he held his kingship, an absolute monarch, against all comers, until his death in 1892. We may anticipate that future historians may make that date the starting-point for a new era, but this is for us scarcely matter even for speculation. Up to the close of the nineteenth century certainly, we can

affirm the maintenance, without radical change of any kind, of the original romantic system, then just one hundred years old. With a myriad minor variations and adaptations, poetry in England, and therefore prose, still were, at the close of Queen Victoria's reign, what they became when Wordsworth and Coleridge remodelled our literature in 1797 in the coombes of the Quantocks.

EPILOGUE

IN attempting to follow the course of a great literature and to survey the process of its growth, one reflection can never escape the historian, however little it may gratify his vanity. He forms his opinions, if he be fairly instructed and tolerably conscientious, on a series of æsthetic principles, guided in their interpretation by the dictates of his own temperament. There has as yet been discovered no surer method of creating a critical estimate of literature; and yet the fragility and vacillation of this standard is patent to every one whose brains have not become ossified by vain and dictatorial processes of "teaching." Nowhere is an arrogant dogmatism more thoroughly out of place than in a critical history of style. In our own day we have read, in the private letters of Matthew Arnold—one of the most clairvoyant observers of the last generation-judgments on current books and men which are already seen to be patently incorrect. The history of literary criticism is a record of conflicting opinion, of blind prejudice, of violent volte-faces, of discord and misapprehension. If we could possess the sincere opinions of Ben Jonson, Dryden, Addison, Voltaire, Hazlitt, Goethe, and Dr. Georg Brandes on Hamlet, we should probably doubt that the same production could be the subject of them all. In the seventeenth century Shakespeare was regarded as one of a multitude, a little more careless and sometimes a little more felicitous than his fellows. To the eighteenth century he became a Gothic savage, in whose "wood-notes wild" the sovereignty of Nature was reasserted, as if by accident. It was left to the nineteenth century to discover in him the most magnificent of the conscious poetic artists of the world. But what will the twentieth century think?

We are not, I think, so helpless as these admissions and examples would indicate, nor is there the least valid reason why we should withdraw from the expression of critical opinion because of the dangers which attend it. I must hold, in spite of the censure of writers of an older school who possess every claim upon my gratitude and my esteem, that certain changes have recently passed over human thought which alter the whole nature of the atmosphere in which criticism breathes. A French professor of high repute has attacked, as an instance of effrontery and charlatanism, the idea that we can borrow for the study of literature help from the methods of Darwin and Häckel. He scoffs at the notion of applying to poetry and prose the theory which supposes all plant and animal forms to be the result of

slow and organic modification. With every respect for the authority of so severe a censor, I venture to dissent entirely from his views. I believe, on the contrary, that what delays the progress of criticism in England, where it is still so primitive and so empirical, is a failure to employ

[F. Hollyer

the immense light

thrown on the subject by the illustrations of evolution. I believe that a sensible observation of what Darwin and Mr. Herbert Spencer have demonstrated ought to aid us extremely in learning our trade as critics and in conducting it in a business-like

manner.

In the days of the Jesuits, when modern criticism began in Europe, it was the general opinion that literature had been created, fully armed, in polite antiquity; that Homer especially Homer as explained by Aristotle had presented the final perfection of literature. If any variation from this

original archaic type was ever observed, it must be watched with the greatest care; for if it was important, it must be dangerous and false. The only salvation for style was to be incessantly on one's guard to reject any offshoots or excrescences which, however beautiful they might seem in themselves, were not measurable by the faultless canon of antiquity. The French critics, such as Rapin and Bossu, were saved by their suppleness of intelligence and by dealing solely with a Latin people from the monstrosities which befell their Teutonic and English adherents. But it is instructive to see where persistence in this

theory of the unalterable criterium lands an obstinate writer like Rymer. He measures everybody, Shakespeare among the rest, on the bed of Procrustes, and lops our giants at the neck and the knees.

The pent-up spirit of independence broke forth in that Battle of the Ancients and Moderns which is of so much secondary interest in the chronicles of litera

ture. People saw that we could not admit that there had been in extreme antiquity a single act of special literary creation constituting once for all a set of rigid types. But the Jesuits had at least possessed the advantage of an idea, monstrous though it might be. Their opponents simply rejected their view, and had nothing definite to put in its place. Nothing can be more invertebrate than the criticism of the early eighteenth century. Happy, vague ideas, glimmering through the mist, supplied a little

momentary light and

passed away. Shaf

[F. Hollyer

Mr. Algernon Charles Swinburne
After the Portrait by G. F. Watts, R.A.

tesbury, amid a great deal of foppery about the Dæmon which inspires the Author with the Beautiful and the Amiable, contrived to perceive the relation between poetry and the plastic arts, and faintly to formulate a system of literary æsthetics. Dennis had the really important intuition that we ought to find out what an author desires to do before we condemn him for what he has not done. Addison pierced the bubble of several preposterous and exclusive formulas. But England was as far as the rest of Europe from possessing any criterium of literary production which could take the place of the rules of the Jesuits. Meanwhile, the individualist method began to come into vogue, and to a consideration of this a few words must be spared.

VOL. IV.

2 A

The individualist method in literary criticism has been in favour with us for at least a century, and it is still in vogue in most of our principal reviews. It possesses in adroit hands considerable effectiveness, and in its primary results may be entirely happy. It is in its secondary results that it leads to a chaotic state of opinion. It is, after all, an adaptation of the whole theory of the unalterable type, but it merely alternates for the one "authority of the Ancients" an equal rigidity in a multitude of isolated modern instances. It consists in making a certain author, or fashion, or set of æsthetic opinions the momentary centre of the universe, and in judging all other literary phenomena by their nearness to or remoteness from that arbitrary point. At the beginning of the present century it seduced some of the finest minds of the day into ludicrous and grotesque excesses. It led Keats into his foolish outburst about Boileau, because his mind was fixed on Beaumont and Fletcher. It led De Quincey to say that both the thought and expression of one of Pope's most perfect passages were "scandalously vicious," because his mind was fixed on Wordsworth. In these cases Wordsworth and Fletcher were beautiful and right; but Pope and Boileau were, on the surface, absolutely in opposition to them; Pope and Boileau were therefore hideous and wrong. Yet admirers of classic poetry have never ceased to retort from their own equally individualist point of view, and to a general principle of literary taste we find ourselves none the nearer. What wonder if the outside world treats all critical discussion as the mere babble of contending fluteplayers?

But what if a scientific theory be suggested which shall enable us at once to take an intelligent pleasure in Pope and in Wordsworth, in Spenser and in Swift? Mr. Herbert Spencer has, with infinite courage, opened the entire world of phenomena to the principles of evolution, but we seem slow to admit them into the little province of æsthetics. We cling to the individualist manner, to that intense eulogy which concentrates its rays on the particular object of notice and relegates all others to proportional obscurity. There are critics, of considerable acumen and energy, who seem to know no other mode of nourishing a talent or a taste than that which is pursued by the cultivators of gigantic gooseberries. They do their best to nip off all other buds, that the juices of the tree of fame may be concentrated on their favourite fruit. Such a plan may be convenient for the purposes of malevolence, and in earlier times our general ignorance of the principles of growth might well excuse it. But it is surely time that we should recognise only two criteria of literary judgment. The first is primitive, and merely clears the ground of rubbish; it is, Does the work before us, or the author, perform what he sets out to perform with a distinguished skill in the direction in which his powers are exercised? If not, he interests the higher criticism not at all; but if yes, then follows the second test: Where, in the vast and evershifting scheme of literary evolution, does he take his place, and in what relation does he stand, not to those who are least like him, but to those who are of his own kith and kin?