A CRITIC UPON CRITICISM.• To notice a book which is
itself a review of reviewers may appear superfluous labour. Readers familiar with the poetical literature produced during the first quarter of this century probably know also with what vigour and persistency it was attacked by the critics of the age. What the Edinburgh Review said of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron, what Blackwood and the Quarterly said of Keats and Shelley, what Leigh Hunt called Southey and Hazlitt called Scott, is known to most of us. Some of this criticism, it must be frankly owned, was not un- merited. Ridicule or vituperation, when applied to Scott, was, indeed, utterly misapplied ; but neither what Mr. Caine designates by the obsolete title of the " Lake " school, nor the school which is supposed to include Keats and Shelley, nor the "Satanic" school, of which Byron is the representative, can be de- scribed as impervious to assault. Yet it cannot be denied that the method pursued by the critics was almost wholly a mistake, and that in some cases a far stronger term might be applied to it. How ignorant this criticism often was, how malicious, how grossly personal, and how unstable, is exhibited with great force by Mr. Caine, and would alone justify the exist- ence of his volume. Apart, however, from this exhibition of the treatment awarded to the great poets of the century, the writer has much to say about criticism and poetry that is full of suggestiveness. Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Byron, Leigh Hunt, Keats, and Shelley,—these familiar names form the headings of chapters in which a reader might well despair of finding aught that is original ; but if he open the first page of the book, he will probably, as we have done, go on steadily to the end.
Mr. Caine may be correct in saying that English critical literature began as a distinct vocation in the present century, but he does not do justice to the criticism which preceded it. In his hasty glance at earlier periods of our literature, he omits altogether the great name of Dryden, whose critical essays are among the manliest and sanest specimens of the art we possess in the language. " In Pope's day," he writes, " it was confined to the pamphleteering of the Dennises, Ralphs, and Kenricks," forgetting the efforts of Addison, and the subtle and kindly criticism of Steele. " What a good critic Steele was," wrote Savage Landor ; " I doubt if he has ever been surpassed." Later in the century, Fielding is said to have exhibited some critical sagacity ; but Johnson, who, in spite of many preposterous judg- ments on things poetical, was a considerable force in criticism, is ignored altogether. How vigorous the power of that " great Cham of letters " was in his own line, may be seen in his life of Dryden.
It was Dryden who wrote,—" They mistake the nature of criticism who think its business is to find fault ;" but the criticism of 1800-25, that has prompted Mr. Caine's volume, rested, he writes, " on the assumption that it was the proper business of criticism not so much to display characteristic ex- cellences, as to detect imperfections—to play, in short, the judge's part in condemning, or say the police-serjeant's part in apprehending, literary defaulters." Criticism can be severe enough in our day, but it avoids personalities, and shows, generally, a higher sense of responsibility. We are alluding to criticism worthy of the name. It is sometimes evident:that a reviewer has been simply content with a glance at the book he notices, and often, more obvious still, that a volume has been praised less from its intrinsic worth, than on account of the writer's name or position. In nothing, we think, was the manly honesty of Anthony Trollope more evident than in the views he held with regard to criticism. A review may lift a hitherto un- known author into the position which he deserves, but it is absurd to say that on that account the author is indebted to the critic. The latter has simply done his duty, and the former profits not by the reviewer's judgment, but by his own merit.
It seems strange to read, but is no doubt a fact, that apart from the criticism of Coleridge, Wordsworth's poetry, in the author's early days, was universally condemned by the reviewers. No doubt he needlessly provoked some abuse. His theory of poetry was open to attack, and the way in which he attempted to carry out his theory was occasionally fitted to excite ridicule. Yet
• Cobwebs of Criticism : a Review of the First Reviewers of the "Lake," " Satanic," and " Cockney" Schools. By T. Hall Caine. London ; Elliot Stock. 1893. the amazing obtuseness of the writer who could find "nothing but absurdity" in the "Ode to the Cuckoo," and who declared the great Ode on Immortality to be " illegible and unintelligible," would appear inconceivable, if, indeed, any blunders were too gross to be conceivable in criticism. Is it not still on record what the poet Waller said of Paradise Lost, what the Monthly Review said of Gray's Elegy, and how Horace Walpole called The Botanic Garden "the most delicious poem upon earth" ? After quoting several perverse comments on the greatest poet of the century, Mr. Caine adds, with an effort at fine-writing scarcely called for by the occasion :—" These critiques are dead now, and it seems almost sorry sport to summon them from their graves, and make them walk in their shrouds in a light from which seventy years' twilight has been spirited away. But surely their sinister figures, that look-out through the film of the vanished eyes of the years that are gone, should for ever stalk through the world as a witness and a warning." Unfor- tunately, such critiques in the early years of our century are more astounding than singular. Coleridge, the most musical poet since Milton, was not better understood than Wordsworth. His Christabel was termed a wretched performance, " beneath the dignity of criticism ;" and Kubla Khan, according to the Examiner of that day, "only shows that Mr. Coleridge can write better nonsense verses than any man in England." The Edinburgh Review for 1816 gave its verdict on Christabel as a " thing utterly destitute of value," exhibiting " from beginning to end not a ray of genius ;" while the Edinburgh of 1835, having grown wiser with age, said that the supernatural imagery of Christabel was " something of a peculiar and ex- quisite cast, which stands unrivalled in modern poetry." Black- wood in 1817 declared that Coleridge had done nothing in any one department of human knowledge, and was regarded by all good men of all parties with pity and contempt ; but the same journal said after his death, in 1834, that Coleridge alone, perhaps, of all men that ever lived, was always a poet, and that there was not within the four seas a brighter genius.
Mr. Caine cannot believe that any critics could be blind to Coleridge's exquisite art, and thinks that the abuse of the poet must have been due " to the criminal intervention of personal malignancy." We cannot say that it was not, but we venture to affirm that if Christabel could have appeared in Pope's life- time, or in the lifetime of Dr. Johnson, both the poet and the critic would have passed the same judgment upon it as that expressed by the Edinburgh in 1816. And the most character- istic poems of Wordsworth must have met with the same treatment in an age which, however great in its own de- partments of literature, was unable to appreciate the higher harmonies of verse or the poetical aspects of nature. Habit, even in our estimate of poetry, may dull the soul and keep the ear captive. Music was not Pope's forte, but his mechanical rhythm satisfied the "age of prose," and was still in vogue in the early years of this century. The authors of the Pleasures of Memory and the Pleasures of Hope were then popular poets, and it will be remembered that even Byron placed Rogers and Campbell above Wordsworth and Coleridge. And the secret of Byron's own success, we are told, was not far to seek. With a genius that compassed the whole domain of passion, " he accepted the dogmas of the poetic sect that found favour in his time, and he caused them to pass through a personality which was fascinating in its sorrows, and even in its sins." The paper upon Byron, we may observe here, is perhaps the least interest- ing in the volume, being little more than a review of Mr. jeaffreson's recent work. The writer runs over once more the story of Byron's life, and the greater portion of what he has to say has little connection with the purpose of his book. He is severe, but hardly, we think, too severe, upon Byron ; and in the chapter on Shelley writes with a frankness of that poet's mis- doings which will be unacceptable to his worshippers. Mr. Caine considers that there was a want of manliness, or, as he prefers to call it, "masculinity," about Shelley, but he does not find this want in Keats. "It is true that Shelley's highest virtues overshadow everything of which Keats was capable ; yet they were the virtues of a noble woman ; Keats's virtues were the virtues of a man." Manly though he was, however, Mr. Caine is " old-fashioned enough to believe that brutal criticism did more than anything else to kill Keats in the year 1821." If it did, the poet's feminine sensitiveness must have far surpassed that of Shelley, who showed throughout life a belief in his own asser- tion,—" The man must be enviably happy whom reviewers can make miserable." The argument that, in the case of Keats, criticism destroyed his means of living is not, we think, borne out by the facts. This, at least, was never the poet's own com- plaint, nor was he likely to hope that his verse, even had it received its due, would produce a yearly income. He wrote in the hope of securing one day a high place among the poets of his country, and from the joy of writing. Of the means by which he intended to secure an income, we know little. He endeavoured, we are told, to make money by contributing to periodicals; and writing to a friend, he says :—"My mind has been at work all over the world to find out what to do. I have my choice of three things, or at least two,—South America, or surgeon to an Indianian, which last, I think, will be my fate."
With regard to the principal count against Shelley, the desertion of Harriett at the time when a wife specially needs the care and protection of a husband, Mr. Caine writes mistily. That the poet forsook her is certain, but did he leave her with- out the means of support ? If he did thus leave her " with only fourteen shillings of ready money," he richly merited, we are told the worst chastisement of his reviewers ; yet he is acquitted of neglect, not because Mr. Caine has discovered that he left pounds behind him instead of shillings, and "not because, as an idealistic poet, he might be adjudged deficient in forethought, for Shelley is proved to have been eminently practical in small money matters," but" because his body, as well as his soul, was at this juncture in a' turmoil, and the one was then as little as the other at all favourable to the steady symmetries of con- ventional life.' " Mr. Caine affects throughout the volume to judge of poets and their critics from a philosophical stand-point. We venture to think that this sometimes leads him unawares to write nonsense. His facts are uniformly interesting, so also are many of his criticisms ; but he is less certain of his ground when he drops the role of a man of letters, and assumes the cloak of the philosopher. His style is then pretentious, like his matter, and both become " high-falutin'."
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