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Page 18
And he had it at a peculiarly important time, to the importance of
which he himself, in this very position, was not the least
contributor. Although the greatest writers of the second period of the
century--Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Thackeray--had, in all cases but
the last, a long, and in the two first a very long and a wonderfully
fruitful career still before them, yet the phase to which they
belonged was as a dominant phase at its height, and as a crescent was
beginning to give place to another. Within a few years--in most cases
within a few months--of Mr Arnold's installation, _The Defence of
Guenevere_ and FitzGerald's _Omar Khayyam_ heralded fresh
forms of poetry which have not been superseded yet; _The Origin of
Species_ and _Essays and Reviews_ announced changed attitudes
of thought; the death of Macaulay removed the last writer who, modern
as he was in some ways, and popular, united popularity with a
distinctly eighteenth-century tone and tradition; the death of Leigh
Hunt removed the last save Landor (always and in all things an
outsider) of the great Romantic generation of the first third of the
century; _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_ started a new kind of
novel.
The division which Mr Arnold, both by office and taste, was called to
lead in this newly levied army, was not far from being the most
important of all; and it was certainly that of all which required the
most thorough reformation of staff, _morale_,[3] and tactics. The
English literary criticism of 1830-1860, speaking in round numbers, is
curiously and to this day rather unintelligibly bad. There is, no
doubt, no set of matters in which it is less safe to generalise than
in matters literary, and this is by no means the only instance in
which the seemingly natural anticipation that a period of great
criticism will follow a period of great creation is falsified. But it
most certainly is falsified here. The criticism of the great Romantic
period of 1798-1830 was done for it by itself, and in some cases by
its greatest practitioners, not by its immediate successors. The
philosophic as well as poetical intuition of Coleridge; the marvellous
if capricious sympathy and the more marvellous phrase of Lamb; the
massive and masculine if not always quite trustworthy or well-governed
intellect of Hazlitt, had left no likes behind. Two survivors of this
great race, Leigh Hunt and De Quincey, were indeed critics, and no
inconsiderable ones; but the natural force of both had long been much
abated, and both had been not so much critics as essayists; the
tendency of Hunt to flowery sentimentality or familiar chat, and that
of De Quincey to incessant divergences of "rigmarole," being
formidable enemies to real critical competence. The greatest prosemen
--not novelists--of the generation now closing, Carlyle and Macaulay,
were indeed both considerable critics. But the shadow of death in the
one case, the "shadow of Frederick" in the other, had cut short their
critical careers: and presumptuous as the statement may seem, it may
be questioned whether either had been a great critic--in criticism
pure and simple--of literature.
What is almost more important is that the _average_ literary
criticism of William IV.'s reign and of the first twenty years of her
present Majesty's was exceedingly bad. At one side, of course, the
work of men like Thackeray, who were men of genius but not critics by
profession, or in some respects by equipment, escapes this verdict. At
the other were men (very few of them indeed) like Lockhart, who had
admirable critical qualifications, but had allowed certain theories
and predilections to harden and ossify within them, and who in some
cases had not outgrown the rough uncivil ways of the great
revolutionary struggle. Between these the average critic, if not quite
so ignorant of literature as a certain proportion of the immensely
larger body of reviewers to-day, was certainly even more blind to its
general principles. Such critical work as that of Phillips, long a
favourite pen on the _Times_, and enjoying (I do not know with
how much justice) the repute of being the person whom Thackeray's
_Thunder and Small Beer_ has gibbeted for ever, excites amazement
nowadays at its bland but evidently sincere ignoring of the very
rudiments of criticism. I do not know that even in the most
interesting remains of George Brimley (who, had fate spared him, might
have grown into a great as he already was a good critic) we may not
trace something of the same hopeless amateurishness, the same
uncertainty and "wobbling" between the expression of unconnected and
unargued likes and dislikes concerning the matter of the piece, and
real critical considerations on its merits or demerits of scheme and
form.
Not for the first time help came to us Trojans _Graia ab urbe_.
Of the general merits of French literary criticism it is possible to
entertain a somewhat lower idea than that which (in consequence of the
very circumstances with which we are now dealing) it has been for many
years fashionable in England to hold. But between 1830 and 1860 the
French had a very strong critical school indeed--a school whose
scholars and masters showed the d�monic, or at least prophetic,
inspiration of Michelet, the milder and feebler but still inspiring
enthusiasm of Quinet, the academic clearness and discipline of
Villemain and Nisard, the Lucianic wit of M�rim�e, the matchless
appreciation of Gautier, and, above all, the great new critical
idiosyncrasy of Sainte-Beuve. Between these men there were the widest
possible differences, not merely of personal taste and genius, but of
literary theory and practice. But where they all differed quite
infinitely from the lower class of English critics, and favourably
from all but the highest in their happiest moments, was in a singular
mixture of scholarship and appreciation. Even the most Romantic of
them usually tried to compare the subject with its likes in his own
and even, to some extent, in other literatures; even the most
Classical acknowledged, to some extent, that it was his duty to
appreciate, to understand, to grasp the case of the victim before
ordering him off to execution.
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