taking the average reading of those who had any reading at all, the late sixteenth century, with a great part of the seventeenth, was the most erudite time in the known history of the world. The level of general erudition has been constantly declining since, though with some fluctuations; and it was at a specially low level during the later eighteenth century. Although it is an auxiliary on whose aid Romantic criticism—or rather that catholic criticism which is neither Classic nor Romantic exclusively, but both and more than both—can by no means pride herself, there is little doubt that the increasing neglect of the classics did help to discredit the criticism which chiefly appealed to them; while the constantly growing attention to certain kinds of physical science could not but tell upon the purely literary estimate. The historical studies which were so great a characteristic of the later century could not, again, but be powerful unsettlers of the fixed point of view; the ever-growing popularity of the novel was constantly lifting into greater prominence a kind of which the ancients had practically taken no notice at all; the equally constant development of the newspaper was always adding writers, who knew little of ancient rules, on subjects of which the ancients had never thought. Even without the special literary influences which we may hope to consider in the next Book, the general trend of habit and event made for a change in criticism; and such a change was imperatively called for, at once by that reductio ad absurdum of neo-classic strictures, and by that illogical tolerance of certain great writers of the past, to which we have given the joint name and status of its Nemesis.^[745]

II.

We now have before us the more important, but also the more difficult, task of summing up the achievements and the shortcomings of the whole period covered by this volume—the only period, be it remembered, in which Criticism was regarded from the point of view of a commonly accepted, if not very commonly understood, orthodoxy. This of itself is an advantage, which, though it has not recently counted for very much, will never be overlooked by true critics. Even if we drop the quod semper, the quod ubique, quod ab omnibus has a weight which leaves it wholly for the other side to show case and cause against. Orthodoxy may be really right—really orthodox; on that head it has at least an even chance against any of its opponents. Even if it is not, it has merits which they can rarely claim. It has no temptations for the clever fool, who is perhaps on the whole the most pestilent, intellectually, of human beings. It demands a certain amount of self-abnegation, which is always a good thing. It does not perhaps really offer any greater temptation to the merely stupid than does the cheap heterodoxy of other times. Above all, it directly tends to a certain intellectual calmness—to an absence of fuss, and worry, and pother, which is certainly not one of the least characteristics of the Judge. At all times the wise man would rather be orthodox than not; and at most times, though not quite at all, the wisest men have been orthodox, if only because they have recognised that every opinion has some amount of truth in it, and that this truth, plus the advantages of orthodoxy just mentioned, is greatest, and should prevail.

This will be recognised by all fair-minded persons as a handsome allowance in any case; it is surely a particularly handsome allowance when the arbiter happens not to be a partisan of the orthodoxy in question. And it is quite sincere. The present writer has emerged from the serious and consecutive examination of “classical” critics, necessary for the writing of this volume, with a distinctly higher opinion of them generally, with a higher opinion in most cases in particular, than he held previously on piecemeal and imperfect acquaintance. It is only in such a case as that of Boileau—where an almost consummate faculty of expression masks really small critical gifts, and where the worst faults of the critical character, personal rudeness and spite, are continually lurking behind what seem to be systematic judgments—that the result of the reading has gone the other way. At the same time, if we take the true reading of illud Syrianum, “Judex damnatur [capitis cum [in]nocens [culpatur vel minime],” then the case of the criticism with which we have been dealing becomes somewhat parlous. It is all the worse because its worsening is gradual and continuous. The sins of the earliest Renaissance criticism are sins chiefly of neglect, and are not as a rule aggravated by commission; while its merits are very great. We could have done nothing without it: at best we should have had to do for ourselves all that it has done for us. But the bad side of the matter betrays itself in the code-making of the seventeenth century; it is but imperfectly and unsatisfactorily disguised in the compromises of the earlier eighteenth; and it appears in all its deformity in the La Harpian recrudescence.

The fault of the whole is undoubtedly but an aggravation of what in Ancient Criticism could hardly be called with justice a fault at all, though it was even there a serious defect—the absence, that is to say, of a wide enough collection of instances from the past, and of an elastic and tolerant system of trial and admission for the present and future. We may now^[746] use the word “fault” almost without qualification, proviso, or apology. The Greek could not, and the Roman until very late days could only to a most limited extent, exercise the proper sweep of observation and comparison; the man of the earlier Middle Ages was, from different causes, prevented from doing so to any effect. But the contemporaries of Lilius Giraldus who knew (or knew of) Chaucer and Wyatt—still more, in the next generation, those of Patrizzi who knew Ronsard and the Pléiade—could plead no such exemption or excuse. They had recovered the exacter knowledge of the remoter past which the Middle Ages lacked, the critical spirit which during the Middle Ages was asleep: and they had accumulated and were accumulating treasures, of completed mediæval work and of modern work constantly accruing, enough to give them every comparison, without exception, that they could have wanted. Their guilt was deepening daily as their opportunities increased.

For they neglected these opportunities, they “sinned” these mercies, almost without exception. If England in any way deserved the good fortune that fell to her at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, it was because she had never wholly denied either Chaucer or Spenser, either Shakespeare or Milton. But the just men who thus saved her were wofully few, and they were almost all of them followers of Naaman, who extorted a permission to bow in the house of Rimmon, rather than of the glorious Three Children, who would do obeisance to no graven image that any king set up. If Germany had the honour of leading the way—or very nearly leading the way—in the Critical Reformation, it was because, from the very beginning of her really modern literature, she had put faith in her Heldenbuch and her Bergreihen. But even this faith was rather hesitating for a long time, and it had no foothold in courtly, and curial, and academic places. The men who were the real pioneers in the revival or commencement of that universal study of literature which alone can lead to a universal criticism, were as a rule mere scholars and antiquaries, men like Oldys and Capell, La Monnoye and Sainte-Palaye, Sanchez and Sedano. Gray, the greatest man of letters by far who at least fumbled with the key of the enchanted garden, did but fumble with that key: and his successors Percy and Warton, who opened what they could, were not great men of letters at all. Abroad, and especially in France, their analogues, such as Marmontel, never got so far even as they did. In Spain it became fashionable to deny Lope if not Cervantes: in Italy Dante-worship was too often, if not in most cases, lip-worship only.

The spectacle of these centuries is almost infinitely interesting and surprising. I cannot, after having, with not a little pains, attained to some Pisgah-sight of it, exhaust my own wonder, especially in regard to the Eighteenth, or disentangle myself from that fatalism which I have already—with the result of some misunderstanding in the house of no un-friends—announced at the end of the First volume. We can understand the Sixteenth century, with its vernaculars hardly yet fully formed, with their greatest literature coming and to come, with an almost excusable distaste for the immediate past, and with the full eagerness—the honeymoon intoxication—of their intercourse with the classics upon them—we can understand this being excessive in admitting, in continuing, in caricaturing, the critical principles of the classics themselves. We can also, if not quite so fully, understand how the dwindling enthusiasms of the Seventeenth, with its still greater sense of “the petty done, the undone vast” in the matter of mere erudition, and its thick-coming concerns of party politics, material progress, physical science, rivalry of nations, and the like—we can understand its sinking, in mid-journey or thereabouts, to an “age of prose and sense,” where the prose was as certain as the sense was sometimes problematical. But the Eighteenth was beginning to be disengaged, to specialise, to take stock, to disuse the Chronicle and begin the History. How, we must ask ourselves, could men like Muratori and Gravina, like Addison and Johnson, like Fontenelle and Du Bos, rest even partly satisfied (for wholly, as we have seen, some of them at least were not) with literary sealed patterns which admittedly would not fit the greatest admitted literature of all their respective countries except France, and which presented, to the not insufficient self-sufficiency of Frenchmen, the proposition that, for hundreds of years, French men of letters had been barbarians, if not idiots?

There is no explanation but Grandgousier’s, eked a little by the remembrance that—as we shall, it is to be hoped, see in the next volume—there was a searching of hearts, a moving of the waters, not very late, in fact very early, in the Eighteenth century itself. But, as we have seen already, the creed of the majority, the orthodoxy of the time, admitted no hint of this. It made a few concessions or extensions—till it found them obviously unsafe—in the direction of amiable but illogical compromise in particulars. It yielded up no jot of the general creed. It was still matter of breviary circa 1780, as it had begun to be circa 1580, that the Fable was the Poem (let us say that if Homer had written an argument of the Iliad, and had left off there, he would have done all that was actually necessary); that you must follow Nature by following the ancients; that you must not use epic verse in non-epic poetry, and so forth. In all countries, or almost all,—the extreme literary poverty and disarray of Germany here serving her in good stead,—these general assumptions, and the many others which have been noticed in the foregoing pages, had narrowed down to yet others of the particular kind—that the pause in an English verse must be absolutely within a syllable or two of the middle; that a French Alexandrine must not have the impudence to overflow into its neighbour; and the like. And the whole sums itself up all the more strikingly—because of the doubtful and argumentative tone of the passage—in that memorable decision of Johnson’s which has been discussed above, the decision justifying Rymer, justifying La Harpe, that we must not “judge by the event,”—that the presence of the fig is no proof of the nature of the fig-tree.

No very elaborate indications of the faults inseparable from this style of criticism can be necessary. That if carried out rigorously (as in some instances at least it was) it would simply have sterilised and petrified the literary production of the world, is of course obvious. That journey au fond de l’inconnu pour trouver du nouveau, which, with whatever success or failure it may meet, however dangerous it may be in some high functions and departments of Life and Thought, is the motive principle of Art, was barred by it at once. It was no question of “progress” in the very likely chimerical sense of improvement; there was to be not even any difference. “To-morrow” was not, according to the proverb, to be “a new day”: if the men of this school did not go as far as Musette and pronounce that Demain, c’est une fatuité du calendrier, they held that it was to be as yesterday, and much more also. It is equally obvious that this doctrine positively invited indulgence in some of the worst faults of criticism. The critic who nowadays compasses all the reference shelves of the British Museum in order to find one discrepancy with his author, and then triumphs over him, is mostly confined to dates and names, or to more or less transparent erections of personal opinion (or personal ignorance) into standards, which the fairly intelligent reader takes for what they are worth. A hundred and fifty years ago the child of Momus had much better cards in his hand. The “exact scales of Bossu” were not only infinitely complicated and elaborate, but people in general, however intelligent, were by no means inclined to find any fault with them or question their justice. He had a hundred chances, to one that he now has, of catching his author tripping under statute, and without any actual garbling or dishonesty.

But between the dangers on the great scale and the dangers on the small, which have been indicated in the last paragraph, there were many of intermediate kinds. Without absolute distrust of novelty or unfamiliarity as such on the one hand, and without a mere peddling tendency to pick holes on the other, a critic under this dispensation might, and almost must, find himself distracted, hampered, wellnigh mantrapped, in his critical investigations. A dreamlike network or chain of obsessions was upon him. To submit himself frankly to the effect of the work and judge it as he would a prospect or a picture,^[747] a vintage or a face, was forbidden him. It was his duty, in the first place, if the author openly classed his work in any Kind, to decide whether it really belonged to this or to another; if the author had omitted that ceremony, to determine the classification sedulously for himself. Then he had to remember, or look up, the most celebrated ancient examples of the Kind, or those modern ones which had obtained the credit of being most like the ancients; and to decide whether the resemblance was sufficient in general. And then he had to descend—if descent be possible in this process of grovelling—to particulars, and see if they were “according to Cocker.” If everything were entirely en règle, he was at liberty to admire and enjoy, supposing that, after the preliminaries, he had any disposition towards admiration and enjoyment left in him.

This is not a caricature; it is absolutely exact according to the “regulation” theory: and as the examples quoted before will have shown, and as hundreds of others might be produced to show, it is by no means untrue to practice. A critic, great, or generous, or happily both, might transcend his brief, be better than his creed, as in that noble eulogy of Gray’s Elegy which makes up for much in Johnson’s Life of the poet. But these were works of supererogation; and it is not quite certain that the exercise of them was entirely orthodox. The “stop-watch” was orthodox: it was the very centre and pulse of the machine of neo-classic criticism.

I do not think that it is part of my duty as a Historian to support this view by any further argument. I have given the strongest possible, in a minute, and I believe faithful, exposition of the actual survey, the actual opinions, the actual processes and judgments of neo-classic critics. If it is necessary to say any more, let it be this only. The weakness of their position is sufficiently shown by the fact that it could not bear the light of a historical knowledge of literature. There was none such, so long as it lasted: and when that light shone, it fell. The coincidences may not be causative; but it is for others to show that they are not.

If, however, any one should conclude from these strictures that, in the view of the present writer, the critical work of these three centuries was only evil continually, he would make a very great mistake. Moreover, putting all personal views out of the question, it is certain that this could not be the case. In almost all arts and even sciences, but in Art even more than in Science, the task set before the human faculties is a gigantic “Rule of False,” as the older arithmetic books called it, in which, by following out certain hypotheses, and ascertaining how and to what extent you are led wrong by them, you at last discover the right way. The most grotesque error is thus a benefit to Humanity, which, indeed, sometimes shows itself conscious enough of the beneficial character to perform the experiment over and over again. And further, in all arts and in all sciences, but especially in the higher division of Art, the reward of these excursions is not confined to the somewhat negative advantage of discovering that man need go that way no more. Corollaries and episodes—wayside windfalls of the Muses—await, not so thinly spread, the adventurous and single-hearted practitioner of Allegory as of Alchemy, on the acrostic as on the astrolabe. And considering the secondary or parasitic character which so specially belongs to Criticism, it is inevitable, not merely that these “bonuses,” these “extras,” should be more abundant here than anywhere else, but that the regular profits of the ordinary work should be considerable. Unless the critic is utterly incompetent and bad—unless he is a very Rymer, I do not say a Dennis, much less a Boileau—his mere contact with a new work of art must result in something useful, in a critical datum and fact for the future. It is very unlikely—if he is a person of even rather more than average brains it is practically impossible—that the exact equation or conjunction of his temperament, and his equipment, and the character of the work, will ever recur. It is, ex hypothesi, quite certain that it can never have occurred before. That he judges under a certain system, even a wrong one, will not detract from the value of the result, save in quantity. There will still be the actual fact—acquired to the stock of critical data for the future—that a critical power, say A, applied under the restrictions of system m or n, to work B, has resulted in the judgment x. And this result, in its own line and sphere, is as much a “thing,” and a thing of interest, to the critical student of literature, as a new beetle to the man of science, or a new judgment of the House of Lords to the man of law. Nay, to such a student it has a higher interest still: it is in rank and line (mutatis mutandis again) with the work criticised, with a picture, with a sonata, as a thing of art itself.

And critics in these centuries, from these points of view and others, estated criticism more richly than it could have hoped to be endowed when the Humanists began once more to attack and defend Poetry, or when Daniello a little later set himself down to write the first treatise of criticism proper in a vernacular language. They attempted, and to the best of their power arranged, the more general questions of the Art, always with zeal, if not always with discretion; they did valuable, if also somewhat and sometimes mistaken, work in its intermediate regions; and slowly, grudgingly, but surely, they set themselves to the apparently humbler but really fruitful work of actual critical examination of literature, at first as it had been provided and already criticised long ago, at last as it was being provided by the flying day. Their own theories, right or wrong, they worked out with altogether admirable patience and thoroughness, applying them, too, with a faithfulness which must excite admiration, if it cannot command agreement. And, as we have taken all fair pains to show, they not unfrequently strayed and stumbled upon outside truths, leant over the border of their somewhat narrow world and pried into others, after a fashion which, when the due time came, was sure to start more adventurous discoverers on wider paths of exploration.

It would be superfluous to extend this already long volume with any list of selected specimens of individual achievement and excellence. I hope, indeed, that this book may attract or help attention to some critics—Capriano, Cinthio, Patrizzi, Ogier are a very few examples—who are at present very little known: and to others, unnecessary to specify, whose claims have, as it seems to me, been underrated or misunderstood. But I have included, I think, no one of all the hundreds appearing in this volume who is not profitable in some way, for example, or for correction, or for reproof—who has not done something, if it be only in the way of warning, to help the student of all time.

We may also advantageously compare this balance-sheet with the balance-sheets of Ancient Criticism as given before, and of Modern in an anticipated draft. As compared with the former, Neo-Classicism has the disadvantage that, with at least equal if not greater narrowness, it is almost entirely destitute of the same excuse for being narrow. The Greeks of the great age wrote with nothing but Greek literature before them; those of the decadence and the Romans with nothing but Greek literature and Roman, which was for the most part a pale copy of Greek. The men of the eighteenth century, had they chosen, could have compared, with the practice and the theory of these two literatures, not merely the vast, the interesting, and, as “correcting” classicism, the inestimable literature of the Middle Ages, but at least four substantive and important literatures of modern times, those of France, Italy, England, and Spain. They not only did not do this as a matter of fact, but they invariably in practice, and not seldom as a matter of express theory, flouted and scouted the bare idea of doing it. They persisted in applying a travesty of the system of Horace, itself travestied from Aristotle, to these totally different products. Sometimes this resulted in the bland absurdity of the Battle of the Books attitude, sometimes in the hardly less ludicrous compromise which, by stretching the faults-and-beauties doctrine to its farthest possible extent, allowed critics to make room, as it were by sufferance, for Shakespeare and Milton, for Dante and Cervantes. They could laugh heartily at a dinner in the style of the ancients, and their common-sense would at once have pronounced any one fit for Bedlam who attempted to journey from London to York bareheaded, clothed in a toga, and with sandals on foot; but in theory, and even partly in practice, they imposed the classical uniform on literature.

Still, they show, at least in some respects, better beside their modern successors than it is the fashion to think. We have opened the road which they barred, and permitted the exploration of the countries which they forbade; but it is rather a question whether we have profited as we should by this gain. It is still the very rarest thing to find a critic who, by equipment or even by inclination, is himself disposed to take a really catholic view of literature; and those who do endeavour to take such a view are constantly regarded with distrust by the general, and with a rather comic rancour by specialists. It follows that the modern critic is, taking each on his own scheme, very much less well prepared as a rule than the critic, not merely of the eighteenth century, as has been said above, but of our period generally, and very nearly as liable as that critic was to take hasty sweeping views in condemnation of whole provinces of his subject.

Excesses, moreover, of this kind, which critics from the Renaissance onwards committed, are a natural result of reaction in all histories. And in the History of Literature a hundred years of something approaching to Anarchy are perhaps not too much to balance three hundred of mistakenly experimental Order. We shall see the causes and the faults, as well as the excuses and the gains, of the Anarchy later. For the present it is fitting to conclude, with an acknowledgment anew of the merits of the Order also, in respect to the faults of which we have been so frank. They are the merits of a remarkable industry, of a commendable freedom from mere dilettantism, of the discovery of not a few sound critical principles, and the registration of not a few sound critical judgments, of an experimentation and accomplishment which, even if it went wrong, serves as an invaluable warning to other ages not to pursue the paths which have so misled. And, yet once more, let us recognise that adjustment of criticism to creation—mysterious or simply natural as it may seem to different temperaments and different systems of thought—which we have observed before, in the cautious check of Renaissance criticism on the heady exuberance of the great Renaissance creation, in the support given by Seventeenth-century classicism to such mediate powers and dispositions as those of Corneille and even Racine, of Dryden and even Pope; in the salutary deterrence of Eighteenth-century orthodoxy, which saved us from more Beatties and more Anne Radcliffes when the time was not ready for Keatses or for Scotts. For so also in literature—and even in that, as some would have it, not divinest part of literature, Criticism—do all the works of the Lord, the lesser as well as the greater, praise Him and magnify Him for ever.