A HISTORY OF
MODERN CRITICISM
1750-1950
FOUR VOLUMES
1. The- Later Eighteenth Century
2. The Romantic Age
3. The Later Nineteenth Century
4. The Twentieth Century
OTHER BOOKS BY RENE WELLE K
Kant in England
The Rise of English Literary History
Theory of Literature (with Austin Warren)
A HISTORY OF MODERN
Criticism: 1750-1950
BY RENE WELLEK
The Later Eighteenth Century
o ^
New Haven: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1955
Copyiight, 1955, by Yale Unwetsity Press.
Printed in the United States of America by
the Vail-Ballou Press, Inc., Binghamton, N. Y.
All rights reserved. This book may not be
reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form
(except by reviewers for the public press),
without written permission from the publishers.
Library of Congress catalog card number: 55-5989
PREFACE
THIS is the first volume of a four-volume history of modern lit-
erary criticism, written from a consistent point of view. The his-
tory of criticism should not be a purely antiquarian subject but
should, I believe, illuminate and interpret our present situation.
It will, in turn, become comprehensible only in the light of a
modern literary theory. The middle of the i8th century is a mean-
ingful point to start, as then the neoclassical system of doctrines,
established since the Renaissance, began to disintegrate. To de-
scribe the changes within that system between 1500 and 1750
seems to me largely an antiquarian task, unrelated to the problems
of our day; but in the later i8th century there emerge, and struggle
with one another, doctrines and points of view which are relevant
even today: naturalism, the view that art is expression and com-
munication of emotion, the symbolic and mystical view of poetry,
and others. The 1830*5, when the European romantic movement
was well on the wane, when Goethe and Hegel, Coleridge, Hazlitt,
and Leopardi died, and when the new creed of realism began to
emerge, seem the natural break in our story. Volume 2 ends here,
and the remaining two volumes, now in active preparation, should
bring the account down to our day.
The term "criticism" I shall interpret broadly to mean not only
judgments of individual books and authors, "judicial" criticism,
practical criticism, evidences of literary taste, but mainly what has
been thought about the principles and theory of literature, its
nature, its creation, its function, its effects, its relations to the
other activities of man, its kinds, devices, and techniques, its ori-
gins and history. I shall try to steer a middle course between pure
aesthetics on the one hand "aesthetics from above," speculations
about the nature of the beautiful and about art in general and
mere pronouncements of impressionistic taste, unsubstantiated,
unargued opinions, on the other. It will be impossible to avoid
VI A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
some excursions into the history of abstract aesthetics and of con-
crete taste, since obviously the history of literary criticism cannot
be totally divorced from them. But we shall discuss purely philo-
sophical aestheticians, such as Kant, only very briefly and shall
merely glance at even prominent writers if they have not given
some kind of theoretical framework to their literary predilections
and tastes.
The first two volumes consider only four countries: England
(with Scotland), France, Germany, and Italy, though the Conclu-
sion touches briefly on developments in other countries. In vol-
umes 3 and 4 Spain, Russia, and the United States will be added;
meanwhile, in the period under discussion, Spanish criticism
seems derivative, Russian barely emerging, and the new United
States still echoing England.
The only existing book which covers our topic in extenso,
George Saintsbury's History of Criticism and Literary Taste in
Europe (3 vols. 1900-04), while admirable in its sweep and still
readable because of the liveliness of the author's exposition and
style, is not only outdated by having been written fifty years ago,
during the heyday of impressionism and art for art's sake, but
seems to me seriously vitiated by its professed lack of interest in
questions of theory and aesthetics.
To preserve the uniformity and readability of the text, all quo-
tations are in English, but in the notes all foreign texts are given
in the original in order to make a check of vocabulary and con-
text possible. Most translations are my own, but in some cases I
have used older translations freely. The spelling is modernized
throughout, for it seems unnecessary, in a book devoted to ideas,
to preserve the printing habits of the time. In many cases, espe-
cially the German classics available in modernized reprints, going
back to the original spelling would have been an almost impossible
task, irrelevant to the purpose of the book. The many superior
numbers need not disturb the reader; only the infrequent notes
which contain something more than a mere reference to the sources
are placed at the bottom of the page. The bibliographies are selec-
tive and descriptive and allow allusions to controversial points of
interpretation avoided in the text.
In three chapters (1,5, and 6) I was able to draw on my discus-
sion in an earlier book, The Rise of English Literary History
PREFACE Vll
(1941). I want to thank the University of North Carolina Press for
permitting me to use some passages verbatim.
I owe a heavy debt of gratitude to the Guggenheim Foundation
for granting a fellowship which allowed me to devote a whole
year to writing and to undertake a short trip to Europe; to Edgar
S. Furniss, Provost of Yale University, who gave generously from
the Fluid Research Fund to facilitate the preparation of this book;
and to several friends and colleagues, Cleanth Brooks, Douglas
Knight, Austin Warren, and Robert Penn Warren, for their crit-
ical reading of several chapters. Two friends between them, Lowry
Nelson Jr. and William K. Wimsatt Jr., have read the whole manu-
script and have made many valuable suggestions for its improve-
ment. David Horne has helped with the proofs and Mr. and Mrs.
Addison W. Ward with the indexes.
R. W.
Yale University
New Haven
Christmas 1954
CONTENTS
Preface v
Introduction i
1. Neoclassicism and the New Trends of the Time 12
2. Voltaire 31
3. Diderot 46
4. The Other French Critics 62
5. Dr. Johnson 79
6. The Minor English and Scottish Critics 105
7. Italian Criticism 133
8. Lessing and His Precursors 144
9. Storm and Stress, and Herder 176
10. Goethe " 201
11. Kant and Schiller 227
Bibliographies and Notes 257
List of Abbreviations and Short Titles 258
Chronological Table of Works 341
Index of Names 347
Index of Topics and Terms 355
INTRODUCTION
THE HISTORY of literary criticism between the middle of the i8th
century and the 1830*5 is the period which most clearly raises all
the fundamental issues of criticism that are still with us today. It
is the period in which the great system of neoclassical criticism,
as it was inherited from antiquity and built up and codified in
Italy and France during the i6th and i7th centuries, disintegrated,
and when divers new trends emerge which early in the igth cen-
tury crystallized into romantic movements.
Today, it seems, we have escaped the dominance of romantic
ideas and have come to understand the neoclassical point of view
far better and far more sympathetically. There is now a large
academic literature which interprets the principles, applications,
and fortunes of neoclassical criticism not only with the historian's
sense of detached justice but with enthusiastic endorsement of
the main neoclassical doctrines and polemical fervor directed
against the romantic creed. Also, in contemporary nonacademic
English and American criticism we find many tendencies and ideas
which could be interpreted as a revival of neoclassical principles.
T. S. Eliot has described his general point of view as classicist in
the famous preface to For Lancelot Andrewes (1928), and he is the
critic who has influenced contemporary criticism most profoundly,
if not on all theoretical issues then at least with his individual
judgments and the general bent of his taste. Eliot's emphasis on
the impersonality and objectivity of the poet, his view of the poet
as "the shred of platinum" (to quote the famous simile from "Tra-
dition and the Individual Talent"), could be interpreted as a re-
vival of neoclassical principles, and it is surely a reaction against
romantic subjectivism, lyricism, and exaltation of the ego. Eliot's
constant stress on the share of the intellect in the creative process,
his plea for reasonableness and toughness, and his view that poetry
2 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
must be at least as well written as prose could also be interpreted
as neoclassical. His advocacy of the colloquial, the conversational
style in poetry, could be compared with its use in Dryden and
Pope. The great feeling which Eliot has for the continuity of the
Western tradition, conceived of not only as a literary but as a
moral and religious force, could also be interpreted as a conscious
return to a similar view held less consciously and less vocally dur-
ing the age of neoclassical dominance. In defining his ideal of
what criticism should be, Eliot voices his preference for analysis
against the impressionism and "appreciation" which we have come
to associate with romantic attitudes.
If we look at other prominent contemporary critics we can find
the same elements, or at least some of them. F. R. Leavis displays
the banner of tradition and criticizes all poetry from the point of
view of "living speech." Yvor Winters talks about prose sense, the
moral idea governing a poem, of poetry as a more intense kind of
prose. The recent almost universal increase of interest in economy
of expression, in craftsmanship, and in rhetoric and its devices
might be thought of as neoclassical. The revulsion against the lyri-
cal cry, the purely subjective, and the merely biographical is com-
mon today. Most of the so-called New Critics in the United States
criticize the English romantic poets, especially Shelley, very se-
verely. Many favor wit, paradox, and irony as central devices of
poetry.
But it would be an absurd simplification of the present critical
situation if we described it merely in terms of a revival of neo-
classicism. It is certainly not a total revival, and one could argue
that the neoclassical doctrines are used today in a different context
and with an altered meaning. One could even argue the opposite:
many modern critics actually use romantic ideas more prominently
in some of their most central theories. An examination of the his-
torical antecedents of some of the key terms of recent criticism will
show this. "Organic" has its origin in a passage of Aristotle's
Poetics (chapter vin). The neoclassical "unity in variety" and
the neo-Platonic "inner form" are other anticipations. But only
Herder, Goethe, Schelling, and the Schlegels have drawn the ul-
timate consequences from the organic metaphor and used it con-
sistently in their criticism. It reaches England with Coleridge. A
further development of the organic view is the idea that a work
INTRODUCTION 3
of art represents a system of tensions and balances. T. S. Eliot
and after him I. A. Richards 1 constantly quote the key passage
in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, describing imagination as the
balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities. 2
This formula is neither neoclassical nor original with Coleridge.
It is merely a reproduction of what some of the most romantic of
the German aestheticians had said: the closest parallel can be
found in Schelling, whom Coleridge had studied and for whom, at
the time of writing the Biographia (1817), he professed such ad-
miration that he thought of himself, momentarily at least, as
merely an expounder of his philosophy.*
Opposites and tensions are easily associated with ironies and
paradoxes. The aesthetic (not merely rhetorical) use of irony comes
* One could argue that "reconciliation of opposites" is foreshadowed
in all rhetorical theories about the recognition of "similitude in dis-
similitude." It dates back to Aristotle's view that in a riddle it is possible
to join together absurdities by metaphor (Poetics, xxn), or to Longinus*
analysis of a poem by Sappho, which speaks of "uniting contradictions
in the feelings" (x, 24), as Allen Tate has pointed out in Lectures in
Criticism, ed. H. Cairns (New York, 1949), p. 61. Anticipations could be
seen in concettist theories, in Gracian's theories of agudeza (1642).
Gracian arrives at a definition of agudeza as a "splendid concordance, a
harmonious correlation between two or three extremes, expressed
in a single act of the understanding." Quoted by Croce, "I trattatisti
italiani del Concettismo e Baltasar Gracian," in Problemi di estetica
(Bari, 1949), p. 317. Dr. Johnson's famous description of metaphysical
wit in his "Life of Cowley" (Lives of the English Poets, ed. Hill, i, 11)
as "a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or
discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike" seems
derived from such widespread theories. But they are all purely rhetori-
cal, little more than recognitions of the distance between tenor and
vehicle in a metaphor, of the opposite in antithesis, paradox, and
oxymoron. They are not the reconciliation of such opposites as nature
and art with its implied metaphysics, as in Coleridge.
Croce, Storia delta eta barocca in Italia (Bari, 1946), p. 222, refers to
Tomaso Ceva (1648-1737) as speaking of the union of contraries which
is poetry, of the probable and the marvelous, of unity and multiplicity,
of naturalness and art, of delight and reason. But I cannot discover more
than faint hints of such ideas in the actual text of Ceva's Memorie
d'alcune virtu del Signor Conte Francesco de Lemene con alcune
riflessioni su le sue poesie, Milan, 1706.
4 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
from Friedrich Schlegel. In another German critic few people read
today, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger, we find at the very center
of his system the view that all art is irony and paradox and, again,
Coleridge had read and annotated Solger's Erwin (1815). The dis-
tinction between the denotative and the connotative meaning of
linguistic signs was worked out earlier, but a theory of metaphor
and symbol as the prime requisite of poetry was first enunciated
by Vico, Black well, Diderot, and Hamann; it finds its fullest elab-
oration in the Schlegels, who propounded a system of correspond-
ences, of an all-pervasive symbolism in the universe which poetry
reflects and expresses. To Goethe we apparently owe the distinc-
tion between allegory and symbol, which was then elaborated by
Schelling and August Wilhelm Schlegel and from there taken over
by Coleridge. Myth, of course, has always been a device of poetry:
classical and Christian mythology were the requisites of neoclassical
epic and tragedy. But the view that all poetry is myth, that there
is a necessity and possibility of creating new myth, is again pro-
pounded for the first time by Herder, Schelling, and Friedrich
Schlegel. The only possible anticipations, unknown or barely
known in their time, were the visions and mythological fantasies of
William Blake.
Most modern critics want poetry to be concrete, visual, precise,
and not abstract or universal. Again some preromantic critics can
be shown to be the first to have decidedly rejected the older view
of poetry as abstract, universal, and wary of the "streaks of the
tulip, the shades of the verdure." The shift happened late in the
i8th century, and we have not returned to the neoclassical ideal.
Thus if we trace the pedigree of the key concepts of many modern
critics we inevitably arrive at the romantic period, though the
modern critics themselves may not always be aware of the exact
derivation of their particular terms. Clearly, much is not drawn
directly from the original sources but rather comes through many
intermediaries, through Coleridge, Poe, the French symbolists,
and Croce. Paradoxically, modern professedly antiromantic criti-
cism, while it has rejected much romantic poetry and some of the
metaphysical claims advanced for poetry by romantic criticism, has
nevertheless revived its basic tenets. Probably it is better to say it
has achieved a curious blend of classical and romantic concepts.
Of course modern criticism cannot be described as merely such a
INTRODUCTION 5
blend. It has its distinctive characteristics. The contributions to
criticism of semantics, sociology, psychoanalysis, and anthropology
are largely new. Yet, whatever the achievement and the originality
of modern criticism may be, we should not forget that the prob-
lems it raises were raised before and that its roots are deep in the
period under discussion. The view recently expressed that, with
the exception of Aristotle and Coleridge, there was hardly any
criticism before our age and that " 'modern* criticism does not seem
to exist to any degree at this time anywhere but in England and
America" seems merely ignorant. 8 Our sense of the continuity of
critical tradition can be increased if we realize that the problems
we discuss today have a long history and that we need not start
thinking about them from scratch. The fact that modern criticism
does not realize this, that every American (and not only American)
critic invents his own ''homebrew" vocabulary, his own shifting
set of terms differing sometimes from essay to essay, is the most
serious obstacle to the propagation, establishment, and final vic-
tory of an excellent cause.
Understanding these eighty years will allow us to understand
the contemporary situation. But what follows should not be
thought of as primarily the presentation of a thesis about the ori-
gins of modern criticism: rather I want to trace history in all its
complexity and multiplicity, in its own right. At the same time
such a history cannot be written without a frame of reference, a
standard of selection and evaluation which will be influenced by
our own time and determined by our own theory of literature.
The history of criticism from the beginning of the Renaissance
to the middle of the i8th century consists in the establishment,
elaboration, and spread of a view of literature which is substan-
tially the same in 1750 as it was in 1550. Of course there are shifts
in emphasis and changes in terminology; there are differences be-
tween individual critics, the main countries of Europe, and the dif-
ferent stages of development. There were three clearly recogniz-
able stages which could be distinguished as governed by authority,
reason, and finally by taste. In spite of these differences, however,
one can speak of a single movement, seeing that its principles are
substantially the same and that its sources are obviously the same
6 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
body of texts: Aristotle's Poetics, Horace's Ad Pisones, the rhetori-
cal tradition best codified in the Institutiones of Quintilian, and,
at a later stage, the treatise On the Sublime ascribed to Longinus.
Neoclassicism is a fusion of Aristotle and Horace, a restatement
of their principles and views which underwent only comparatively
minor changes during almost three centuries. This fact alone es-
tablishes something that many literary historians are reluctant to
recognize: the deep gulf between theory and practice throughout
the history of literature. For three centuries people repeated the
views held by Aristotle and Horace, debated these views, put them
into textbooks, learned them by heart and actual literary crea-
tion went on its way quite independently. Substantially the same
critical theory was embraced by such diverse men as the poets of
the Italian Renaissance, Sidney and Ben Jonson in Elizabethan
England, the French dramatists of the court of Louis XIV, and the
middle-class Dr. Johnson. Literary styles had undergone profound
revolutions during these three centuries, but no new or different
theory of literature was ever formulated. The metaphysicals, who
wrote poetry totally different in structure and local detail from
that of Spenser, had scarcely any theoretical justification for what
they were doing: they spoke sometimes of "wit," they spoke of
"strong lines"; but if we except these few critical tags we must con-
clude that neither Donne nor any of his fellow poets developed a
theory of literature which would really account for their aston-
ishingly different practice. One must never forget how strong the
authority of classical antiquity was in those times; how strong the
craving was to conform to it and to ignore the gulf that existed
between one's own age and the centuries in which Aristotle or
Horace wrote. The situation can be illustrated by two drastic ex-
amples derived from the history of the fine arts. Bernini, the
highly baroque sculptor who created the famous group of St.
Teresa floating on a cloud of marble and the angel in the Church
of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, gave a lecture at the Paris
Academy in which he argued that he was the true successor and
imitator of the Greek sculptors. Daniel Adam Poppelmann, the
architect of that very rococo building in Dresden, the Zwinger,
published a little pamphlet which tried to demonstrate in detail
how closely his work conformed to all the purest principles of
Vitruvius, the main theoretician of Roman architecture. 4 One
INTRODUCTION 7
must recognize that theory and practice may diverge very widely in
the history of literature and that convergence or divergence differs
widely from author to author. There may be authors, such as Zola
or Gogol, where one can put one's finger on a real cleavage. There
are others, more highly self-conscious writers, who can work out a
theory closely related and even helpful to their practice. But dur-
ing these centuries the weight of authority was such, the acceptance
of certain presuppositions and terms so general, that one cannot
find any sharply divergent formulas and original theories which
would really break with the views handed down from classical
antiquity.
It should be frankly recognized that the history of criticism is a
topic which has its own inherent interest, even without relation
to the history of the practice of writing: it is simply a branch of
the history of ideas which is in only loose relationship with the
actual literature produced at the time. No doubt one can show
the influence of the theory on the practice and, to a minor degree,
of the practice on the theory, but this is a new and difficult ques-
tion which should not be confused with the internal history of
criticism. We shall proceed mostly on the assumption that the rela-
tion between theory and practice is very indirect and that we can
ignore it for our purposes, which are, after all, directed mainly to-
ward an understanding of ideas. It is, of course, undeniable that
these ideas should apply to actual literature, and it is obvious that
we shall confront them with the general norms for literary works
of art and hence with the theory of literature that we possess. Still,
this is a different procedure from handling such historical ques-
tions as how much the doctrine of ut pictura poesis has actually
stimulated the writing of descriptive poetry, how far the theory of
the neoclassical epic accounts for the failure of the epics written
at that time, how far the doctrines of the German "Storm and
Stress" describe the nature of the poetry written by young Goethe.
It is a new question which has to use quite different evidence if
we inquire whether Wordsworth actually wrote poetry in the com-
mon language of men. The historian of criticism need only ask
what Wordsworth meant by his doctrine, whether what he said
makes sense, and what were the context, the background, and the
influence on other critics of his theory. The concrete poetry writ-
ten by critics will be left out of account, since an actual study of
8 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
the influence of criticism on poetry and vice versa would abolish
the unity of our subject matter, its continuity and independent
development, and would make the history of criticism dissolve into
the history of literature itself.
Another extremely complex problem has to be excluded if we
want to keep a sharp focus on critical theory and opinions: the
causal explanation of the changes we shall describe. Causal expla-
nation, in an ultimate sense, is impossible in matters of mind:
cause and effect are incommensurable, the effect of specific causes
unpredictable. All causal explanation leads to an infinite regress,
back to the origins of the world. Still, we might at least glance at
the kind of questions raised and answers suggested. We must first
recognize that there is an inner logic in the evolution of ideas: a
dialectic of concepts. An idea is easily pushed to its extreme or
converted into its opposite. Reaction against the preceding or pre-
vailing critical system is the most common driving force of the
history of ideas, though we cannot predict what direction a reac-
tion will take or tell why it should come at a certain time. One has
to leave something to the initiative of the individual, the luck of
the gifted man devoting his thought to a particular matter at a
given time.
The individual critic himself will be motivated by his personal
history: his education, the demands of his calling, the requirements
of his audience. To investigate such psychological causes would
lead us into biography and the whole variety of personal histories.
Only now and then will we be able to refer to such possible motives
of critical positions.
Criticism is part of the history of culture in general and is thus
set in a historical and social context. Clearly it is influenced by
the general changes of intellectual climate, the history of ideas,
and even by definite philosophies, though they may not have
produced systematic aesthetics themselves. We shall constantly
bear in mind these affiliations. The effects of Cartesian rationalism,
Lockean empiricism, and Leibnizian idealism are imprinted on the
criticism of the three leading nations, and seem to a large extent
to account for the differences between French, English, and Ger-
man criticism. It has been argued that the emergence of romantic
INTRODUCTION 9
criticism, with its emphasis on the organicity of the work of art, is
due to shifts of interest from physics to biology, from Newton to
Linn or Bonnet. 8 A similar shift can be observed in political
theory: natural law was discarded by Burke and his German fol-
lowers in favor of the organic national state. But to pursue these
questions in detail would lead us too far into the history of thought
and science.
The specific influence of social and general historical causes on
criticism is much harder to grasp and describe. One can certainly
observe the influence of the widening reading public on even the
forms of criticism. In the iyth century the formal treatise, the poet-
ics, often written in Latin, was standard, while in the i8th century
the essay in the vernacular took its place. The freer form, even
in formal treatises, and the less purely learned vocabulary show
that the critic came to appeal to an audience wider than that of
students in the library or lecture room. Critical periodicals, which
even early in the i8th century were almost all abstracting media,
mainly describing learned books, changed slowly into critical re-
views of recent belles lettres.
Yet it seems harder to associate particular doctrines with par-
ticular social or historical changes. The idea that the breakdown
of neoclassicism has something to do with the rise of the middle
classes will not withstand close scrutiny. Many expounders of neo-
classicism were churchmen, teachers, men of the comparatively
unattached middle classes, and Dr. Johnson, Gottsched, and La
Harpe must strike us as peculiarly middle class. The growing sen-
timentalism seems a particularly bourgeois trait when we think of
the contrast between men such as the Earl of Chesterfield and
Richardson; yet Chateaubriand and Byron were aristocrats who
played a decisive role in the spread of romantic emotionalism.
Exact social affiliations and allegiances would need much closer
study and can only be alluded to when the occasion seems to de-
mand it. More obvious is the influence of specific historical events
such as the French Revolution or the defeat of Napoleon: the
French emigrants in England and Germany brought back new
ideas to France. The fall of the French Empire coincides with a
decline of the prestige of French taste.
The differences between the national traditions of criticism are
obviously connected with different political and historical institu-
10 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
tions and events. It is no mere fancy to see a connection between
the French monarchy and the neoclassical dogmatism. Surely there
is something to the view that English resistance to the French
system was based on patriotic motives, at least in part, and that,
without pressing the parallel too hard, the English political tradi-
tion, which maintained considerable local autonomy even under
the Stuarts, favored also an unsystematic, undogmatic approach in
criticism. English literature was hardly ever a court literature and
was also far less urban and centralized than French. What is called
preromanticism seems often to be the taste of men living in the
country or coming from it: the large number of clergymen or sons
of clergymen who almost lived in a churchyard has been suggested
as a "cause" of the "graveyard" school. 8
In Germany the situation was somewhat similar to that in Eng-
land: there was the same patriotic feeling directed against France,
which increased sharply during the Seven Years' War. This feel-
ing was also aimed at the German powers who upheld French
taste, especially Frederick the Great, whose ambition was to be-
come a French poet, who founded the Berlin Academy with a
French president and many French members, and who wrote the
famous contemptuous pamphlet against the German literature of
his time. 7 It seems no accident that the anti-French movement be-
gan in Switzerland, which had upheld its local democratic tradi-
tion most strongly and had kept up English and Italian relations,
and that men like Hamann, Herder, and Gerstenberg came from
the other outlying regions of the German-speaking world, namely
from East Prussia and Schleswig. The reaction against the Enlight-
enment, the attempt to revive the old Germanic traditions in lit-
erature, is connected with the defense of the Holy Roman Empire
and its institutions and local traditions against the leveling tend-
encies of enlightened despotism. Moreover, the local religious
tradition of Pietism resisted the spread of the secular enlighten-
ment. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic conquests in-
creased the reaction of German patriotism, and they are also re-
flected in the violent nationalism of the criticism. 8 But all these
questions lead deeper and deeper into general history. It seems
impossible to isolate one specific cause for these changes or always
to distinguish clearly between cause and effect, to decide the
priority of the chicken or the egg. We must concentrate on the de-
INTRODUCTION 11
scription, analysis, and criticism of ideas and opinions, and even
there will constantly be confronted with unsolved questions of
priority and interrelationships, overwhelmed by the sheer mass of
printed matter, and challenged by the necessity of rejection and
selection. We can hope to master the subject only by a conscious
purity of method, by a refusal to enter into related problems
around us, by intense probing of the great authors and central
ideas.
I have used in part the method nowadays called "history of
ideas/' the tracing of key concepts or what A. O. Lovejoy calls
"unit-ideas," through diverse texts, but I have chosen to combine
this with more traditional methods of describing and evaluating
the ideas of individual great writers. Pure "history of ideas" no
doubt offers some advantages which I have foregone. In experi-
menting with various approaches to my topic, I came to the con-
clusion that the history of critical terms and ideas is in many in-
stances not yet far enough advanced to give full scope to the "his-
tory of ideas," and that the great virtue of that method, the ease in
tracing dialectic sequences and shifts of meaning which it allows,
is more than offset by its drawbacks. Pure "history of ideas" does
not encourage any synoptic understanding of sometimes loosely
put together and even self-contradictory systems of individual
theorists, any development of the individuality and personality, the
peculiar attitude and sensibility of the great critic. (I am not speak-
ing of his biographical idiosyncrasy.) I have used the method of
"history of ideas" here and there, where it seems to work best, with
certain masses of rather imindividualized materials, but even in
these areas I have shifted freely to the exposition of individual
texts, to the characterization of total critical outputs. Through this
history I have wished to convey an impression not only of the de-
velopment of modern critical ideas and the evolution of our own
critical outlook, but of the richness, diversity, and attractiveness of
some of the greatest minds in literary history, working, from how-
ever diverse positions, toward a common aim: the understanding
and judgment of literature.
/: NEOCLASSICISM AND THE NEW TRENDS
OF THE TIME
NEOCLASSICAL criticism can be defended even today if we rein-
terpret its terms, though it would be folly not to recognize the
excesses of pedantry to which it could lead or the narrowness of
literary experience on which it was inevitably based. It cannot be
revived in toto because it could not cope intelligently with the
variety of modern literature, its many values and problems for
which the neoclassical creed had no vocabulary and no framework
of questions. But basically the aim of neoclassicism was sound and
right. It attempted to discover the principles or the "laws" or
"rules" of literature, of literary creation, of the structure of a lit-
erary work of art, and of the reader's response. To deny the neces-
sity of such an attempt would lead to mere skepticism, to anarchy,
and finally to total theoretical impotence. In some extreme pro-
nouncements of critical impressionists who think of criticism as
"the soul's adventuring among masterpieces," l or in theories of
total critical relativism which assume not one but many mutually
exclusive ideals of literature, we come perilously near to complete
critical shipwreck. Neoclassical criticism scarcely recognized these
dangers: it assumed a stable psychology of human nature, a funda-
mental set of norms in the works themselves, a uniform working
of human sensibility and intelligence allowing us to reach con-
clusions which would be valid for all art and all literature.
These laws were not, as the older caricature of neoclassicism
assumed, simply taken over from Aristotle or the other ancients
because of veneration for their authority as authority. We cannot
interpret the history of criticism merely as a revolt against such
authority and call any disavowal of it "romantic." There were
no doubt very literal-minded Aristotelians among the critics of
the Italian Renaissance and the French i7th century. But even
the most fanatical Aristotelians managed to reconcile their venera-
NEOCLASSICISM 13
tion of Aristotle with the cult of reason. Thomas Rymer has the
well-earned reputation of being the most rigid of all the English
neoclassical critics. For his unimaginative mauling of Shakespeare's
Othello, he has been pronounced by Macaulay "the worst critic
that ever lived." But even Rymer would say that the laws of
literature, the rules as he calls them, are based on reason and
experience. "What Aristotle writes on this subject are not the
dictates of his own magisterial will or dry deductions of his meta-
physics: but the poets were his masters, and what was their practice
he reduced to principles. Nor would the modern poets blindly
resign to this practice of the ancients, were not the reasons con-
vincing and clear as any demonstration in mathematics." 2 Dryden
quoted Rapin in Rymer's translation with approval: The rules
"are founded upon good sense, and sound reason, rather than on
authority: for though Aristotle and Horace are produced, yet no
man must argue, that what they write is true, because they writ
it." 8 Dennis said it again quite succinctly: "The rules of Aristotle
are nothing but nature and good sense reduced to a method"; and
his enemy, Pope, rephrased it memorably:
Those rules of old discovered, not devised,
Are Nature still, but Nature methodized.*
Almost all neoclassical critics tried to formulate a theory of litera-
ture explaining its function, the nature of the creative process, and
the ways in which a work of literature is constructed. They were
not authoritarians but rather rationalists.
But the term "rationalist" is misleading if it is interpreted to
mean that neoclassical criticism conceives of art as a construct of the
conscious intelligence to the exclusion of feeling, imagination, and
even the unconscious. The theory of literature is a matter of the
conscious mind, but no reputable critic has ever held that artistic
creation itself is nothing but conscious rational process. The terms
"genius," "inspiration," poeta vales, furor poeticus are the stock in
trade of Renaissance poetics, and even the most rigid critics of the
most formalistic kind never forgot to say that poets need "inspira-
tion," "imagination," "invention," this last a term which covers
much that later criticism would have called creative imagination.
They believed in a rational theory of poetry but not that poetry
was entirely rational. But, of course, neither did they believe that
14 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
poetry was a merely subconscious process, something like the twit-
tering of a bird in a tree, or automatic writing. They constantly
stressed the share of judgment, discrimination, and design in the
composition of poetry. Imagination needs the guide and bridle of
reason. As Pope tells us of Pegasus,
The winged courser, like a generous horse,
Shows most true mettle when you check his course. 5
Also, in the reader's response his "taste," as it came to be called
during the i7th century a rational element, the share of judg-
ment, was emphasized. Trained taste, the taste of those who had
experience and knowledge, the taste of the ideal, informed, cul-
tivated reader, was taken as the standard.
The central concept of the neoclassical theory of literature was
"imitation of nature." Both its terms are today open to gross mis-
understanding. "Imitation," the Aristotelian mimesis, does not of
course mean copying, photographic naturalism, but rather rep-
resentation: it merely says that the poet makes something which
is not nature itself but is meant to represent it. Nor does "nature"
mean "dead nature" still-life or outdoor landscape as it is fre-
quently used today, but reality in general and especially human
nature. This central assumption puts all emphasis on the referen-
tial side of the work of art. The poet is not primarily looking into
his heart, expressing his soul or mood, or writing his autobiog-
raphy, his grand confession. Nor is the poet a mystic visionary who
"sees into the life of things," rises beyond reality to some trans-
cendent absolute for which poetry is only a symbol or sign. Rather,
the poet reproduces reality by his art.
But what exactly is meant by "nature" in neoclassical theory?
The term meant very different things to different people. Imita-
tion of nature was frequently understood to mean realism. The
classical theory of painting in particular, with its stories about
birds trying to pick painted cherries, fostered a concept of art as
literal duplication of reality and even deception. Since Castel-
vetro's commentary on Aristotle's Poetics (1570) naturalistic argu-
ments were the main support for the three unities. D'Aubignac,
in his Pratique du thddtre (1657), was the most consistent of the
critics when he argued that the time of action should be limited
to three hours, the actual time of representation. Others com-
NEOCLASSICISM 15
promised for twelve hours, twenty-four hours, or even (like Cor-
neille and Dryden) allowed an extension to thirty hours. Similarly
D'Aubignac is completely consistent with regard to the unity of
space: the place cannot change for "one and the same image [the
stage] remaining in the same state, cannot represent two different
things." The spectators are in Athens, and if the action shifts
from Athens to Sparta what becomes of the poor spectator? Must
he fly like a witch through the air? Or imagine himself to be in
two places at the same time?
The concept of probability was also used to enforce naturalistic
standards. The literary use of the term is based mainly on Aristotle,
who justified the "probable" against the merely true, the historical
event. Aristotle distinguished three orders of action: the real, the
possible, and the probable, and argued that in poetry the impos-
sible probable is preferable to the possible improbable. To give
a modern instance: Ariel would be an impossible probable, while
a chance happening in a novel, an accidental death, would be a
possible improbable. Aristotle's term was a justification of fiction
against reality, but in neoclassical criticism (at least in a large part
of it) it was used rather to restrict art to commonplace reality. It
served to exclude the marvelous and supernatural. Ancient my-
thology was often admitted only because it was believed by the
ancients to be true. Thus standards of literal probability, of fidelity
to life, were very widespread. For instance Rymer, in his attack
on Othello, laughs that a "woman never loses her tongue, even
though after she is stifled." 7
But this interpretation of "imitation of nature" as naturalism
or copying was only one strand of neoclassical criticism. Often
"nature" was rather understood to mean "general nature," the
principles and order of nature. This could mean also the typical,
that which characterizes the species man as he is everywhere and
at all times, and nonhuman nature conceived as free from purely
local and accidental conditions. Negatively this view of "general
nature" meant the exclusion of the purely local, concrete, and in-
dividual. The demand for the typical and universal was at the base
of the doctrine of decorum, bienseance, propriety. Propriety for-
bade the depiction of the horrible and ugly, the low and mean. As
La Mesnadire, an early French theoretician, formulated it, the
poet must not describe the "meanness of avarice, the infamy of in-
l6 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
dulgence, the blackness of perfidy, the horror of cruelty, the smell
of poverty/' 8 Propriety on the precept of Horace forbade the dis-
play of violent events on the stage. Medea must kill her children
offstage, Agamemnon must be murdered behind the scene. General
characters, or types, must preserve their typical behavior and
decorum. A king must behave and speak like a king, a miser like
a miser. Rymer merely applies the views of his time when he con-
demns Shakespeare for introducing an ungrateful, scheming sol-
dier in lago, for soldiers are typically honest and straightforward.
Mesnadire expressly prohibited "subtle Germans, modest Span-
iards, and impolite Frenchmen" on the stage, though he admits
that such individuals may exist in real life. 9 Clearly the principle
of universality or typicality had two sides: it could and did mean
in the best writings of the period a universal appeal which made
its greatest works comprehensible anywhere and everywhere. This
appeal to the verdict of the ages was implied in the whole concept
of "classicity." A "classical" author was obviously an author who
could stand beside the ancient classics because of his assumed ap-
peal to a distant posterity, beyond the immediate public of his
time. But this conception of art as imitating universal nature also
meant something extremely limited and limiting. All too easily
it was assumed that men are everywhere the same and that the
type of man of one's own time was the only right and proper type
of humanity. "Universal nature," in practice, meant very specific
demands on the ethical and psychological traits of the characters
represented, and implicitly the rejection of everything that did
not conform to the social ideals of the time. "Universal nature" in
art was part of the whole system of nature which assumed a "na-
tural" law, "natural" rights, a "natural" theology, a system of
cosmic order, and a psychology of man which was basically Stoic
in its practical precepts. The age hardly ever realized how closely
its universal man was tied up with a unique social and historical
situation. For instance Racine, in his preface to Iphigtnie (1675),
deluded himself by the complacent assumption that the success of
his plays which derived from Homer and Euripides proved that
"good sense and reason are the same in all ages" and that the "taste
of Paris was found to agree with that of Athens." 10
The demands for universality and typicality easily passed into
demands for idealization. Nature might mean ideal nature, nature
NEOCLASSICISM 17
as it ought to be, judged by moral and aesthetic standards. Art was
to exhibit beautiful nature, la belle nature. This meant not only
a selection from, but a heightening, an improving of nature. This
concept was derived from a theory of the fine arts: in sculpture the
human body was to be represented not as it usually is but as it
ideally should be. The story of the painter Zeuxis who assembled
the most beautiful virgins of Crotona in order to paint the most
beautiful leg of one, the hand of another, the breast or thigh of
a third was the standard example for the view that idealization is
simply selection from nature. 11 But others saw that the standard
of selection is not given in nature, that man in "idealizing" im-
poses his idea of beauty and that he does not actually "imitate."
The consequences of this view, which would be destructive of any
simple theory of imitation, were, however, rarely acknowledged, or
rather they were avoided by the assumption that there is a com-
plete identity of the artist's ideal with the universal, eternal es-
sence of things. But idealization could mean an appeal to the
inner vision ot the artist. A strand of neoclassical aesthetics em-
phasized this "internal model" in the artist's mind. It found its
philosophical affinities in the tradition of neo-Platonism. The
standard text was a passage in Plotinus which told of Phidias that
he had not "created his Zeus after something visible, but made him
such as Zeus would appear if he wanted to reveal himself to our
eyes." 12 This inner conception of the artist, which was eventually
assumed to be confirmed by reality, pervaded the art theories of
the later Renaissance. In England it inspired Sidney's Defence of
Poesie; through the Italian theorists of ideal beauty it re-entered
French and English speculation in the i8th century and re-
mained a significant undercurrent which again became dominant
in Winckehnann's new proclamation of ideal beauty.
The ideal, even when conceived less exaltedly, was an important
factor in much neoclassical theory. Certainly the epic hero had
a definite function of representing ideal human nature, and the
pastoral was constantly justified as representing the golden age,
nature before the fall. Idealization in art could be defended from
two almost opposite philosophical positions: by a theology which
assumed the decay of nature and considered, as Dennis did, that
the function of art was "to restore the decays that happened to
human nature by the fall, by restoring order." 18 Or it could fol-
l8 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
low from a naturalistic trust in man's power and creativeness in
making another and better world, on the analogy of and almost in
rivalry with Divine creation. It is no chance that a man such as
Giordano Bruno exalted genius and rejected the genres and rules,
since all his hope was put into the powers of the artist of seeing
ideas. 14
The doctrine of poetic justice was also a version of the ethical
ideal. The term apparently comes from Rymer, but the doctrine
itself is much older: it was known to Scaliger, Scudry, Corneille,
and others. It was argued at length by Dennis. 15 Every character,
it was assumed, should be rewarded and punished at the end of a
play according to his deserts. The poet was required to present an
order of the universe, free from chance and injustice, and thus
became a defender of the ways of God to man. In practice, how-
ever, it often meant that the end of a play was a distribution of
prizes, an untruthful rosy dream image.
Thus "imitation of nature" was a term which allowed almost
all kinds of art: trorn literal naturalism to the most abstract ideali-
zation, and all stages in between. What specifically was recom-
mended depended not only on the particular predilection of the
critic but also on the assumption that the different genres required
different kinds of imitation. In critical practice, little attention was
given to the relation of image and model, art and reality, and there
was hardly any "social" criticism in our sense.
If we shift attention to the neoclassical teaching of the structure
of the work of art, we shall have to admit some disappointment
that most neoclassical theory had a clumsy view of the relation of
content and form. In Aristotle the way had been pointed toward
an organic conception of a work of art: he spoke clearly of a "struc-
tural union of the parts being sue h that, it any one of them is dis-
placed or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed." 1G
But this insight into the unity of a work of art was never regained
during the Renaissance, and neoclassicism usually was content
with the dichotomy of content and form. On the one hand its
theory embraces formalism of an external and empty kind, and on
the other it could not disengage itself from a ranking of subject
matter outside of the work of art according to criteria of dignity
and moral value. These two doctrines are not incompatible: rather
are they the two sides of the same dilemma. In actual practice in
NEOCLASSICISM 19
the best authors there is an almost instinctive sense of form, a
knowledge of intellectual disposition, lucidity, harmony, and sym-
metry of almost architectural order which is the fruit of formalism
rightly understood. But among critics it amounted mostly to a
breakup of the work of art into categories viewed almost in isola-
tion: the fable, the characters, the diction, the thought, and the
meter, which in Aristotle's analysis of tragedy had formed a unity,
became fragments discussed separately. Attention to the details of
stylistic devices (to what was called "rhetorical colors"), the classifi-
cation of figures, and the tabulation of meters was imported from
rhetorical theory, and increasingly the view of form as mere orna-
ment triumphed over older, more instinctively organic concep-
tions. The decorative rococo was only a symptom of a tendency
existing, in one form or another, in many late times of history. The
rules of the genres, which were originally conceived as inherent
laws, became at times the rules of a game and in practice often a
set of pedantries which allowed the unimaginative reader and critic
to judge by a ready-made yardstick. One can put up a convincing
general defense of the rules as imposing limits which create diffi-
culties and thus stimulate the artist to overcome them. One can
explain how the introduction of the three unities led to a tighten-
ing of dramatic form salutary as a reaction against the looser formal
structures of the early popular drama. But one cannot deny that
the rules, especially in the most studied and most analyzed genres,
the drama and the epic, had also a cramping influence even on the
greatest writers. It is enough to cite the example of Corneille, who
almost all his life, despite his high respect for authority in church
and state and for the ancients, had to struggle for his artistic in-
dependence.
The rules were rarely defined in general terms but rather speci-
fied according to genres. The distinction between genres was basic
to the neoclassical creed, so basic that its assumptions were never,
to my knowledge, properly examined during this time. Aristotle
and Horace were the classical authorities for the main divisions
of the drama and the epic. Antiquity, however, never clearly en-
visaged the lyric as a single genre and rather discussed independ-
ently its different forms the ode, the elegy, satire, and the like. 17
The ancient table of genres was enormously increased during the
Middle Ages, and new genres established themselves in practice
20 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
without too much theoretical resistance or even attention. The
social preferences of the age for the elevated style, and the fact
that Aristotle treats of tragedy and the epic and Horace mainly
of the drama, focused most theories on these two genres and helped
to establish an elaborate hierarchy of genres, but its exact rationale
was not clear. Was it dignity of subject matter? mere size and effort
involved? intensity of effect? The actual grounds of classification
were extremely various and often quite obscure or purely practi-
cal. Formalistic criteria of a simple external kind, such as recog-
nizable verse form, stood next to criteria which were based on a
ranking of subject matter or moral effect. At times the detailed
rules were conceived as a merely empirical characteristic of the
original model of the genre. Thus Dryden said of the epic that "no
man ought to dispute the authority of Homer, who gave the first
being to that masterpiece of art." He recognized similar authority
in Pindar for odes and even in its founders for opera. 18
It was rarely clear whether the table of genres was closed or
whether new genres could be admitted. In practice hybrids of exist-
ing genres or ruleless new genres outside of the table ot categories
arose and were at least tolerated. The neoclassical scheme was
being undermined, however, by the success of genres for which its
theory made little or no provision: the novel, the periodical essay,
the serious play with a happy ending, and so on. At times, even
very early, the whole theory of genres was challenged; but the chal-
lenge was usually an argument in favor of a new genre, such as
the much debated romantic epic of Ariosto, or an assertion of the
freedom and independence of the artist from all rules. Especially
in England the rules and unities were combated during the whole
of the i7th century, and in France, where the rules held sway on
the stage most persistently, they were constantly questioned and
debated, and frequent allowances were made even by Boileau for
genius to transgress them. 19 More and more a distinction between
essential principles and arbitrary rules became established. It was
recognized that there were some general laws of art, such as the
necessity of pleasing and the desire for conformity between style
and subject matter, and that there were local rules, empirical pre-
cepts which may be modified or even totally ignored by the great
artist. In practice there was wide disagreement about the line of
demarcation between these two kinds of rules. On the issue of the
NEOCLASSICISM 21
unities, for instance, the view prevailed that those of time and
space were less essential than those of action. Besides, from the
beginning of French neoclassicism some realm was reserved for
the unknown, the mysterious, which was called the hidden beau-
ties, the je ne sais quoi, the "grace beyond the reach of art," 20 a
region which eluded the systematizing of the critic and the ra-
tionalism of the theorist. Though critics could hardly have real-
ized it, it meant an abdication before the main task of criticism,
an admission that the theory held was insufficient to account
for much more than a fragment of reality.
But neoclassical theory was not merely interested in the rela-
tions of art to reality and in the concept of structure and genre.
Much of it was concerned with the effect of literature on its
audience. The classical texts for this concern were two bits from
Horace: utile dulci and prodesse et delectare. Both rather crudely
stated the union of pleasure and instruction art was supposed to
convey. There were a few writers who thought that poetry should
only delight, but the majority of critics accepted moral utility as
the primary aim of literature. Pleasure and delight were, however,
generally considered the necessary means toward this end. In the
many defenses of poetry against Puritan objections (by no means
limited to Protestant countries, but common also in Catholic coun-
tries during the Counter Reformation) a constant appeal was made
to the history of literature as proving its social utility and the high
social status of the poet. Vossius, for instance, says bluntly that
"the poets are physicians of manners." Comedy writers believed,
as Moliere did, that the "duty of comedy is to correct men by
diverting them." 21 Tragedians praised the theater as a school of
virtue. Le Bossu defined the aim of the epic as "moral instruc-
tion disguised under the allegory of action." He actually thought
of the process of composition as first the selection of a moral and
then the invention of an appropriate fable. 22 On the whole, the
problem of art and morals proved unsolvable because the aesthetic
effect was still concealed under the far too inclusive term "pleas-
ure," and the moral effect of art was not distinguished clearly from
that of the mere stating of moral precepts. It took the whole i8th
century to disentangle the distinctions between the good, the use-
ful, the true, and the beautiful. Only then could the relations be-
tween art and morality be freshly reformulated.
22 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
Still, besides the pleasure-instruction formula the age had access
to a subtler theory of the effect of literature: Aristotle's concept of
purgation. Though this was occasionally claimed for the epic it
was generally considered to be limited to tragedy. The interpre-
tation of the difficult passage in the Poetics has a complex history
which is not yet concluded. It can safely be said that in the neo-
classical age purging was interpreted to mean hardening, becoming
inured to the passions of pity and fear, just as a physician becomes
indifferent to the sight of terrible wounds and a veteran soldier to
the most dangerous fighting. In Corneille catharsis was interpreted
as the purging of the spectator from the emotions in which the
characters of the play indulged to their cost. Tragedy became a
warning example. The misfortune of the hero should arouse our
pity, and this pity should in turn arouse our fear that we might
meet similar misfortunes ourselves. Corneille minimized pity and
exalted "fear," the pathetic, the admiration we carry away for the
suffering hero. 28
In this theory of catharsis the emotional effect of art was central,
even though it was interpreted to mean a release from emotion as
the final attainment of a contemplation, "calm of mind, all passion
spent." 24 But simultaneously the view that poetry is persuasion,
communication, and even incitement to feeling has its ancient
history. Part of the success of this second theory must be due to
extraliterary circumstances, and in particular to the general rise
of sentimentalism. But its theoretical justification was largely
drawn from the arsenal of rhetorical theory. Poetry is to move the
affections as rhetoric does. The observance of the rules and even
the observance of the right relation to reality can be interpreted
as a means toward achieving this emotional effect. The poet him-
self must be moved in order to move, as Horace knew when he
said "if you would have me weep, you must first of all feel grief
yourself." 25 In England John Dennis was an early exponent of
this view. To him "poetry is an art, by which a poet excites pas-
sion ... in order to satisfy and improve, to delight and to re-
form the mind." "The more passion there is, the better the
poetry." 26 The theory of tragedy reflects the same change. Dryden
argued that tragedy achieves not only an "abatement" of our
pride but "insensibly works us to be helpful to, and tender, over
the distressed." 27 Dubos, in his Reflexions critiques sur la podsie
NEOCLASSICISM 23
et la peinture (1719), built a whole theory of poetry purely on the
ground of the communication of emotion. Art (both poetry and
painting) is a means of exciting artificial passions without the dire
consequences of real ones. 28 But neither Dennis nor Dubos drew
the consequences from their positions. They did not see that poetry
merges with persuasion, ceases to be art, and becomes life, ex-
citement of experience, passion. If the aim of art is only this, any
kind of form and any relation to reality is justified. The question
of morality disappears or rather has to be reintroduced by devious
ways. But on the whole neoclassicism suffered mostly from the ex-
cesses of literal-minded moralists who thought of art as a mere
intellectual statement of moral precepts. At their best and worst
critics understood that literature is a part of politics in the wide
sense of the word, that the poet is, willy nilly, a molder and shaper
of human souls.
Thus the idea of the poet and the requirements for becoming
one always included moral qualities and intellectual achievements.
Although there would always be reference to the need of genius
and inspiration, most insistently critics stressed art (in the sense
of artistry), science, and knowledge. Even information was con-
sidered an important requisite: the epic poet especially was re-
quired to have an almost encyclopaedic knowledge. Later, how-
ever, there was an increasing suspicion of mere learning and ped-
antry, and the ideal of the gentleman collaborated with the de-
mand for universality to exclude from the bulk of literature the
display of information and the use of technical terms. The learned
humanist, such as Milton, gave way to the cultivated gentleman as
the ideal poet.
He was also the ideal audience of literature. When the critics ap-
pealed to general human nature, to man in the abstract, they often
had in mind only the man of their own time, the man of taste, the
civilized man educated on the classics and trained since childhood
to distinguish the good from the bad. In practice the ideal reader
became the self-consciously modern man, very proud of his exalted
position at the pinnacle of civilization. He looked down at the
barbarians, even those of antiquity like Homer, who was scorned
by many for depicting Nausicaa at the family washing or Patroclus
cooking meat. Fnelon put it quite bluntly: ''The heroes of Homer
do not resemble gentlemen, and the gods of that poet are even
24 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
much below his heroes, who are unworthy of the idea we have of
a gentleman." 29 Thus the universal audience supposedly appealed
to actually became more and more narrowed down: it excluded
the dark ages as well as the barbarous societies of one's own time,
and within the "polite" nations it also excluded the bulk of the
population, the poor and the lowly. But these critics did not, to
my knowledge, face the paradox of a universal audience, of a true
taste confined to a very few select groups.
All these difficulties were inherent in the term "taste," which
was the crystallizing point of the new concepts that turned atten-
tion to the individual state of mind of the reader or listener. The
term "aesthetics" comes from Baumgarten, but "taste" is much
older and shows the same basic shift: the concept of general beauty
is being discarded in favor of an individual standard. Taste can
be found throughout the Italian and French i7th centuries as a
term, but it becomes the subject of elaborate theorizing only in
the early i8th century.* Pere Bouhours and Dubos are the main
authors who discuss it at length. Bouhours tried to reconcile it with
rationalism. "Taste is the first motion, or to put it another way a
kind of instinct of right reason, which works with more rapidity
and more certainty than any trains of reasoning." 80 Taste was a
quicker reason, a short cut to the results of reason. In Dubos it
becomes a "sixth sense," a purely irrational instinct, a special
faculty of the mind. On the whole, however, the 1 8th-century crit-
ics refused to embrace such radical anti-intellectualism. They usu-
ally managed to reconcile taste and judgment and even to identify
it in some form. They defended the view that taste was both ac-
quired and spontaneous, innate and cultivated, "sentimental" and
intellectual. But these reconciliations of opposites raised a prob-
lem which proved dangerous to the basic assumptions of neoclassi-
cism, which demanded, after all, an objective standard of value and
beauty.
Neoclassical theory, expounded here in very general terms with-
* Croce cites a passage from Ludovico Zuccolo (1623) in his Storia
della eta barocca in Italia (Bari, 1946), p. 166, and Borgerhoff quotes a
letter by Guez de Balzac (1645), in Freedom of French Classicism, p. 14.
The widely held view that "taste" comes from Spain and particularly
from Baltazar Gracidn is thus untenable. See Karl Borinski, Baltasar
Gracidn und die Hofliteratur in Deutschland (Halle, 1894), pp. 39 ff.
NEOCLASSICISM 25
out distinctions as to nations, authors, and diverse stages of its de-
velopment, had many contradictions concealed in its system. What
happened in the i8th century was not anything like a unified ro-
mantic or preromantic revolt; rather, individual issues concealed
in the current theory were brought out into the open, critics
pushed this or that position to its logical or illogical extreme, and
theories became established which kept up connections with the
past only uneasily and formally. Thus if we take the imitation
theory as an example, many attempts were made to restate it and
to make it even more coherently applicable. Charles Batteux's Les
Beaux Arts reduits a un meme principe (1746) is the best known
formulation of the imitation of "beautiful nature" as the general
principle of all the arts. Even music as the "imitation of passions"
was included in the scheme. The lyric, Batteux argued, is also
an imitation of emotions and passions, and not a cry of the heart. 81
But the imitation theory broke down partly under the impact of
the shift toward the emotional effect of art and partly through the
growing emphasis on the self-expression of the artist. This creative
power of the artist could be thought of as something purely per-
sonal, a necessity for self-expression, but in these earlier stages
the creative imagination of the artist was on the Renaissance
model, increasingly conceived of as the power of creating an in-
dependent world which is a parallel or an analogue of actual
creation. This view, common in the Renaissance, was echoed by
Shaftesbury and became most widespread and effective in Ger-
many. It allowed the development of purely imaginative poetry
cut off from ordinary reality which was to be the great feature of
German literature from Klopstock to Novalis and E. T. A. Hoff-
mann. On the other hand, a new turn toward naturalism becomes
obvious in the i8th century. Its rise is closely connected with the
victory of empiricism in philosophy, the growth of the scientific
spirit, the increased self-consciousness of the bourgeoisie, which
wanted its life depicted in art. Naturalism enters into many com-
binations with emotionalism and makes many compromises with
classicism. But one can say that a few of the greatest figures of the
i8th century in all three main countries Diderot, Dr. John-
son, and Lessing have strong naturalistic leanings and are often
in danger of losing grip on the nature of art. This tendency
which unites such apparently diverse figures in different countries
26 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
emerges again with renewed vigor in the 30*8 of the igth century,
after the sudden breakdown of the romantic movement.
If we turn to theories of structure, the most important and prom-
ising event was the rebirth of the organic view of the relation
of form and content. It came slowly and was by no means uni-
versally accepted; it may have had something to do with the turn
of interest from physics to biology. 82 It is prominent in Herder,
Goethe, and all the German romantics, and it comes back to Eng-
land with Coleridge. The organic view led to a slighting of the
purely rhetorical analysis of poetry and to the breakdown of the
genre theory. But it took a long time before the uniqueness of
the work of art was asserted with any decision, as the organic view
allowed a new theory of genres on the analogy of biological species.
The organic view was associated with the concept of creative
imagination, as creating was thought of as an irrational process like
procreating or growing.
But by far the strongest and most obvious change in the middle
of the i8th century was the shift of critical concern to the reaction
of the audience, which led to a dissolution of neoclassicism into
emotionalism and scntimentalism. Today this tendency is wrongly
identified with the romantic movement; it was a minor factor in
the English and German romantic writers and is predominant only
among the French. It shifted attention to the emotional effect of
art, and, if pushed to its extreme as it was by writers such as the
early Diderot or Madame de Stael and some theorists in England,
it became destructive of the essential feature of art: its appeal to
contemplation. Art became identified with persuasion, rhetoric,
and even raw emotion. This flying asunder of the neoclassical posi-
tions and theories toward naturalism, emotionalism, and highly
imaginative art was closely involved with a process of very great
importance in history and the history of criticism: the awakening
of the modern historical sense. The historical sense should not be
identified simply with historical relativism. Relativism itself leads
only to barren skepticism, to the old and vicious maxim of De
gustibus non est disputandum. Rather the historical sense should
be defined as a combination of the recognition of individuality
with a sense of change and development in history. These two ideas
are complementary, since there is no proper understanding of his-
torical individuality without a knowledge of its development,
NEOCLASSICISM 27
while on the other hand there is no true historical development
beyond a series of individualities. We must not, of course, think
of individuality as restricted to the person of the poet. Rather,
with the increased sense for the peculiarities of different human
beings in different ages, the sense of individuality and its value
began to be extended also to types of art: the national peculiari-
ties of one literary tradition in opposition to another, one type of
drama clearly contrasted with another. The individuality of dif-
ferent epochs became recognized; the "spirit of the age" was a
new term used for the analysis of the peculiar characteristics of
each successive period in history.
Literature was increasingly studied in the context of its environ-
ment. Individuality cannot be comprehended and described ex-
cept in the context of or in contrast to some environment. In the
i7th century more and more attention was paid to the climatic and
geographical conditions of literature, and increasingly literature
was seen in terms of social conditions and intellectual atmosphere.
People began to discuss the influence of social stability, peace
and war, liberty, and despotism on literature. The concept of a
national character as a determining factor in literary creation was
slowly taking shape.
Development, or at least movement and change in time, was the
central concept which for the first time made the writing of literary
history possible. Before the 171!! century Greece and Rome were
considered as being on almost the same plane as France or Eng-
land. Virgil and Ovid, Horace, and even Homer were discussed
almost as contemporaries. There was little consciousness of the
gulf of time between the ages, though everybody knew the actual
facts of the chronology. The germ of the concept of historical
development is in the idea of progress, which can be traced back
to the Renaissance. 33 But the idea of progress itself is not sufficient
to make proper literary history possible, since it merely implied a
uniform advance toward one ideal of perfection. It rather tended
to increase the contempt for the past and obliterated any distinc-
tions except those of uniform improvement in the regularity of
meter, for instance, or the purity of diction. Also the ancient idea
of cyclical progress implied an inevitable advance and decline,
which cannot be reconciled with the actual diversity of the his-
torical process. 84 The modern concept of development could arise
og A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
only when the idea of independent, individual, national litera-
tures had become established and accepted. The recognition of the
diversity of different national traditions and their courses of evolu-
tion was only possible when past literature had been rediscovered
and radically re-evaluated. The slow opening up of the treasures
of medieval literature and folklore was broadening the literary
horizon beyond the confines of the tradition that had descended
from classical antiquity to the Renaissance. This formerly despised
and therefore unexplored past began to be appreciated, at first
with many reservations, and then so enthusiastically as to be
exalted at the expense of the classics.
The whole process was closely bound up with the spread of
a point of view which we are now accustomed to call primitivism. 86
It is a somewhat misleading term, since there were very few critics
who could be described as recommending an actual return to
primitive poetry. It should be stressed that the "historicity" of a
given work of literature was felt for a long time merely as a limi-
tation and drawback and was usually used only as apology for the
"faults" of older poetry and for its violations ot the rules. To give an
example from the French debate about Homer's supposed lack of
modern polite manners: La Motte defends him, saying thai it is
"ridiculous to reproach Homer for faults of decorum as he could
not depict something which had not yet come into being." 36
Homer did not describe gentlemen because there were no gentle-
men at that time. But this reluctant apology soon changed into a
recognition of the existence of two kinds of poetry, the natural
poetry of rude, barbarous manners, and the universal poetry based
on the eternal principles of taste derived from Greece and Rome.
Many antiquaries and literary historians, even late in the i8th
century, upheld such a double standard of poetry. They do not
abandon their belief in neoclassical principles, but at the same
time they profess a liking for and delight in the primitive, the
popular, and the naive. Antiquarianism, literary history, was a
hobby which did not induce them to give up their basic convic-
tions. It was, however, a dangerous hobby, as more and more
admirers of primitive poetry accepted its implied standards and
began to disparage modern and classical literature. The so-called
Scottish primitivists were the first (if we ignore the forgotten Vico)
to assert definitely that the "times which we call barbarous are the
NEOCLASSICISM 20
most favorable to the poetic spirit." 8T Only Herder, encouraged
by their initiative, jettisoned the neoclassical view completely.
All these elements went into the actual writing of literary his-
tory; the historical sense, the sense of individuality and develop-
ment, had to combine with the antiquarian spirit, use the mate-
rials it had accumulated in the past centuries, and penetrate them
with a sense of urgency and application to its own time. At first
most literary histories were mere accumulations of biographical
and bibliographical information, huge storehouses of raw ma-
terials. Certainly the great works of antiquaries such as Muratori
and Tiraboschi in Italy and the Benedictine group which pro-
duced the Histoire litteraire de la France are little more than that.
But simultaneously actual narrative history of literature arose
which had a critical scheme in mind and a critical ambition to re-
evaluate the past. Though still greatly hampered by a mass of
purely inert antiquarian learning, two books with literary pre-
tensions and presuppositions stand out: Gian Mario Crescimbeni's
Istoria della volgar poesia (1698) and, seventy-six years later, the
first History of English Poetry, by Thomas Warton (1774-81). But
even these books were uneasy compromises. One can speak of suc-
cessful literary history only in the early igth century, with Bouter-
wek, the Schlegcls, Villemain, Sismondi, and Emiliani Guidici.
But this was a victory which should not make us ignore its definite
preparation during the i7th and i8th centuries. Then the materi-
als for literary history were accumulated and then the intellectual
groundwork was laid, in the idea of development and in the new
concepts of criticism.
Originally literary history was mainly confined to national litera-
ture, since one of its main motivations was patriotism. But there
was an increasing awareness of the literatures and literary activi-
ties of other nations. There existed, of course, some remnants of
the humanist community of learning in such reviews, in France,
as La Bibliotheque anglaise (founded in 1716), but that was con-
fined to reports on books in theology, archaeology, etc. Still, even
the French, though they have been the most self-sufficient of all
nations, began to discover the existence of English literature. A
very great importance has usually been ascribed to the beginnings
of this discovery. But one must not forget that the French dis-
covered England when it was itself officially ruled by neoclassical
gO A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
taste, and that they could not help seeing it through the spectacles
of their own taste and the taste of their contemporaries in England.
Thus a "Dissertation sur la posie anglaise" in the Journal lit-
t&raire (1717), concludes with an argument of the general inferi-
ority of English literature. Prior must bow to La Fontaine, Roches-
ter and Dryden to Boileau, the English comedy writers to Molire,
and even Milton to F6nelon. 88 Voltaire's attitude toward English
literature is hardly different.
Thus about the middle of the i8th century we see the tensions
of the neoclassical creed breaking out with far greater violence
and sharpness. It would be an error to think, however, that these
diverse reinterpretations and innovations followed a logical or
chronological order. Rather all these positions were taken up al-
most simultaneously and became sorted out only very slowly. The
baffling complexity of reality is such that we can meet it squarely
only by analyzing the great critics and the important documents
in some detail. We shall begin with Voltaire, who represents a late
stage of French neoclassicism, and then proceed to the great critics
Diderot, Dr. Johnson, and Lessing who restated neoclassicism
in new terms. Chapters on the minor critics in France, England
and Scotland, and Italy will permit us to observe the general trends
of the century before we turn to the radical break with neoclassi-
cism in Herder and its very different restatement in Goethe and
Schiller.
2: VOLTAIRE
VOLTAIRE (1694-1778) is the best representative of late French
classicism. There arc, it is true, other writers who summarize the
position of neoclassical orthodoxy more systematically than the
volatile Voltaire. But he is such a key figure in French literature,
thought, and life of the i8th century, he is a lively writer of such
wide range and scope, and, of course, he is so much more widely
known and discussed than any of the critics who were his con-
temporaries that it seems best to start with him. He is, besides, of
particular interest to the English-speaking world because of the
considerable attention he paid to English literature and his many
pronouncements on Shakespeare which are worth knowing, dis-
cussing, and understanding.
Voltaire cannot be described as a rigid neoclassicist who merely
echoed the views of the i7th century. He is strongly opposed to
the growing geometrical spirit, the excessive rationalism of the
end of the i7th and the beginnings of the i8th century. He shares,
however, some views of the party of the Moderns against the An-
cients, and he found it surprising that Boileau and Sir William
Temple were obstinate enough not to recognize the superiority of
their own age over classical antiquity. 1 He endorsed the attacks of
La Motte on Homer and generally preferred Virgil, yet he was
skeptical of rigid prescriptive poetics as expounded by D'Aubignac
and Le Bossu. 2 Voltaire is also never weary of defending poetry
and verse against the rationalists, such as La Motte, 8 who actually
wrote odes and tragedies in prose and saw the end of the age of
poetry as inevitable and even desirable. Voltaire, whom we think
of as the foremost representative of the Enlightenment, who
certainly was proud of the achievements of his time in promot-
ing tolerance and science and thought highly of his share in such
progress, nevertheless did not believe in continuous uniform
progress in civilization or, of course, in literature. He rather
31
gg A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
shared the view which can be described as cyclical progress. He
believed that humanity had passed through four great ages of
flowering: the Athens of Pericles, the Rome of Augustus, the Rome
of Leo X, and the Paris of Louis XIV. 4 But in between there were
troughs of utter decay or ages of utter darkness, and in literature
ages of bad taste and barbarism. Voltaire was well aware how pre-
carious the hold of civilization is on mankind. The violence of
some of his late opinions must be interpreted as the aroused feel-
ings of an old man who sees a new flood of barbarism advancing.
Voltaire's taste was, no doubt, already substantially formed when
he arrived in England in 1726. Still, the English years (1726-28)
proved of very great importance for the widening of his literary
horizon and the actual writing of criticism. Voltaire certainly
learned to read English very well, though it may be doubted that
he ever spoke or wrote well. He met many of the literary figures
then famous in England Pope, Swift, Edward Young, Congreve,
etc. and he frequented the theater in London, partly to learn
English and partly to learn something about the English drama.
He saw Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Hamlet, not to speak of
Addison's Cato and any number of comedies. In England he wrote
Essai sur la poesie epiquc, which was published as an English origi-
nal as Essay upon the Epic Poetry of the European Nations from
Homer down to Milton in 1727. It was not, of course, a history of
the epic, but mainly served an immediate purpose: it was a defense
of Voltaire's own epic, the Henriade, which he was then preparing
and for which he was anxious to get English subscriptions. The
Henriade needed defense against the strict neoclassical prescrip-
tions such as those laid down by Le Bossu, since it chose a historical
and not a mythical hero (Henri IV) and since it did not use pagan
machinery. Voltaire argues against the classicists that a modern
epic must be different from an ancient. He also wanted to antici-
pate any unfavorable comparison of the Henriade and Paradise
Lost by pleading that a French epic must be different from an
English epic. His defense is based on a distinction which he could
have found in Perrault and St. Evremond: there are essential beau-
ties and conventional beauties, rules which are based on common
sense and universal reason and rules which are merely customary
and local. Machinery is local, based on national taste. Voltaire then
gives a short sketch of the history of epic poetry which is quite su-
VOLTAIRE 33
perficial as history but argues both for the independence of modern
literatures from the classical, by pointing to a deep gulf of social
and technological changes between the two civilizations, and for
the differences between the main modern national traditions. No
attention is paid to Dante or Ariosto (Voltaire admired the latter
but excluded him from the epic), and only Trissino, Tasso,
Camoes, Ercilla, and Milton are taken up in some detail. Though
the information on Camoes and Ercilla is secondhand, 6 the range
of observation is remarkable for the time, and the discussion of
Milton (cautious as it is in order not to offend his hosts) is cer-
tainly novel for France for its recognition of different taste. "If the
difference of genius between nation and nation ever appeared in
its full light, it is in Milton's Paradise Lost/' begins the discussion,
and Voltaire concedes that "he is very far from thinking that one
nation ought to judge its productions by the standard of another." 6
In the later French version, published in 1733, Voltaire again
pleads for the importance of knowing other literatures than one's
own and for the divergencies of national taste which must be ac-
cepted as a matter of fact. "It is impossible that a whole nation
could err in matters of feeling and be wrong in being pleased." 7
Some scholars 8 have hailed the Essay on Epic Poetry as the begin-
ning of comparative literature and of true critical relativism and
toleration. But in the light ot Voltaire's later writings it seems
rather doubtful that it can claim such a position, for he never gave
up the idea of one universal taste. It also seems questionable
whether total relativism is such a great advance on the neoclassical
point of view, and there is, of course, hardly anything like true
comparative literature in Voltaire's remarks on different epics,
often discussed before, or on the differences of national taste, a
topic broached by St. fivremond and many others before him.
Still, Voltaire in England did become more open minded and
interested in English literature. The Letters concerning the Eng-
lish Nation were also published first in English in 1733, while the
French original, rechristencd Lettres philosophiques, came out a
year later. There is no need to discuss the importance of the book
in the history of French thought, but the discussions of English
literature belong to our province. The key is established in the
characterization of Shakespeare. "Shakespeare boasted of a strong,
fruitful genius: he was natural and sublime, but had not so much
34 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
as a single spark of good Taste, or knew one Rule of the Drama/ 1
Shakespeare's influence was the ruin of the English stage, though
there are "beautiful, noble and dreadful scenes in this writer's
monstrous farces, to which the name of tragedy is given." 9 Voltaire
then gives a list of Shakespeare's most obvious "absurdities": Des-
demona speaking after being strangled, the gravediggers in Ham-
let, the jokes of the Roman cobblers in the same scene with Brutus
and Cassius. But Voltaire wants also to present some of the beau-
ties of Shakespeare and produces a translation of "To be or not
to be":
Demeure, il faut choisir et passer a 1'instant
De la vie a la mort, ou de 1'ctre au nant . . . 10
He then quotes, in his translation, a speech of Dryden's, and com-
ments: "It is in these detached passages that the English have
hitherto excelled. Their dramatic pieces, most of which are bar-
barous and without decorum, order or verisimilitude, dart such
resplendent flashes through this gloom as amaze and astonish." n
Addison was the first writer to write a regular tragedy, Cato, but
Voltaire objects to the love intrigue and its general frigidity. "One
would think," he concludes, "that the English had been hitherto
formed to produce irregular beauties only. The shining monsters
of Shakespeare give infinitely more delight than the judicious
images of the moderns. Hitherto the poetical genius of the English
resembles a tufted tree planted by the hand of nature, that throws
out a thousand branches at random, and spreads unequally, but
with great vigor. It dies if you attempt to force its nature, and to
lop and dress it in the same manner as the trees of the garden of
Marly." 12 The same comparison was soon to be reversed in favor
of the untamed forest.
The discussion of English comedy is of far less interest. Voltaire
seems to admire Wycherley, though his summary of the Plain
Dealer stresses the absurdity of the intrigue, and his account of
the Country Wife the grossness of the situation. Rochester is then
praised as "the man of genius," "the great poet," and as an illustra-
tion of his "shining imagination" Voltaire translates a part of the
Satyr against Mankind. The same chapter gives a lukewarm ac-
count of Waller, and the next some enthusiastic praise of Butler,
Swift, and Pope. Voltaire deplores only Butler's local wit, but
VOLTAIRE 35
Swift is preferred to Rabelais and is called, rather oddly, a
"Rabelais in his senses, and frequenting the politest company."
"The poetical numbers of Dean Swift are of a singular and almost
inimitable taste" a judgment which will surprise those who re-
member only the "Lady's Dressing-Room" or the "Progress of
Love." The highest praise goes to Pope. "He is in my opinion the
most elegant, the most correct poet, and at the same time the most
harmonious that England ever gave birth to. He lias mellowed the
harsh sounds of the English trumpet to the soft accents of the
flute." 18 Voltaire then translates a passage from the Rape of the
Lock and concludes with some envious reflections on the regard
shown to men of letters in England.*
But with the years Voltaire's opinion of Shakespeare grew more
unfavorable. One could not say that he actually changed it. The
basic assumptions stayed the same, but the tone becomes much
more sharp and even bitter and the acknowledgment of beauties
much less frequent and generous. One must have in mind the
circumstances: in the Lettres philosophiques Voltaire felt himself
to be a discoverer; in 1776, when his attacks were most violent, he
felt that bad taste had triumphed in France and that his own
countrymen were now preferring Shakespeare to Corneille and
Racine, not to speak of the tragedies of Voltaire himself. A letter
explains it quite honestly thus: "What is frightful is that the mon-
ster has a party in France: and to fill up the measure of calamity
and horror, it is I who long ago was the first to speak of this
Shakespeare. It is I who was the first to show the French some
pearls which I had found in his enormous dunghill. I did not then
expect that one day I should help to trample under foot the crowns
of Corneille and Racine in order to adorn the brow of a barbarous
stage player." 14
The most extravagant condemnation of Shakespeare is the fa-
* One other early piece of Voltaire's throws much light on his critical
opinions of French literature: the poem Le Temple de gout (1731-33),
which has a Hell filled with commentators and philosophers and a
Purgatory with La Motte, J. B. Rousseau, and Fontenelle. Then nearer
the Temple of Taste we see Pascal, Rabelais, Marot, and Bayle, who
still have to be purged of their sins. Finally, Paradise contains only
eight authors: F^nelon, Bossuet, Corneille, Racine, La Fontaine, Boi-
leau, Moltere, and Quinault. 15
36 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
mous letter to the French Academy which was read by D'Alembert
at the Festival of St. Louis on August 25, 1776. 16 Voltaire's wrath
was then overflowing because of the new translation of Shakespeare
by Le Tourneur and the very high praise of Shakespeare in a
prefatory epistle addressed to Louis XVI, who, together with
Catherine the Great and the King of England, figured among the
list of subscribers. Voltaire's method of attack is twofold. Partly
it consists in more or less literal translations of what he considered
crude and obscene passages in Shakespeare: the first scene of
Othello, with lago waking the father of Desdemona and telling
him, in coarse terms, that she had run away with a blackamoor;
the porter in Macbeth; the wooing of Catherine by Henry V; the
punning of the servants at the beginning of Romeo and Juliet;
the first scene in King Lear, when the Duke of Gloucester in-
troduces Edmund as his illegitimate son and jokes about the
manner of his procreation. Even details are recounted when to
the taste of Voltaire they seemed undeniably "low," such as the
talk of the soldiers at the beginning of Hamlet. To Bernardo's
question: "Have you had a quiet guard?" Francisco answers, "Not
a mouse stirring." The shocked Voltaire translates it "Je n'ai pas
entendu une souris trotter." He is particularly angry since Lord
Kames 17 had preferred these words to those of an officer of Aga-
memnon in Racine's Iphigenie: "Mais tout dort, et l'arme, et les
vents, et Neptune." "Yes, sir," Voltaire comments, "a soldier may
answer thus in a guard-house; but not on the stage before the first
persons of a nation who express themselves with nobleness and
before whom he must express himself in the same manner." 18
The other method is one in which Voltaire excelled: the bur-
lesque recounting of the contents of Shakespeare's plays, especially
of Hamlet, which appears in his summary as an absurd murder
story without rhyme or reason. 19 This conclusion thus seems ob-
vious: Shakespeare is nothing but a "village clown" (gille de vil-
lage), a "monster," a "drunken savage," a "water-carrier." But it
would be a mistake to think that Voltaire has completely forgotten
his praise. He constantly held to the view that Shakespeare was a
"beautiful, though very savage nature," who knew no regularity,
no decorum, no art, who mixed baseness and grandeur, buffoonery
and the terrible: "It is a chaotic tragedy with hundreds of rays of
light." 20 Shakespeare always represented to him the crude genius
VOLTAIRE 37
of nature in the beginnings of art. When Voltaire wrote his final
comparison between Corneille and Racine he had in mind Scali-
ger's comparison of Homer and Virgil. But he also alludes to
Shakespeare: "Corneille was unequal like Shakespeare, and full of
genius like him: but Corneille's genius was greater than Shake-
speare's as that of a nobleman is greater than that of a man of
the people who was born with the same mind as he." 21 The final
argument, which must have seemed to Voltaire quite unanswer-
able, is the view that Shakespeare is admired only locally. "He
was a savage who had some imagination. He has written many
happy lines: but his pieces can only please at London and in
Canada. It is not a good sign for the taste of a nation when that
which it admires meets with favor only at home. On no foreign
stage has any piece of Shakespeare ever been performed. The
French tragedies are acted in every capital of Europe from Lisbon
to St. Petersburg. They are played from the borders of the Arctic
sea to the sea that separates Europe from Africa. Let the same
honor be done to a single piece of Shakespeare, and then we shall
be able to enter into an argument." 22
It requires a considerable effort of sympathy not to dismiss much
of this criticism as totally absurd. The last argument certainly
would refute Voltaire completely today; we refuse to be worried
about lowness and even obscenity; we easily make allowance for
improbabilities of plot and situation. Least of all can we think
why Voltaire should be so annoyed by the "stirring mouse." After
all, the soldiers are speaking among themselves and not to the king
who may be in the audience.
We must try to describe Voltaire's taste, his different opinions
and judgments, in order to arrive at something like an under-
standing of his view of Shakespeare. Voltaire was not a systematic
thinker or even a systematic critic. He prided himself on his mo-
bility, his distaste for mere metaphysical speculations, his refusal
to become pedantic and stuffy. He has no theory of beauty, and
the little he said on questions of general aesthetics would point to
a radical individualism. There is the famous beginning of the
article "Beau" in the Dictionnaire philosophique: "Ask a toad
what is beauty . . . and he will answer his she-toad." 23 But ac-
tually he was far from being a mere relativist. He stressed taste and
disliked judging by mere rules. To Pascal's well-known view that
38 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
"a man who judges by rules is like a man who tells time by a
watch compared to a man who has none," Voltaire answered dryly:
"In matters of taste, in music and poetry and painting, taste takes
the place of a watch: and those who judge only by rules, judge
badly." 24 Taste, again, seems at first sight something purely indi-
vidual. There are passages in Voltaire which suggest such conclu-
sions. "Every man according to his taste," he would say, "I cannot
convince a man that he is wrong if he feels bored." 25 But actually
Voltaire believes only in one universal taste, that which found
its models in Roman antiquity and in the French i7th century.
"Fine taste consists in a prompt feeling for beauty among faults
and faults among beauties." 28 The man of taste must not judge
"in the lump"; he is a born anthologist, a culler of passages. That
is why Voltaire detested complete works (and would have de-
tested the fifty-two volumes of Moland). "The mania of editors
to collect everything," he says, "resembles that of sacristans who
collect rags they want to have worshiped; but still just as one
judges true saints by their good actions, so one should judge
talents by their good works." 27
Most of Voltaire's principles can thus be studied only in his
concrete pronouncements, but these are fortunately so numerous
and cover so many authors that a general view emerges with aston-
ishing consistency. Voltaire adheres to the classical tradition of
decorum, bienseance, convenance. "Perfection consists in knowing
how to adjust one's style to the matter one treats." 2S Style, form,
way of expression are always decisive for critical judgment. "As
far as making the passions speak, all men have almost the same
ideas; but the way of expressing them distinguishes the man of wit
from the man who has none." 29 Voltaire restates the ancient doc-
trine of the three levels of style: each subject has its level, "nat-
ural," "tempered," or "elevated." The natural style is not, of
course, the style of the barbarian, the savage, or even the natural
man. Simplicity is precisely the result of civilization. Clarity, pur-
ity, ease are associated with it. Barbarous people emerge from
rudeness by flying into preciosity, bombast, comparable to the
drunkenness of the newcomer to Paris or the squandering of the
newly rich. Voltaire is thus an enemy of anything "baroque," or
what he calls "oriental." He attacks Ossian and the grandiloquence
of the Old Testament, 80 and obviously the style of Shakespeare's
VOLTAIRE 39
speeches seemed to him mere bombast. Voltaire frequently trans-
lates verse into prose to "test" it and to achieve comic effects. Sim-
plicity of style means also homogeneity of style, unity of tone: a
view which is implicit in the whole insistence on purity of genre
and the disapproval of mixtures of style. He is extremely pedantic
and also subtle in his linguistic criticisms: only contemporary good
usage is his standard. Even Moliere, La Fontaine, and Corneille
must be read with caution. The standard of clarity applies also to
poetry: "Poetry must have the clarity, the purity of the most
correct prose." 81 He praises some lines of verse by saying: "All the
ideas are closely linked, the words are the right words, and it would
be beautiful in prose." 82
But it would be a misunderstanding of Voltaire to think of him
as a disparager of poetry. Poetry is not superfluous or obsolete.
"Verse which does not say more, better and more quickly than
prose would say it, is simply bad verse." 33 In his elaborate com-
mentary on Corneille's plays Voltaire subjects them to a minute
linguistic criticism which points out all instances of preciosity as
a vice. 84 Clarity is thus a prime requirement of both prose and
verse. "Any verse or any sentence which requires explanation does
not deserve to be explained" S5 is his surprising statement which
makes short work of one-halt of the world's literature, the half
which we seem to love most today and which our poets are aug-
menting in every issue of the little magazines. Also poetry should
impress itself on the memory and thus must be easily understood.
Still, Voltaire recognizes higher styles: above the natural style
rises the elegant, which is always based on selection, a result of
justness and agreement. Virgil and Racine are the masters of ele-
gance and the greatest poets. Poetry is not mere rhymed prose. Vol-
taire thus disapproves of the prose poem advocated by La Motte,
and resents Fenelon's calling his prose epic Telemaque a poem. 86
Rhyme is not a shackle: it rather forces the poet to think more
justly and to express himself more correctly. 87 Poetry, he says fre-
quently, is the "music of the soul," 38 and in practice he stressed
the qualities of euphony in verse. Translation of poetry is thus,
he knew, all but impossible. "Don't believe," he wrote, "you know
the poets from translations; that's like wanting to see the colors of
a picture in an engraving." 89 It would be a mistake to think that
Voltaire ranked the mere reasoners in rhyme highest. He did not
40 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
admire Boileau or Pope excessively and he realized that he was
living in an age of decay in French poetry. His admiration was for
Virgil and Racine, their harmonious poetry, their "language of
the soul." In French literature he recognized at the most, besides
Racine, some passages in Corneille, in La Fontaine, and in Qui-
nault, and possibly some stanzas in Malherbe and Racan, as perfect
poetry. 40
Beyond the poetic style there was the elevated, the dramatic,
tragic style. Voltaire loved and admired the French theater above
any other institution or tradition. Corneille, he said, ' 'established
a school of the greatness of soul: Moliere founded one of social
life." The drama is to him the supreme result of civilization, espe-
cially, of course, of French civilization. "There was no good
comedy until Moliere, just as there was no art of expressing true
and delicate sentiments before Racine, because society had not yet
arrived at the perfection it reached in their times." 41 Drama, to
him, must first of all have an emotional effect; it must move us,
interest us. This interest is damaged by improbability, by unneces-
sary complications of plot or intricate reasonings. The three uni-
ties which Voltaire defends in the early preface to Oedipe (1729)
are merely guards against improbability. The unity of action is
there "because the human mind cannot embrace several objects
at the same time"; the unity of place "because a single action can-
not occur in several places at the same time"; 42 and the unity of
time because only the moment of decision can be interesting. The
stage must never be empty, and no character must appear on it
without sufficient part in the action. Tragedy, according to Vol-
taire, should and must be lofty, even pathetic, theatrical. He thus
had no patience with the new bourgeois tragedy, which seemed to
him a debasement of the true kind, though he was rather tolerant
of the comedie larmoyante and wrote several himself. Still, to a
certain extent he was discontented with some of the traditions of
French 17th-century tragedy. He objected especially to love in-
trigues if they were not the center of the play and were only
dragged in as obligatory diversion, and also to the rigid exclusion
of scenes of violence and death, at least in his early period. He
wanted to bring the death of Mariamne on the stage, and he was
obviously at first favorably impressed with the amount of action
in a play like Shakespeare's Julius Caesar or Otway's Venice Pre-
VOLTAIRE 41
served. His own plays, La Mori de Cesar, which violates the unity
of time, and Semiramis, which introduced a ghost in broad day-
light, are certainly examples of Voltaire's own desire and willing-
ness to experiment. But later he became more and more hostile to
stage business, to elaborate actions and costumes, and thought that
the theater was sinking back into barbarism. 48
This short description alone should show how well defined Vol-
taire's taste was, how firmly rooted in the French i7th century to
which he looked back with nostalgia, with a clear feeling of the in-
feriority of his own time in poetic genius but with pride in the ad-
vance of freedom of thought and civil liberties. There is nothing
merely capricious about Voltaire's taste: he feels it definitely to be
an expression of a society and a standard which has the moral and
social sanction of that society. He is neither an impressionist nor a
mere dogmatist: he is a man of taste, the voice of a civilization
which may have irrevocably passed away but has left its deep im-
press on French literature and criticism. Clarity, measure, design,
taste are still words to conjure with in France, and French neo-
classical taste represents in its purity a permanent contribution to
civilization.
Voltaire cannot be placed with the pioneers of historical criti-
cism. No doubt he knew a great deal of history; he has been de-
scribed, not unjustly, as the founder of the history of civilization,
of economic and world history. But even as a historian he was
primarily interested in the present and the future. As a critic he
was not concerned with literary antiquarianism, though he wrote
some sweeping surveys which could be called literary history: the
sketch of the epic in Essai sur la poesie epique, the survey of litera-
ture in Siecle de Louis XIV, or the slight sketch of the history of
dramatic art in the Dictionnaire. Occasionally Voltaire would use
historical arguments: in order either to apologize for faults or to
stress historical merit, the introduction or origination of some-
thing. Thus the bombast in Corneille's Le Cid would be excused
as Spanish taste which then was "the spirit of the time." 4 * The
Church Fathers would be called great in spite of their bad taste for
allegories and metaphors. Voltaire would recommend indulgence
in order to understand Nausicaa or the Song of Songs, which he
translated, toning down the erotic passages. Voltaire was struck by
the similarities of all primitive literature, and by primitive he
42 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
meant any writing which was not derived from the tradition of
Roman antiquity. Thus he compared the Iliad with the Book of
Job, the ancient Greek theater with the operas of Metastasio. The
Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus strikes him as similar to a Spanish
auto sacramental.** Homer, the Bible, and Ossian he sometimes
classed together as representing a kind of literature which is con-
sidered to be inferior to true taste. Still, he shows some awareness
of the existence of different standards of taste in different ages and
nations. On the whole, however, Voltaire recognizes only one kind
of literature: classical Latin and French, or anything which, in
nations other than France, seems to approach it. He is sometimes
described as a pioneer of cosmopolitanism in literature; but surely
his hopes for a future republic of letters, for a grand society of
spirits, could be rather described as French cultural imperialism,
since the "French language would be its essential idiom" and cer-
tainly French taste would be its central point of reference. 46
In his early years Voltaire thought of the role of the English as
one of contributing to a liberalizing ot French taste. He recognized
the existence of local beauties and the different geniuses of the
main European nations. Occasionally he would give social ex-
planations for differences of taste. In speaking of Oriental poetry,
he refers to the different status of women: "Poetry will be different
with a people that locks up its women in harems and with a people
that gives them unlimited freedom." 47 But basically he always ap-
peals to universal taste, and that universal taste is the classical taste
which is founded on the principles of general human nature. One
of his attacks on Shakespeare is called Appel a toutes les nations de
I' Europe (1761), and he recurs again and again to the argument
that an author who pleases only locally (such as Shakespeare or
Lope de Vega) cannot be really great and correct. French taste he
thinks of as the nucleus of European taste to which all other na-
tions can only contribute, a view which will seem less absurd if we
consider the tremendous spread of French language, taste, and
customs during the i8th century. Six years after Voltaire's death
Rivarol could win a prize of the Prussian Academy with his Dis-
cours sur I' universal! te de la langue frangaise (1784). Voltaire him-
self was feted at the court of Frederick the Great, whose great
ambition was to be considered a French poet. In Russia French
had become the language of the court and of the nobility, a state
VOLTAIRE 43
of affairs which lasted far into the igth century, as any reader of
Tolstoy must know. French was certainly the second language of
Italy. 48 The dominance of neoclassicism in Spain, Italy, Germany,
and even England began to be challenged only in the years im-
mediately preceding Voltaire's death. No wonder that he saw other
literatures through the spectacles of French taste. In England, of
course, he would have to be classed among the most conservative.
His attitude toward Shakespeare is proof enough; there is no
doubt that he read and knew Rymer and even learned from his
method. 49 He certainly was, after some general professions of ad-
miration and puzzlement, hostile also to Milton. One suspects that
the views of Pococurante, the Venetian nobleman in Candide, are
not too far removed from Voltaire's own.
"Milton?" said Pococurante; "that barbarian who made a
tedious commentary on the first chapter of Genesis in ten
books of rugged verse? That clumsy imitator of the Greeks,
who disfigures the creation and, instead of representing the
Eternal Being, as Moses does, creating the universe at a word,
makes the Messiah take a large pair of compasses from one of
the cupboards of Heaven to draw a plan of his intended work?
Do you expect me to appreciate the man who has spoiled
Tasso's conception of Hell and the Devil, who disguises
Lucifer first as a toad and then as a pigmy, who makes him
repeat the same speeches a hundred times, and even argue
about theology? Why, the man has so little humor as to imi-
tate in all seriousness Ariosto's comic invention of firearms
and make the devils fire cannon in Heaven! Neither I nor
anyone else in Italy can take pleasure in these sorry extrava-
gances. The marriage of Sin and Death and the snakes to
which Sin gives birth sicken every man with any delicacy of
taste, and his long description of a hospital will only please a
gravedigger. This obscure, bizarre, and disagreeable poem was
despised on publication. I judge it today as it was first judged
by the author's fellow-countrymen. I say what I think, and
care little whether others agree with me." B0
Though Pococurante's memory of Milton is curiously inaccurate
(he even changes hellhounds into snakes), and though he does not
know of the biblical authority for the compasses, 51 the view ex-
44 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
pressed fits so well with Voltaire's taste that his ridicule of Poco-
curante does not affect the criticism of Milton.
Again, as with Shakespeare, Voltaire admired individual beau-
ties and flights of imagination. He translated the monologue of
Satan after his fall, but the episode of Death and Sin is called
"disgusting and abominable/' 2 On the whole, he concludes that
Paradise Lost is a "work rather singular than natural, more full
of imagination than of graces, of boldness than of selection, whose
subject is all ideal and seems not to have been made for man." 5S
The same attitude is behind the rather scarce pronouncements
on Dante, who is praised for being frequently naive and sometimes
sublime. But usually he is charged with "bizarre taste," and Vol-
taire even wrote two burlesque imitations in the Essai sur les
mceurs and the Dictionnaire.** Among foreign poets the one who
receives the highest praise is Ariosto, who to Voltaire combines the
invention of Homer with the elegance and taste of Virgil. He adds
the imagination of the Arabian Nights to the sensibility of Ti-
bullus and the pleasantry of Plautus. He is superior to La Fontaine
as a story teller and is at times equal to Racine in pathos. 55 Tasso
is also admired by Voltaire, though less fervently. Ariosto and
Tasso surpass Homer: Orlando Furioso is better than the Odyssey,
Gerusalemme Liberata than the Iliad. He censures them only for
too many marvels in an epic poem and admits occasional clinquant
with which Boileau had charged Tasso. 56
Among the French writers Voltaire singles out Racine for the
highest praise. Voltaire's tone becomes positively lyrical when he
speaks of Racine, and in tones of deep emotion he describes Iphi-
genie and Athalie as masterpieces of the human mind. 57 Moliere is
to him undoubtedly the greatest of all writers of comedy, while he
showers generous praise on Pascal and Bossuet, though he dis-
agreed with their views profoundly and argued against Pascal
much of his life. Among the contemporaries Voltaire naturally
disapproved of Rousseau, for personal and later ideological rea-
sons. His method of ridiculous summaries of plot certainly shines
at its wittiest when he retells La Nouvelle Helotse 58 or picks holes
in the grammar, the images, and the morals of Rousseau's novel.
But privately Voltaire was not totally unappreciative of his elo-
quence and genius. "He is a Diogenes, who sometimes speaks like
Plato." 59
VOLTAIRE 45
One could go on giving examples of Voltaire's innumerable lit-
erary judgments. But the more one reads him, the more one is
impressed with the coherence and consistency of his taste: the uni-
formity of his outlook, in spite of occasional contradictions or
shifts of emphasis. His literary opinions are an almost instinctive
assertion of this taste. The main criteria are always standards of
style, composition, harmony, and eloquence, and the central con-
cept is that of decorum, understood in terms of the French gentle-
man. Socially Voltaire was certainly the French aristocrat, in spite
of his religious skepticism and his hatred of despotism and intoler-
ance. His literary judgments are never or very rarely colored by his
religious and political opinions. Athalie, a pernicious example of
fanaticism, is still the "chef-d'oeuvre de 1'esprit humain."
I thus cannot agree with Saintsbury's discussion of Voltaire as a
critic. 60 The view that Voltaire's "treasure" and heart were no-
where in literature, "that for literature he had very little genuine
love," seems to me completely mistaken. He was a man of letters,
first of all, and it seems surprising that anyone could doubt his
fervent love and interest in literature and his lifelong ambition to
be a poet. One must have narrowly romantic taste not to appreciate
the very real artistic success of some of Voltaire's tales such as
I'Ingenu and Candide. And within limits even his tragedies, his
burlesque poems such as La Pucelle, and many fugitive pieces show
genuine power. He himself knew that he was merely a follower of
the great men of the i7th century and that he could not measure
up to them. That is why he held to their standards so strongly: he
thought of himself as a defender of the poetic faith in an age of
prose, as a representative of aristocratic civilization in the age of
the rising bourgeoisie with its low "foreign" taste for the violent
and the commonplace. There may be a paradox in the fact that
Voltaire can be considered a forerunner of the French Revolution
as well as the last outpost of the age of Louis le Grand. But it can
be resolved in the unity of personality of a man who hated in-
justice, intolerance, obscurantism, irrationality, just as he despised
what he considered the gross, the low and the violent, the absurd
in taste and poetry. Religious skepticism and even political radical-
ism are not incompatible with literary conservatism and have
never been so in history.
: DIDEROT
DENIS DIDEROT (1713-84) as a critic is a most baffling subject to
deal with. The reasons for the difficulty of presenting a coherent
account of Diderot's thought on literature and poetry are obvious
enough. The range of his interests and the variety of literary genres
in which he is apt to discuss aesthetic and literary topics are as great
as in Herder. There is, besides, an obvious evolution in his views
from the early pieces in the late 40*5 to the Paradoxe sur le
comedien (1778). These difficulties are those one would expect:
more surprising are the contradictions and shifts of emphasis in
Diderot's views, which he held simultaneously and which cannot
be reconciled by simply deciding that only one view was his
genuine one. Finally and basically there is the volatility of his
temperament, the dynamism of his personality, which is reflected
in his style and composition and which makes systematization of
his views all but impossible. 1
There are several ways of handling the situation: one would be
to observe the contradictory variety of Diderot's views and to de-
cide that he was simply incoherent and possibly therefore of little
account. Another would be boldly to single out what one considers
his basic view and to dismiss all other theories as deviations or con-
cessions to the times. Neither of these ways commends itself. We
shall have to find some kind of common denominator among his
theories in order to explain how he could hold them simultane-
ously. If one studies his works in strict chronological order one
can trace a not unreasonable shift, and, if one pays close attention
to the polemical context of pronouncements and the genres to
which they are applied, one can discover a further coherence and
consistency.
Diderot's early theories could be best labeled as emotionalist.
Art and literature are to move us, of course, to virtue. The artist
himself must be moved, and the devices, the structures he uses
4 6
DIDEROT 47
must be as moving as possible. Diderot wants literature to be above
all pathetic. This is possibly a somewhat rash generalization, but
it may allow us to accommodate the seemingly contradictory theo-
ries of his early years. Later Diderot became more skeptical about
the effect of art and hence about the need of spontaneity in the
artist and of emotion in the work itself. He moves back to neo-
classical idealism and speaks more insistently of an "interior
model" in the artist's mind.
His theories of the drama were the most influential of his criti-
cal writings in his time. There is a well-known discussion of
French tragedy in the indecent early novel Les Bijoux indiscrets
(1748) which Lessing was to quote, 2 and there are the various
dialogues and discourses which Diderot wrote to follow or intro-
duce his plays, Le Fils nature! (1757) and Le Pere de famille
(1758). It seems unfortunate that Diderot as a critic is known
mostly by these early writings on the drama. They have their great
historical importance and interest but do not seem impressively
new to those who know the English critics. They can be judged
mainly as a plea for a realistic drama as opposed to the conven-
tions of the French stage: they are the manifestoes of a new genre,
the domestic tragedy, which was new in France but had its models,
known and admired by Diderot, in Lillo's London Merchant and
Edward Moore's Gamester. The passage in Les Bijoux indiscrets
implies wholly naturalistic standards: French plays are criticized
for their improbable accumulation of events within a short time,
for their set speeches, and for their unnatural gestures. He
imagines the response of a foreigner who had never seen a French
play and was promised the sight of an actual intrigue in the
palace. 8 As soon as the foreigner was admitted into the box from
which he could see the theater, which he supposed to be the
palace of the sultan, he would burst into laughter and recognize
that it was all a play, on account of the stilted walk of the actors,
the bizarreness of their costumes, the extravagance of their ges-
tures, the emphasis of their strangely rhymed and cadenced lan-
guage. Diderot seems literally to accept the view that the theater
should deceive: "The perfection of a spectacle consists in such an
exact imitation of an action that the spectator, deceived without
interruption, imagines that he witnesses the action itself." 4 In re-
porting a successful performance in Marseilles of his own P&re de
48 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
famille, Diderot is pleased to relate that "hardly had the first scene
been played before one believed oneself in a family circle and one
forgot that one was in a theater. These were no longer the boards,
this was a particular house." 5 But all these requirements of natu-
ralness are not those of modern realism. They are meant to be
strictly subordinate to emotional effects, as we see when we ex-
amine the two treatises Diderot annexed to his domestic plays, or
his famous eulogy of Richardson (1761). Still, many concrete opin-
ions imply naturalistic standards. In criticizing French tragedy he
objects to too much speechifying, to the forced unities of place
and time, to the intricate fable, to the whole social milieu of re-
mote antiquity and remoter Orient. But what he recommends is
not simply realism. It should rather be called sensationalism, in
which realistic devices are valued only as contributing to an in-
tense emotional effect.
The moderns (that is, the French of the iyth and i8th centuries)
are criticized particularly for shirking this emotional intensity of
real art.
In general [he says] the more a people is civilized and pol-
ished, the less are its customs poetic; everything weakens
and softens. On what occasions does nature present us with the
models for our art? When children tear out their hair beside
the bed of the dying father; when a mother uncovers her
bosom and appeals to her son by the breasts which have
nursed him; when a man cuts off his own hair, throws it at
the corpse of a friend, raises the corpse and carries it to a
pyre, where he collects the ashes and shuts them up in an urn
to which he conies, on appointed days, to wet it with his tears;
when disheveled widows tear their faces with their nails . . .
when bacchantes, armed with thyrsi, wander in the forest and
inspire fear and curse those whom they meet; or when other
women undress without shame, open their arms to the first
comer and prostitute themselves. ... I do not say that these
are good manners, only that they are poetic manners. 6
Thus Diderot's ideal is that of emotional intensity, of spon-
taneity. There is, he finds, nothing in common between the mod-
ern hooped and powdered ladies with handkerchiefs in their hands
DIDEROT 49
and the heroines of antiquity. Brutus, Catiline, Caesar, Cato would
not recognize themselves on the French stage. The modern audi-
ence shuns the great emotional effects of Greek tragedy and shuns
them wrongly. Philoctetes crying and moaning on his island, the
Eumenides hot on the trail of blood, Oedipus with the blood
streaming from his eyes these are scenes after Diderot's heart. 7
The dramatic poet thus "should aim not at the clapping of hands
after a striking line, but at the deep sigh which leaves the soul
after the constraint of a long silence, and which relieves it. He
should aim at the even more violent impression which puts people
as if to the rack. Then the spirits will be troubled, uncertain,
floating, lost: and the spectators will be like those who in an earth-
quake see the walls of their houses shake, and feel the earth open
under their feet." 8 Diderot feels as violently the effect of Richard-
son's novels. "When I read of the last hours of this innocent
creature [Clarissa], I am always astonished that the very stones and
walls and cold and senseless flags on which I walk are not stirred to
cry out and join their sorrow in mine." 9 He favors melodramatic
plots and situations: he sketches a harrowing scene of a Death of
Socrates; 10 he writes highly strained, high-pitched plays full of
impossible situations and complications. "Touch me, surprise me,
tear me; make me tremble, cry, shudder, be angry!" X1
Diderot is dissatisfied with the ordinary means of achieving the
emotional effect on the stage. He thinks words insufficient. Passion,
he argues, does not speak in flowery, ornate set speeches. It speaks
haltingly, it resorts to pantomime, to gestures. This is why Diderot
admires the scene with Lady Macbeth sleepwalking, rubbing her
hands. 12 The situation is seen, is visualized, brought home in more
than mere words. Thus he welcomes a novelty on the Parisian
stage, the Italian dramatic pantomime, and he even sketches a
scenario for such an experiment. 13
This naturalistic emotionalism in Diderot was perfectly com-
patible with traits which have been hailed as anticipations of sym-
bolism or modern impressionism. It connects with his polemics
against the intellectualization of language and poetry, with his
particular brand of primitivism. Like Fontenelle or Vico, Diderot
voices the view that because barbarous people were more spon-
taneous and more violent they had more poetry.
50 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
There is more fire in barbarous people than in civilized;
more fire in the Hebrews than in the Greeks; more fire in the
Greeks than the Romans; more fire in the Romans than the
Italians or French; more fire in the English than in the last.
There is always a decline of fire and poetry in proportion to
the progress of the philosophical spirit. ... Its cautious ad-
vance is an enemy of movement and figures. The realm of
images passes as the realm of things extends ... as civil and
religious prejudices disappear; it is incredible what damage
this monotonous politeness does to poetry. . . . The philo-
sophical spirit leads to a sententious and dry style. Abstract
expressions, which extend to a great number of appearances,
multiply and take the place of figured expressions. . . .
Which kind of poetry, do you think, requires most fire? The
ode, without doubt. It has been a long time since odes have
been written. . . . When does one see critics and grammar-
ians arise? Always after an age of genius and divine produc-
tion. . . . There is only one propitious moment; when there
is enough fire and liberty to be warm, and enough judgment
and taste to be wise. 14
Thus Diderot condemns Helv<kius for his unmetaphorical, dry
style, and prefers the loose and informal Montaigne. 16 Like Vol-
taire he understands that the process of rationalization has been
detrimental to poetry and that it means depriving words of what
we would call their connotative rather than their denotative mean-
ing.
Diderot has a theory of language as a system of signs. Language
has the tendency to become more and more arbitrary and fixed.
Original language was natural, i.e. a language of nonconventional
signs. The poet is a man "who passes from abstract and general
sounds to less abstract and less general sounds, until he arrives at
a sensible representation, the last resort and repose of reason." 10
The natural sign is better, it is more concrete, and it is truer; for,
according to Locke and Condillac, only an "idea," i.e. a sense
datum, is immediately evident. It is more poetic because it appeals
directly to the senses, to the visual imagination. "We are presented
not merely with a chain of strong terms which express the idea
with force and nobility, but with a tissue of hieroglyphics heaped
DIDEROT 51
one above the other which picture it. I may say that in this sense all
poetry is emblematic." 17 As Diderot's elaborate comments on
passages of poetry show, "hieroglyphics" and "emblems" do not
mean symbols which conceal an intellectual content, but stress
what we would call sound symbolism and the physiological effect
of meter. "The poet is under the necessity of finding an expression
of genius, a unique, original, and natural physiognomy, the force-
ful and strong image of an individual quality." 18
But sometimes, instead of stressing the concreteness and visual
force of the word in art, he recommends connotation as a means for
achieving vagueness and even downright obscurity, which seems to
him sublime and moving. "Clarity is all right for convincing: it is
of no use for moving. Clarity of whatever kind damages enthusi-
asm. Poets, speak incessantly of eternity, infinitude, immensity,
time, space, divinity. ... Be dark!" 19 "The vaguer is expression
in the arts, the more is imagination at ease." 20 "At ease" must here
mean free to roam, to indulge in its own play of association. This
seems the opposite of the precision of the visual, the physiognomic,
the characteristic and individual, which the preceding passages
recommended. Here is one of the contradictions of Diderot's
theory, reconcilable only if we understand that both doctrines are
directed against the ideal of purely rational language, and that
both distinct visual beauty and indistinct vague sublimity are
prized for achieving emotional impact. Diderot works toward a
rhetoric of sensation: an idea, in poetry and in the arts in general,
must not remain a mere sense datum, and of course it must be-
come not a concept but an emotion. 21 Sensationalism and emotion-
alism fuse.
But Diderot pushes further. He also tries to explain the effect
of poetic images by a psychological theory which demands more
than vividness of impressions. In Le Reve de D'Alembert (1769,
published 1830) there are hints for a theory of imagination as the
perception of analogies beyond the merely associational. He com-
pares metaphoric imagination to the sympathetic vibration of
strings at unexpected intervals. The creation of original meta-
phors, the yoking together of remote spheres, the apprehension of
unsuspected relationships comes about through the accumulation
of delicate and varied experiences during the long life of an organ-
ism. The memory serves, so to speak, as a vault of images, stored in
52 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
the darkness of nerve centers, from where they spring in an un-
predictable and often inexplicable manner, coupling themselves
to present ideas to form the metaphors of the poet and the hy-
potheses of the scientist. 22 Apparently Diderot does not distinguish
between the intuition of the philosopher and the imagination of
the poet. He defends the poet's original associations, as we could
expect, by the sensationalist theory of knowledge: they are real
because they occur in the organism of the poet and may be felt
by him with an intensity which is often lacking in direct sense im-
pression. But Diderot breaks off these speculations by suggesting
that they may furnish the subject of a book. He leaves the poet
dangling in a world of subjective, irrelevant, interior associations
and linkages. No theory of poetry may be derived from these
passages. It seems impossible to reconcile them with the conven-
tionally neoclassical idea of the "interior model." 28
Diderot, in accord with his age and his own gifts, paid little at-
tention to lyrical poetry. But he thought enough about verse to
see the connection between language as metaphoric emblem and
the physical effect of sound: onomatopoeia, rhythm, and meter. He
thinks of verse rhythm as following closely the "movement of the
soul/' the interior rhythm of the mind. 24 It is clear that with such
a conception of poetry Diderot understood that translating is well-
nigh impossible. Even the best translation will lack the suggestive
sounds which depend on the distribution of long and short sylla-
bles, and of vowels between consonants. 28
Poetry, which moves our sense by physical signs, can be pro-
duced only by the moved mind, by the emotional man who is
genius and poet, the man of feeling. Diderot constantly assumes
intense emotional personal engagement as the criterion of poetic
greatness. He criticizes Saint-Lambert's version of Thomson's
Seasons as academic poetry, full of art, design, intellect. "The soul
alone, not art, must produce [the effect]. If you think of the effect,
you have failed." 26 Nothing is seen or felt in Saint-Lambert's de-
scriptions. "His body is in the country but his soul in the town
... he never waited for the inspiration of nature and he has
prophesied, to use an expression of Naigeon, before the Spirit de-
scended on him. He does not intoxicate, because he himself is not
intoxicated. At the sight of a beautiful landscape, he says: 'O, what
a beautiful view for a description' instead of falling silent and
DIDEROT 53
letting himself penetrate it deeply and only then seize the lyre." 2T
"What then does Saint-Lambert lack? A soul that torments itself, a
violent spirit, a strong and burning imagination, a lyre that has
many chords." 28 For Diderot the poet or the artist is a tragic, mel-
ancholy figure. "Before taking up the pencil one must have
trembled twenty times in the presence of the subject, lost sleep, got
up in the middle of the night and have run in one's nightshirt and
with bare feet in order to throw one's sketches on paper under the
light of a night-lamp." 29 These are the tones of the young Goethe
jumping out of bed in the middle of the night, the Sturm und
Drang, the emotional overflow. Diderot contrasts genius, the "pure
gift of nature," with taste. 80 Genius is above the rules: it can break
any rule and all of them, even though rules may be useful in an
age of decadence.
If this were all Diderot had written we should have a fairly con-
sistent theory of the emotional genius, the moved spectator, and
the moving work of art. But this aim is considerably modified by
basic neoclassical assumptions which, with the years, became
stronger and finally pushed him into a position contradictory, at
least in part, to his earlier sentimentalism. Even his very influential
advocacy of a new genre, the drame bourgeois, is made almost en-
tirely in terms acceptable to neoclassical theory. He elaborates a
hierarchy of dramatic genres, in which the domestic tragedy ap-
pears to fill the gap between tragedy and comedy, while the bur-
lesque comedy and the marvelous play are relegated to the role
of inferior subgenres. 31 Tragicomedy is expressly condemned as
a bad genre which confounds two genres distinctly separated by
a natural barrier. "One does not pass from one to the other by
imperceptible nuances, but one falls at each step into contrasts
and thus the unity disappears." 82 Diderot censures Shakespeare
and Otway for this mixture as bad taste, though less violently than
Voltaire censured Shakespeare. The new genre, the drame bour-
geois, differs from tragedy in its subject matter and also in its tone
and its lack of heroic passion. Diderot thinks of it also as inter-
mediary between the other genres in the sort of characters it ex-
hibits. Comedy is about types, tragedy about individuals. Domes-
tic drama is about conditions, a term which refers to Diderot's
practice of introducing types such as the financier, the man of
letters, the philosopher, the judge, the lawyer, the politician, and
54 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
people in their basic family relations as father, husband, sister,
brother. 88 It is difficult to see what novelty lies in these characters:
Diderot could hardly have thought that condition can replace
either individuality or the general type; it is simply good neo-
classical typology. He himself says that one could write a new
Misanthrope every fifty years, 8 * an admission that a comic type can
be localized in time and place. He could hardly have thought that
tragic heroes are totally individual and not representative.
Art therefore, or at least the art of the drama, obviously does not
mean mere emotionalism but rather the imitation of nature; and,
of course, by "nature" Diderot means the typical, the universal, the
assumed harmony of nature. "The harmony of the most beautiful
picture is nothing but a feeble imitation of the harmony of na-
ture/' 85 There are many passages, especially in the later writings
such as the Salon of 1767, in which Diderot takes up the concept
of an internal model which the artist is to follow. Thus he accepts
the neo-Platonic strain in neoclassicism and sometimes sounds ex-
actly like Shaftesbury (whom he studied and a translation of whose
essay on Virtue and Merit was his first publication in 1745) or
Winckelmann. Diderot can even say that works of art "preach
more forcefully the grandeur, the power, and the majesty of nature
than nature herself." 30 Art then is idealization and implicitly a
justification of nature. In the question of sculpture Diderot be-
comes involved in arguments about the imitation of ancients, the
undesirability of imitating modern nudes who are deformed by
stays and garters, 87 the difficulty of merely recommending the imi-
tation of classical statues, and the possible ways by which antiquity
may have arrived at ideal beauty (to which, in this context at least,
Diderot gives a purely naturalistic interpretation). "The most
beautiful model, the most perfect model of a man or woman is
one which is supremely fit for all the functions of life, has arrived
at the age of fullest development without, however, having ful-
filled any." 88 This apparently means a biological ideal of beauty,
a woman who has not yet borne children but is best capable of
bearing them, an ideal which does not take one very far in
aesthetics and certainly in literature suggests little beyond nor-
malcy and regular beauty.
By far the most interesting application of this "idealism" is
Diderot's dialogue Le Paradoxe sur le comtdien, written between
DIDEROT 55
1770 and 1778 but published only in 1830. It differs so strikingly
from his earlier more naturalistic theories that attempts have been
made to deny its authenticity. But it is well attested on external
and internal grounds and actually fits in very well with many
scattered pronouncements and the general drift of Diderot's de-
velopment. 39 The argument of the Paradoxe refers mainly to the
art of acting, but its implications for poetry, though recognized
only slightly by Diderot himself, are far reaching. Diderot now
argues that an actor cannot and should not identify himself with
his role and should not be carried away by emotion, but rather he
should imitate an interior model of the character which he has
formed in his mind. There will thus be three such models: the
actual man in reality, the model imagined by the poet, and the
model imagined by the actor. Strangely enough Diderot now says
that "the model of nature is less grand than that conceived by the
poet, and that in turn is less grand than that achieved by the
great actor, which is the most exaggerated" (and apparently there-
fore the best of the three). Naturalistic expressions of feeling are
now rejected. If the actor is endowed with extreme sensibility,
either he does not act or he acts ridiculously. "If I have to tell a
pathetic story, some unknown trouble arises in my heart, in my
head; my tongue falters; my voice is changed; my ideas disinte-
grate; my speech halts; I stammer; my tears flow down my cheeks
and I fall silent." The other speaker objects: "But that is what
succeeds." "In society, but in the theater I'll be hissed." "Why?"
"Because the audience does not come to see tears but to hear mov-
ing speeches, because the truth of nature clashes with the truth of
convention. Neither the dramatic system, nor the action, nor the
speech of the poet are patterned from my stifled, interrupted, sigh-
ing declamation. It is not sufficient to imitate nature. One must
imitate beautiful nature." 40 The argument seems to have come
full circle: Diderot now considers the hissing of a French i8th-
century audience as the test of dramatic art. Many arguments and
anecdotes about actors are produced to strengthen this view. Some
are convincing, though in bad taste: stories about actors who in-
terrupt the passion of their role to address their fellow actors or
the audience; a dying actress whispers to the actor stretched out
next to her: "You smell"; another, admonished by the audience
to speak louder, answers, "You be quiet." The actor, after a per-
56 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
formance that leaves the audience in tears, is not sad but merely
tired by the effort, wants to change his shirt and go to bed. The
good actor is then the man who best knows how to render the
external signs of emotion, not the actor who is himself most pro-
foundly moved. Such real emotion cannot be repeated and can
extend only to one or two roles, to one or two situations. Diderot
recognizes that what he says about the actor must apply also to the
poet, the orator, the painter, the musician. "The great poets, the
great actors, and probably in general all the great imitators of na-
ture, whatever they are, endowed with a beautiful imagination,
with a good judgment, a fine tact, a sure taste, are the least sensitive
of all beings. . . . They are too much occupied with looking,
knowing, and imitating to be vividly affected and carried beyond
themselves." 41 Diderot says of art in words strikingly similar to
Wordsworth's "recollection in tranquillity":
Do you compose a poem about death the moment after you
have lost your friend or your mistress? No. ... When the
great pain has passed, when the extreme sensitivity has dulled,
when one is remote from the catastrophe, when the soul is
calm, when one recalls the past happiness . . . when the
memory unites with the imagination, then one can speak well.
One says that one weeps, but one no longer weeps when one
chases a striking epithet . . . when one is occupied in making
the verse harmonious; when the tears flow, the pen drops from
one's hands, one surrenders to feeling and one stops compos-
ing. 43
Diderot now recognizes that the actor does not cease to be a private
person and is not transformed into the character he is portraying.
What happens is something like a division of personality: "In this
moment, she is double: the little Clairon and the great Agrip-
pina." 48 Diderot now also recognizes that the figures of the stage,
the Cleopatras, Meropes, Agrippinas, and Cinnas, are not historical
personages, not personages at all, but "the imaginary specters of
poetry: I say too much: they are the specters of the particular
character of this or that poet." 44 The theater is based on an old
convention, a formula given by Aeschylus, "a protocol aged three
thousand years." 4B
Also Diderot's view of the effect of art has changed. He no
DIDEROT 57
longer speaks of violent emotional effects, of putting men on the
rack, of breaking up their world like an earthquake. Rather
naively he even dreamt of some fortunate island Lampedusa,
between Tunisia and Sicily, is singled out where on feast days
tragedies and comedies would be performed and where actors
would become the great preachers of morality. 46 He had high ex-
pectations of the immediate moral effect of the stage. "The pit of
a theater is the only place where the tears of a virtuous and a
wicked man mingle. Here the evildoer becomes indignant at the
injustices which he himself would have committed, feels pity for
the evil he himself would have occasioned, and gets angry at a
man of his own character. . . . The evildoer leaves his box less
disposed to work evil." 47 But later Diderot became more skeptical
as to the immediate moral effect of the theater. "There in the
theater I am magnanimous, just, compassionate, because I can be
so without consequence." 48 These later pronouncements certainly
show a deeper comprehension of the nature of art, the nature of
the creative process, and the effects of art than his earlier, more
influential writings, full of the emotionalism and sentimentalism
of the time.
Something must be said of his practical criticism, his rating of
the main authors, his predilections and tastes. He cannot be de-
scribed as a fertile or careful critic of individual authors, nor can
his views of the history of literature be considered particularly
novel or striking. Toward antiquity he takes a sensible in-between
position. He disapproves of the wholesale adulation of antiquity
and thus seems to side with the moderns in the Querelle. But he
does so only very provisionally on general grounds. Actually he
admired many ancients very fervently. "When I prefer Homer to
Virgil, Virgil to Tasso, Tasso to Milton, Milton to Voltaire or
Camoes, it is not a matter of date at all. I can give my reasons." 49
He rejects the accusation of antico-manie but is actually quite in-
sistent on the necessity of knowing antiquity. There is no excel-
lence of taste without a knowledge of the Greeks and Latins. One
easily recognizes a modern author who does not know the ancients.
Diderot himself read Greek and Latin very well. He emphasizes
the value of knowledge and erudition for the poet and, in criti-
cism of the rococo poetry of his time, protests that modern poets,
"because of their lack of knowledge, sing nothing but melodious
58 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
insipidities." 80 Though nature is the source of all beauty, still the
ancients furnished the greatest models of art.
Homer comes in for the highest praise. He differs from all other
poets for he speaks the language of poetry as if it were his own; all
other poets compared to him smack of the academy. Diderot goes
all out in defending Homer against his many detractors in the wake
of Bayle. He accepts Homer's heroes, his manners, his language,
his technique of description. Like Lessing he singles out for praise
the passage in the Iliad where the beauty of Helen is not described,
but suggested by the effect it had on the old men of Troy. 01
Virgil is also very great but not as great as Homer. Diderot espe-
cially admires the Georgics. He admires Horace and thinks the
Ars poetica a work of genius greatly preferable to Boileau's L'Art
poetique, which seems to him merely a work of good taste. 53 He
praises Tacitus as the Rembrandt of literature, admires Lucretius
for his imagination but criticizes him for his "dry and chaotic
style." 4
Diderot was most deeply impressed by Greek tragedy. He ad-
mires Aeschylus as "gigantic and epic," "sublime," especially in the
Eumenides, to which he always refers when he wants an example
of moving tragic art. Sophocles' Philoctetes is to him the perfect
masterpiece: "One cannot add a word or subtract one." 5B But he
is surprisingly cool toward Euripides. He constantly appeals to
Greek tragedy as a model for modern tragedy, especially extolling
its simplicity of action as compared with the complex intrigues of
a French tragedy. Diderot also has an inkling of the social implica-
tions of Greek tragedy: he contrasts the great public space of the
Athenian stage with the little dark corners of modern theaters
where only a few hundred people can gather. He tells the story
of a man who thought a Parisian theater a prison. 56 Great effects
like those on the Greek stage are needed, but Diderot recognizes
that "we need for such a genre authors, actors, a theater, and
possibly a people." 5T He belongs to the many critics of the i8th
century who expected something like a reunion of the arts of
dance, pantomime, stage painting, music, and poetry and he
saw a partial fulfillment of his ideal in the Italian opera.
Diderot, quite comprehensibly, was enthusiastic about Terence.
Terence depicts family life; he is pathetic and even bourgeois. He
has nothing of the violence and extravagance of Aristophanes or
DIDEROT 59
even Molire. He is praised as having "the more tranquil and sweet
Muse/ 1 68 and the first scene of Andria seems to Diderot unsur-
passed by anything even in Molifere. He praises Colman's transla-
tion of Terence into English, hoping it may give the English a
lesson in truth, unity of design, precision. It may teach them to
avoid the extravagances of Vanbrugh, Wycherley, and Congreve. 59
Compared to Terence, Aristophanes is only a "jester," useful to the
Athenian government. 80 And Plautus did not interest Diderot at
all.
Diderot's attitude toward classical French literature is somewhat
ambiguous. He opposes many features of French tragedy and
comedy but cannot withhold his admiration from their great
authors or suppress the feeling that the i7th century will be
revered as the classical age of French literature. 61 He praises Cor-
neille as sublime but uneven, considering only eight or nine plays
really excellent. But he disapproves of the baroque features in
Corneille. "Corneille is almost always at Madrid and not at Rome."
Racine is "probably the greatest poet who ever existed," 62 possibly
the most perfect, the purest of all writers of the world. 63 And, like
Voltaire, Diderot gives the highest praise to the melody of Racine's
language and verse. The actor becomes a musical instrument in his
hands. 64 His poetry is charged with the subtlest "hieroglyphics."
Moliere is a favorite, of course, but for surprising reasons. Diderot
thinks him most original in his burlesques and farces and defends
these farcical features against the strictures of Boileau and Fenelon.
Tartuffe is singled out for the skill with which the action is man-
aged and still made perfectly probable and natural.
Diderot shows considerable interest in English literature, espe-
cially Shakespeare and Richardson and, of course, the domestic
drama of the English, which anticipated his own reforms of the
French stage. There are remarks on English writers, Milton, Swift,
Pope, and Young, but they are undistinguished. 65 Shakespeare is
seen with more sympathetic eyes than those of Voltaire, though
fundamentally Diderot still considers him a natural, rude, and
tasteless genius. In a curious passage he protests against the idea
that one can find Shakespeare's originality only in his sublime
passages. It is rather in the "extraordinary, incomprehensible, in-
imitable mixture of the best and the worst taste" that Shakespeare's
greatness lies. 68 He condemns tragicomedy, but is lenient toward
6o A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
the comic scenes in Shakespeare, which he believes show little
taste. 67 On the whole one should not be shocked by the violence of
Shakespeare any more than by the pathos of Homer, by the sight
of Oedipus with his eyes pulled out, or by the crying and moaning
of Philoctetes. He ironically asks French poets if they write for a
delicate, vaporous nation which enjoys only the harmonious,
tender, and touching elegies of Racine and which is hurt by the
butcheries of Shakespeare, for souls too feeble to support violent
shocks. 08 "In Shakespeare sublimity and genius shine like lightning
in a long night, but Racine is always beautiful." Homer is full of
genius and Virgil of elegance, 60 but Shakespeare is a representative
of almost medieval crudeness. "He will not compare him to the
Apollo of Belvedere, to the Gladiator, to Antinous, or to the
Hercules of Glycon, but rather to Saint Christopher of Notre
Dame, a shapeless colossus, rudely sculptured, between whose legs
we all can pass without our forehead touching his shameful
parts." 70
Diderot expresses the greatest enthusiasm for Richardson in the
famous eulogy (1761) and also in private letters to his mistress,
Sophie Volland. Richardson is true to life, is moral, incites to
virtuous actions, is perfect. "How good I felt, how just, how self-
satisfied, after reading your books: I felt as a man does after a well-
spent day." 71 "The nobler the mind, the more refined and the
purer the taste, the more one knows human nature, and the greater
one's love of truth, so much the more one will appreciate the works
of Richardson." 72 Diderot compares Richardson's novels with the
Bible. "Since I have known them I use them as touchstones, and
when they are not appreciated I know in what esteem I hold such
persons." 7S "O! Richardson, if you did not, during your life, earn
all the praise that you deserved, how great will be your fame
among our descendants when they see you at the distance that we
see Homer. Who will then dare to erase a line from your sublime
work?" 7 * When a lady criticized Clarissa, whose chief gift in her
opinion was the making of fine phrases, Diderot became indignant.
"I must confess that I think it is a great curse to think and feel
thus: so great, that I would rather my daughter should presently
die in my arms than know that she could thus be afflicted. My
daughter yes I say it deliberately and will not draw it back." 75
This seems today sheer madness of "sensibility." We can more
DIDEROT 6l
easily understand why Diderot should have seen "sparks of sublime
beauties" in Lillo's London Merchant and should have liked
Moore's Gamester, and, when he saw it in French translation,
should have praised Lessing's Miss Sara Sampson.
As we survey Diderot's critical work it is hard not to be unjust
to the richness of its suggestions and the multitude of its interesting
passages, ideas, and aper$us, because one cannot help seeing that
Diderot is a man situated between two worlds, unable to choose
between them. One can read into him anticipations of igth-century
bourgeois naturalism; one can see, in a few passages, anticipations
of symbolist conceptions of poetry. The emotional romanticism
and sentimentalism can hardly be denied, but surprisingly some
of his finest criticism comes when he turns back on the past and
seizes firmly on certain truths of the neoclassical creed, the im-
personality of the artist, the inner ideal, the "interior model," the
deliberate shaping of the artist's work. In this respect Diderot's de-
velopment parallels that of the two great Germans, Goethe and
Schiller, who also, after a youth of romantic emotionalism, restated
the neoclassical creed in terms free from the old dogmatism.
4: THE OTHER FRENCH CRITICS
THE TWO most significant figures of literary criticism and theory
in France during the second half of the i8th century were obvi-
ously Voltaire and Diderot. The third most famous writer, Jean-
Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), though enormously important in the
general history of literature and ideas, was hardly a literary critic
in the strict sense. His one formal piece of literary criticism, the
Lettre a d'Alembert sur les spectacles (1758), is an attack on
d'Alembert's proposal to allow a theater in Geneva. It is a highly
moralistic piece, in which Rousseau tries to argue that drama may
be good for the corrupt Parisians but would spoil the pure Gene-
vans. He draws on the whole arsenal of the antistage controversy
carried on for centuries by Puritans, whether Catholic or Calvinist,
and excitedly declaims on the dissolute manners of actresses, the
bad economic consequences of the sale of theater tickets, the spread
of luxury and display, and so on. The whole argument seems of
little relevance or even interest today. The famous criticism of
Molire's Misanthrope, in which Rousseau takes the side of Al-
ceste, proposes a complete rewriting of the play. Rousseau obvi-
ously sees himself as the misanthrope and wants Moliere to justify
him at every point. It is bad criticism, which confuses life and art,
Molire's Alceste with a hypothetical human type. Logically Rous-
seau's rigid moralism is contradicted by his own frequent recogni-
tion that each society has the art it wants and needs. "An author,"
says Rousseau, "who wanted to injure the general taste would
soon write only for himself." * Sophocles would fail on the French
stage because "we cannot put ourselves in the place of people who
don't resemble us." Drama "reenforces the national character, aug-
ments the natural inclinations, and gives a new energy to all our
passions." 2 Besides, Rousseau also combats his own conclusion by
minimizing the emotional and moral effect of the theater. He
doubts that the passions may be purged in any other way than by
6s
THE OTHER FRENCH CRITICS 63
reason, and objects to the idea that only specific passions can be
aroused by a play. "Don't they know that all passions are sisters,
that one suffices to excite thousands, and that to fight one by
another is only a means of making the heart more susceptible
to all?" 8 He decries the pity excited by the stage, particularly
by the iSth-century sentimental drama. "It is passing and use-
less emotion, which lasts no longer than the illusion which pro-
duced it. It is a sterile pity, which has never caused the least act of
humanity." * But then, of course, his indignation at d'Alembert's
proposal seems out of proportion: Geneva, though it has a theater,
is no sink of iniquity.
Rousseau's own proposal to encourage outdoor spectacles where
the spectators would be actors has been hailed by Romain Rolland
as an anticipation of his Theater of the People. 6 Actually Rousseau
offers only naive suggestions about May-day celebrations, gym-
nastic competitions, boat races, solemn public balls, and reunions
of citizens scattered abroad: all meetings where any artistic activity
or purpose is lost sight of. He wanted to facilitate marriages, reduce
clandestine courtships, and increase respect for the aged, not en-
courage art.
Rousseau's importance for literary criticism is in neither his
puritanical horror of the stage nor his recognition of the relativity
of taste nor his disparagement of sentimentalism in the drama, but
in the general impulse he gave to the primitivistic view of poetry
and to the whole "conjectural" history of society. The Essai sur
Vorigine des langues (1749) in particular contains echoes of views
common since Vico and Blackwell on the metaphorical nature of
early poetry and on the primacy of poetry over prose.* To define
what Rousseau contributed to criticism by his attack on civiliza-
tion, his exaltation of individuality, imagination, and revery, and
his insight into the connection between man and nature would be
an almost impossible task, merging into the general history of ideas.
Quite apart from the three philosophes stands the naturalist
* Esp. chs. 3 and 4, in CEuvres completes (Paris, 1824), 2 > 4 2 4 * Fausto
Nicolini, "La teoria del linguaggio in Giambattista Vico e Giangiacomo
Rousseau," Revue de htterature comparee, 10 (1930), 292-8, tries to
show that Rousseau could have known Vice's Scienza nuova, but the
main ideas could have come from any number of sources, e.g. Blackwell,
Warburton, Condillac.
64 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
Button (George Louis Le Clerc, Comte de Button, 1707-88), who
will always be remembered in the history of criticism for his Dis-
cours sur le style (1753). It is the plea of a scientist for things, ideas,
reasons, something which would not merely strike the ear and
occupy the eyes but also act on the soul and touch the heart in
speaking to the mind. Button apparently wants matter, not manner
or rhetoric. One must possess one's subject to write well. Good
writing is good thinking. But the emphasis seems to shift when
Button reflects that only well-written works pass on to posterity as
new discoveries and new facts make most scientific books soon
obsolete. "These things are outside man, the style is the man him-
self" is the passage which is frequently quoted both wrongly and
out of context. 6 It does not imply a justification of individuality
of style nor even of a physiognomy of style; it does not mean that
the total man is expressed in style. Rather, style is a purely intel-
lectual virtue to Button; it is order, continuity, reasoned develop-
ment; it is the human element, man's mind ordering and com-
municating ideas. Button's ideal is the one great sublime style,
universal, generalized, impersonal. He is a late representative of
the Cartesian ideal rather than a writer recommending personal-
ity. 7
Voltaire had definite adherents and followers in literary criti-
cism. Two of these were extremely influential codifiers and popu-
larizers of the taste of the time and are sufficiently distinct to merit
separate treatment: Jean-Francois Marmontel (1723-99) and J. F.
La Harpe. Marmontel wrote a two-volume Poetique franfaise
(1763) and contributed most of the articles on literary theory to
the Encyclopedic. They were collected as Elements de litterature
(1787) and were often reprinted, even in the igth century. Ostolo-
pov's valuable Russian Dictionary of Poetry (1821) still draws
heavily on Marmontel. 8 Marmontel aims at an alliance between
poetics and science. He proclaims his poetics to be inductive and
historical, an application of the methods of Bacon and Descartes to
literature. 9 Actually his appeal to reason, experience, and nature is
hardly different from that commonly found in the whole Stoic
tradition of generalized nature and universal man. The decision
that "the philosophic and the poetic spirit are one and the same,"
that the "more a poet is a philosopher, the more he is a poet/' is
not really carried out in practice, as Marmontel also talks about
THE OTHER FRENCH CRITICS 65
genius, imagination, sensibility, enthusiasm, taste; and at the same
time he accepts many, even completely arbitrary, rules if they were
established de facto. 10 Marmontel has many rationalistic traits: he
distrusts verse and considers only rhythm essential to poetry; he
distrusts metaphor as associated with the savage state. "The less
civilized the poetry, the more figurative/ 1 xl At times he seems to
think of poetry as a mere contrivance. Speaking of the epic, he calls
it a building, a machine contrived to produce a common move-
ment, in which the characters function as wheels, the plot as
chain. 12 But this is hardly thought through, for he can also compare
the plot of the Iliad to a polyp, whose every cut-off part is a living
organic polyp in itself. 13 Unity is for him not only the three unities,
but also unity of design, unity of tone, and unity of style. The rules
are acknowledged side by side with genius and the gift of creation,
imagination, sensibility, taste. He can say that the one and only
rule of poetry is to be born a poet. 14
While in Marmomel's poetic theory contradictory elements lie
next to each other unreconciled and unexamined, he made a real
effort to apply science to the history of literature. He would like to
"consider poetry as a plant and discover why, indigenous in cer-
tain climates, it rises and flowers as of itself; why in other climates
it flourishes only by cultivation; and in others cannot be made
to bloom in spite of all efforts; and why, even in the same climate,
it has sometimes flowered and borne fruit and sometimes with-
ered." 16 He would like to give a social and physical explanation of
the revolutions of the arts. But this grandiose plan, suggested by
Dubos and Montesquieu, is hardly realized in detail. The history
of poetry is largely made to celebrate the Greeks and the French
of the i7th century when social and moral circumstances com-
bined to create great periods of literary excellence. The historical
explanation is, however, halfhearted: the Greeks are national but
the great French are universal, like the empire of passions. 18 Mar-
montel's taste is, in practice, Voltaire's; he shares Voltaire's horror
for Shakespeare's and Milton's "deformities." Richardson and the
English Augustans he praises as examples of the salutary influence
of the French. 17 The compliments to genius, even to "original"
genius, do not mean any sympathy with art outside of the Latin
tradition. Genius is merely the inventive faculty, while the actual
composition of a work of art is due to talent and taste and to the
66 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
observance of the rules. Virgil is much more tasteful than Homer,
the French more than the ancients. 18 But even Marmontel's em-
phasis on taste and his frequent disapproval of Boileau are decep-
tive if we interpret them as mitigating the basic rationalism. Mar-
montel distinguishes between a taste of speculation and a taste of
sentiment, with the taste of speculation representing "love for
real beauty'* and the "taste of sentiment" love for novelty. Love
for novelty is the cause of decadence in this present age of sensa-
tionalism and sentimentalism. At the same time he introduces a
somewhat different distinction between "natural" and "conven-
tional" taste. Natural taste (hardly, one would think, the equivalent
of speculative taste) is ascribed to antiquity and even to the savage,
while conventional taste is assigned to the modern age. The two
double concepts of taste do not match and are not reconciled:
Marmontel wants to "naturalize" art, return it to a simple, severe,
classical taste. Taste is to be Greek and natural, yet still rational and
speculative. 19 As often at that time, fire and water were declared
the same.
In general Marmontel represents an eclectic, loosely articulated
view of literature, in which many current motifs of literary theory
are juxtaposed: rationalism, neoclassicism, the new historical sense,
the cult of taste and genius. Unfortunately his historical knowledge
was too slight, his insight too dim to make a success of a history of
literature in terms of the physical and social milieu. Still, he antici-
pates Madame de Stael, who herself did only a little better with
the subject.
Jean-Francois de la Harpe (1739-1803), in his youth a protege of
old Voltaire, was the most influential codifier of French taste. He
was a well-established poet, dramatist, translator, and critic when
in 1786 he began a long series of lectures at the Lyce, a newly
founded literary society in Paris supported by the nobility and
ladies. His lectures were interrupted by the Revolution, and al-
though he had been an ardent adherent of its principles he was
imprisoned during the Terror but escaped execution through the
timely fall of Robespierre. While in prison in 1 794 La Harpe un-
derwent a conversion. When he resumed his lectures in 1796 his
religion and politics had changed, but not his critical outlook. In
1799 the lectures began to appear in book form as Cours de littdra-
ture ancienne et moderne, and reached sixteen volumes two years
THE OTHER FRENCH CRITICS 67
after his death. The Lycee, as it was frequently called, proved
enormously popular, especially after the Restoration; deep into
the igth century it served as a kind of summary of the old French
taste. 20
La Harpe, in the Preface to Lycee, boasts of writing "a systematic
history of all the arts of the spirit and the imagination from Homer
to the present day," 21 including all times and all nations, and de-
clares that he is absolutely the first, not only in France, to accom-
plish such an undertaking. Actually the volumes are confined to
classical antiquity and to French literature of the i7th and i8th
centuries. Only one lecture attempts a very cursory survey of the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance, paying some attention to Marot
and Ronsard. 22 Modern foreign literatures are not discussed in the
course of the lectures at all, except in occasional remarks and in a
few reviews which were inserted to fill the glaring gaps. These
reviews discuss Ossian, Milton, Pope, and Goethe's Werther very
critically. 23 Elsewhere there is praise for Fielding's Tom Jones, "the
first novel in the world." 24 We must add an early and very Voltair-
ian essay on Shakespeare (1778) and remember that La Harpe
translated Camocs* Lusiads (1776), parts of Tasso, and the Psalms
(1798). La Harpe thus shares the growing interest in other foreign
literatures.
His basic point of view, however, is a slightly liberalized version
of French neoclassicism. One can observe a slow change from the
early dogmatism of rules toward a more emotional conception of
literature. Yet the belief in the neoclassical code persists and exists
side by side with a recognition of something beyond it. La Harpe
insists that there are eternal principles of literature, valid for all
times and nations, that the rules are true guides, the feeling of
beauty "reduced to method," that the critic's task is to make an
"exact summary of the beauties and defects of every author." 25 He
has no doubt that "our stage is superior to all others." 2G In discuss-
ing Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare he makes no concession to the
view that there are "graces beyond the reach of art." He admits
that there are beautiful passages in these poets, but they must have
been executed according to principles. What is good in them is due
to "art." What is bad is due to violation of the rules, which results
in a lack of "conception of the whole." 27 The view of the French
translator and admirer of Shakespeare, Le Tourneur, that Shake-
68 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
speare despised taste, is simply ridiculous. 28 There can be no con-
tradiction between genius and taste: taste is an essential part of
genius. Sophocles, Demosthenes, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, F&ielon,
Racine, Boileau, and Voltaire all prove this unity. 29 Shakespeare
lacks taste and hence has neither truth nor nature. In the early
essay La Harpe ridicules him with weapons drawn from Voltaire's
armory: he quotes some clowning, quibbling, and coarse passages
from the Tempest and Othello, insisting that he criticizes Shake-
speare not for violation of the three unities or any rules about plot
structure but for transgressions against good sense and good man-
ners. 80 He quotes passages from Othello translated into French
prose and confronts them with speeches from Zaire, never dream-
ing that anybody could prefer Shakespeare's "unintelligible gib-
berish" to the fine verse of Voltaire. 81 Later he admitted that
Shakespeare had some "natural talent," and even preferred him to
Lope de Vega and Calderon. But none of the three is comparable
to the great geniuses of the Age of Louis. 32
La Harpe, in his Cours de litterature, describes and criticizes the
French classics in great detail. His highest admiration is reserved
for Racine; the sections on his plays, which leisurely expound their
beauties and refute objections while admitting some blemishes, are
still a good introduction to what a whole society was looking for and
finding in French classical tragedy. Molire is also exalted as the
first of the philosopher-moralists, and Boileau's L'Art poetique is
eulogized as "a perfect legislation, whose application is found just
in every case, an indefeasible code whose decision will serve forever
to distinguish what should be condemned and what should be ap-
plauded." 83 Voltaire is the central figure of the i8th century; even
the Henriade is defended at length, and two whole volumes are
devoted to the tragedies. He is called "the most tragic of all poets,"
and even (Edipe is shown to be preferable to Sophocles' original
play. 84
Nevertheless this impression of complete acceptance of neoclassi-
cal taste, the endorsement of Boileau included, is somewhat decep-
tive. It cannot be said that La Harpe is merely eulogistic and that
his praise is indiscriminate. Within the limits of his taste and
critical equipment he knows how to criticize plot, character draw-
ing, probability, and so on, often with severity and even acidity.
Many minor figures and minor works of great writers are ill
THE OTHER FRENCH CRITICS 69
treated, discussed in a tone of pontifical self-confidence with ele-
gant and somewhat facile oratory. The ideal of good style, of cor-
rect French, is a frequent measuring stick by which Corneille and
many older writers are found wanting.
Like Voltaire, La Harpe is by no means a dry rationalist in his
judgment of poetry. He severely disapproves of the pedantries of
D'Aubignac and Le Bossu and attacks the early iSth-century ra-
tionalists, Fontenelle, La Motte, and Trublet, for their disparage-
ment of poetry and preference for prose. 85 Poetry, he argues, is an
art of the "mind, the ear, and the imagination"; it has its special
"logic of passions" which must not be suppressed by the "spirit
of system." 86 Long before his conversion La Harpe was touched
by the emotionalism of the time. Poetry needs an inner warmth,
needs verve. The French drama is praised for having introduced
the theme of unhappy love, unknown to the ancients. The relief
of tears is called "the ultimate effort of art, the most beautiful
triumph of tragedy," and pity, not the purging of pity, is consid-
ered the aim of tragedy. 37 After his conversion, in the introduction
to his translation of the Psalms (1798), La Harpe comes nearest to
a new view of poetry in saying that everything in the Psalms is
"image, emblem, allegory" and that "motion, images, sentiments,
figures, are undoubtedly the essence of all poetry." We must read
the Psalms with our heart. 38 But in a nonreligious context La
Harpe usually tempered his emotionalism. Poetry, he says, is "the
language of imagination guided by reason and taste." 89 He con-
demns the frequency and the boldness of metaphors in early 17th-
century poetry, saying that the true principles of style have been
fixed forever. 40 Style, in isolation, is even made to be the discrimi-
nating trait of French drama as compared to ancient drama, which
is centered on plot. 41 The noble, pathetic style of Racine and Vol-
taire is the high point of all art. But style, of course, is not merely
linguistic: it means a specific kind of sentiments and ideas. In a
remarkable page criticizing the older Crbillon, La Harpe asserts
that "there is a natural and almost infallible link between the man-
ner of thinking and feeling, and that of expression." In general,
"the man who writes badly has thought badly, and what one would
like to let pass as a simple fault of taste in style is a fault of the
mind, a lack of justness, clarity, truth, and force in ideas and
sentiments." 41
70 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
Occasionally La Harpe recognizes the value of the historical
point of view. He applied it when he defended the Psalms by draw-
ing on Lowth's Lectures on Hebrew Poetry.** He even asserts a
"secret and necessary interdependence between the principles at
the basis of a social order and the arts which adorn it." ** There
are numerous references to the different stage conditions of the
Greek drama and to the social advances, such as the improved
status of women, in modern France. 46 But the general approach is
not historical at all. The French classics are held up as eternal
models, beauty is declared to be the same in all ages, and in prac-
tice each author is criticized directly, text in hand, with no his-
torical perspective. To claim for La Harpe the position of a
founder of literary history and historical criticism seems quite mis-
taken. 46 Though professedly a history of literature, arranged in
chronological order, La Harpe's Cours de litterature conveys no
sense of evolution, not even of a history of genres or the develop-
ment of a single author. Much in the later volumes is ideological
polemics, written after the Revolution. La Harpe attacks Hclvtius
and Diderot for their atheism, and Rousseau is called a "vile
charlatan." 4T On religion and such matters as the poetry of the
Bible La Harpe definitely broke with his master Voltaire, but
otherwise he must be considered as an exponent of Voltaire's taste,
which was the taste of a whole society, of a strong literary and social
tradition, and which remained fairly intact up to the fall of Na-
poleon.
While the followers of Voltaire dominated literary theory and
taste, Diderot influenced some contemporaries very strongly. Un-
fortunately it was not the most original in Diderot which affected
his time; it was rather his dramatic theories, his defense of the
middle-class drama, his emphasis on emotional effect, and his senti-
mentalism which found an echo in many breasts. His closest friend
and follower was Friedrich Melchior Grimm (1723-1807), a Ger-
man by birth and training, who came to Paris in 1749. Sainte-
Beuve has praised Grimm as "one of our [i.e., French] most distin-
guished critics/' in a class above La Harpe and Marmontel. 48 Ed-
mond Scherer, no mean critic himself, devoted a long book to him
in which he hails Grimm as the "true precursor of criticism as it
is understood today [i.e., in 1887], a criticism which is not content
to analyze and quote, but which judges the works, explains the
THE OTHER FRENCH CRITICS 71
appreciations, discusses the doctrines, connects reflections with the
books, and makes sometimes an original work out of an article." 49
But all this seems quite extravagant. Between 1753-63 Grimm
wrote most of the Correspondence litteraire, a miscellaneous in-
formative sheet sent to a very limited number of subscribers that
included mostly German princes and princesses but also Catherine
the Great, the King of Poland, and the Queen of Sweden. 50 It was
published only in 1812 and thus could not have directly affected
earlier critical writing. It is journalism: a treasure trove for the
student of the history of French civilization, most important be-
cause it preserved the text of Diderot's novels and Salons. But
Grimm's literary criticism, scattered throughout, seems far from
distinguished. Compared to Diderot he is more balanced, more
sensible, but also far more colorless and ordinary. He has nothing
new to offer in theory. The dramatic criticism, which takes up a
great deal of space, is very much determined by Diderot's ideas.*
Grimm criticizes French classical tragedy as artificial and cold, dis-
likes the French alexandrine, and shows no car for French poetry.
What he recommends is an emotional realism: he praises Diderot's
two plays to the skies; he would like to see more action on the
stage, e.g., sec Mariamne die, and, like Diderot, he even advocates
a tragic pantomime. 51 His standard of judgment is always that of
emotional effect, though he is much more sober than his master.
Corneille seems to him dry and dull, Shakespeare is only vaguely
recommended, with the usual reservations based on the standards
of French taste. Still, although Grimm did not understand the
performance of Romeo and Juliet which he saw in London in 1772,
he liked the balcony scene and the huge funeral procession as pure
spectacle. 52 He can praise the naturalness of the English stage and
admire The Beggar's Opera. 53 Surprisingly, he has no use for Beau-
marchais, whose Eugenie he judged harshly, predicting that he
"will never do anything, not even anything mediocre." 64
It fits in with this standard of emotional realism that Grimm
* Smiley, Diderot's Relations to Grimm, pp. 56 ff., argues that Grimm
first developed the dramatic theories expounded by Diderot in the
introduction to Le Fils naturel (1757). While one need not assume that
Grimm could not have contributed to Diderot's theories, the case seems
unproved in view of Diderot's discussion in Les Bijoux indiscrets
72 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
should praise the 18th-century English novelists Richardson and
Fielding. He disapproved of Marivaux and thought it astonishing
that such a bad writer could have stimulated the development of
the English novel, so superior to his own works. 65 For personal and
ideological reasons it is obvious that Grimm would ridicule Rous-
seau's novel, and even Candide is judged severely as being without
"design, plan, or wisdom." 66 Voltaire seems to Grimm old fash-
ioned, not materialistic and atheistic enough, though he deplored
the bad taste of Voltaire's attacks on the Bible. In every way
Grimm is Diderot's disciple: he calls him his master 5T and shares
his general outlook, though he seems more pessimistic about hu-
man nature, less sanguine, less artistic, duller and drier. The con-
ception of Grimm as an important intermediary between Germany
and France is not supported by evidence: in criticism he was origi-
nally a pupil of Gottsched, but Gottsched himself was only an
echo of French neoclassicism. Grimm's two early articles on Ger-
man literature for the Mercure (1750-51) make very modest claims
and merely express hope for the future flowering of German litera-
ture.* Later he praised the idylls of Gessner extravagantly, but he
had no contact with the new German literature. Whatever nebu-
lous German characteristics can be found in his temperament, in-
tellectually, in his criticism at least, he is part of the French tradi-
tion.
Among the propagandists of emotional realism, a much more
original note was struck by Sebastien Mcrcier (1740-1814). Mer-
cier was also an advocate of the sentimental bourgeois drama, as
before him was Beaumarchais himself in the Preface to Eugenie
(1767). But Mercier's book, Du Theatre, ou nouvel essai sur Vart
dramatique (1773), is far more radical than even the romantics of
1830 in its rejection of the classical system. Mercier is definitely
inspired by a democratic hatred for this "ghost dressed up in
scarlet and gold," without soul, life, or simplicity. 58 Moliere is con-
demned for ridiculing virtue and making vice attractive. Only
Tartuffe, as anticlerical, finds favor in Mercier's eyes. The unities
* Cf. Richard Mahrenholz, "Grimm als Vermittler des deutschen
Geistes in Frankreich," Archiv fur das Studium der neueren Sprachen,
82 (1889), 291-302. Louis Reynaud, in L' Influence allemande en
France (Paris, 1922) argues that Grimm was sent out by Gottsched to
Paris as a sinister propagandist of German literature.
THE OTHER FRENCH CRITICS 73
of time and place are declared completely useless. The walls which
separate the genres are themselves called upon to crumble. 59 The
new middle-class drama is recommended: it must be moving, must
draw tears, all in the interest of a new democratic solidarity. Mer-
cier sounds almost like Tolstoy or Wordsworth when he wants
art to "serve in linking men by the victorious sentiment of com-
passion and pity." We must judge "the soul of every man by the
degree of emotion he displays in the theater." 60 Mercier wants a
new political, patriotic tragedy, addressed to all people. It would
not be afraid to depict extreme suffering and poverty, and it could
set its scene in a hospital or a house of correction. The effect aimed
at is always the same: "I weep, and I feel with pleasure that I am
a man." 61 The theater is the masterpiece of society: sanguinely
Mercier expects that a good tragedy could change the bad constitu-
tion of a kingdom and implies that it could bring about a political
revolution. 02
Mercier is a diffuse and declamatory writer who rejects all
poetics and all system. In a collection of short essays, Mon bonnet
de nuit (1784), all rules and critics are condemned as "the scourge
of the arts, the real assassins of genius." We must start out alone
and rely on genius; for there is no theory in the arts of taste.
Boileau is called "dry, cold, minute," a mere pedant. 63 Poetry is
the art of moving. At the same time Mercier's sentimentalism is
highly and even prudishly moralistic. He writes indignant pages
against the Iliad condemning its cruelty and grossness, against
Georges Dandin as a licentious play which encourages adultery,
and against the shocking morals of Phedre. He seems a representa-
tive of a new social type: the lower bourgeois, resentful of all
upper-class art, sentimental, expansive, and yet rigidly puritanical
in his rejection of the rococo society around him. It is not surpris-
ing that Mercier appealed to the young German Sturmer und
Dranger, or that Heinrich Leopold Wagner translated his book
(1776). Goethe contributed an appendix, "Aus Goethes Brief-
tasche," in which he endorsed the rejection of the conventions of
French tragedy but warned that there is something like an "inner
form." 6B
Mercier was by no means alone in his time, even in France.
There was an enthusiastic, even mystical, group of writers who are
today almost completely forgotten but represent a striking parallel
74 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
to the German Sturm und Drang.* One can collect many passages
from these writers praising genius and enthusiasm, sublimity, and
immediate feeling, and condemning good taste, the rules, the uni-
ties, and all "art." The enormous vogue of Ossian in France, the
growing appreciation of Shakespeare, at least on the stage, the ad-
miration for the Bible as poetry all this presages a new concep-
tion of poetry and, in principle, anticipates almost everything that
the later French romantics proclaimed as a new gospel. But these
anti-philosophes and anticlassicists were not able to give a clear
theoretical account of their loves and hatreds. The mystic Saint-
Martin's piece, "De la poesie prophtique, epique et lyrique," f
and the weird effusions of Jean-Marie Chassaignon, called Catar-
actes de V imagination, deluge de la scribomanie, vomissement lit-
teraire, hemorrhagie encyclopediqne, monstre des monstres (1779),
have remained almost unknown. They serve to show that France
was not as homogeneously neoclassical before Hugo as is often
assumed.
One must realize that poetic emotionalism was supported also
from the opposite side of the mystics: by the dogmatic sensualism
of the Abb Condillac (1714-80). His one book which belongs to
literary criticism, L'Art d'ccrire (1775), is a rather elementary
textbook of rhetoric written for his pupil Ferdinand, the son of the
Duke of Parma. It contains a remarkable chapter on poetic style J
in which Condillac stresses the impossibility of fixing rules for
* Kurt Wais, Das antiphilosophische Weltbild des franzosischen
Sturm und Drang (Berlin, 1934), seems to exaggerate the coherence of
a group and to overrate the literary importance of the authors he dis-
cusses.
fin CEuvres posthumes (Tours, 1807), 2, 271 ff. Saint-Martin pro-
claims prophetic poetry the only genuine poetry. The true object of
poetry is to depict the "supreme facts" which can inspire us with a
divine fire (p. 276).
J Condillac was tutor in Parma from 1758-67. The textbooks (13
vols.) ran into trouble with censorship and could be published only in
1775 with the fictitious imprint Deux-Ponts. Condillac says that the
chapter on poetic style was added much later (p. 317 of 1782 ed.). I
cannot share Gustave Lanson's estimate of Condillac's literary ideas (in
Etudes d'histoire htteraire, Paris, 1929). The distinction between a uni-
versal philosophy and a national poetry is neither so novel nor so im-
portant as he claims.
THE OTHER FRENCH CRITICS 75
poetic style, since there are as many species as there are men of
genius. Poetry varies extremely with every language, nation, and
time. It uses images and is thus local, national, tied to the lan-
guages, while philosophy on the other hand uses analysis and is
thus universal. Nothing is more contrary to taste than the philo-
sophic spirit. Even rules and genres are variable. "The names of
epic, tragedy, comedy have been preserved, but the ideas connected
with them are not at all the same: and every people has assigned
different styles, different traits to each different species of poem." 66
There are in poetry and in prose as many "natures" as there are
"genres." The nature of poetry and of each species is purely con-
ventional, differing too much to be defined. The only advice
Condillac can give is: "One feels it, and that is enough." Reason-
ing is no use: "The better one reasons about beauty the less one
feels it." 6r Actually Condillac is primarily interested in speculative
psychology and "conjectural" history. He works out a scheme of
infancy, progress, and decadence, and in his other writings specu-
lated like Rousseau on the origins of language and poetry as due
to man's need for self-expression and for emotional release. 68 Still,
he is enough of a rationalist and philosophe to argue that French
literature is the best because it combines the universal philosophi-
cal spirit, the "greatest connection of ideas," with the poetic spirit.
Thus from many different philosophical positions, from Rous-
seau's, Diderot's, Condillac's, and Saint-Martin's, the emotional
conception of poetry was established. The reasons it did not be-
come completely effective long before 1 830 seem somewhat obscure.
No doubt these were partly that no really great poet and drama-
tist carried out the theories, partly that many propounders of even
the boldest theories kept a timid practical taste and made many con-
cessions and compromises, and partly that the French Revolution
appealed again to classical antiquity. Napoleon, though he carried
Ossian and Werther in his pocket to Egypt, reinstalled neoclassi-
cism as an official creed, and even the Bourbons, after the Restora-
tion, did not change the official line.
There is something fresh and novel, however, in two figures of
the late i8th century: Andre Chenier (1762-94) and Antoine
Rivarol (1753-1801). Chenier remained unknown and imprinted
in his own lifetime and was discovered only in 1819. He wrote a
poem, "L'Invention," which upholds the slightly paradoxical posi-
76 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
tion that what is needed is invention or creation, but also, at the
same time, imitation of the ancients. The famous verse
Sur des pensers nouveaux faisons des vers antiques, 69
suggests a rather simple dualism of content and form. Ch&iier
recommends a new content for poetry: modern science. He sees in
Torricelli, Newton, Kepler, and Galileo a treasure open to the new
Virgil. He himself attempted such a scientific poem, "Herms," but
simultaneously recommended adherence to the design and form
of the ancients, stated sharply the demand for complete purity of
the genres and for rigid preservation of decorum and good sense,
and alluded unfavorably to the English as violators of truth and
reason. 70
Chnier's literary opinions become clearer from the fragments
of an Essai sur les causes et les effets de la perfection et de la deca-
dence des lettres et des arts which would have been, if finished, the
kind of sociological history of literature later sketched in Madame
de Stael's De la Litterature. 71 Chenier wanted to discuss the causes
which favor literature climate, laws, manners and customs, local
and momentary circumstances, the influence of good literature
which were to contrast with the causes unfavorable to literature
coteries, court influence, bad literature, etc. What has been pre-
served is only a series of notes which show that Chenier intended
to praise naivete and the simplicity of the Greeks, who always fol-
lowed nature and truth. He disparages the barbaric convulsions
of Shakespeare and the mad despair of Young, attacks both Voltaire
and Pascal, and asserts the fierce independence of the poet against
courts, rulers, and academies. Chenier himself points out the simi-
larities of these views to those of his friend Alfieri. 72
But more original than this worship of the Greeks or the exalta-
tion of the poet's freedom are Chnier's occasional glimpses of an
allegorical or symbolical concept of poetry. The "great movements
of the soul inspire sublime expressions," ardor requires metaphori-
cal language, allegory is a language of the mind. In his plan for
"Hermes" he wanted to represent "the earth under the metaphori-
cal emblem of a great animal that lives, moves, is subject to
changes, revolutions, fevers, disorders in the circulation of its
blood." 7S But when Chnier's poems were published they appealed
chiefly as sensual or political poetry, whose versification pointed
THE OTHER FRENCH CRITICS 77
the way to romantic innovations. His great intellectual ambitions
were disclosed only much later. 74
Chnier perished by the guillotine. Rivarol died in exile in Ber-
lin, almost forgotten. Today he is best known for his Discours sur
I'nniversalite de la langue f ran false (1784), a prize-winning answer
to a question proposed by the Berlin Academy. This is a most in-
teresting document on the dominant position of French language
and literature late in the i8th century. It is also a reasoned and
well-informed survey of the main European languages and their
historical role. It culminates in a comparison between French and
English which is frequently rash in its generalizations but has the
merit of formulating the ideal of French clarity in strong terms.
"What is not clear is not French." 75 There is some simple literary
criticism in Rivarol's sketch of the history of French, in his em-
phasis on prose, and in his sharp rejection of the figurative when
it is not strictly illustrative of meaning.
The translation of Dante's Inferno (1785) into prose must, how-
ever, be mentioned not only as a sign of changing taste but also
for the introductory essay by Rivarol, who, though still full of
reservations, shows a genuine taste for the sublime and terrible in
Dante. He describes his style as "keeping on its feet by the sheer
force of noun and verb, without the help of a single epithet." His
verses are "at the same time thought, image, and sentiment. They
are real polyps, alive in the whole, and alive in every part." 70
But Rivarol's main claim to be remembered in a history of
criticism is his book De I'Homme intellectuel et moral (1797),
which begins with a discussion of language in general. It contains
a psychology and anthropology of considerable originality. 77 It also
contains some reflections on aesthetic problems. Rivarol distin-
guishes between an active creative imagination and a merely
passive faculty. He defines genius as the creative faculty, distin-
guishing between a genius of ideas, which is the summit of the
spirit, and a genius of expression, which is the summit of talent.
Genius, then, is what engenders and procreates; it is the gift of
invention. 78 In discussing criticism as a spirit of order, Rivarol
distinguishes between particular and general criticism and stresses
the need for judging both by masses and by detail. 79
His friend Chenedolte has reported conversations with him held
in Hamburg in 1795, which contain many striking remarks. "The
78 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
poet is nothing but a very ingenious and animated savage, in whom
all ideas present themselves as images. Both the savage and the
poet . . . speak only in hieroglyphics." 80 This sounds like a good
brief summary of some of the insights of Diderot, still new in
France when the conversations were first printed. But it is hard
to see why Sainte-Beuve said that Rivarol "could have been a
great literary critic" and that there is a "French Hazlitt" in him. 81
His opinions on specific authors, quoted by Chenedoll, are mostly
boutades, and much else he wrote on literary matters, such as the
Petit almanack de nos grands hommes (1788), is merely a series of
satirical squibs against most of his contemporaries. Rousseau and
the French Academy are the particular butts of his satire, but he
also attacks Voltaire and the early writings of Madame de Stael.
Rivarol's view of Shakespeare is nonetheless substantially that of
Voltaire. His taste is still the conventional sort: he did, however,
welcome Chateaubriand and glimpse something of Dante's great-
ness. Though his speculations are groping toward a new conception
of the mind and thus of poetry, in temperament and in practical
taste Rivarol remained a Frenchman of the i8th century, witty,
rationalistic, and cut off from the sources of great poetry. He repre-
sents the dilemma of the time: insight into the new, and yet deep
involvement in the entrenched tradition.
: DR. JOHNSON
SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709-84) cannot be considered simply as a repre-
sentative of English neoclassicism. He does, it is true, hold to many
of its commonplaces and share most of its tastes. But he differs
clearly from the neoclassical creed on some important issues. In
him certain of its elements have overgrown all others and led to
consequences which are destructive of its very essence. Dr. Johnson
is, of course, no romanticist or even unconscious forerunner of
romanticism: he is rather one of the first great critics who has al-
most ceased to understand the nature of art, and who, in central
passages, treats art as life. He has lost faith in art as the classicists
understood it and has not found the romantic faith. He paves the
way for a view which makes art really superfluous, a mere vehicle
for the communication of moral or psychological truth. Art is no
longer judged as art but as a piece or slice of life. This new view
comes out very clearly in Johnson's famous Preface to his edition
of Shakespeare (1765).
This therefore, is the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama
is the mirror of life; that he who has mazed his imagination, in
following the phantoms which other writers raise up before
him, may here be cured of his delirious extasies, by reading
human sentiments in human language, by scenes from which
a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world, and a con-
fessor predict the progress of the passions. . . . Shakespeare
has no heroes; his scenes are occupied by men, who act and
speak as the reader thinks he should himself have spoken or
acted on the same occasion. . . . The dialogue of this author
is often so evidently determined by the incident which pro-
duces it, and is pursued with so much ease and simplicity, that
it seems scarcely to claim the merit of fiction, but to have been
gleaned by diligent selection out of common conversation,
and common occurrences. 1
79
80 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
This view, that literature is "a just representation of things
really existing and actions really performed," 2 that the "legitimate
end of fiction is the conveyance of truth," 8 that the novelists
should be "just copiers of human manners/' 4 recurs again and
again. There runs through Johnson a deep suspicion of all fiction
and all art. According to Hawkins he "could at any time be talked
into a disapprobation of all fictitious relations, of which he would
frequently say they took no hold of the mind." 5 "The rejection
and contempt of fiction is rational and manly" is another of his
sayings. 8 We can see this preference for truth running through all
Johnson's judgments. It comes out with ludicrous violence in a
story, also told by Hawkins: "Talking with some persons about
allegorical painting, he said: 'I had rather see the portrait of a dog
I know, than all the allegorical painting, they can show me in the
world/ " 7 It comes out even more strikingly in his preference for
domestic tragedy: "What is nearest touches us most. The passions
rise higher at domestic than at imperial tragedies." 8 Timon of
Athens is a "domestic tragedy, and therefore strongly fastens on the
attention of the reader." 9 A pathetic and moving scene in Henry
VIII (IV. ii), in which Catharine of Aragon hears of the death of
Wolsey and speaks of her own last wishes, was to Johnson "above
any other part of Shakespeare's tragedies, and perhaps above any
scene of any other poet, tender and pathetic, without gods, or
furies, or poisons, or precipices, without the help of romantic cir-
cumstances, without improbable sallies of poetical lamentation,
and without any throes of tumultuous misery." 10
This emphasis on truth and suspicion of fiction is at the basis
of some of Dr. Johnson's most striking and well-known literary
opinions. He disliked Milton's Lycidas for many reasons, but one
was "insincerity" of emotion. "It is not to be considered as the
effusion of real passion; for passion runs not after remote allusions
and obscure opinions. Passion plucks no berries from myrtle and
ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse and Mincius, nor tells of 'rough
satyrs and fauns with cloven heel/ Where there is leisure for fiction
there is little grief." X1 Johnson does not realize that the require-
ment of sincere grief in the poet himself, though justifiable by
Horatian or even Aristotelian precepts, does away with three-
quarters of the world's literature and introduces the standard of
DR. JOHNSON 8l
the individual experience of the author, which is both indetermin-
able and aesthetically false.
Johnson's discussion of Cowley's erotic verses is another instance.
He ascribes the fashion for amorous verse to the model of Petrarch
and continues: ''But the basis of all excellence is truth: he that pro-
fesses love ought to feel its power. Petrarch was a real lover, and
Laura doubtless deserved his tenderness. Of Cowley we are told by
Barnes . . . that, whatever he may talk of his own inflammability
and the variety of characters by which his heart was divided, he in
reality was in love but once, and then never had resolution to tell
his passion." On the basis of this most unlikely anecdote, Johnson
tells us that "no man needs to be so burthened with life as to
squander it in voluntary dreams of fictitious occurrences," and ridi-
cules "him who praises beauty whom he never saw, complains of
jealousy which he never felt, supposes himself sometimes invited
and sometimes forsaken, fatigues his fancy, and ransacks his mem-
ory, for images which may exhibit the gaiety of hope or the gloomi-
ness of despair, and dresses his imaginary Chloris or Phyllis some-
times in flowers fading as her beauty, and sometimes in gems as
lasting as her virtues." 12
Or take the curious reason for which Johnson singles out Pope's
Eloisa and Abelard for special praise, as "one of the most happy
productions of human wit." "The heart naturally loves truth. The
adventures and misfortunes of this illustrious pair are known from
undisputed history." "So new and so affecting is their story that
it supersedes invention, and imagination ranges in full liberty
without straggling into scenes of fables." 18 Actually Eloisa is based
on a highly sentimentalized and fictionalized version of the letters
by Bussy de Rabutin (1697) ^ n an English translation by John
Hughes, and thus is at several removes from historical truth.
The same attitude can be seen almost anywhere: it is at the basis
of Johnson's dislike of ancient mythology because it simply is not
true. Discussing a tragedy by Edmund Smith, Phaedra and Hip-
politus, he says: "The fable is mythological, a story which we are
accustomed to reject as false, and the manners are so distant from
our own that we know them not from sympathy, but by study: the
ignorant do not understand the action, the learned reject it as a
school-boy's tale; incredulus odi. What I cannot for a moment
82 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
believe, I cannot for a moment behold with interest or anxiety." 14
It is hard to see why the same criticism would not be applicable to
Racine's Phedre, though Smith's tragedy may be as bad as Johnson
says it is. The condemnation of mythology extends, of course, also
to the "puerilities of obsolete [that is, Welsh] mythology" in Gray's
"Bard," 15 and to the allegorical figures in Aeschylus' Prome-
theus or Euripides' Alccstis, as well as to the allegory of Sin and
Death in Paradise Lost. 19 All allegories which are active agents are
absurd: they are only approved if they are mere figurative dis-
course, pleasing vehicles of instruction, such as Johnson himself
composed for the Rambler and Idler in dull profusion. The famous
objections to all pastorals are motivated in the same manner. Of
Lycidas he said, "Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and
therefore disgusting." 1T He has good fun in saying that "we know
they [Milton and Edward King] never drove afield, and they had no
flocks to batten." 18 "Nothing can less display knowledge or less
exercise invention than to tell how a shepherd has lost his com-
panion and must now feed his flocks alone, without any judge of
his skill in piping; and how one god asks another god what is be-
come of Lycidas, and how neither god can tell. He who thus grieves
will excite no sympathy; he who thus praises will confer no
honor." 19 Two Ramblers (Nos. 42 and 46) are devoted to a satire
on the ideal rural life portrayed by pastoral writers, and Idler No.
77 shows how Dick Shifter discovered that rustic simplicity is not
what pastoral writings had led him to expect. Of Lyttel ton's "Prog-
ress of Love" Johnson says curtly: "It is sufficient blame to say
that it is pastoral." * Though Johnson may have read through the
romance Felixmarte of Hircania, he disapproved of romances both
medieval and modern as well as of most novels, with the exception
of Fanny Burney's Evelina, which he admired, if we can trust Miss
Burney, for its "knowledge of life and manners" and "accuracy of
observation." 21
The second great principle of Dr. Johnson's criticism after "real-
ity" is, of course, "moral truth," morality. Didacticism has a vener-
able tradition in criticism, and I am not disposed to dispute its
rights if they are properly limited. In Johnson they are not always
properly limited. Instead, his didactic criterion often becomes a
demand for mere moralizing, for a selection from nature which
frequently runs counter to his own principle of reality. In Rambler
DR. JOHNSON 83
No. 4 he discusses modern fiction and begins by saying: "It is
justly considered as the greatest excellency of art, to imitate nature;
but it is necessary to distinguish those parts of nature, which are
most proper for imitation: greater care is still required in present-
ing life, which is so often discolored by passion, or deformed by
wickedness." He draws the conclusion that "many characters ought
never to be drawn." The purpose of novels is "to teach the means
of avoiding the snares which are laid by Treachery for Innocence
... to give the power of counteracting fraud, without the tempta-
tion to practice it; to initiate youth by mock encounters in the art
of necessary defence, and to increase prudence without impairing
virtue." Perfect heroes are not objectionable, and "vice, for vice is
necessary to be shewn, should always disgust." Johnson also fre-
quently required poetical justice. He sides with the general public
in preferring a happy ending for King Lear. "I was many years ago
so shocked by Cordelia's death, that I know not whether I ever
endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to
revise them as an editor." 22 Johnson feels "some indignation" that
Angelo in Measure for Measure is not punished. He even endorses
lago's warning to Othello ("She did deceive her father, marrying
you"), solemnly moralizing on deceit and falsehood as "obstacles
to happiness." He thought that "perhaps Shakespeare meant to
punish Juliet's hypocrisy" when she asked to be left alone:
For I have need of many orisons. 23
But Johnson's concept of poetic justice is not always so obtusely
literal minded.
In the Lives there is a passage which admits that "since wicked-
ness often prospers in real life, the poet is certainly at liberty to
give it prosperity on the stage. For if poetry is an imitation of real-
ity, how are its laws broken by exhibiting the world in its true form?
The stage may sometimes gratify our wishes, but if it be truly the
mirror of life, it ought to shew us sometimes what we are to ex-
pect." 24 The demand for reality here triumphs over the demand for
morality with the argument that reality is instructive and hence
moral. But more frequently the moralist is dominant, to the exclu-
sion and even detriment of the critic. Johnson preferred Richard-
son to Fielding for moral and political reasons; he condemned Tom
Jones as a "vicious book" 2G and Fielding as a "barren rascal." 20
84 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
He despised Sterne for his impiety and obscenity. In spite of his
admiration he had strong moral reservations against Swift; and
of course Johnson is the most famous of those critics who, like
Tolstoy and Shaw, complain of Shakespeare's lack of morality.
He sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more care-
ful to please than to instruct, that he seems to write without
any moral purpose. . . . He makes no just distribution of
good or evil, nor is always careful to show in the virtuous a
disapprobation of the wicked; he carries his persons indiffer-
ently through right and wrong, and at the close dismisses them
without further care, and leaves their examples to operate by
chance. This is a fault the barbarity of his age cannot extenu-
ate; for it is always a writer's duty to make the world better,
and justice is a virtue independent on time and place. 27
Johnson has been widely admired for this type of pronounce-
ment, for his sturdy common sense, for his attitude of "no non-
sense." At the same time, therefore, he has been dismissed espe-
cially on the Continent as a "British superstition." It seems hard
to deny that in Johnson we can observe a slipping of the grasp
on the nature of art and an anticipation of standards of realism
and moralism which will make art really as superfluous as it seemed
to many Englishmen of the igth century. It must have become so
to Johnson, who in his later years felt that his conversation did as
much good as his writings.
But it is impossible to dismiss him as a mere moralist or ex-
pounder of a realistic view which confounds art and life. For
Johnson moralism and realism combine with a strong and em-
phatic exposition of many of the central neoclassical tenets, espe-
cially the basic rationalistic view of art, and with a trained and
self-conscious taste which worked with remarkable sureness within
the body of accessible literature. That Johnson is not a narrow
authoritarian is obvious; he condemns the imitation of ancient
authors. "No man ever yet became great by imitation," he says in
Rambler No. 154, and repeats it in Rasselas. On the other hand
Johnson recognizes the greatness of many ancients and the impor-
tance of the argument based on tradition and general agreement.
' 'What mankind has long possessed they have often examined and
compared; and if they persist to value the possession, it is because
DR. JOHNSON 85
frequent comparisons have confirmed opinion in its favor." "What
has been longest known has been most considered, and what is
most considered is best understood." 28
Literature is thus not imitation of ancient writers, but repre-
sentations of general nature, of ''general manners or common
life," 2B as "reason and nature are uniform and inflexible" 80 and
"human nature is always the same." 81 Realism, Dr. Johnson fre-
quently recognizes, is thus not accurate copying nor is it merely
selection by moral criteria; it is rather the depiction of the gen-
eral, the universal, the typical. There is, I think, a certain un-
deniable contradiction between Johnson's many purely realist or
moralist pronouncements and this abstractionism. There is a con-
tradiction between his constant recommendations of the abstract,
the generalized and universal, and his actual practical love of life,
of its concrete particularity. The abstract neoclassicism clashes
with the new realism; but the former, while deplorable in its desic-
cated abstractness, did something for Johnson: it gave him a hold
on art, some view of the nature and function of art which would
not simply identify it with a slice of life, selected and judged by
moral standards.
He recognizes that realism is not enough. "If the world be
promiscuously described, I cannot see of what use it can be to read
the account: or why it may not be as safe to turn the eye immedi-
ately upon mankind as upon a mirror which shows all that presents
itself without discrimination." 82 His usual remedy is moral selec-
tion. But this moral selection is assumed to proceed to "general
and transcendental truths." Thus Johnson arrives at his con-
demnation of the particular, the local and transient, a thesis which
he formulated possibly more sharply than any other critic of high
repute. In the tenth chapter of Rasselas is the famous passage:
"The business of a poet is to examine, not the individual, but the
species; to remark general properties and large appearances: he
does not number the streaks of the tulip, or describe the different
shades in the verdure of the forest." 8S "Poetry," he says, discussing
the pastoral, "cannot dwell upon the minuter distinctions, by
which one species differs from another, without departing from
that simplicity of grandeur which fills the imagination; nor dissect
the latent qualities of things, without losing its general power of
gratifying every mind by recalling its conceptions." 84 This view
86 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
appears quite frequently. Thus Shakespeare is praised as the "poet
of nature," a term which is, to a modern reader, surprisingly ex-
plained by what follows:
His characters are not modified by the customs of particular
places ... by the peculiarities of studies or professions . . .
or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opin-
ions; they are the genuine progeny of common humanity . . .
His persons act and speak by the influence of those general
passions and principles by which all minds are agitated,
and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the
writings of other poets a character is too often an individual,
in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species. 80
The same view underlies the discussion of the metaphysical poets.
Johnson objects to their failure to reach the sublime. "Sublimity
is produced by aggregation, and littleness by dispersion. Great
thoughts are always general, and consist in positions not limited
by exceptions, and in descriptions not descending to minute-
ness." 36 We find this criterion again and again: Butler's Hudibras
cannot last, because it is full of allusions comprehensible only at a
particular time; a poem by Casimir (Sarbieski) expresses a thought
"more generally, and therefore more poetically" than a poem by
Cowley; Edgar's speech in King Lear describing the cliff of Dover
is censured for "its observations of particulars, its attention to
distinct objects," choughs and crows, the samphire gatherer and
the fishermen. Johnson feels that the "one great and dreadful
image of irresistible destruction" is "dissipated and enfeebled" by
these details. 87 On the other hand, Gray's "Elegy" "abounds with
images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to
which every bosom returns an echo." 38
Practically all critical theory since Johnson has run in the op-
posite direction. Bergson asserts that "art always aims at what is
individual . . . what the poet sings of is a certain mood which
was his, and his alone, and will never return." 39 Croce says the
same in more philosophical terms. The view was not unknown to
the i8th century, and we shall describe the trend toward particu-
larity in Joseph Warton, George Campbell, and others. 40 The judg-
ments of Johnson will surprise us: we are likely to think it is the
highest praise of Shakespeare that he carefully individualized his
DR. JOHNSON 87
characters, and might agree with Bergson that "nothing could be
more unique than the character of Hamlet." 41
Johnson's view has a very respectable ancestry in neo-Platonic
aesthetics. It was common in the theory of fine arts during the i7th
and i8th centuries: in Bellori, in Du Fresnoy, translated by Dry-
den, 42 in Shaftesbury, and very prominently in Reynolds' Dis-
courses, which Johnson was unjustly suspected to have written
himself. It seems to survive today chiefly in theories defending
abstract sculpture. It certainly contains a germ of truth: all art
must be in some way general in order not to be completely incom-
prehensible or uninteresting. The very nature of language is to
work by generalizations. Dr. Johnson was pushing the extreme of
generality, while we are apt to stress the opposite. He does seem,
however, to acknowledge the value of particularity in places, and
he certainly did show a passionate interest in what today would be
called the "local detail" of poetry. He censured the plays of
Nicolas Rowe because they do not show "any deep search into
nature, any accurate discriminations of kindred qualities, or nice
display of passion in its progress; all is general and undefined." 43
He complained about the general praise bestowed indiscriminately
by epitaphs, and once he attacks the problem of relevance of detail.
Shakespeare, "instead of dilating his thoughts into generalities
and expressing incidents with poetical latitude, often combines
circumstances unnecessary to his main design, only because he hap-
pened to find them together." 4 *
Dr. Johnson's criticism, however, is not defeated by the conflict-
ing theories of realism, moralism, and what is here called abstrac-
tionism. The three strands were no doubt reconcilable in his own
mind. When he says "Nothing can please many, and please long,
but just representations of general nature," 46 the term "just"
means both true and moral. The three motifs here analyzed are
kept in balance and stressed according to context, alternating by
turns, apparently without a clear consciousness that these criteria
lead to very different conclusions about the nature of art and the
value of particular works of art. Johnson wrote valuable analyses
of many critical questions from one or several of these points of
view and enjoyed a positive appreciation of a whole body of litera-
ture accessible to him within the limits of his taste.
Historically most important was Johnson's attack on the rules.
88 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
He follows partly the usual line of recognizing that genius is above
rules, that there "is always an appeal open from criticism to na-
ture." * 6 But this would be little but giving up the question. More
frequently and more consistently he recognizes that it is the aim
of criticism "to establish principles: to improve opinion into
knowledge," 4T to discover "principles of judgment on unalterable
and evident truth," 48 to use rules as "instruments of mental
vision." 49 These basic principles must be distinguished from arbi-
trary local prescriptions: "The accidental prescriptions of author-
ity, when time has procured them veneration, are often con-
founded with the laws of nature." 50 Some laws of criticism are to
be considered "fundamental and indispensable, others only as
useful and convenient; some as dictated by reason and necessity,
others as enacted by despotic antiquity; some as invincibly sup-
ported by their conformity to the order of nature and operations
of the intellect; others as formed by accident, or instituted by ex-
ample, and therefore always liable to dispute and alteration." 51
This is, in itself, a fairly widespread idea accepted by Voltaire
among others, but the dividing line between nature and custom
drawn by Johnson involved a rejection of the rigid unities of time
and place, and a defense of tragicomedy. In practice this was espe-
cially a defense of Shakespeare as a great English classic.
Johnson criticizes the unity of space with a recognition of the
falsity of the usual neoclassical assumption of delusion.
The objection arising from the impossibility of passing the
first hour at Alexandria, and the next at Rome, supposes, that
when the play opens, the spectator really imagines himself at
Alexandria, and believes his walk to the theater has been a
voyage to Egypt, and that he lives in the days of Antony and
Cleopatra. Surely he that imagines this may imagine more.
. . . The truth is, that the spectators are always in their
senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage
is only a stage, and that the players are only players. . . .
Where is the absurdity of allowing that space to represent
Athens, and then Sicily, which was always known to be neither
Sicily nor Athens, but a modern theater? ez
The same argument holds good with respect to the unity of time.
Johnson concedes that "probability requires that the time of
DR. JOHNSON 89
action should approach somewhat nearly to that of exhibition.
. . . But since it will frequently happen that some delusion must
be admitted, I know not where the limits of imagination can be
fixed." 68 Especially the interval between acts can be imagined as
long as the author thinks fit. Thus nothing is essential but the
unity of action. In these arguments Johnson correctly grasps what
modern aestheticians would call "aesthetic distance."
Tragicomedy is defended by Johnson with fundamentally realis-
tic arguments. "The connexion of important with trivial incidents,
since it is not only common but perpetual in the world, may
surely be allowed upon the stage, which pretends only to be the
mirror of life." 4 Specifically Johnson defends Shakespeare's mix-
ture of tragedy and comedy by going so far as to deny the distinc-
tions of genres in him. "Shakespeare's plays are not in the rigorous
and critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but compositions
of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature,
which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with end-
less variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combina-
tions; and expressing the course of the world, in which the loss
of one is the gain of another." 5B "When Shakespeare's plan is
understood, most of the criticisms of Rymer and Voltaire vanish
away. The play of Hamlet is opened, without impropriety, by two
sentinels; lago bellows at Brabantio's window, without injury to
the scheme of the play, though in terms which a modern audience
would not easily endure; the character of Polonius is seasonable
and useful; and the grave-diggers themselves may be heard with
applause." 56 Johnson accepts Menenius, the clownish senator in
Coriolanus, and defends the fact that King Claudius, a king, is
represented as a drunkard in Hamlet. Shakespeare "always makes
nature predominant over accident."
His story requires Romans or kings, but he thinks only on
men. He knew that Rome, like every other city, had men of
all dispositions; and wanting a buffoon, he went into the
Senate-house for that which the Senate-house would certainly
have afforded him. He was inclined to shew a usurper and a
murderer not only odious, but despicable: he therefore added
drunkenness to his other qualities, knowing that kings love
wine like other men, and that wine exerts its natural powers
go A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
upon kings. ... A poet overlooks the casual distinction of
country and conditions, as a painter, satisfied with the figure,
neglects the drapery. 57
One sees that in this example "nature" does not mean mere ab-
stract man but men fully equipped with personal characteristics,
whose characterization, however, may not observe the decorum
of rank or historical accuracy.
While Johnson is thus liberal in the matter of decorum in char-
acterization, he holds firmly to neoclassical views about decorum
in language. His own theory and practice of style leans in the
direction of the abstract, the grandiose, the ornamental. In Adven-
turer No. 115 he distinguishes a plain style, "clear, pure, nervous
and expressive," which is used in the discussion of science and
demonstration, but argues that if the "topics be probable and per-
suasory, the author must recommend them by the superaddition
of elegance and imagery, to display the colors of varied diction,
and pour forth the music of modulated periods." Elsewhere he
says: "The pebble must be polished with care, which hopes to be
valued as a diamond; and words ought surely to be labored, when
they are intended to stand for things." 58
Yet in his criticisms of Shakespeare and other writers Johnson
does not stand very strictly by the ideal of splendid diction. Shake-
speare is praised especially for his comic dialogue, which seems to
Johnson a "style which never becomes obsolete, a conversation
above grossness, and below refinement where propriety resides." 89
Many times Shakespeare is censured for his "disproportionate
pomp of diction," his "tumor" 60 and even bombast. Gray's odes
excite Johnson's dislike, partly for the "cumbrous splendor" of
their diction. 61 We may be surprised, in view of a general similar-
ity of Johnson's own style with that of Jeremy Taylor or Sir
Thomas Browne, to see how severely he censured Browne's style as
"rugged, pedantic, obscure, harsh, uncouth." 62 Much of this can
be explained by the traditional rhetorical theories of levels of style
and by Johnson's own interest in the stabilization and purification
of the English language. Johnson devoted years of his life to the
Dictionary, which is not merely a descriptive thesaurus of the Eng-
lish language but a work which aims to prescribe good usage and
to censure words. It includes words such as "abstrude," "adjugate,"
DR. JOHNSON gi
"advesperate," and "agriculation," but either excludes many other
words as obsolete or colloquial or lists them with notes stating
that they are "low," "improper," "corrupt," "barbarous," "unau-
thorized," or "lacking in etymology." ("Punch," for example, is of
a lower order than the Arabic "sherbet.") We thus can hardly be
surprised that Johnson did not like "low" diction in a tragic
context and devoted a whole number of the Rambler (No. 168) to
a discussion of Macbeth's speech (I, v, 5 iff.):
Come, thick night!
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes;
Nor heav'n peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry: Hold, hold!
"Dun" is criticized as an epithet "now seldom heard but in the
stable," and "knife" as the "name of an instrument used by butch-
ers and cooks in the meanest employments." "Who does not, from
the habit of connecting a knife with sordid offices, feel aversion
rather than terror?" Johnson can hardly "check his risibility" when
he thinks of the two unfortunate words "peep" and "blanket."
There are elsewhere censures of "studied barbarity" in Spenser's
Shepheardes Calender 63 and of mean diction used by kings in
Henry V or Richard II. But on the whole Johnson's views of dic-
tion are moderate and carefully graduated according to genre and
context. He condemns technical terms derived from sailing in
Dryden's Anntts Mirabilis because "all appropriated terms of art
should be sunk in general expressions, because poetry is to speak
an universal language." 64 Although he always objects to Gallicisms,
he is sensibly aware that "every author does not write for every
reader." 65 He defends hard words in their proper context, but,
like his time in general, is totally unappreciative of puns and
ambiguities. Samson Agonistes affords examples of "all meanness
that has least to plead, which is produced by mere verbal con-
ceits," 8fl and Shakespeare's quibbles are inexcusable. "A quibble
was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was
content to lose it." 67 Though Johnson has praised Shakespeare's
style, especially in the comedies, he can elsewhere generalize so
extravagantly as to speak of it as "ungrammatical, perplexed and
obscure." He even says that Shakespeare "has corrupted language
92 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
by every mode of depravation." 68 Johnson judges past diction and
style by the ideals of his own time.
His attitude toward versification is somewhat different. Even
more than in the matter of diction, Johnson was convinced that his
own time had achieved the pinnacle of perfection. English versifi-
cation is a "science" which excludes "all casualty" and aspires to
"constancy." 69 Thus, once established, it cannot and should not
be changed. After Pope, "to attempt any further improvement
of versification will be dangerous." A whole Rambler essay (No.
86) is devoted to the distinction between "pure" and "mixed"
measure in English heroic pentameters. By "pure" Johnson means
lines which fulfill the metrical patterns exactly. He admits only
grudgingly the necessity of "mixed" measures, i.e. those which
allow "substitution," especially in the first measure. The possibil-
ity of using more unaccented syllables than two in a measure is not
even mentioned, and triplets and alexandrines, while admitted as
necessary, are condemned. Dr. Johnson's ear must have been early
attuned only to the heroic couplet, whose niceties and differences
he was obviously very well able to perceive and to describe. But he
had considerable difficulties even with blank verse, a meter sanc-
tioned in his eyes by the precedents of Shakespeare and Milton.
In discussing Milton's arguments against rhyme, he professes to
see a strong difference between English and the classical languages
which can do without rhyme. "The music of the English heroic
line strikes the ear so faintly that it is easily lost, unless all the
syllables of every line cooperate together; this cooperation can be
only obtained by the preservation of every verse unminglcd with
another as a distinct system of sounds, and this distinctness is ob-
tained and preserved by the artifice of rhyme." 70 "Blank verse left
merely to its numbers has little operation either on the ear or
mind: it can hardly support itself without bold figures and strik-
ing images." 71 Thus the sublime Milton is admitted: also Young's
Night Thoughts and Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination; but
most of the contemporary blank verse, especially in didactic or
burlesque subjects, excites Johnson's disfavor. "But it is blank
verse" suffices to condemn a poem by David Mallet. 72
Johnson was even more hostile to and apparently simply in-
capable of reading lyrical measures of greater complexity and
diversity. He dislikes the "Pindaric madness" of Cowley, observing
DR. JOHNSON 93
that the "great pleasure of verse arises from the known measure of
the lines and uniform structure of the stanzas." 78 Dryden's and
Pope's "Odes for St. Cecilia's Day" are similarly said to "want the
essential constituent of metrical compositions, the stated recur-
rence of settled numbers." 74 Most famous, of course, are Johnson's
strictures upon the minor poems of Milton: even the songs of
Comus are "not very musical in their numbers," and Lycidas is
written in "unpleasing numbers." 75 Thus his highest praise goes
out to Pope. If we can believe Boswell, Johnson said that "a thou-
sand years may elapse before there shall appear another man with
a power of versification equal to that of Pope." 76
Johnson is thus firmly rooted and even enclosed in the taste of
his own age. He seems hardly touched by two of the new motifs
of iSth-century criticism: aesthetics and cosmopolitanism.
There is hardly any discussion of beauty in Johnson's writings.
The discussion which introduces No. 92 of the Rambler (1751)
seems to come to relativistic conclusions. Beauty is "merely rela-
tive and comparative," and Johnson seems to grant that it is "little
subject to the examinations of reason." But then he takes away
this concession to skepticism by an appeal to the verdict of the
ages, the common sense of humanity. The long continuance of the
reputation of certain writings "proves that they are adequate to
our faculties, and agreeable to nature." He announces the possibil-
ity of "reducing some regions of literature under the dominance
of science" and enters into a discussion of the relation of sound and
sense in verse. Beauty, in literature, seems to Johnson to be largely
confined to beauty of language and versification, the sonority of
sound, the regular recurrence of meter. Now and then, apparently
under the influence of his friend Edmund Burke's Inquiry into the
Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756), John-
son distinguishes between the beautiful and the sublime, between
attention to the vast and to the minute. Milton is characterized in
terms of sublimity or "gigantic loftiness." 77 "Sublimity is the
general and prevailing quality of this poem [Paradise Lost] ; sub-
limity variously modified, sometimes descriptive, sometimes argu-
mentative." 78
Johnson resists, however, a tendency of current aesthetics, which
we have met also in Diderot, to identify the sublime and the
pathetic. Paradise Lost is sublime, but there is little opportunity
94 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
in it for the pathetic, the passions being moved on only one
occasion. In it sublimity goes with a "want of human interest." 79
Shakespeare, on the other hand, is pathetic, moves the passions,
subdues the heart. Johnson prefers the moving and even tearful to
the grandiose. He can praise Rowe's Tragedy of Jane Shore, "con-
sisting chiefly of domestic scenes and private distress," for laying
hold upon the heart. "The wife is forgiven because she repents, and
the husband is honored because he forgives. This therefore is one of
those pieces which we still welcome on the stage." 80 There is in
Johnson a streak of 18th-century sentimentality which comes out
in his literary tastes only fitfully, but is constantly present in his
private Prayers and Meditations and in his letters to his wife and
Miss Boothby.
The metaphysicals are criticized by Johnson partly for disap-
pointing the expectations of emotional satisfaction. "They were
not successful in representing or moving the affections." "They
had no regard to that uniformity of sentiment which enables us to
conceive and to excite the pains and the pleasure of other minds:
they never enquired what on any occasion they should have said
or done, but wrote rather as beholders than partakers of human
nature; as beings looking upon good and evil, impassive and at
leisure." 81 Johnson dislikes what we would call their ironic de-
tachment, their lack of uniform sentiment, their refusal to allow
the reader to identify himself emotionally with the speaker. He
felt their qualifications and reservations, their rich and complex
"local detail" as offending his demands both for the abstract and
for the emotional. The "grandeur of generality" could be found
in Milton, though he was deficient in humanity. Domestic tragedy,
Richardson, the pathetic passages in Shakespeare all these satis-
fied Johnson's desire for "uniform" sentiment, but the metaphysi-
cals were neither sublime nor moving and did not, of course, live
up to demands for smoothness of versification and beauty of sound
which Johnson admired in Pope. The only good Johnson can find
in them is some intellectual labor, learning, and ingenuity.
Apparently Johnson was not interested in the current wide-
spread speculations about the reader's response and about taste.
But he does show some awareness of the debate in which men like
Burke and Hume took a prominent part. A passage in the life of
Congreve parallels exactly the much earlier discussion of beauty
DR. JOHNSON 95
in the Rambler. Johnson seems to endorse the relativity of taste.
In referring to Congreve's dedication defending the Double
Dealer, he says: "These apologies are always useless, de gustibus
non est disputandum; men may be convinced, but they cannot be
pleased, against their will," an argument already used by Dryden
and Voltaire. But then again he offsets this concession to relativism
by an appeal to universal common sense and the verdict of time.
"Though taste is obstinate, it is very variable, and time often
prevails when arguments have failed." To works of literature "no
other test can be applied than length of duration and continuance
of esteem." 82 The famous much misunderstood "common reader"
is the representative of this universal common sense. "Uncorrupted
by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the
dogmatism of learning," he will "finally decide all claim to poetical
honors." 83 The common reader is surely not the average man nor
the common man in any sense of low social status, but the uni-
versal man in the neoclassical sense which put such hope in the
uniformity of human nature. The critic and the scholar as such
are not excluded (as Virginia Woolf would have it in her use of
the term), 84 but only the critic corrupted by prejudices and the
scholar hidebound by dogmatism. But Johnson does not pursue
this trust in the "common reader" to its consequences. He does
not analyze the reader's response or the nature of the audience or
the processes by which an author established his fame. Though
reliance in posterity might imply skepticism as to the durability
and truth of one's own insights, Johnson rarely relents in his self-
assurance. There are passages which show his suspicion of excessive
rationalism, but just the theory of the "common reader" is merely
a time-honored device to identify the critic with the audience, his
voice with the verdict of the ages.
Nor did Johnson rely on the psychology of the artist. He cer-
tainly shows little interest in speculations about genius and imagi-
nation. Not that he never uses these terms: he always recognizes
the necessity of genius in a poet, i.e. the necessity of his having
some innate gift of nature. In describing the genius of Pope, he
enumerates the standard qualities: invention, imagination, judg-
ment. 85 He would say that "the highest praise of genius is original
invention." 86 Discussing Shakespeare, Johnson can praise inven-
tion as the "first and most valuable" power of the poet and under-
96 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
stand it as "that which is able to produce a series of events/' to
"strike out the first hint of a new fable: hence to introduce a set of
characters and to wind up the whole in a pleasing catastrophe." 8T
But "genius" has none of the romantic connotations. It is simply
ingenium, "a mind of large general powers, accidentally deter-
mined to some particular direction." 88 In a conversation Johnson
went so far as to say that "had Sir Isaac Newton applied himself to
poetry, he would have made a very fine epic poem. I could as easily
apply to law as to tragic poetry." Boswell objected, "Yet, sir, you did
apply to tragic poetry, not to law." Johnson answered, "Because, sir,
I had not money to study law. Sir, the man who has vigor, may walk
to the east, just as well as to the west, if he happens to turn his head
that way." 89 The implication that any man of parts could be a poet
if he wills so, that there is no difference between the gifts for poetry,
law, or mathematics, does not disturb Johnson, as he wanted the
poet to be assimilated to man in general.
Thus Johnson cannot show any interest in the new theory of
creative imagination. It is not, however, a sufficient demonstration
of his distrust of imagination to point to Imlac's discourse in
Rasselas (ch. 43) on the "Dangerous Prevalence of Imagination"
or the 8gth Rambler on "Luxury of Vain Imagination." Johnson
there disapproves of day dreaming, escapism, and, as other passages
in Prayers and Meditations show, simply of "sensual images and
loose thoughts." "Imagination" is understood as the power of
visualizing absent things, the common use of the i8th century.
"Imagination selects ideas from the treasures of remembrance, and
produces novelty only by varied combinations." 90 In purely liter-
ary contexts Johnson accepts imagination as part of the poet's
equipment. He would say about Pope: "He had Imagination,
which strongly impresses on the writer's mind and enables him to
convey to the reader the various forms of nature, incidents of life,
and energies of passion, as in his Eloisa, Windsor Forest, and the
Ethic Epistles." The inclusion of the Ethic Epistles, which we
could hardly call "imaginative," is enough to show that "imagina-
tion" here is used merely as the power of representation. The term
"invention" seems to come nearer to imagination in the modern
sense, when Johnson praises Pope's invention in the Rape of the
Lock as displaying "new trains of events and new scenes of
imagery." On the other hand he couples the Rape of the Lock and
DR. JOHNSON 97
the Essay on Criticism as having a kind of invention "by which
extrinsic and adventitious embellishments and illustrations are
connected with a known subject." 91 Invention here is little more
than inventiveness, ingenuity in finding rhetorical ornaments.
Mostly Johnson expresses his distrust of imagination as a "licen-
tious and vagrant faculty, unsusceptible of limitations, and im-
patient of restraint." 2 In speaking of Young's Night Thoughts he
refers to "the greatest ebullitions of imagination," "the wild diffu-
sion of the sentiments and the digressive sallies of imagination." 3
He disapproved of his friend Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield as
"having no real life in it, and very little of nature. It is mere fanci-
ful performance." 94 He is not entirely unsympathetic to the mar-
velous in Shakespeare, but makes no issue of it as later the roman-
tics did and as Joseph Warton and Mrs. Montagu did even long
before the romantics. Johnson praises The Tempest for its "bound-
less invention": but Midsummer Night's Dream is called "wild and
fantastical." Usually he gives a historical justification of the mar-
velous. The witches in Macbeth and the fairies in Midsummer
Night's Dream are excused as contemporary superstitions. It is
impossible to deny that Johnson did not like or understand highly
fantastic art unless he could reinterpret it as a picture of truth. It
was his settled conviction that "the mind can only repose on the
stability of truth." 9B
The same attitude comes out in Johnson's discussions of
imagery, simile, metaphor, and symbolism. Johnson can be very
amusingly literal-minded in criticizing metaphors, of which he
requires perfect consistency and rational progression. He censures,
for instance, the first stanza of Gray's "Progress of Poetry" for "con-
founding the images of 'spreading sound' and 'running water,' " 96
or shows a surprising incomprehension of ordinary metaphorical
expression when he comments on the conclusion of Gray's "Ode on
a Cat": "If what glistered had been 'gold,' the cat would not have
gone into the water; and, if she had, would not less have been
drowned." 97 In close succession two figures by Addison are ridi-
culed for mixed or "broken" metaphor, catachresis. 08 Johnson is
also opposed to figures drawn from art to illustrate nature.
" 'Idalia's velvet-green* has something of cant. An epithet or
metaphor drawn from Nature ennobles Art; an epithet or meta-
phor drawn from Art degrades Nature." 99 This is a common rhetor-
98 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
ical theory which seems to be based on a theological view of the in-
feriority of man's work to God's, but which, applied rigorously,
would make short work of much of the metaphorical wealth of
poetry today and during the Renaissance.
Johnson considers simile an ornament which serves only as
"illustration" or rhetorical heightening, "ennobling the sub-
ject." 10 And metaphor is defined in the Dictionary as a simile
"comprized in a word." Denham's well-known lines expressing the
wish that his style would flow like the river Thames are praised for
the way "the particulars of resemblance are so perspicaciously col-
lected and the different parts of the sentence are so accurately ad-
justed," but are censured because "most of the words thus artfully
opposed are to be understood simply on one side of the compari-
son, and metaphorically on the other; and if there be any language
which does not express intellectual operations by material images,
into that language they cannot be translated." 101 This curious de-
mand for translatability into an imaginary, purely rational, ab-
stract language (something like the characteristica of Leibniz or
modern symbolic logic) seems to say that language, even in poetry,
should express intellectual operations without any material
images. Johnson wants to hear about style but not about the
stream, and he objects that the desired qualities of the style could
not be found literally in the river, even though he recognizes that
they are ingeniously matched. 102
The same rationalistic conception underlies Johnson's most
elaborate analysis of the metaphors in the metaphysical poets. The
term "metaphysical" comes originally from Dryden but was made
a matter of common acceptance only through Johnson's Life of
Cowley (1780). It meant to Johnson not "concerned with meta-
physics," but "metaphysical," "beyond nature," or really "unnatu-
ral," the opposite of "natural" in the neoclassical sense of the uni-
versal. "They neither copied nature nor life; neither painted the
forms of matter nor represented the operations of intellect." 103
Their imagery or "wit" is well described by Johnson as discordia
concors: "a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult
resemblances in things apparently unlike." "The most heteroge-
neous ideas are yoked by violence together." "Their attempts are al-
ways analytic: they broke every image into fragments." 104 This
is still good characterization, and Johnson's skillful florilegium
DR. JOHNSON 99
of metaphysical conceits is worth reading. But in this analysis it is
not very clear why ideas must not be "yoked by violence together,"
what would be meant by nonviolent combinations, nor what is bad
about analytic poetry, the breaking of images into fragments. In
discussing simile elsewhere, Johnson seems to hold the opposite
view. "A simile," he says, ''may be compared to lines converging
at a point and is more excellent as the lines approach from a
greater distance: an exemplification may be considered as two
parallel lines which run together without approximation, never
far separated, and never joined." 10 But apparently even when a
simile is drawn from the most remote and opposite parts of the
universe, the tenor and the vehicle should remain neatly separated
and not "yoked by violence together," whatever "violence" may
mean to Johnson. Analytic poetry is bad because it does not allow
a uniform sentiment and a unity of tone, and fragmentation of
images requires a close attention, which has the effect of dispersal,
ambiguity, and irony, things which we seem to love today. The fact
that Johnson thought Cowley "undoubtedly the best" of the meta-
physicals 10G and that he totally ignored their actual qualities shows
the strength of his rationalistic prejudices against anything which
seemed to him a special taste, a fashion rather than the assertion of
universal truth. One of the most special tastes the world has ever
seen abstract neoclassicism was erected into the only standard
of art and poetry.
Johnson's incomprehension of the centrally metaphorical char-
acter of poetry illuminates and is in turn illuminated by his atti-
tude toward religious poetry. In many contexts Johnson condemns
religious poetry. In discussing Cowley's Davideis he shows that he
thinks poetry and imagery as "amplification" (of sacred history)
are "frivolous and vain: all addition to that which is already suffi-
cient for the purposes of religion seems not only useless, but in
some degree profane." 107 Speaking of Waller's sacred poems, John-
son explains again that "poetical devotion cannot often please." He
allows that doctrines of religion may be defended in a didactic
poem and that the beauties of nature may be praised in a descrip-
tive poem. The subject of the description "is not God, but the
works of God." But "contemplative piety, or the intercourse be-
tween God and the human soul, cannot be poetical. Man admitted
to implore the mercy of his Creator and plead the merits of his
1OO A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
Redeemer is already in a higher state than poetry can confer."
This can be interpreted as meaning that prayer is a higher state
than poetic contemplation, and one apparently excludes the other.
"The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by produc-
ing something unexpected, surprises and delights. The topics of
devotion are few, and being few are universally known; but, few
as they are, they can be made no more; they can receive no grace
from novelty of sentiment, and very little from novelty of expres-
sion." ("Grace" here means adornment, ornament; "sentiment"
the content, the subject matter; "expression" the rhetorical
form.) * "Omnipotence cannot be exalted; Infinity cannot be am-
plified; Perfection cannot be improved." 108 Exactly the same ideas
underlie the criticism of Paradise Lost: "The good and evil of
Eternity are too ponderous for the wings of wit." 109 Paradise Lost
is vitiated by a constant confusion of spirit and matter, especially
in the narration of the war in heaven. 110 Isaac Watts's devotional
poetry is also unsatisfactory. "The paucity of its topics enforces
perpetual repetition, and the sanctity of the matter rejects the
ornaments of figurative diction." in It seems surprising to be told
so, in view of the Bible's figurative diction so recently described by
Bishop Lowth. But one must recognize that Johnson here joins in
an old critical debate in which Boileau had taken the side Johnson
accepted: the Christian marvelous was condemned. Johnson takes
this side in the controversy for deep personal reasons: religion is
for him completely divided from fiction, the gulf between God
and man being almost as great as in Calvinistic doctrines. Though
he was an Anglican he was incapable of sharing the older view of
a Chain of Being, the gradual ascent from nature to God,f the
whole metaphorical view of the universe, its correspondences and
relations among which poetry as well as religion weaves a web.
Johnson was also untouched by the new cosmopolitanism. He
did, of course, read some French and Italian literature. But his
critical writings contain only the most perfunctory references to
* This explanation seems needed, as Allen Tate has misunderstood
these words, taking "grace" to mean "supernatural grace." Cf. "Johnson
on the Metaphysicals," Kenyan Review, n (1949), 384.
f Cf. Johnson's review of Soame Jenyns, Free Enquiry into the Na-
ture and Origin of Evil (1757), in Works, n, 276 ff. The ridicule of the
social implications of Jenyns' "cosmic Toryism" seems richly deserved.
DR. JOHNSON 101
modern foreign authors: occasional praise for La Bruyfere's Char-
acters or Cervantes are the high points. "Corneille," he said to
Mrs. Piozzi, "is to Shakespeare as a clipped hedge is to a forest." 112
Boileau's "Tenth Satire" is inferior to Pope's "Characters of
Women," though "he surely is no mean writer to whom Boileau
shall be found inferior." "As to original literature the French have
a couple of tragic poets who go round the world, Racine and
Corneille, and one comic poet, Molire." Fnelon's Telemaque is
"pretty well." Voltaire has not stood his trial yet and nobody reads
Bossuet. 118 It will not surprise us that Rousseau excited his con-
tempt. "I think him one of the worst of men; a rascal who ought
to be hunted out of society. ... I would sooner sign a sentence
for his transportation, than that of any felon who has gone from
the Old Bailey these many years. Yes, I should like to have him
work in the plantations." 114 But this is hardly literary criticism,
and we must not forget that Johnson was needling Boswell, who
made a pilgrimage to Switzerland to see Rousseau. There is noth-
ing beyond the bare names in Johnson concerning Dante, Pe-
trarch, or Boccaccio. Tasso's Aminta is condemned specifically as a
pastoral, and Orlando Furioso is criticized for the enchanted wood
to which we follow "Rinaldo with more curiosity than terror." 118
But Johnson was not only touched but deeply involved in the
general awakening of the historical sense and specifically in the
revived interest in early English literature and in literary anti-
quarianism and historiography. There is, of course, the evidence
of his Dictionary, which shows that he had read in practically every
earlier English writer, though it may be difficult in some cases to
distinguish between real reading and mere sampling by him or
an amanuensis. There is the Introduction to the Dictionary, which
is a history of the English language, and in which, incidentally,
Johnson has something to say about early English literature. He
quotes specimens of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English from
Hickes's Thesaurus, and remarks, with an unusual suspension of
judgment, that "our ignorance of the laws of their metre and the
quantities of their syllables excludes us from that pleasure which
the old bards undoubtedly gave to their contemporaries." 116 John-
son wanted to edit Chaucer. His edition was to contain "remarks
on his language, and the change it had undergone from the earliest
times to his age, and from his to the present, with notes explana-
102 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
tory of customs, etc. and references to Boccace, and other authors
from whom he has borrowed, with an account of the liberties he
has taken in telling the stories." 117 Yet Johnson could not have
appreciated Chaucer highly. He says, of Dryden's retelling the
"Nun's Priest's Tale," that the "Tale" seems "hardly worth re-
vival," and he censures Dryden's praise of the "Knight's Tale" as
"hyperbolical." 118 Johnson smiled at some of the excesses of anti-
quarianism: in Rambler No. 177 he ridicules an antiquary proudly
displaying "a copy of the Children in the Wood, which he firmly
believed to be of the first edition." "Chevy Chase" is condemned
for "chill and lifeless imbecility." 11D Medieval mysteries are "wild
dramas." 12 But for linguistic reasons Johnson read some of the
romances, dipped even into Lydgate, and, of course, prepared
his great edition of Shakespeare, which, besides its critical preface
and comments on the individual plays and passages, is also a work
of textual criticism and historical elucidation. Johnson's Proposals
for Printing the Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare (1756)
expounds a very full program for interpreting Shakespeare's allu-
sions, language, and relation to his sources; and Johnson at least
partially fulfilled this plan in his edition. He hoped, by "compar-
ing the works of Shakespeare with those of writers who lived at
the same time, immediately preceded, or immediately followed
him, to be able to ascertain his ambiguities, disentangle his intrica-
cies, and recover the meaning of words now lost in the darkness of
antiquity." 121 Johnson wrote a commendatory preface to Mrs.
Charlotte Lennox's Shakespear Illustrated (1753), a first collec-
tion of Shakespeare's sources, and used the information in his notes
to the edition without, it seems, adding anything of his own. 122
We get Johnson's nearest approach to a literary history of Eng-
land in the Lives of the Poets (i779~80> which are of course pri-
marily biography and straight criticism, but which contain an im-
plicit scheme of the history of English poetry of the preceding cen-
tury. The choice of lives was prescribed by the booksellers who
ordered them, and thus from the outset Johnson was limited to the
living tradition of poetry, from Cowley to Gray. He himself seems
to have urged only the inclusion of minor poets such as Blackmore,
Watts, Pomfret, and Yalden. Nothing came of a suggestion made
by George III that Spenser should have been included. 128 In the
Life of Cowley Johnson starts with a discussion of the metaphysi-
DR. JOHNSON
cals as background and foil to the tradition he is about to treat in
full, and he stresses everywhere the anticipations and steps which
led to its establishment. The reform begins with Waller and Den-
ham, who "traced the new scheme of poetry." 12 * The actual
founder of the new style was Dryden: "To him we owe the im-
provement, perhaps the completion of our metre, the refinement
of our language, and much of the correctness of our sentiments." 12B
Before the time of Dryden "there was no poetical diction: no sys-
tem of words at once refined from the grossncss of domestic use
and free from the harshness of terms appropriated to particular
arts." 126 Johnson always points out either relapses from or ap-
proximations to this ideal norm. Addison "debased rather than
refined" the versification which he had learned from Dryden. 127
And Pope, of course, is the summit of perfection.
This view of a progress of English poetry toward an ideal techni-
cal norm attained especially by Pope is curiously enough com-
bined in Johnson with a constant recognition of the historical
point of view and pleadings for some relativity of standards. He
recognized that wit "has its changes and fashions, and at different
times takes different forms." 128 He explicitly states that "to judge
rightly of an author we must transport ourselves to his time, and
examine what were the wants of his contemporaries, and what were
his means of supplying them." 129 As early as the Observations on
Macbeth (1745), Johnson had stated that "in order to make a true
estimate of the abilities and merit of a writer, it is always necessary
to examine the genius of his age and the opinions of his contempo-
raries." However, he uses the historical argument largely as an
apology for shortcomings and mistakes in older literature. Thus
Dryden's "Threnodia Augustalis" has the "irregularity of meter,
to which the ears of that age however were accustomed"; 13 Mil-
ton's verse was "harmonious, in proportion to the general state of
our metre in Milton's age"; 131 Waller's poem "On the Danger of the
Prince on the Coast of Spain" may be "justly praised, without
much allowance for the state of our poetry and language at that
time." 132
Once, in Johnson's defense of Pope's translation of Homer, the
historical argument is prominent and effective. "Time and place
will always enforce regard. In estimating this translation considera-
tion must be had of the nature of our language, the form of our
104 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
meter, and, above all, of the change which two thousand years have
made in the modes of life and the habits of thought" since Pope
"wrote for his own age and his own nation." 13S But the historical
argument which seems to Johnson valid in case of an adaptation
of a work of remote antiquity did not affect his central view of
English literature as one continuous effort toward the establish-
ment of a timeless norm, that of Pope and Dryden. Johnson cer-
tainly believed in progress (despite all personal pessimism as to
the possibility of human happiness). He rejected the view that the
world "was in its decay" and that "souls partake of the general de-
generacy." 184 "Every age," he thought, "improves in elegance. One
refinement always makes way for another." 18B But the new dispen-
sation seems firmly established. Since Dryden, English poetry has
had "no tendency to relapse to its former savageness." 186 This
faith or hope may help explain Johnson's acrimonious criticism of
Gray's and Collins' attempts to revive what he considered an
obsolete and essentially superseded diction and versification. It
explains in part the harshness of his comments on Milton's early
poems, which he knew were not only highly valued by his con-
temporaries but had also become the models of a new Miltonic
school of which he disapproved as of any archaism. He did not
and could not very well see that he himself stood almost at the end
of a great tradition. The stirring of the new seemed to him only
the odd, perverse, and, at the most, partially successful revival of
old and worn-out things. His own critical work is certainly varied
enough, unified without being monotonous, strongly rooted in the
tradition but still far from merely dogmatic in its acceptance of it.
Johnson, while holding firm to the main tenets of the tradition of
neoclassical criticism, constantly reinterprets them in a spirit for
which it is difficult to avoid a term he would have hated: liberal.
6: THE MINOR ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH
CRITICS
THE FIGURE of Dr. Johnson looms large on the English scene of
the later i8th century. Yet all around Johnson a great activity was
being carried on which proved exceedingly influential in both
England and abroad, and which finally became destructive of the
position of neoclassicism everywhere in the Western world. The
ideas propounded in England and Scotland were not peculiarly
English or Scottish: they could be paralleled in France and Italy,
and they were certainly carried further and elaborated more sys-
tematically and radically in Germany. Still, the English and Scot-
tish body of thought was, at least in its early stages, more coherent
than anything comparable on the Continent. Modern subjective
aesthetics and a historical conception of the development of litera-
ture were formulated in England and Scotland first, whatever the
scattered anticipations elsewhere.
It is now the fashion to deny the existence of preromanticism
and to minimize the revolutionary elements in these critics. One
may admit that the older interpretations drew the issues far too
crudely. Neoclassicism in England was rarely a narrow, rigid creed,
and certain critics who have been called precursors of romanticism
held basic neoclassical positions. A praise of Homer and Shake-
speare and a mere rejection of the authority of Aristotle and of the
three unities in the drama are not, in themselves, indications of
romanticism, and in practice they were perfectly compatible with
a strong hold on neoclassical tenets. The first reaction against neo-
classicism was hardly conscious, certainly not organized, and thus
not describable as a "movement." In any case, it did not move in
one direction.
A strong naturalistic tendency is obvious even in so classical a
figure as Johnson, and emotionalist concepts flourished long be-
fore one can speak of anything as romantic or even preroman-
105
106 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
tic taste. Such concepts were strongly encouraged by ideas revived
from ancient rhetoric with its emphasis on effects, and by the
growing taste for the pathetic, the moving, and the downright
sentimental. Anticipations of the imaginative and symbolist con-
cepts of poetry later to be adopted by the great English romantic
poets were rare. One must grant that there was a real break in the
English critical tradition when Coleridge and Shelley revived Pla-
tonic ideas or imported similar German concepts.
Whatever the arguments for caution in speaking of preromanti-
cism and however justified may be the dissatisfaction of some
scholars with the multiple meanings of the term "romanticism," it
seems impossible to deny that we are confronted with the problem
of the dissolution of neoclassicism and its replacement by new and
different theories. The problem should not be ignored and ob-
scured by exclusive insistence on the undeniable survivals, the
compromises, and the open contradictions of individual authors.
What mattered were frequently short striking pronouncements in
texts whose general import may have been quite conventional. It
has been the privilege of every age to pull sentences out of con-
text, to fasten on what is new and fertile and meets its own de-
mands for change. 1
When we look at the criticism produced in the second half of
the century in England and Scotland, we must come to the con-
clusion that the achievement in literary theory and practical criti-
cism was not impressive. No individual critic can compare with
Dr. Johnson. Among attempts at a general theory of literature,
Lord Kames's Elements of Criticism (1762) seems the only inde-
pendent and systematic synthesis. Compared with it, Hugh Blair's
widely known Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1782) is
only an unoriginal textbook. But what the age lacked in strictly
literary theory was amply made up in two related disciplines
which profoundly influenced literary criticism: aesthetics and
literary historiography. We shall have to discuss these disciplines if
we are to understand the further development of criticism.
There is no need to enter into detail about the early history of
British aesthetics. It has, roughly speaking, two fairly well-defined
traditions: one empiricist and mechanistic, which goes back to
Hobbes; the other Platonic or rather neo-Platonic, for which, in
the i8th century, Shaftesbury was the main source. Hobbes's in-
THE MINOR ENGLISH CRITICS 107
fluence was frequently modified and mollified by Locke's. Shaftes-
bury's was also far from clear-cut, since he was a loose thinker who
cclcctically combined elements from Stoicism, neo-Platonism, and
the new empiricism. His aesthetic ideas were soon amalgamated
with the Lockean tradition by his main disciple, Francis Hutche-
son.
In Shaftesbury beauty is form, proportion, eternal harmony.
We can learn to perceive it correctly. But this beauty is not neces-
sarily physical proportion and form. The higher stages of beauty re-
veal an "inward form/' "interior numbers," a secret invisible
measure and harmony, a design or "idea" which at times is con-
ceived as residing in the mind of the artist, in his inner vision, and
at times is conceived of as a reflection of the light of God.* Shaftes-
bury thus condemns mere liking, capricious individual taste. He
thinks of the act of valuing as an intuitive judgment of something
objective, be it beauty or virtue. Hutcheson, who wrote the first
formal treatise on aesthetics in English, An Inquiry into the Orig-
inal of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), though professing
to "explain and defend the principles of the late Earl of Shaftes-
bury," actually translates his ideas into very different terms. 2 Taste
to him is an "inner sense." Though this sense still recognizes a
world of objects characterized by unity in variety, attention is
shifted to the aesthetic response. Divergencies of taste are ex-
plained by the interference of personal, purely individual associa-
tions.
David Hume discarded the survivals of Platonic ontology when
in his essay "Of the Standard of Taste" (1757) he came to apply
radical empiricism to the question. "All sentiment is right," he
asserts boldly. "Beauty is no quality in things themselves. It exists
merely in the mind which contemplates them." Taste and literary
opinions, one might conclude, are purely subjective. But Hume
rejects this consequence immediately, appealing to the uniformity
of human nature, the verdict of the ages, the universal principles
* Shaftesbury probably did not read Plotinus himself, but he read
the Cambridge Platonists, Platonizing Italians such as Bellori, and
Maximus Tyrius, a peripatetic philosopher under Emperor Commo-
dus, from whom he drew a central quotation; see Characteristics (3d
ed. London, 1723), 2, 295. Shaftesbury here refers to an "ancient phil-
ologist" who, I believe, has never before been identified.
108 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
of association. These principles are used to justify such neoclassical
doctrines as the purity of genre and the unity of action in tragedy.
Hume does not see that he is appealing to the taste of a small group
at a particular time and place and that he identifies this group
with humanity. One of his examples gives the argument away:
"Whoever would assert an equality of genius and elegance between
Ogilby and Milton, or Bunyan and Addison, would be thought to
defend no less an extravagance, than if he had maintained a mole-
hill to be as high as Teneriffe. or a pond as extensive as the ocean." 8
Many today would feel no qualms in preferring Bunyan's genius
to Addison's (if not his elegance), though Ogilby, a 17th-century
translator of Homer, has not found modern defenders. In Hume
the identity of his own taste or that of his class with that of hu-
manity is merely asserted as a fact.
In Edmund Burke's discussion of taste, added in 1758 to his
Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime
and Beautiful (1757), the problem is solved by dividing taste into
two kinds. Burke grants the subjectivity of taste as far as it is
imaginative and sensuous, but at the same time argues that "the
cause of a wrong taste is a defect of judgment," that taste concerns
questions of disposition, decorum, congruity, and that therefore
understanding operates with it. 4 Taste, in a wider sense, includes
judgment.
This solution, which reintroduces rationalism or at least the
function of reason into the problem of aesthetic response, is also
the solution of the most elaborate and most scholastic treatise of
the time on the subject, Alexander Gerard's Essay on Taste (1759).
Gerard analyzes taste into a number of "simple senses": novelty,
sublimity, imitation, beauty, harmony, wit and ridicule, and vir-
tue. This incongruous list does not help him, however, to escape
from the empiricist predicament. At first he tries hard by postu-
lating a standard of cooperation or union among these different
"senses," 8 but then he himself recognizes that this does not allow
him to get beyond individual taste, and he is forced to abandon
his doctrinaire empiricism: he must again appeal to judgment
validated by tradition and the verdict of the ages. With Gerard
taste, by including virtue, has ceased to be distinctly aesthetic.
Kames seems to have been the only writer during the period
who explicitly recognized what was implied by an appeal to uni-
THE MINOR ENGLISH CRITICS 1O0
versal human nature. He expounds a theory of taste very similar
to Hume's but concludes that we must exclude several classes of
men from the standard of taste: "Those who depend for food on
bodily labor, are totally void of taste, of such a taste at least as can
be of use in the fine arts. This consideration bars the greater part
of mankind; and of the remaining part, many by a corrupted taste
are unqualified tor voting. The common sense of mankind must
then be confined to the few that fall not under these exceptions."
Though he admits that the "exclusion of classes so many and nu-
merous, reduces within a narrow compass those who are qualified
to be judges in the fine arts," he still preserves his faith in a "won-
derful uniformity in the emotions and feelings of the different
races of men." He does not see any contradiction in arguing for
a universal standard which may be appreciated by only a very tew.
Thus the discussion of taste arrives at an impasse. Yet at least it
poses the antinomies of Kant's Critique of Judgment and reso-
lutely raises the problem of criticism as such. Actually it is a criti-
cism of criticism.
The discussion of taste in the i8th century is paralleled by a
discussion of the equipment of the poet, his genius and his imag-
ination. This too leads to a complete impasse, to a leveling and
obliteration of the creative act, just as taste by identifying itself
with moral judgment had done. "Imagination" as conceived in
the Renaissance is the creative imagination of the poet: the term
recurs again in the i8th century in Shaftesbury and others, and
means there the inventive, spontaneously creative power of the
poet. It is frequently used as a defense of the "marvelous" in
poetry, ot the "fairy way of writing," of supernatural machinery
such as the sylphs in Pope's Rape of the Lock, or it justifies alle-
gories and personifications. Imagination is also associated with
genius and originality. Shaftesbury especially, with his emphasis
on genius, on the poet as "a second maker, a just Prometheus, under
Jove, who like that sovereign artist or universal Nature forms a
whole, coherent and proportioned in itself," revives Platonic motifs
which later proved very influential in Germany. 7
Edward Young's Conjectures on Original Composition (1759)
takes up the same ideas, though emphasizing more the "individual-
ity" and "originality" of the great poet. Young asserts that all
men are born "originals," that "no two faces, no two minds are
110 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
just alike." Antiquity must not be imitated. "The less we copy the
renowned ancients" the more we shall resemble them. Genius,
which at one time meant little more than ingenium, great gifts or
talents, with Young assumes the ancient connotation of religious
inspiration, of supernatural magic. "With regard to the moral
world, conscience, with regard to the intellectual, genius, is that
god within," he says, apparently alluding to the Socratic demon.
"A genius differs from a good understanding, as a magician from
a good architect." What original genius makes is then no longer
an artifact, a work of design and labor. It "may be said to be of
vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of
genius; it grows, it is not made." 8 Biological analogy has replaced
the analogy from physics or handicraft. The work of art has be-
come the result of an unconscious act or process, something like
procreation or growing. The poet's imagination ceases to be a con-
structive combinatory faculty and becomes the creator of a second
world. The radicalism of these statements cannot be obscured by
Young's diverse caveats (one inserted by Richardson) or his pious
commonplaces. But Young remains isolated in the England of his
time.
Late in the century, in William Blake, we can find again such
assertions of the power of imagination. In Blake imagination be-
comes so exalted that it ceases to be an artistic or even a human
faculty. Imagination is "the real and eternal world of which this
vegetable universe is but a faint shadow." "Vision or Imagination
is a Representation of what eternally exists, really and unchange-
ably." Blake considers the external world as the "dirt upon his
feet," because he wants to "look through" the eye and "not with it."
In his violent annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses he
attacks Reynolds' disparagement of inspiration and originality.
"Man brings all that he has or can have into the world with him."
"Taste and Genius are not teachable or acquirable, but are born
with us." "Man is all Imagination. God is man and exists in us and
we in Him." In annotating Wordsworth's Poems Blake asserts that
"one power alone makes a poet: Imagination, the Divine Vision."
It has nothing to do with memory, it is only hindered by natural
objects. Nature itself is imagination, is a spiritual sensation. Blake
wants an all-pervading symbolism, "addressed to the intellectual
powers, while it is altogether hidden from the corporeal under-
THE MINOR ENGLISH CRITICS HI
standing." But it would be a mistake to press his concept of the
imagination into literary or even aesthetic terms: it hardly flows
from the tradition of aesthetic thinking but rather from mystical
theories of knowledge and interpretation. Blake stands quite alone
and almost unknown in his time. Some of the pronouncements
just quoted, though not perhaps datable with accuracy, are very
late: as late as the go's of the igth century, and thus may reflect the
new romantic atmosphere. Certainly Blake's conception of the
imagination is neither the usual iSth-century idea nor the ro-
mantic. His poet is a visionary without pride, a "literalist of the
imagination" who takes down what is dictated to him by the "au-
thors in Eternity." 9
The general iSth-century development of the concept of imag-
ination went rather in an opposite direction toward identifying
imagination, at first simply with the power of visualization, as in
Addison's papers "On the Pleasures of Imagination," and then in-
creasingly toward the power of evoking associations, especially
emotive ones, the power of entering sympathetically into other
people's feelings. Scholars who have hailed every iSth-century ex-
pression of concern with imagination as romantic are certainly
mistaken. In the i8th century imagination becomes so broadly
conceived that it cannot define the creation or contemplation of
art or even distinguish it from any kind of recall of a touching
event or picturesque scene, or from the reading of a physiognomy,
or from the intuitive insight into character from gestures or words.
The sympathetic imagination of the iSth-century aestheticians is
indistinguishable from the "sympathy" of Hume or Adam Smith,
which had become with them the only organ of morality.
The shift away from Addison's meaning of imagination as
visualization seems first accomplished in Edmund Burke's Philo-
sophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful. Burke argues against the necessity to visualize in the
verbal arts. A particular effort, he says, is required in order to
visualize metaphors. Implicitly, at least, Burke rejects the i8th-
century emphasis on description, and he uses the example, later
exploited in Lessing's Laokoon, of the impression Helen made on
the old men of Troy, which Homer conveys without any descrip-
tion of her beauty. Burke concludes that "poetry and rhetoric do
not succeed in exact description so well as painting does; their
112 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
business is, to affect rather by sympathy than imitation; to display
rather the effect of things on the mind of the speaker, or of others,
than to present a clear idea of the things themselves/' 10 In a
chapter ("Of Sympathy") in his Essays on Poetry and Music (1776),
James Beattie drew the contrast between this faculty and the comic,
which he saw as the intellectual and hence unimaginative and un-
sympathetic view of the world. 11 The comic writer has the cold,
detached view of a spectator. As Blair formulates it, the tragic
writer has the power of entering "deeply into the characters which
he draws; of becoming for a moment the very person whom he
exhibits, and of assuming all his feelings." 12
With Beattie and other followers of Adam Smith sympathy is
active and is, of course, a moral asset. It characterizes both the
great poet and the connoisseur of the arts. With the strict associa-
tionist, however, sympathy can, at least in theory, become passive,
the mere result of a "train of emotions." Archibald Alison, in his
Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790), holds that it
is in "this powerless state of reverie, when we are carried on by our
conceptions, not guiding them, that the deepest emotions of beauty
or sublimity are felt, that our hearts swell with feelings which lan-
guage is too weak to express, and that in the depth of silence and
astonishment we pay to the charm that enthrals us, the most flatter-
ing mark of our applause." 18 Alison quotes Rousseau's Reveries.
Yet he uses the principle of association, deterministic as it is, to
defend uniformity of effect and tone as a requirement of art. He
even objects to tragicomedy on the grounds of its irregularity and
appreciates Corneille for his "uniform character ot dignity." 14
(Beattie had drawn the opposite conclusion from the principle of
sympathy. He had argued that Shakespeare's tragedies would be in-
supportable if not relieved by comic interludes such as the porter
scene in Macbeth and the gravediggers in Hamlet. 1 *) The conse-
quences of this view of imagination as sympathy were only drawn
in the early igth century by Jeffrey, Hazlitt, and Keats.
The same process of the dissolution of ancient concepts oc-
curs in another central question of aesthetics: that concerning
the object and method of imitation. During the later i8th cen-
tury in England the traditional view was best formulated not
by a literary critic but by the painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds, in his
Discourses before the Royal Academy (1769-90). The third dis-
THE MINOR ENGLISH CRITICS 113
course (1770) especially makes a general statement which is also
applicable to literary theory. Simple copying of nature is rejected
in favor of representing ideal beauty, the perfect state of nature,
superior to all singular forms, local customs, particularities, and
details of every kind. Imitation is not of anything supernatural (as
in the Platonic theory upheld by Shaftesbury), nor of any inner
vision, nor does it demand an irrational genius or inspiration.
"This great perfection and beauty are not to be sought in the
heavens, but upon earth. They are about us, and upon every side
of us." The artist does not depict the individual, but represents the
class, the "common idea and central form," the species. 16 At times
Reynolds thinks of this common idea as an average, a means ar-
rived at by empirical observation. In general he restates the Aris-
totelian view which had been applied to the fine arts at least since
the time of Cicero, the view that the object of imitation lies in the
general nature of man, in what is characteristic of a species, of
humanity as such. Yet on occasion he leans, though cautiously, to
the neo-Pla tonic view, which postulates an "image of perfect
beauty" in the mind of the artist. Idealization, with Reynolds, may
even mean simple indulgence, escape into a dream world. "The
object and intention of all the arts is to supply the natural imper-
fection of things, and often to gratify the mind by realizing and
embodying what never existed but in the imagination." 17 One
suspects that Reynolds is not quite clear about these distinctions:
the very looseness of his phrasing allows him to praise both
Michelangelo and Correggio. He recommends both the "grand
style," historical painting, which he equates with poetical paint-
ing, and the portrait, which must, however, be generalized to escape
the danger of mere naturalism. 18 "Imitation" and "idea," as before
in history, serve to justify quite diverse kinds of art.
Belief in the theory of imitation nevertheless remained very
strong. It was, moreover, fostered by the contemporary victory of
philosophical empiricism with its emphasis on sense experience.
The theory of imitation underlies the many recommendations of
particularity, vividness, and concreteness which appear during the
century. These are associated with the concept of imagination as
visualization and with the prevailing interest in description and
descriptive poetry. Quintilian is the classical authority for par-
ticularity, followed by a whole group of the mid-century critics.
114 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
Joseph Warton wants "clear, complete, and circumstantial images"
and expressly objects to the growing taste for generalities, alluding
to the style of Johnson. 19 Kames wants us to "avoid as much as
possible abstract and general terms" and recognizes that "images,
which are the life of poetry, cannot be raised in any perfection but
by introducing particular objects." 20 Campbell in his Philosophy
of Rhetoric (1776) devotes much space to "specialty," advising "not
only to particularize, but even to individuate the object presented
to the mind." 21 To this trend we owe not only the minute descrip-
tive poetry which is characteristic of the period but also the nu-
merous treatises devoted to the "picturesque." The two best known
books, William Gilpin's and Sir Uvedale Price's, have, however,
little to say of literature. 22 William Blake, who in his manner of
painting stands quite apart from this particularizing trend, ex-
pressed his opposition to classical generality when he annotated
Reynolds' Discourses. "To generalize is to be an idiot. To partic-
ularize is the alone distinction of merit." 2S
But both these rival theories, that recommending the general
and that recommending the particular, were undermined in the
i8th century by the emotionalist concept of art, which minimizes
the object of imitation completely in favor of the effect of that ob-
ject on the mind. This was not a theory of emotional expression,
of romantic subjectivity. It was rather a result of the turn to pathos
and rhetoric, and of the whole empiricist logic which ceased to be
able to account for abstraction. Burke, in his Sublime and Beau-
tiful (1757), cuts off poetry from representation and imitation. He
cannot understand that words are symbols and must conclude that
their effect is merely emotional, sympathetic, touching, with a
resultant emphasis on the vague, the obscure, or what he calls "the
sublime." The sublime, which had originally been a rhetorical
name for the elevated style, becomes with Burke and many con-
temporaries a synonym for the dark and terrible, for the occult
fears of man, rather than for any determinate aesthetic object or
style. The whole world of objects is relegated to an inferior prov-
ince of "beauty." Beauty with Burke is social, sexual, little, pretty,
smooth, weak, in short typically rococo. He even tries to give a
physiological explanation of the contrast between the sublime and
beautiful. Beauty acts by "relaxing the solids of the whole system."
The sublime, as fear and terror, increases tension. 24 Poetry, which
THE MINOR ENGLISH CRITICS lig
affects the emotions, "cannot," he concludes logically, "with strict
propriety be called an art of imitation." 25 The theory of imitation
was undermined also from other sides: several writers excluded
music from the imitative arts. 26 Sir William Jones, in his "Essay on
the Arts, commonly called Imitative" (1772), proclaimed boldly
that neither music nor poetry belongs to the arts of imitation. 27
One can well observe the different strains of aesthetic specula-
tion as they apply to literature in Lord Kames's Elements of Criti-
cism. Kames lays an elaborate groundwork in association psychol-
ogy before applying his observations about emotions and passions
to literature. He feels that he is an innovator, a pioneer: "To
reduce the science of criticism to any regular form, has never once
been attempted." 28 To some extent he makes good his extravagant
claim by complex psychological explanations of sound symbolism,
metrics, and imagery, a detailed classification of figures of speech,
and an analysis of the principles of composition and the unities.
Kames uses the Hobbesian term of "ideas in a train" rather than
association, but works with a scheme based on resemblance, con-
tiguity, and causation in order to account for simplicity, contrast,
variety, motion, grandeur, and other aesthetic ideas. Poetry is
always communication of emotion achieved by what he calls
"ideal presence," illusion. 29 Kames's exemplifications of the ef-
fect of sound and meter and his attempts at a new classification of
figures are often purely scholastic and sterile. His personal taste is
very conventional and he disparages the witty and paradoxical.
He has strong prejudices in favor of real experience which lead
him constantly into awkward confusions between art and life.
Thus he declares that a man like York in Henry VI, "spent and
disspirited after losing a battle, is not disposed to heighten or illus-
trate his discourse by similes"; that hyperbole is never prompted
by sorrow, and that "in expressing any severe passion that wholly
occupies the mind, metaphor is improper." 30 Kames's standards
are always those of concrete vivacity and emotional impact. The
two collaborate so closely as to be almost identical for him. A man
of sixty-six when his book was published, he remained quite con-
servative in his defense of the main neoclassical conventions. True,
he recognized that the genre theories are untenable in their rigid-
ity. "Literary compositions run into each other, precisely like
colors: in their strong tints they are easily distinguished; but are
Il6 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
susceptible of so much variety, and so many different forms, that
we never can say where one species ends and another begins." 81
But he does not draw the legitimate consequences from that em-
pirical observation. He points the way toward a theory of poetry
as communication of emotion, with all the difficulties implicit in
it: in distinguishing between art and life or between poetry and
oratory, in defining genres, and classifying works of art.
Most critics of that time seem not to have perceived the problem
of genres at all but simply to have accepted the inherited concep-
tions of their hierarchy and ideal purity. Hugh Blair's Lectures on
Rhetoric and Belles Lettres has a series of chapters on the principal
genres, but no introductory discussion of kinds in general or prin-
ciples of literary classification. Nor do the kinds he selects have
any methodological or other consistency. First Blair has a chapter
on pastoral and lyric poetry, then one on didactic and descriptive
poetry, which is followed by the one on the "Poetry of the He-
brews," which is scarcely a genre. Later he takes up the two highest
kinds of poetic writings, the epic and the dramatic, while the novel,
which is treated with unusual sympathy, appears not among the
poetic genres but as "fictitious history" in the same class with his-
torical writings, dialogues, and letters. 82 There is no system, no
defense of the kinds, not even any awareness of the problem.
The bulk of 18th-century criticism moved in the well-worn
grooves of the kinds and their particular traditional problems.
Most attention was still given to the highest genres, though the
successes of the age were not in tragedy or the epic. The theory of
tragedy remained that of the Aristotelian system as modified by
the French, though during the i8th century significant changes
began to take place. The rules, which had been attacked even in
the i7th century, were combated much more effectively and suc-
cessfully in the second half of the i8th. The influence of Shake-
speare, whose fame grew in spite of the rules by leaps and bounds,
proved decisive. At first the arguments either excused Shake-
speare's violation of the rules on grounds of ignorance, or main-
tained that, despite his success, he would have done even better
had he observed the rules. Or it was said that what is good in Shake-
speare follows the rules if they are properly interpreted. The dis-
tinction between eternal and temporary rules was drawn by Dry-
den. More and more often it was said that Shakespeare violated
THE MINOR ENGLISH CRITICS 11^
only the rules which were merely the fashion of the i8th century.
Later the view emerged that Shakespeare established his own kind
of art. Thomas Percy, for instance, said that the histories are
neither tragedies nor comedies, but simply plays. 88 Finally, Shake-
speare was glorified as the wild genius who was right by virtue of
his genius. "Whatever Shakespeare wrote is right" seems the slogan
of the cult. Shades of these opinions need illustration only in a
history of Shakespeare criticism.
Disparagement of the unities went along with a shift from in-
terest in plot and structure to interest in character drawing and
in Shakespeare's knowledge and depiction of human nature. Dur-
ing the i8th century, almost from its beginning, a large body of
criticism was devoted to the discussion of Shakespeare's dramatic
characters, often quite independently of the plays themselves.
Joseph Warton's essays in the Adventurer (1753-54) on the Tem-
pest and King Lear, which characterize Ariel and Caliban and
give a running commentary on the progress of Lear's feelings, are
good examples of a kind of criticism which Warton himself felt to
be new: namely, if I may use a term unknown to Warton, "psycho-
logical." 34 Henry Mackenzie's essays on Hamlet in the Mirror
(1780) anticipate Goethe's sympathetic interpretation of Hamlet's
weakness. Other books, like those by William Richardson, use
Shakespeare largely as a text for disquisitions on morals. 85
The most sell-conscious and original of iSth-century essays on
Shakespeare is Maurice Morgann's Essay on the Dramatic Char-
acter of John Falstaff (1777). This professes to refute the usual
labeling o Falstaff as a coward and braggart. Morgann defends a
method of "looking to the spirit rather than the letter of what is
uttered, and relying at last only on a combination of the whole,"
and of distinguishing between a real and an apparent character.
He seems to have been the first to speak of a "certain roundness
and integrity in the forms of Shakespeare, which gives them an
independence," and the first to argue that Shakespeare, in "un-
folding" his characters from within, must himself have felt every
varied situation. Shakespeare's art is something hidden, a "felt
propriety and truth from causes unseen." Criticism has the task
of "entering into the inward soul of [Shakespeare's] compositions."
The characters are totalities, wholes. The poet "gives to every
particular part a relish of the whole, and of the whole to every par-
Il8 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
ticular part." ae Morgann has a vague feeling for Shakespeare's
art, for the Gestalt, the wholeness of his characters, for a central
principle conceived in almost biological terms. But in his argu-
ment he constantly runs the risk of confusing fiction and reality,
of treating his dramatic character as a historical person, of press-
ing a thesis about Falstaff s lack of cowardice while only half be-
lieving in it. He echoes too the current ideas on sympathetic imag-
ination, the view that poetry is justified by its effect, that it is, as
Young implies, "magic." Though it seems difficult to prove direct
influence, Morgann anticipates the methods of Lamb, Coleridge,
and Hazlitt. A. C. Bradley complimented the distant originator of
his own method when he wrote of Morgann's essay that "there is
no better piece of Shakespeare criticism in the world." 37
Almost as important as the iSth-century breakdown of the uni-
ties and the shift to character analysis were the new conceptions
of the effects of tragedy. The Aristotelian version of catharsis seems
not to have been understood except by specialists. What interested
the time was the question of why we derive pleasure from tragedy,
joy from grief. The purgation of pity and fear was talked about,
but interpreted not to mean purgation at all and not to refer to
both pity and fear. Tragedy was increasingly considered simply a
means of arousing pity. Blair said bluntly that the "intention of
tragedy is to improve our virtuous sensibility," and George Camp-
bell wanted to "include under the name of pity all the emotions ex-
cited by tragedy." 38 Burke shifts the emphasis to irrational feeling
even more radically. Our sympathy is "antecedent to any reason-
ing, by an instinct that works to its own purposes without our con-
currence." Since Burke cannot distinguish between a work of art
and real life, he concludes that it would be the triumph of real
sympathy if, at the announcement of an execution in the adjoining
square, everybody left the theater to see it. He does not face the
objection that the theater might also be emptied by a coronation
or any other rare spectacle, or that viewing an execution might be
an indulgence in cruelty and not in sympathy. He thus concludes
that "the nearer a tragedy approaches the reality, and the further it
removes us from all idea of fiction, the more perfect is its power." 89
Implicitly Burke justifies middle-class tragedy, naturalistic in tech-
nique, emotionally harassing. Questions of structure and even
meaning become irrelevant: the drama as drama is destroyed.
THE MINOR ENGLISH CRITICS 1 ig
Kames tries a compromise between tradition and the new ex-
periments by recognizing two types of tragedy: moral and pathetic.
He clearly prefers the second type for its appeal to sympathy, and
shows an amazing coolness toward Greek tragedy. Greek tragedies,
he tells us, are "more active than sentimental," that is, contain
more action than feeling. They have "no sentiments except of
the plainest kind ... no intricate or delicate situation to occa-
sion any singular passion: no gradual swelling and subsiding of
passion: no conflict between different passions." 40 Shakespeare
satisfies Kames's requirements on these counts: he quotes numer-
ous instances of Shakespeare's psychological penetration and truth
to life. Still, he disapproves of tragicomedy because "discordant
emotions are unpleasant when jumbled together," 41 and he slights
the unities of space and time as merely contributory to the one
obligatory unity, that of action. Kames's standard is always that of
emotional effect, which can be achieved only by illusion, an im-
pression of reality, as if we were spectators of a real event. "Any
interruption annihilates that impression, by rousing the spectator
out of his waking dream, and unhappily restoring him to his
senses." 4 ' 2 Johnson must have had this passage in mind when he
argued that the spectator is always in his senses.
Hume, somewhat surprisingly in view of his ethics of sympathy,
was one of the few who saw that tragedy cannot be reduced to pity.
If sympathy were the effect of tragedy, he says tellingly, "an hos-
pital would be a more entertaining place than a ball." 43 He him-
self propounded, in his essay Of Tragedy (1757), a complex theory
of tragic pleasure, according to which the dominant pleasure, that
of imitation, is reinforced by the subordinate unpleasant feeling of
pain, just as love is supposed to be strengthened by jealousy. 44 But
this view remained without influence.
Only very much later the concept of tragedy as pitiful gives way
to a return of the Stoic idea that in tragedy we are to feel senti-
ments of heroic magnanimity. In 1805 Richard Payne Knight ex-
pounded this view, which had again found favor in Germany with
Schiller. 45
Compared to tragedy, the theory of comedy was given little at-
tention during the i8th century. The old commonplaces about its
salutary effect on morals and its ridicule of vice were repeated ad
nauseam. Sentimental comedy, which flourished on the stage,
ISO A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
seemed hardly to have any defenders among critics, though Hurd
says grudgingly that he does not "dispute the propriety of serious
or even affecting comedies." * 6 More important for the future were
the general discussions of the comic and laughter. These, al-
though not literary in themselves, do reflect a shift from the early
meaning of humor as oddity to the new meaning of sympathy,
laughter through tears. But Kames and Beattie, who discuss comic
theory most fully and with many literary examples, are not yet
aware of this change. They refute Hobbes's view of laughter as
"sudden glory" and argue mostly for incongruity as a general ex-
planation of the comic. 47
Developments in epic theory parallel those in dramatic. Lc
Bossu's extremely rationalistic definition of the epic was never
accepted in England. 48 Milton's fame in itself combated the view
that the "Christian marvelous" should be excluded from the epic
as Boileau had demanded. Pope, in Peri Bathous, had parodied "a
receipt to make an epic poem." Two new elements, however, enter
epic theory in the i8th century. Homer was increasingly inter-
preted as a primitive bard, especially after Thomas Blackwell's
Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735). This was
(if we ignore the unknown Vico) the first attempt to see Homer
independently of the tradition of epic rules, as a representative of
his age and society. The "discovery" of Ossian further hastened
the breakdown of the old ideas on the epic, or at least the recogni-
tion of a special type of primitive epic. Hugh Blair, in his influ-
ential Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (1763), had
argued that "in strength of imagination, in grandeur of sentiment,
in native majesty of passion" Ossian is the equal of Homer and Vir-
gil, though he granted that Ossian has not "the regular dignity of
narration" which we find in them. Although Blair took the precau-
tion of showing that Fingal fulfills all the essential demands made
by Aristotle on the epic, his positive stress was on the poet of the
heart who makes his readers "glow, and tremble, and weep." 49
Blair's comparative restraint was soon thrown to the winds by many
enthusiasts for Ossian who exalted him above Homer and his lyrical
looseness above the time-honored epic conceptions.
While primitivistic conceptions of Homer and Ossian offered
one alternative to the classical epic tradition, another was offered
in a cult of the Italian "romantic" epic poets, Ariosto, Tasso, and
THE MINOR ENGLISH CRITICS
their English follower, Spenser. Admiration for Ariosto and Tasso
had never completely disappeared. About the middle of the cen-
tury the theoretical defense of the structure and machinery of their
poems; which had been undertaken in the Renaissance by many
Italian and French critics, was revived in England, largely because
of the need to defend the Faerie Queene* Thomas Warton's first
book, Observations on the Fairie Queene (1754), a loose collection
of notes on sources, the history of allegory in England, chivalry,
and so on, surrendered the cause of Spenser's "regularity" in order
to argue that "the faculties of creative imagination delight us, be-
cause they are unassisted and unrestrained by those of deliberate
judgment. . . . Though in the Fairie Queene we are not satisfied
as critics, yet we are transported as readers." B0 Warton thus admits
the validity of a criticism based on the classical canon of composi-
tion, but evades it by pleading for an aesthetics of effect, a "grace
beyond the reach of art." Ariosto and Spenser "did not live in an age
of planning" and must not be judged by "precepts they did not
attend to." r>1
Richard Hurd, in his Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762),
is much bolder. He docs not concede any lack of decorum in the
Faerie Queene. He argues that the poem should be "read and
criticized under this idea of a Gothic, not classical poem," 5 - and
that there is a unity of design, if not of action, in the whole. Hurd
plays down plot and composition and emphasizes description and
manners. He praises Tasso as an "original painter of the world of
magic and enchantments." 53 He asserts the "preeminence of the
Gothic manners and fictions, as adapted to the ends of poetry, above
the classic," and has a good word to say even for medieval ro-
mances. He had hardly read real medieval romances and would
* Hurd knew Sir John Harington's "Apologie of Poetrie," prefixed
to his translation ol Orlando Furioso (1591); see entry in his com-
monplace book, quoted in Edwine Montague, "Bishop Hurd as Critic,"
unpublished dissertation, Yale University (1939), p. 124. He also knew
defenses of Italian poetry by 18th-century Italians: Scipione Maffei,
Baretti, etc. He may have read Jean Chapelain's "Dialogue de la lec-
ture des vieux Romans" (1646), first printed in 1728. Opuscules cri-
tiques, ed. Alfred C. Hunter (Paris, 1936), p. 206. See Victor M. Hamm,
"A Seventeenth Century French Source for Hurd's Letters on Chivalry
and Romance" PMLA, 52 (1937), 820-8.
122 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
not have admired them as works of art. "The tales of fairy," he says,
"are exploded, as fantastic and incredible. They would merit
this contempt, if presented on the stage," but they have their
place in the epic. The gallantry of feudal times seems to him more
poetical than the "simple and uncontrolled barbarity" of the
Greeks, and the enchanters and witches more "sublime, more ter-
rible, more alarming than those of the classic fablers." M Folklore
and romance motifs are justified by the new emotionalist theory of
poetic effect, not by medievalism, if we mean by that sympathy for
the Middle Ages. Percy was the first real student of medieval ro-
mances in England, and he tried laboriously to find traces of clas-
sical composition in one romance of the Gawain cycle, Libius Dis-
conius. Later in the century romances began to be studied seri-
ously by Thomas Warton and Joseph Ritson: but even they treated
them largely as pictures of manners, as documents, and at most as
occasions for speculations on the migrations of folklore themes.
Did these come from the Orient through the Arabs, or from Brit-
tany or Wales or Scandinavia, or did they arise independently in
all countries? 6
The iSth-ccntury decline of interest in conventional epic theory
is also reflected by a growing interest in the novel as an art form.
The novel labored under the suspicion of being a mere waste of
time, a frivolous and even pernicious amusement. Many critics are
definitely embarrassed in dealing with it. Hurd calls novels "hasty,
imperfect, and abortive poems." 67 Henry Fielding, as a practicing
novelist, tried to combat this attitude by arguing that the novel is
an epic in prose. Tom Jones closely parodies devices and proce-
dures of the Homeric convention. Fielding's excellent plotting and
Richardson's sentimental morality helped to raise the novel in
critical consideration. Late in the century Blair, Beattie, Mrs.
Clara Reeve, and John Moore sketched its history and showed
its continuity with the romances. 58 Classical epic theory more and
more became a purely academic subject.
Similar shifts can be observed during the period in the theory
of lyrical poetry. In neoclassical theory the lyric itself had excited
little attention. Bacon and Hobbes, who considered plot as central
for poetry, excluded the lyric completely: generally it was rated
among the minor genres. Yet the great ode, because of its elevation
of style and solemn subject matter, was classed among the higher
THE MINOR ENGLISH CRITICS 133
genres. In England Dryden's Alexander's Feast was admired as the
height ot the sublime. The Pindaric ode, in practice a vehicle for
frigid and stilted rhetoric, became in theory the focus of many new
ideas. The ode was declared the oldest and most primitive genre
of poetry, for it was thought to preserve its original characteristics:
lively metaphorical language, deep feeling, pathos, rapture, a loose
composition, and a musical verse. In Collins and Gray the ode
assumes central place. Joseph Warton thought Gray's "Bard" truly
sublime, superior to anything in Pope. 60 Gray tried in his odes to
recapture the "oriental," elevated, sublime, metaphorical style
which was supposed to be nearest to the language of the heart and
thus to the poetry of unspoiled natural man. Figurative language,
which had always been recognized as particularly poetic, was newly
recommended by the belief that it was the original language of
man and the sign of a fiery imagination. 60 Lowth's De sacra poesi
Hebraeorum (1753) is a repertory of illustrations drawn from the
Bible. Daniel Webb tried to explain why imagery is the language
of passion, suggesting that imagination is literally heated with the
animal spirits. He commented at length and with considerable
subtlety on Shakespeare's similes, metaphors, and figures. 61 The
shift of emphasis to the expression of feeling in poetry and the
growing interest in world-wide folk poetry brought about at last,
late in the century, a definite dethronement of the drama and epic
in favor of the lyric. Sir William Jones, the distinguished oriental-
ist, repudiated imitation precisely because poetry was to him
mainly lyrical poetry. "The finest parts of poetry, music and paint-
ing, are expressive of the passions, and operate on our minds by
sympathy. The inferior parts of them are descriptive of natural
objects, and affect us chiefly by substitution." 62 Jones was an ex-
ception in England: no English writer went to the lengths of
Herder or Leopardi in installing the lyric as the center of poetry.
Still, a great revolution in the concept of poetry was prepared in
the second half of the century: feeling in neoclassical theory had
often been perhaps somewhat less than feeling, in that it was
broadly generalized and its character fully prescribed. But feeling
was soon to be translated into personal emotion, "sincerity," even
autobiographical confession. In England this view was completely
victorious only in the igth century. During the i8th century meta-
phor, which had always been the proper ornament of a poem, be-
124 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
came its central principle, and vividness and particularity replaced
generality as the main demand made on poetry. The emotional
effect which had always been the aim of rhetoric and of some
poetry became, under the influence of sentimentalism, the sine
qua non of all poetry, even of all literature. Romantic subjectivism
was only a step away.
The shift to the emotionalist conception of poetry was generally
European, as Diderot and Herder testify. But the new historicism
was at first mainly an English contribution, though it was later
developed more fully by the Germans. It was no accident that the
new historicism arose in England, where modern aesthetics also
first arose. Aesthetics meant a turn to individuality, to the concrete
response of the individual: it prepared the way to a true under-
standing of history, not as something dead and schematic, but as a
living process. This new historicism first gave increasing attention
to the setting and conditions of poetry. It amounted to a plea
(which had many precedents) that we can "never completely relish,
or adequately understand, any author, especially any ancient, ex-
cept we constantly keep in our eye, his climate, his country and his
age." *" This is not, as is often asserted, the historical method in
the full meaning of the word. This only intensifies the classical
recommendation of a proper regard for decorum and circum-
stance. But a natural consequence of this awareness of the influ-
ence of environment was an increased skepticism as to the perma-
nence of critical standards. Goldsmith, for instance, demanded
that "English taste, like English liberty should be restrained only
by laws of its own promoting." Criticism must "understand the
nature of the climate and country &c. before it gives rules to direct
taste. In other words, every country should have a national system
of criticism." 64 Such broadmindedness led to greater and greater
tolerance for different types of art and finally, in the igth century,
to a paralyzing relativism.
The emphasis on environment became especially significant
when the "manners" which determine a work of art were analyzed
in detail. At first the most remote explanation was the most widely
favored. Sir William Temple's theory about the connection be-
tween the variable English weather and the odd humor of English-
men 65 was one of the earliest instances of the explanation of litera-
ture by climatic conditions. Later the older idea that poetry
THE MINOR ENGLISH CRITICS 125
especially highly imaginative poetry flourished best in the South
received a rude shock from the "discovery" of the northerner
Ossian. Gray admitted that "imagination dwelt many hundred
years ago in all her pomp on the cold and barren mountains of
Scotland" and thus could not be the result of heat. 68 But Hume
and Kames became quite skeptical of the whole business of ex-
plaining poetry by climatic conditions. 67
The climate theory becomes much more acceptable when it is
reinterpreted to include geographical conditions. Bishop Lowth's
De sacra poesi Plebraeoium tried to explain the particular char-
acter of Hebrew poetry by the influence of the surrounding ob-
jects of nature: he traces Palestinian landscape in the imagery of
the Bible. Robert Wood traveled in the Near East and, in An
Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer (1769),
studied the topography of the site of Troy, concluding that Homer
was "the most constant and faithful copier after nature." 68
Political conditions too were invoked to explain literature. The
ancient association of liberty and letters was firmly implanted in
the minds of Englishmen during their own Glorious Revolution.
In the later i8th century Kames observes that "taste could not long
flourish in a despotic government." 69 The whole time is full of
unfavorable comparisons between Italy, Spain and France, and
free England in respect to all aspects of civilization, including
literature. Yet Hume and a few others saw that the simple equa-
tion of liberty and letters is refuted by history. The greatness of
the ages of Louis XIV or Leo X can hardly be ascribed to free-
dom. 70
But mostly the history of literature was explained by a theory
which is usually, though somewhat misleadingly, called "primi-
tivisin." It assumes that "simple manners foster poetry," that po-
etry thus flourished best in early societies and that it has since
inevitably declined. The conception of this simple society varies
considerably with individual authors. Among writers in English,
Blackwell's book on Homer (1735) was the fountainhead of the
view that Homer was a primitive bard, but Blackwell suggested
that Homer's society was not at all savage but rather in a state of
transition, when manners were passing from the stage of rude-
ness to the polite stage. 71 This golden moment of the emergence
of man from the primitive was found by others in the Elizabethan
126 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
age. Kurd's dialogue "On the Golden Age of Queen Elizabeth"
(1759) describes it in these terms, and Thomas Warton takes over
Hurd's ideas. The defenders of Ossian were naturally more en-
thusiastic about more primitive times. Blair thought that the
"times which we call barbarous are most favorable to the poetical
spirit," and that "imagination is most glowing and animated in
the first ages of society." 72 William Duff, another Scottish enthu-
siast for Ossian and Homer, went to greater extremes in praising
the "early and uncultivated periods of society" as "peculiarly fa-
vorable to the display of original poetical genius." 7S Robert Wood,
in trying to account for the greatness of Homer, drew upon his
observations in North Africa to offer Arab society as an analogy
for the Homeric.
What is most striking to a modern observer is the complete con-
fusion about the states of society supposed to be primitive. The
early stages of Greek civilization, the society depicted in the Old
Testament, contemporary Arabian society, the feudal Middle
Ages, and the dim time in which Ossian was supposed to have
lived are all considered the same. This sociological simplification is
matched by the crudity of the iSth-century dichotomy between
natural poetry and art poetry. This contrast dates back to the
Renaissance, but only in the i8th century was natural poetry iden-
tified with a universal folk poetry in which everything which de-
viates from the Latin-French tradition was lumped together: the
Bible, Homer, Ossian, the Welsh bards, the few Lapland and In-
dian songs known at the time, the Scottish ballads, and even
chivalric romances. Thomas Percy seems to have been the first to
entertain the explicit conception of primitive poetry as a whole.
He planned a collection of Specimens of the Ancient Poetry of
Different Nations, and his lifework consisted in various attempts
to carry out this plan. His translations from the Chinese and from
Runic poetry, his paraphrase of the Song of Songs as a "sample of
Hebrew poetry," his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765),
which contains not only ballads but many Elizabethan lyrics and
scenes from Shakespeare, his specimens of "Moorish" romances,
his transcriptions of chivalric romances, and the planned edition
of Surrey 74 all point to this conception of a substantial identity
of primitive poetry. His dissertations on the Ancient English
Minstrels, the Origin of the English Stage, and the Ancient Met-
THE MINOR ENGLISH CRITICS 127
rical Romances are all contributions to a history of such poetry,
however halfhearted and cautious his own taste remained and how-
ever apologetic he felt toward his work. 78
The same conception underlies Gray's antiquarian and critical
activity. Gray planned a history of English poetry which would
have provided a wide background in primitive poetry. Gaelic
(Welsh and possibly Erse) and Gothic (Scandinavian and Anglo-
Saxon) poetry was to be discussed at length. 78 Gray was rather an
antiquary than a critic. He studied the history of versification
closely and tried to show that rhyme came from the Welsh, though
later he suggested that it "might begin among the common people,
and be applied only to the meaner species of poetry." 77 He made
some attempt to set parts of his history down on paper. We have a
descriptive piece on Lydgate and another on Samuel Daniel, but
the whole remained only a plan. 78 Gray pronounced often on his
reading and made many criticisms of the poetry of his friends in
his fine letters, yet he knew that he was not a critic. "You know I
do not love, much less pique myself on criticism and think even
a bad verse as good a thing or better, than the best observation, that
ever was made upon it." 79
But if poetry was originally primitive, some attempt had to be
made to account for its evolution. Most writers assumed a process
of inevitable decline of imagination with the growth of civiliza-
tion. John Brown attempted quite systematically to give a "con-
jectural" history of poetry in his Dissertation on the Rise, Union
and Power, the Progressions, Separations and Corruptions of
Poetry and Music (1763). Brown collects examples for primitive
poetry from all over the world, from Greece, Ossianic Scotland,
Bardic Ireland, Scaldic Iceland, Peru, India, China, and America.
Among all nations, Brown declares, there obtained an original
"union of song, dance and poetry." Verse came before prose be-
cause the "natural passion for melody and dance throws necessarily
the accompanying song into a correspondent rhythm." With the
advance of civilization the arts break up into their several kinds.
At first they "lie confused, in a sort of undistinguished mass,
mingled in the same composition." The original union of poet,
musician, and legislator would, however, dissolve, and the in-
dividual arts arise. Poetry would at first be the confusion of all
genres, a "rapturous mixture of hymn, history, fable and mythol-
128 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
ogy." Then the individual kinds would arise: first lyrical poetry,
odes and hymns, because ''these in their simple stage, are but a kind
of rapturous exclamations of joy, grief, triumph, or exultation."
Then the epic would come, and finally the drama. The later proc-
ess is again one of fission, specialization, and, in Brown's eyes, de-
generation caused by the general corruption of manners. Obviously
Brown derives his history of the genres from the study of Greek
poetry, from the sequence of Orphic hymns, Homeric epics, and
Attic tragedies. But he looks for confirmation elsewhere and tries
to fit Hebrew poetry and Ossian into the same scheme. The Renais-
sance must be condemned on Brown's terms. During that period
the three greater kinds of poetry were divorced from music: trag-
edy became ''the languid amusement of the closet," odes were writ-
ten "that cannot be sung," epics which can now only be read
and not recited. The whole history of poetry appears as a single
process of disintegration and a gradual dissolution of the original
ideal union of the arts. Brown himself hoped to reverse the course
of events and therefore traced the several modern attempts to re-
unite poetry and music: the song, the opera, the motet, and the
oratorio. But he condemns them all as imperfect and sees hope only
in odes in the style of Dryden, with musical accompaniment, sup-
plying a dreary example of such an ode himself. 80
Brown's scheme, certainly influenced by Rousseau, was varied
by many other writers of the time: for instance, Adam Ferguson,
who in an Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) described
the history of literature as a progressive division of labor. Brown
and Ferguson with their speculative schemes anticipate the evolu-
tionary historians of the igth century, Brunetiere and John Ad-
dington Symonds. But their concrete knowledge of literary history
was weak. While grasping evolution and change in relation to so-
ciety, they lost all hold on individuality. Literature is handled by
them as a mass seen from afar, an almost anonymous lump.
Similar schemes also underlie the works of the best practical
critics of the time: the Wartons and Richard Hurd. Joseph War-
ton's Essay on Pope (1756, 1782) combines a theory of history which
assumes a decline of imagination into prose, with a parallel theory
of genres and a classification of human faculties. Warton has a
strong feeling that poetry must and cannot help but express the
real sentiments of an age, and that it must be personally, even
THE MINOR ENGLISH CRITICS 1 29
autobiographically, sincere. He thus thinks that Pope could not
have written an epic or that his projected Brutus would have been
a failure because Pope is "disqualified for representing the ages of
heroism, and that simple life, which alone epic poetry can grace-
fully describe." Modern poets in general are handicapped by the
unheroic age in which they live and would do better to "treat of
things, not men," to "deliver doctrines, not display events." 81
Didactic and descriptive poetry is justified as a necessity of the
time, as a result of the necessary decline of imagination. Pope is
the poet of a late prosaic time, though he is unsurpassed in the
kind of poetry now possible. This historical scheme presupposes
a ranking of poetry according to the faculty to which it is ad-
dressed and by which it is presumably produced, and a hierarchy of
genres which basically is the ancient one, exalting epic and trag-
edy. The greatest English poets are Shakespeare, Milton, and
Spenser, because they wrote tragedies and epics, are sublime and
pathetic, and appeal to the heroic and imaginative in man. "The
sublime and the pathetic are the two chief nerves of all genuine
poesy." Pope belongs to a second class of poets, the "men of wit
and sense." "What is there transcenden tally sublime and pathetic
in Pope?" asks Warton, and his answer is almost entirely in the
negative. Eloisa to Abelard and the Elegy to the Memory of an
Unfortunate Lady are praised as pathetic; but on the whole, War-
ton argues, Pope's "grand characteristical talent is satiric or moral
poetry," and "wit and satire are transitory and perishable, but
nature and passion are eternal." Pope's admirers must be content
to consider him "the great poet of reason, the first of ethical au-
thors in verse." 82 Warton is far from disparaging Pope: one could
argue that it is hardly possible to give him a higher rank, just
below the greatest. Still, the general effect of the book was to
widen the gulf between the poet of imagination and the poet of
sense, between what Warton calls (very differently from our use)
"pure poetry" and satirical and moral poetry. The whole book
constitutes a defense and reassertion of Warton's early preface to
his own Odes (1746). There he complained that the fashion of
"moralizing in verse has been carried too far," and he announced
that "invention and imagination are the chief faculties of a poet"
and that the Odes are "an attempt to bring back poetry into its
right channel." 88 Warton, like John Brown, did not worry over
A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
the fact that, according to his own concept of history, his attempt
was foredoomed to failure.
Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance is based on an iden-
tical historical scheme. Like Warton, Hurd is far from subverting
the accepted hierarchy of genres, as is obvious from his other writ-
ings, e.g., his "Dissertation on the Provinces of the Drama" (1753).
He is firmly neoclassical in his treatment of imitation and kinds,
and by temperament he is more systematic and scholastic than his
close associates. Yet the Letters fit the defense of Spenser, Ariosto,
and Tasso into the new historical scheme: the decline of imagina-
tion with the growth of civilization. "What we have gotten by this
revolution ... is a great deal of good sense. . . . What we have
lost, is a world of fine fabling." 8 * Hurd somewhat nostalgically
looks back into the poetical past, but he does not, and on his prin-
ciples cannot, advocate a return to it. He wants to extend the
range of feeling, to justify his own intense admiration for Spenser
and his Italian models. He closely paraphrases Joseph Warton
when he makes the contrast between "the greater, and what may
be called pure poetry" of Spenser and Milton and the "humbler
sorts of poetry, chiefly satiric and ethic" of Dryden and Pope. 85
Bishop Hurd is a man of his age, proud of its accomplishments and
progress, but at the same time he deplores the decay of imagina-
tion and would like to restore the appreciation of the "romantic"
Italian poets. Like many in his time he could not escape an unrecon-
ciled dualism between head and heart. He wrote much criticism
which accepts the reigning system and he never ceased to enjoy and
admire Dryden and Pope, but on the other hand he recognized
something which eluded the system: a greater imaginative poetry
in the past.
Hurd influenced Thomas Warton, whose History of English
Poetry (1774-81) could be described as an exemplification of the
same historical scheme and of the same division in the mind of
its author. It has some unique merits: it is the first history of Eng-
lish literature of any scope and it combines historical sense with
a critical regard for the individual work, at least in theory and
ambition. Warton was somewhat overwhelmed by his materials,
floundering in a mass of quotations from manuscripts, out-of-the-
way books, and information on bibliography and biography. His
History is loosely organized. Yet it has a basic scheme and concep-
tion which is the best elaboration of the double allegiance we have
THE MINOR ENGLISH CRITICS 131
described in his brother and in Hurd. Warton believes in progress,
from "rudeness to elegance." He asserts that we "look back on
the savage conditions of our ancestors" with a "triumph of su-
periority." 86 He constantly traces an advance in versification
toward the ideal of regularity of his own time. He disparages the
grotesque, the fantastic, and the tasteless, and deplores the ab-
sence in older times of canons of composition, correctness, selec-
tion, and discrimination." There was thus no insincerity or later
conversion in Warton's "Verses on Sir Joshua's Painted Window
at New College," written in the year (1782) after publication of
the third volume of the History. Warton sings of being brought
"back to truth again,"
To truth, by no peculiar taste confined,
Whose universal pattern strikes mankind:
To truth, whose bold and unresisted aim
Checks frail caprice, and fashion's fickle claim. 88
But, side by side with this belief in progress and universal truth
(a progress toward the universal truth of classicism), Warton had
a genuine taste for the curious and wild, the strange and imagina-
tive, the Gothic and extravagant. His admiration for Chaucer, the
Scottish Chaucerians, much in the chivalric romances, Dante (with
some reservations), Spenser, and Milton's minor poems was genu-
ine and deep. Believing in progress, he accepts the view of the de-
cline of imagination since the early stages of society. "Ignorance
and superstition, so opposite to the real interests of human society,
are the parents of imagination." Echoing Hurd's Letters, Warton
recognized that the modern world had gained "much good sense,
good taste, and good criticism." "But, in the mean time, we have
lost a set of manners, and a system of machinery, more suitable to
the purposes of poetry than those which have been adopted in their
place. We have parted with extravagancies that are above pro-
priety, with incredibilities that are more acceptable than truth,
and with fictions that are more valuable than reality." 89 War-
ton did not really prefer fiction to reality, but he wanted to ar-
gue as Hurd had done that a certain kind of fiction is more valu-
able than reality for the uses of poetry. He shared his brother's
and Hurd's regret that chivalry and folk mythology could not be
used by modern poets because they no longer carried conviction.
This double point of view allows Warton a glorification of the
132 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
ag e of Queen Elizabeth as the age which successfully combined
imagination and reason. Despite the degree of civilization that
age enjoyed, there was still alive a "degree of superstition sufficient
for the purposes of poetry, and the adoption of the machineries of
romance/' 90 Criticism did not yet restrain imagination, satire did
not curb the flights of fancy, science had not yet blighted all illu-
sions.
In Warton's view English poetry (and presumably all poetry)
passed through three stages: imagination, imagination and reason
synthesized, and judgment and correctness, which seemed to him
beneficial from the point of view of the social advance of human-
ity even though it might spell death to imagination and poetry.
Still Warton had not lost hope for poetry. In spite of his rigid
scheme with its fear of a further decline in imagination as a result
of the further growth of civilization, he hoped that the process
might be reversed. He looked upon the contemporary Miltonic
revival as a "visible revolution," an attempt to reintroduce "fiction
and fancy, picturesque description, and romantic imagery" with-
out sacrificing the "selection and discrimination, address and
judgment" which seemed to him the gains of modernity. 91 Some-
what uneasily Warton and his associates kept a double point of
view: trust in the progress of modern civilization and even of
modern good taste, and yet regret for the "world of fine fabling."
Only on the Continent, in the German Sturm und Drang, were
the consequences understood and the compromise rejected. From a
present-day point of view, however, the English compromise will
appear not without its attraction or even rational justification. It
is animated by a truly historical spirit of tolerance and a recogni-
tion of the impossibility of a return to the conditions which pro-
duced early poetry. In a different situation and in different terms
we are apt to share this compromise today. Our historicism, which
countenances the most diverse kinds of art, from prehistoric cave
paintings to Picasso, from Homer to Eliot, from plain chant to
Stravinsky, is an all-embracing eclecticism. It has the same implica-
tions of sterility which we feel in the antiquarian critics of the i8th
century. Today they rightly elicit great sympathy and interest, for
they represent the beginnings of an attitude which seems to have
become almost universal in the academic world of our time.
;: ITALIAN CRITICISM
ITALY plays a large and significant part in the history of criticism:
in the Renaissance, in the early i8th century, and again later in the
igth (De Sanctis) and early 2Oth century (Croce). But in the later
i8th century its role seems to be comparatively minor.
Gian Vincenzo Gravina's Delia ragion poetica (1708) is one of
the best formulations of the neoclassical doctrine. Poetry is truth
disguised in a popular semblance, a science in which the abstract
is expressed in concrete form. "Poetry is a sorcerer, but a salutary
one, and a delirium which dissipates our follies.'* x Gravina op-
posed slavish adherence to the rules and deplored the extreme in-
tellectualism of some of the French Cartesians. In an early piece,
Discorso sopra V Endimione (1691), he even pronounced against the
concept of genre, though later he wrote on the theory of tragedy.*
On the whole it is difficult to see how he could have been hailed
as a forerunner of romanticism. He was a jurist, basically a ration-
alist, who saw in the poet a man who gives body to concepts and
uses the sweetness of song to civilize men. 2
His contemporaries, such as the learned scholar Ludovico An-
tonio Muratori (1672-1750), belong roughly to the same tradition,
which attempted to revive Renaissance poetics after what seemed
to them the aberrations of the baroque. They talk about good
taste as did the French, defend the marvelous, and uphold imagi-
nation: i.e., the power of invention, the right of fiction, of visual
representation, of making the improbable probable positions
* "Discorso sopra I'Endimione di Alessandro Guidi," in Prose, pp.
249 ff., esp. pp. 260-1. Croce, in Estetica, Eng. trans., pp. 444-5, and
M. Fubini, "Genesi e storia dei generi letterari," in Tecnica e teoria
letteraria, ed. A. Momigliano (Milan, 1948), pp. 189 ff., make much of
this passage, but it seems to me little more than a plea for exceptions
and novelty. Later, Gravina wrote "Delia tragedia" (1715), Prose,
pp. 150 ff., without qualms.
133
Ig4 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
which had been defended by all good neoclassicists. They hardly
differed from the more liberal defenders of the neoclassical creed
abroad and they did not exercise a distinct influence outside of
Italy. The one very tenuous contact was the reception given to
Pietro di Calepio by Bodmer, the Swiss critic, for his little treatise,
Paragone della poesia tragica d 'Italia con quella di Francia (1732).
Calepio anticipated some of Lessing's arguments against the
French stage, not appealing, of course, to romantic freedom, but to
the text and true meaning of Aristotle against the French rules. 8
But while the neoclassical tradition was re-established in Italy,
there lived and wrote in Naples a philosopher, Giambattista Vico
(1668-1744), who expounded a very different concept of poetry and
literary history in his Scienza nuova (1725). Poetry is resolutely
opposed to the intellect, associated with the senses, identified with
imagination and myth. Poets belong to the early heroic ages of
mankind when people spoke a language of metaphor, of real signs.
Vico, apparently for the first time, taught that poetry is a necessity
of nature, the first operation of the human mind. 4 Homer, who
is only a name for the Greek nation telling its history in song, and
Dante, the Homer of the new barbarism of the Middle Ages, are
the representatives of the poetic ages, while modern times can only
produce rhetoricians, literati, philosophers. 6 Nature, not art
imagination, not reason seems to sum up Vice's theory.
This astonishingly novel and radical concept of poetry and its
history is intricately woven into a stupendous speculative scheme
of a philosophy of history and mankind: its significance was not
recognized until Benedetto Croce expounded it in his Estetica
(1902). Croce, who sees in Vico his immediate spiritual ancestor
and the founder of aesthetics, emphasizes what he considers the
fruitful motifs and consistently minimizes or ignores other ele-
ments which make Vico's doctrines far less clear-cut than they
appear in his brilliant exposition. 6 Vico was actually unable to
distinguish between poetry and myth, and his "poetic wisdom" is
not Croce's intuition but simply inferior knowledge. In practice,
his conception of poetry is not so distant from that of his com-
patriot Gravina as it would appear. "Fantastic truth" is an inferior
kind of truth available to primitive societies, and poetry is by no
means autonomous but was the main educative force leading men
out of barbarism. 7
ITALIAN CRITICISM 135
Granting the Crocean interpretation, one may still have one's
doubts as to whether the complete divorce of poetry from the in-
tellect and the identification of poetry with language are such
merits. One must accept Croce's own system to see in Vico the
founder of aesthetics. To a non-Crocean Vico is rather a philoso-
pher of history, even a sociologist who attempts to construct a
scheme of historical evolution. His grasp of concrete literature
seems weak: Homer and Dante are treated only as symbols for the
heroic ages he was studying. Vice's interpretation of Dante, which
brushed aside theology and allegory and saw the sublimity of
his imagination, was, while limited and debatable, Vico's most im-
portant insight into a work of art. 8
In discussing Vico in a history of criticism, we cannot ignore
the fact that he had little recognition or influence in his own cen-
tury. 9 This surely does not lessen his greatness, yet it does lessen his
historical role. There are some echoes of Vico in Italian i8th-
century criticism, but they are faint and never show any grasp
of his revolutionary importance. The attempts to prove his influ-
ence in France, England, and Germany during the i8th century,
especially in aesthetics, have all failed. There is not a shred of
evidence that he was read by any Englishman before Coleridge,
who was lent a copy of Scienza nuova by Dr. Prati in i825. 10 Yet
even Coleridge did not see his full significance for aesthetics and
literary theory. There seems to be no evidence that Condillac or
Rousseau could have drawn directly on Vico. In Germany Vico's
influence also comes very late: Hamann ordered a copy of the
Scienza nuova in 1777, when his ideas had all been formulated.
Goethe got a copy in Naples in 1787 but seems not to have read
it. Herder vaguely refers to Vico as late as 1797 and 1800 as a "very
sensible philosopher of humanity." " No argument or proof can be
produced that Vico was understood abroad in his century: his diffi-
cult, crabbed style, the obscure plan, and the whole air of 17th-
century obsolete erudition were forbidding.
The similarities which can be found between Vico's teachings
and those of several contemporaries must be explained by common
antecedents and by a common situation. Nobody reproduced the
peculiar pattern of his thought, but individual ideas, which seem
characteristically Vichian, were well known before. The distinc-
tion between the poetry of art and the poetry of nature goes back
136 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
to the Renaissance. It is, for instance, fully elaborated in Francesco
Patrizzi's La deca disputata (1586). Puttenham and Samuel Daniel
assume it and it was constantly debated in the i7th century. Fonte-
nelle's Traite de la podsie en generate is an exact counterpart to
Vico's historical scheme, though with opposite evaluation. Fonte-
nelle hails the end of the age of * 'fabulous and material images,"
the end of inspiration and talent, and hopes for a future poetry
of the intellect. 12 Vico's conception of Homer, which completely
dissolves his personality, is not paralleled elsewhere; still, the idea
of Homer as a primitive poet has its sources in antiquity and was
commonplace enough at that time for Englishmen, such as Richard
Bentley and Henry Felton, to refer in 1713 to Homer's "loose
songs M and "strings of ballads/' 1S Vico's influence on aesthetics and
criticism in the i8th century was nonexistent.
Italian criticism of the second half of the i8th century must be
described as largely derivative, not so much from its own tradition
as from the French and English criticism of the time. Whenever it
emancipates itself from the doctrines of Gravina, it does so only
to absorb the ideas of English empiricism and French sensualism.
Late in the century the German revival of neo-Platonic aesthetics,
by Winckelmann and the painter Rafael Mengs, began also to
affect Italy.
The most prominent poets of the second half of the century,
Parini and Alfieri, are of little importance as critics. Giuseppe
Parini gave the lectures Dei principi delle belle lettere (1773-75),
echoing the commonplaces of the time: good sense and reason,
pleasure and taste, the motivation of poetry in boredom, its end
in moral elevation and social utility, its means as touching and
moving the reader. Parini was apparently one of the first Italians
to abandon rationalism, to appeal to the pleasure principle and
sensuous impression, and to speak of sincere emotion. But that
was news only in Italy. Basically Parini was still a moralist who
believed in "the natural sentiment of men, common to all and not
subject to any change." 14
Vittorio Alfieri, the great tragedian, propounded views on the
role of literature which are hardly very new yet are surprising for
their fervent tone and almost prophetic rapture. Del principe e
delle lettere (1788) is really a dithyramb or diatribe (one is not sure
which) in favor of the old identification of liberty and letters. Al-
ITALIAN CRITICISM 137
fieri contrasts the Prince, the ruler, with the man of letters, and
wants no dealings whatever between them. Any court literature,
any acceptance of patronage, any subservience to authority is
treason, "la trahison dcs clercs," as we would say with Julien
Benda. Alfieri reviews the history of literature from this single
point of view: Virgil, Horace, Tasso, Ariosto, and Racine all had
patrons and were thus corrupt; only Dante (and, we understand,
Alfieri) were really and totally free. Alfieri's glorification of the
passionate genius, of natural impulse, seems to have romantic
overtones, but actually it is rather the survival of aristocratic pride,
humanist aloofness, a last hymn to the vainglory of the vates thirst-
ing for eternal fame. 15
The more professional poetics and criticism of the time were
largely traditional or variations of the new empirical theories.
Thus Cesare Bcccaria's Riccrche intorno alia natura dello stile
(1770) is based on the view that all our ideas are derived from
sensations, and that therefore the best style will be the one which
evokes the most pleasurable sensation. 16 It is an argument in favor
of a vivid concrete style and against the abstract rhetorical tradi-
tion inherited from the Renaissance. The opposite tendency
toward an aesthetics ot the ideal was revived late in the century
largely by theoreticians of the fine arts such as Milizia, who was
under the influence of Winckelmann and Mengs. A little known
Abb, Giuseppe Spalletti, presented in a small Saggio sopra la bel-
Iczza (1765) a version of the theory of ideal beauty, but admitted, in
a subordinate position, the ' 'characteristic," the peculiar, the indi-
vidual. 17 The term "characteristic/' known since Shaftesbury,
found much favor in Germany with Sulzer (who seems to have
picked it up from Spalletti), Hirth, Heinrich Meyer, Goethe, and
finally with Friedrich Schlegel and Hazlitt. Bosanquet even calls
it "the central idea of modern aesthetic," 18 though in itself it
seems only a new term for the main problem of imitation.
The same struggle between the old classicism and the new em-
piricism can be illustrated in the practical criticism of the time.
The literary polemics reflect, as everywhere, the emergence of a
new taste. Saverio Bettinelli, in his Lettere virgiliane (1757), criti-
cized Dante according to the taste and general arguments of Vol-
taire. The Divine Comedy is a poem "without action, of goings
and comings," full of bad taste, with a few fine passages. 19 Virgil,
138 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
Petrarch, and Racine are his heroes: a new modern literature is
to emerge free from what Bettinelli considered the dead hand of
the past. Gasparo Gozzi's Difesa di Dante (1758) rehearses the argu-
ments for Dante's sublimity, for his "gallery of pictures," and tries
to find the unity of the poem in the person of the poet: if the
Commedia had been called Danteide, the neoclassical conscious-
ness of Gozzi would have been satisfied. 20 The Difesa is no revolu-
tionary document: it seems characteristic that Pope's Essay on Criti-
cism appears in Italian translation as an appendix.
Only two critics stand out as real personalities and innovators:
Melchiorre Cesarotti and Giuseppe Baretti. Cesarotti (1730-1808)
has been called the Italian Herder, and at first sight his position
is not dissimilar. Cesarotti translated, or rather adapted, Ossian in
Italian unrhymed verse, which recently has again found fervent
admirers. 21 A letter Cesarotti wrote to Macpherson shows his pref-
erence for the "poetry of nature and sentiment" over the "poetry
of reflection and mind." 22 The notes to Ossian praise him as a
genius of wild nature and quote Vico that "rough and passionate
men singularize and speak by sentiments," calling this the most
essential quality of poetic language. 23 Like Herder, Cesarotti was
acutely conscious of the diversities of national taste and the need
for a philosophical history of literature.
But actually Cesarotti is not comparable to Herder, either in
range or achievement or for his historical position. Though his
translation of Ossian shows a new sensibility, Cesarotti never broke
with the basic iSth-century concepts of poetry. He remained a man
of the Enlightenment, similar in outlook to the Scots and English
who prepare the way for Herder Blair, Percy, Warton. He was
not so much of a primitivist as Blair was in his praise of Ossian.
Even the taste for Ossian is a taste for the civilized, the refined and
delicate, which Cesarotti was delighted to find in the midst of
barbarism. Though he had his misgivings about the complete au-
thenticity of Macpherson's version, he could prefer Ossian to
Homer, asserting that Homer is inferior to Ossian in humanity. 24
Cesarotti's own adaptation of the Iliad, La morte di Ettore (1789-
94), is quite rationalistic and moralistic. Helen voices remorse
for her betrayal of Menelaus, Hector is punished for his conniv-
ance at the passion of his brother Paris. Cesarotti was an anti-Greek
modernist of some violence and even rancor. Though or perhaps
ITALIAN CRITICISM 1 39
because he was a professor of Greek and lectured extensively on
the literature, he pronounces Lucian the only Greek author worth
translation in extenso, and he has nothing but contempt for Greek
philosophy. 25
Cesarotti was not a primitivist and had no feeling for folk
poetry, but he admired and liked the pathetic, the grandly emo-
tional. Metastasio seems to him the greatest poet, and late in his
life he was highly impressed, though deeply disturbed, by Foscolo's
Jacopo Ortis. Dante is chaotic, English tragedy irregular and
sanguinary. 27 There is no contradiction between his translating
three of Voltaire's tragedies and Ossian and his admiring Metas-
tasio. They are all pathetic.
In his literary theories Cesarotti was likewise unusual only in the
Italian context. Substantially he holds the views of Gravina, whom
he praised fervently and often. 28 He rejects Vico's view of Homer,
recognizing that in Vico primitive poetry is the "natural speech of
men" and that his Homer is not that of the ancient and modern
masters at all. 29 Similarly, late in his life he argued against the
Wolfian theories oi Homeric origins.
In an acute essay on the theory of tragedy, Ragionamento sopra
il diletto della tragedia (1762), Cesarotti criticizes Dubos and
Hume as well as Aristotle. Tragedy, he argues, causes real emotion
and intermittently complete illusion. The fact that we know the
events are unreal can only decrease our feeling of horror and pain
but cannot change them into delight. The good effect of tragedy
comes only from its moral, its plot. We seek it out because it is a
"mirror of our dangers." 30 Cesarotti remained unsatisfied with the
current psychological discussion which ignored the plot of tragedy
and argued on the pleasure-pain principle. Though he violently
disparages purgation and Aristotle's Poetics, he is more of an Aris-
totelian than he knew.
Cesarotti has other merits: his Saggio sulla filosofia delle lingue
(1785) gives a liberal interpretation of linguistic change sorely
needed in an Italy still worshiping archaic imitation for its own
sake. In Saggio sulla filosofia del gusto (1785) Cesarotti impres-
sively formulates the requirements of good taste: "a harmonized
ear, an awakened fancy, a heart ready to respond with an instan-
taneous tremor to the smallest vibrations of sentiment, a readiness
to transport oneself into the situation of the author, a quickness in
140 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
seizing hidden signs and elusive flashes of expression," all of which
he wants to see combined with discipline and knowledge and a
"spirit superior to the miserable prejudices of the age, the nation,
and the school." 81 There is merit also in the posthumous Saggio
sul bello (1809), which shows in its scholastic classifications the new
taste for the sublime and the terrible. Demosthenes, Tacitus, Bos-
suet, and Ossian are the examples of the grand and pathetic: 32 an
incongruous list to our minds but congenial to the emotional eclec-
ticism of the time.
Though Cesarotti's merits in a history of Italian criticism are
high, he cannot be ranked among the great in the general Euro-
pean context. He was no genuine innovator or synthesizer but a
man of compromise, of the middle road, and such men, however
sensible, are never long remembered.
The one Italian critic of the later i8th century who is known,
even today, in the English-speaking world is Giuseppe Baretti
(1719-89). His long and close association with Dr. Johnson, his
many compilations useful for the study of Italian language and
literature (dictionaries and anthologies) make his name familiar to
students of the i8th century. But few realize that Baretti has ac-
quired or regained a great Italian reputation, largely for his peri-
odical La frusta letteraria (The Literary Whip, 1763-65). He is
at present being praised as "the critic," the critic of genius, and
is newly edited, reprinted, anthologized, and much debated. Un-
doubtedly Baretti, in his Italian context, has great historical mer-
its: he attacked, with satirical skill and moral fervor, the ruling
literary and poetic fashions of the time Arcadian pastoral poetry
and its mummery, the orotund bookish prose derived from the imi-
tation of Boccaccio, the pedantic inert learning of the academi-
cians and Jesuits, the whole Italian literary decadence. His stand-
ards, though rarely formulated theoretically, are always those of
"life," of common sense, utility, simplicity, truth, good morals.
At his best Baretti was a writer of power and edge: he had a popu-
lar journalist's feeling for the urgent and useful; he had a gift for
grotesque, racy, ebullient language. He created, in the wake of
the English periodicals modeled on the Spectator, a fictional
speaker, the rough soldier Aristarco Scannabue, behind whose
mask he could speak his mind freely and frankly. His methods are
ITALIAN CRITICISM 141
those of a constant appeal to common sense, clarity, and simplicity.
He takes a piece of conventional poetry and subjects it to question-
ing: how is it that the year is old and "white-haired" in December,
presumably because it snows, while in January it is in its childhood
though snow is still falling? 83 What is all this fuss about "laugh-
ing roses of sweet lips/' "arrows from the quiver of Cupid," etc.,
etc? 34 How is it that the hero of Goldoni's comedy, La bottega
del caffe, though a simple servant, displays medical learning, talks
high-flown morals, and indulges in obscene allusions all at the same
time? ar> What can one say for Goldoni's Pamela, where the humble
peasant father of the girl turns out to be a Scottish peer and the
English ladies drink rum in their tea? 3G It is all nonsense; it has
nothing to do with real life. Even Dante, though admired in parts,
"cannot be read rapidly and with pleasure"; it requires a "good
dose of resolution and patience" to get through him. 87 Petrarch has
false Platonic ideas about love and also needs to be studied to be
well understood. 88 Boccaccio is immoral, "dirty," and besides, he
initiated the vicious Latinized Italian which Baretti wants to re-
place with a living language.' Baretti rediscovered Cellini's auto-
biography and was one of the first to praise its "most vivid and pic-
turesque" style. 40 La frusta letteraria thus belongs to the Enlighten-
ment, which preached "things" instead of "words." Though
Baretti's social and political outlook was conservative and ex-
tremely hostile to French philosophy to Voltaire and Rousseau
he believes in utility, the common man, and a realism which is
hardly able to distinguish between art and life.
All this was most important in the Italy of his time, but it is
difficult to see Baretti's greatness as a critic in a general European
context. What he says on theoretical questions was simple and
common at that time: poetry must be inspired, genuinely felt, a
critic must have some poetic feeling himself; poetry is "saying
natural things, beautiful things, great things, many things, with
simplicity, with energy, with enthusiasm." 41 Where he goes be-
yond such declarations, he is derivative and even copies Johnson:
thus he takes the specific objections to pastoral poetry from John-
son and argues exactly in his terms against literal theatrical illu-
sion and the unities of place and time. 42 He follows Johnson's
Preface so closely that the claims made for the Discours sur Shake-
142 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
speare (1777), witty and telling as it is, as a "work of genius," seem
grossly exaggerated.* It comes too late, after Johnson, Lessing, and
even Herder, to add anything new to the arguments directed
against the French system.
Nor can one say that Baretti's practical criticism is particularly
well defined or fully argued. His innate realism and moralism is
clear enough; but side by side there is his admiration for Ariosto,
whom he considers the greatest Italian poet, for Berni and the
whole burlesque tradition, and, most incongruously, for Metas-
tasio. 48 Metastasio is praised for the "clarity and precision of his
thought" and for his depiction of subtle "sentiments which even
Locke or Addison could hardly express in prose." 44 No wonder
that Baretti also praises many minor poets and poetasters of the
time and does not see what is new and great in Goldoni because he
dislikes his skepticism and morality.
Baretti, in the vicissitudes of his life, his many travels, his two
long stays in England (1751-60, 1766-89), was an iSth-century cos-
mopolite, a man of wide interests in other literatures than Italian.
One of his first works was a translation of Corneille (1747), whom
he continued to admire as the greatest of the French tragedians, the
"poet for men," while he disparaged Racine as a "poet for the
ladies." 46 Two of his publications, the English Dissertation upon
Italian Poetry (1753) and the French Discours sur Shakespeare
(1777), are polemics directed against Voltaire. In the early piece
Baretti, rather timidly, defends Dante and Tasso against Voltaire's
Essay on the Epic Poetry, showing that Voltaire knew little Italian
and had no right to judge Baretti's compatriots. In the later
pamphlet he attacks Voltaire for his judgment of Shakespeare. He
again shows that Voltaire does not know much English, that he
translates wrongly and maliciously, and that his opinion is of no
value. He proves to his satisfaction Voltaire's "insolence, malignity,
brutality and stupidity," but elsewhere admits that he is (after
Johnson) the greatest writer of the century. 48 He had less patience
with Rousseau: mile seemed to him mere sophistry. 47 But he
knows his French and French literature, within the limits of his
age and his hatred of the esprit philosophique.
* Fubini and Binni praise Baretti far beyond his merits. Fubini,
Dal Muratori al Baretti, p. 145: "il piu audace e geniale scritto del
nostro autore, il Discours sur Shakespeare"
ITALIAN CRITICISM 143
Baretti also knew much about Spanish literature and gave one
of the first accounts of it in English. He described Calder6n and
Lope de Vega sympathetically, though with many neoclassical res-
ervations. 48 Many English authors, including Shakespeare, Milton,
Dryden, Pope, and Addison, were familiar to him. His conception
of Shakespeare is clearly Johnson's. Shakespeare is praised for his
profound knowledge of human nature, for his characters, which are
not individuals but species, for his popular appeal. 49 But Baretti
says little of the others, even of the admired and revered Dr. John-
son, whom he quotes in his Frusta and introduces in the disguise
of Diogene Mastigoforo as the master of his Aristarco. 60 Much of
Baretti's work in England was devoted to an exposition and de-
scription of Italian literature: there he wrote the Dissertation
upon Italian Poetry (1753), for which he translated passages from
Marino and Dante, a History of the Italian Tongue (1757), and
other works. But his point of view was not that of 18th-century
cosmopolitism: he rather thinks in terms familiar to Goldsmith
and Herder, of national systems of literature and taste which are,
will, and should remain different. "Since there have been two
nations in the world, each speaking its own language, it has been
impossible to find a taste common to the two." 51 He is content
with this variety and delights in it, explaining the difficulties of
translating, the divergencies of meanings between the languages he
knows. All of this, of course, does not prevent him from scolding
Voltaire for upholding his special French taste, for he was a good
Italian patriot, after all, and admired his Shakespeare.
Baretti, who is still untouched by primitivism and the love of
folk poetry, presents thus an intermediate stage on the way to
literary nationalism and its presumed synthesis in a conception
of a varied world literature, as it was then being achieved in Ger-
many by Herder. Besides, he represents in Italy the same turn
toward realism and common sense which Johnson represents in
England. But he is greatly inferior to Johnson in range, learning,
and theoretical awareness. He will remain interesting rather as a
character, a temperament, a readable lively polemist, amusing
even when he indulges in clumsy verbal gambols and vindictive
abuse.
8: LESSING AND HIS PRECURSORS
THE DEVELOPMENT of literary criticism and theory in Germany
differed in many respects from that of other Western countries. A
long tradition of Renaissance and Baroque poetics died out in the
early i8th century. 1 Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700-66), the
commanding literary figure of the 30*5 and 40% established a pon-
derous and pedantic local version of French neoclassicism with his
Kritische Dichtkunst (1730). The older German literature had be-
come either unknown or rejected as obsolete. No body of poetic
texts was canonical as in France or demanded admission imperi-
ously as did Shakespeare and Milton in England. Thus poetic
theory remained an abstract academic exercise. Lessing was the first
German critic of high standing, and even his importance was
mainly at the level of theory.
The comparative isolation of German critics from concrete lit-
erature goes a long way to account for their intense preoccupation
with general aesthetics. A new theory of literature was to bring
about a new flowering of poetry. The main source of inspiration
was the philosophy of Leibniz, which, in a watered-down version
by Christian Wolff, dominated the German universities and effec-
tively immunized them against the extremes of both Cartesian
rationalism and Lockean empiricism. The very term "aesthetics*'
was invented in Germany during this period. Alexander Gottlieb
Baumgarten (1714-62), in his Meditationes philosophicae ad
poema pertinentibus (1735), a small dissertation in crabbed Latin,
suggested that there should be a "science of perception," an
"aesthetic" (from the Greek aisthanesthai, to perceive), and in
1750 he put the term Aesthetica on the title of the first volume of
his system of the new science. The term is today accepted so com-
pletely and used so widely to designate almost anything that has to
do with art that Baumgarten's specific meaning and theory have
been lost sight of. This is due in part to the extreme rarity and in-
144
LESSING 145
accessibility of these Latin writings (Aesthetica has never been
translated into any modern language) and in part to the scholastic
method of presentation and the sharply defined theoretical frame-
work in which Baumgarten was clumsily moving, as if in heavy
armor. Baumgarten, however, has not only the merit of inventing
an important term. More definitely than anybody before him with
the possible exception of Vico, he distinguished the realm of art
from the realms of philosophy, morality, and pleasure. Aesthetics
is to him a "science of sensuous cognition." 2 Art and poetry are
"cognition," but not thought; they are nonintellectual knowledge,
"perception." Thus art does not convey theoretical or moral
truths; its knowledge precedes that of intellect. But it is not sensu-
ous pleasure either, because it is a form of knowledge. If aesthetics,
as Baumgarten argues, were merely a science of perception, it
would have little to do with actual works of art. There are passages
in the Aesthetica which show that he conceived of his science as a
kind of general inductive logic; he treats of telescopes, barometers,
and thermometers as instruments of perception. He brings in ac-
tual works ot art by defining a poem as a "perfect sensuous dis-
course." 3 Discourse, language, is the material of poetic art, and
perfection means, as Baumgarten explains in detail, two things:
clarity (which must not be confused with logical distinctness) or
vividness of representation, and what we would call organization,
totality, wholeness. Both of these requirements are pushed very
far, further than in any other theory of the time. The emphasis
on sensuous vividness and concreteness is so strong that we might
be tempted to consider Baumgarten's ideal of poetry almost
imagistic, and certainly it is, in part, a defense of descriptive
poetry, ot the doctrine ut pictura poesis. 4 Baumgarten is simply fol-
lowing the logic of his reasoning when he finds personifications,
exemplifications, and especially proper names the most concrete
and hence the most poetic of all terms. He praises the catalogue of
ships in the second book of the Iliad as particularly poetic. His
emphasis on the concrete and individual is combined with a view
that the "interconnection is that which is poetic," that the poet is
like a maker or a creator, that a poem ought to be like a world
ideas which seem to take up the praise of the creator-poet in Scali-
ger and Shaftesbury. But Baumgarten sharply distinguishes be-
tween "heterocosmic" or probable fictions and "utopian" or im-
146 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
probable fictions. "Heterocosmic" is another word for coherent,
self-consistent, for any fiction which displays a "lucid order" and
fulfills the demands of Aristotelian probability. 5 His formulas
sound bolder today than they actually were.
Unfortunately Baumgarten was not able to hold to his central
insight that art is neither utile nor dulce, neither instruction nor
pleasure. The Leibnizian scheme of the mind, with its emphasis on
the law of continuity and its hierarchy of faculties with reason as
the highest, forced on Baumgarten the view that aesthetic knowl-
edge is, after all, only an inferior form of logical knowledge:
poetry, in many of his pronouncements, becomes only a prepara-
tion for philosophy; aesthetic knowledge an analogon rationis,
gnosologia inferior. 6 Intellectualism won out.
A totally different tradition of aesthetic thought is represented
by Baumgarten's contemporary, Johann Elias Schlegel (1719-49),
an uncle of the two celebrated romantic critics. He was a clumsy
writer and still very conventional in his taste. His comparison be-
tween Shakespeare and Andreas Gryphius (1741) shows a knowl-
edge of only Julius Caesar, which is criticized for "cold scenes,"
violation of the unities, "low" words, and bombast. It is praised
only for good characterization. But as a theoretician Schlegel had
an unusual grasp of the difference between art and reality. In sev-
eral papers he speculated on imitation, much more subtly than any
of his contemporaries. Image and model, he argued, must be dis-
similar. What is decisive is the effect, the emotional impact, and
not the resemblance to reality. He attacks the notion of art as
deceptive illusion and declares that we are never deceived in the
theater. The French neoclassicists had defended the unities of
time and place with naturalistic arguments. Schlegel defends them
on the different ground that they allow concentration on action,
on characters, on the passions. They support the "rapture" induced
by a work of art. 7
Neither Baumgarten nor Schlegel had much influence in his
time. They were both still untouched by British empirical aesthet-
ics. Baumgarten moves in the framework of Wolffian faculty psy-
chology, Schlegel emerged slowly from the tutelage of Gottsched's
pseudo-Aristotelianism. Neither had much to say about actual lit-
erary texts. Both seem hardly affected by the contemporary turn
toward literary history.
LESSING 147
The influx into Germany of two new critical motifs, empirical
aesthetics and historicism, was accomplished largely by Johann
Jakob Bodmer (1698-1783) of Zurich, who was the first of the great
Swiss intermediaries among the European nations; he brought the
form of the Spectator essay into German and translated Paradise
Lost, Homer, the old English ballads, Hudibras, and the Dunciad.
He was the first to defend Dante in Germany with historical argu-
ments. He was the discoverer of German medieval literature: of
Wolfram's Parzival (1754), the Nibelungenlied (1757), the great
Minnesanger manuscript (1758-59). Though his editions and ver-
sions were shockingly inaccurate and incomplete by modern stand-
ards (he published at first only the second part of the Nibelungen-
lied), Bodmer had more than the antiquary's interest in unearthing
the past. He had a real appreciation of what he thought was the
fresh spontaneity of the Minncsang, the Homeric sublimity of the
Nibelungenlied, and even the scholastic metaphysics of Dante,
"without which Dante would not be Dante/' 8 He represents a
new taste and, in Germany, the first lively feeling for history.
In literary theory Bodmer appeared as the bitter opponent of
Gottsched, and with his friend Johann Jakob Breitinger (1701-76)
composed a rival Kritische Dichtkunst (1740). Bodmer, whose
main role was that of an importer of ideas, thought of himself as a
useful merchant; 9 he adopted and expounded Addison's concept
of the pleasures of imagination, he introduced Blackwell's idea of
original metaphorical poetry, he learned something of Italian
aesthetics from his friend Pietro di Calepio, 10 he read Batteux and
Dubos. But he was more than a mere eclectic or middleman: he
assimilated Western theories of imagination to Leibnizian philos-
ophy and thus made a bold defense of imaginative poetry. The
poet, according to Bodmer, is not an imitator of nature. Rather,
"he imitates the powers of nature in transferring the possible into
the condition of reality." " "Poetry always prefers to take the ma-
terial of imitation from the possible rather than from the existing
world." 12 Leibniz' possible worlds become here an argument in
defense of "heterocosmic" poetry, which is not merely, as in Baum-
garten, "probable poetry," but poetry using the Christian marvel-
ous and even the "fairy way of writing." Like Black well, Bodmer
stresses the metaphorical character of poetic language: the whole
system of poetry must agree exactly in all its figurative connections;
148 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
the poet creates a whole in which all parts hang together. There
should be a center to every work of art. 18 But these strikingly radi-
cal pronouncements, which show Leibnizian and Platonic ele-
ments and revive the ancient parallel between microcosm and
macrocosm, are, in Bodmer's text, heavily modified by other tradi-
tional survivals. His recommendation of imaginative poetry re-
mains in the service of Christian doctrine, of a religious didacti-
cism which wants to defend the angels and devils in Milton and
in Klopstock. The emphasis on wholeness, on metaphorical truth,
is compromised by Bodmer's frequent surrender to mere allegory:
he admires the didactic fable. His stodgy middle-class morality con-
stantly warps his imaginative insights. In the context of German
criticism he was a great precursor, an initiator.
The ideas of these three critics Baumgarten, Schlegel, and Bod-
mer seem to combine in the writings of Moses Mendelssohn
(1729-86). Mendelssohn, his friend Lessing, and a third author,
Friedrich Nicolai (1733-1811), created German periodical criti-
cism and concentrated it in the new intellectual center, Berlin.
Nicolai surveyed the state of German literature in 1755 with a
severe eye. In 1759 he founded both a Bibliothek dcr schonen
Wissenschaften und freien Kunste, which lasted till 1805, and
Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend (1759-65), where Lessing
and Mendelssohn were the main contributors. Nicolai later ac-
quired a bad reputation for his parody on Werther and his con-
stant attacks on the German classics. Mendelssohn was a distin-
guished reviewer, though largely of learned publications rather
than of imaginative literature. He was one of the early admirers of
Shakespeare in Germany, but as a practical critic he usually kept
to a middle road, disapproving of sentimentalism and Sturm und
Drang as well as of old-style academic neoclassicism. The review
of Rousseau's Nouvelle Helo'ise u shows his distaste for emotional
extravagance and artistic incoherence. But Mendelssohn's strength
is in theory rather than in practical criticism. He picks up ideas
from everywhere: from Baumgarten, from Dubos, from Kames;
his emphasis is always psychological and moralistic. He tries to
sketch a system of the arts 10 based on a distinction between arbi-
trary and natural signs, which he derives from Dubos. Poetry is
a time-art, using arbitrary signs. Mere word painting, onoma-
topoeia, is childish. But the arts can combine music with poetry
LESSING 149
and so on. What is common to the arts is the aim of "presenting
perfection sensuously/' Here the terms are derived from Baum-
garten. But Mendelssohn speculates also on taste, on the beautiful
and the sublime, on the pleasures of tragedy. He combines Leib-
nizian and neo-Platonic ideas with the empiricism he has learned
from the French and English. His ideas on taste as a "faculty of
approval," and of beauty as inducing a "quiet liking," remote from
the desire to possess or utilize the object, prepare the way for
Kant's views, at least terminologically. 10 His concept of genius also
anticipates Kant's, as he stresses the need, in genius, of all faculties
collaborating in perfection toward one single aim. 17 In strictly
literary theory he discussed illusion in a way that was to prove
fruitful. Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief" formulates
strikingly what Mendelssohn had argued. "A certain capability is
needed to surrender to illusion and to resign the consciousness of
the present in its favor." "If we carry with us the intention to let
ourselves be deceived in an agreeable manner, sensuous knowledge
will do its usual job; from the signs of passion, from the signs of
free actions we shall draw inferences as to intention and motiva-
tion and shall thus become interested in nonexistent persons. We
take a real part in unreal actions and feelings because, for the
sake of being pleased, we abstract intentionally from their un-
reality." 18 Here Mendelssohn develops suggestions made by
Schlegel. In his theory of tragedy he was almost Lessing's collabo-
rator.
Before we can approach Lessing himself, we must add Winckel-
mann to our roster of authors who make his background compre-
hensible. Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68) was no literary
critic or theorist, but his importance in the history of aesthetics is
such that he influences all literary theory after him. It is not mainly
the content of his doctrines but rather his total exaltation of the
Greeks at the expense of the Romans and the Latin tradition, his
tone, his fervor, and his style which color the whole course of Ger-
man classicism. Herder and Goethe, quite justly, erected "monu-
ments" in prose to his memory. Lessing begins his Laokoon with
a saying by Winckelmann. Schiller is full of Winckelmann. Seen
purely in terms of a history of ideas, Winckelmann can be de-
scribed as reviving neo-Platonic aesthetics as he found it in Shaftes-
bury and in the Italian aestheticians of the 1 7th century. Beauty is
150 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
divine: it is reflected in the beautiful minds, bodies, and statues
of the Greeks and the best paintings of Italians such as Raphael.
This beauty is ideal in the many senses available to Platonizing
aesthetics: it had been an ideal realized in ancient Greece, under a
serene sky, in a free society, where men and women could develop
perfect bodies and harmonious minds. It is "ideal" in the sense
that the artist concentrates what is found only rarely in reality,
and it is ideal as an image in the mind of the artist, an inner
vision, an idea. It is the ideal of "quiet simplicity and noble
grandeur," 19 which inspired the paintings of David and the sculp-
tures of Canova and Thorwaldsen. Winckelmann stands at the
fountainhead of this movement, 20 which seems to us today rather
dreary in its worship of abstract classical form. Winckelmann
wrote a great deal about the pure, colorless, "indeterminate" ideal,
and even indulged in speculations and recommendations concern-
ing recondite allegories. 21 Yet both as a writer and as a person
Winckelmann was really quite remote from all that. He was deeply
influenced by sensualism: his experience of Greek statues was sen-
sual, even sexual. His friendships with men were of the highly
emotional "Platonic" variety, and he finally fell victim to a homo-
sexual murderer. His whole experience of the classic is concrete,
vital, organic. The way he described statues (however conventional
the same statues may seem to us) is ecstatic and expressionistic. It is
an evocation of emotional states which, transferred to literary criti-
cism by Herder, changed the whole tenor of German writing on
literature. To Winckelmann's sensualism we must add his genuine
historicism: he had a feeling for and insight into the concrete real-
ity of antiquity which went far beyond any merely antiquarian hu-
manism. His Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1764), though
very limited in its knowledge of genuine Greek sculptures, was the
first internal history of any art, and by its method and conception
it profoundly influenced the writing of literary history. Both
Herder and Friedrich Schlegel wanted to become the Winckel-
manns of literary history. In the History of Ancient Art Winckel-
mann not only describes and evokes individual works, not only
tries to account by historical conditions for the unique greatness
of Greek art, but quite consciously attempts to write an internal
evolutionary history of style. The account of the styles of Greek
sculpture, 22 while hardly more than sketching and guesswork,
LESSING 151
elaborates a parallel with the course of human life its rise, ma-
turing, decline, and end. He distinguishes four periods of Greek
sculpture: the grand and high style of the earliest time, the beauti-
ful of the Periclean climax, the decline with its imitators, and the
end with the late Hellenistic mannerists.
Winckelmann's achievement is extraordinarily complex and
openly contradictory. Platonizing neoclassicism with its ideal of
quiet beauty, strong sensualism, and a new historicism struggle for
supremacy in a body of work which anticipates many later German
developments.The neoclassicism was to be developed in Lessing,
Goethe, and Schiller, the sensualism in Herder and in such a crude
but vigorous worshiper of the body as the novelist Wilhelm Heinse,
the historicism in Herder and the Schlegels.
All the authors surveyed briefly in the present chapter precede
the great flowering of literary theory in Germany. The first great
literary critic, in a narrow sense, was undoubtedly Lessing.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81) has an enormous reputa-
tion as a literary critic, but a clear account of the reasons for his
prominence in a history of European criticism is hard to find.
There is no difficulty in accounting for his importance in the de-
velopment of German literature, and Germans have constantly
stressed his historical merits. He was, after all, the first great man
of letters Germany produced in modern times: he has been called
the founder of modern German literature and its liberator (i.e.
the liberator from the dominance of French neoclassicism as repre-
sented by the mediocre Gottsched). Lessing certainly was a drama-
tist of considerable power, though hardly of enduring greatness.
He was also a theologian and semiphilosopher who, especially in
his last writings, formulated an important version of the optimistic
philosophy of the Enlightenment, with surprising touches of mysti-
cism and what the i8th century called "enthusiasm," in his Edu-
cation of the Human Race. He was also a classical philologist and
an archaeologist of great erudition, though this phase of his work
is inevitably obsolete today. He was, besides, an aesthetician who,
in the Laokoon, speculated importantly on the limits of the arts
and the differences between poetry and painting. And finally he
was a literary theorist and critic. All these varied activities are held
together by the power of an obviously straightforward honest per-
sonality and an individual style of wonderful clarity and sobriety
152 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
which is a joy to meet in reading German. Lessing's criticism is
frequently encumbered by a heavy ballast of classical learning, and
is sometimes marred by the demands of an existence absorbed in
literary journalism and thus in the necessity of writing on ephem-
eral topics of the day and also by the acerbities and brutalities
of contemporary polemical manners. But on occasions, and they
are luckily not rare, he rises above these handicaps, suddenly
breaking into a striking simile or a dignified assertion of his su-
periority to the times and his opponents. "Why do I detain myself
with these chatterers? I will go my way and persist regardless of
what the grasshoppers chirp by the roadside. Even a step aside to
crush them is too much honor. The end of their summer is not
long to await." 2S
Thus it is not easy to isolate Lessing's literary criticism from his
manifold activities and its permanent value from its merely his-
torical merit. One can understand George Saintsbury's feeling of
disappointment in Lessing's criticism, especially since Saintsbury
always wants pure literary criticism and means by it a body of liter-
ary judgments on specific authors. "There is nearly always some-
thing that Lessing prefers to literature, constantly as he was oc-
cupied with books. Now it is the theater; now it is art; especially
art viewed from the side of archeology; now it is classical scholar-
ship of the minuter kind; now philosophy or theology; now it is
morals; not unfrequently it is more, or fewer, or all of these things
together, which engage his attention while literature is left out in
the cold." 24
It is true that we get in Lessing little practical literary criticism
of important authors. There is a good deal of minute discussion of
specific plays in the Hamburgische Dramaturgic, but, with very
few exceptions, even those who are widely read have not and
would not care to read the plays in question. The only exceptions
are the plays of Voltaire and one play (Rodogune) by Corneille,
and even they have few admirers today. In the Laokoon there is
detailed criticism of Homer and Sophocles which is still of interest,
and there are the scattered passages on Shakespeare, which are,
however, quite disappointing if we judge them as criticism of
Shakespeare. They merely echo the passage in Dryden on Shake-
speare as the "poet of nature": Lessing had translated Dryden 's
Essay of Dramatic Poesy for one of his early collections, Theatra-
LESSING 153
lische Bibliothek (1754-59). The famous i7th Literaturbrief
(February 16, 1759) attacks Gottsched's introduction of a Frenchi-
fied theater into Germany with the claim that "we Germans rather
fall in with the taste of the English than of the French"; prints
the fragment of a scene from a supposedly ancient German tragedy
of Faust; and advances the claim, astonishing for the time and
place, that "Shakespeare is a much greater tragic poet than Cor-
neille, though Corneille knew the ancients very well and Shake-
speare scarcely at all." Corneille rivals the ancients in "mechanical
contrivance" (mechanische Einrichtung), but Shakespeare in the
"essential" (das Wesentliche). But beyond the statement that
Shakespeare's plays have more power over our passions than any
others except Sophocles' Oedipus, no reason is given for the su-
periority of the former, and even in the Hamburgische Drama-
turgic no plays of Shakespeare are discussed. Lessing seems to have
known King Lear, Richard III, Othello, Hamlet, and Romeo and
Juliet, but he never goes beyond saying that Othello is "the most
complete text book of this sad madness, jealousy" 25 and that
Romeo and Juliet is "the only tragedy in which Love itself has col-
laborated," 20 whatever that may mean. The only more specific
criticism of Shakespeare in Lessing is the comparison he makes be-
tween the ghost in Voltaire's Semiramis and the ghost in Hamlet? 1
and this is rather a discussion of poetic belief than practical criti-
cism, and in its praise of the effect of the ghost it is derivative of
Addison rather than an independent discussion. The praise of
Shakespeare is mostly in rhetorical hyperboles, as in the famous
passage where Lessing denies that it is possible to commit plagia-
rism on Shakespeare. "What has been said of Homer, that it would
be easier to deprive Hercules of his club [i.e. by Donatus in Vita
Vergilii] than him of a verse, can be as truly said of Shakespeare.
There is an impress upon the least of his beauties which at once
exclaims to all the world: I am Shakespeare's and woe to the
foreign beauty which has the self-confidence to place itself beside
it." 28
There is little more concrete criticism in his other discussions of
English authors: something is said about Ben Jonson in connec-
tion with a discussion of the meaning of the English term
"humor." Every Man Out of His Humour is described as "play
without fable, where a crowd of the oddest fools appear one after
154 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
another, one does not know either how or why." 2 * Once Lessing
quotes a fantastic scene about the hunger of some shipwrecked
people in Beaumont and Fletcher's Sea Voyage. In order to dis-
parage Thomas Corneille's tragedy of Essex, Lessing describes an
English play on the same subject by John Banks, The Earl of Essex
(1682), translating passages very freely into prose and pruning the
diction, which he considers "too vulgar or too precious, too creep-
ing or too bombastic." 81 This is, I believe, all the knowledge Les-
sing shows of the earlier English drama. He undoubtedly knew
more about the contemporary stage: there are references to Addi-
son's CatOy which he liked only mildly he would have rather
written Lillo's Merchant of London* 2 He was obviously ac-
quainted with many English comedies like those of Colman and
Farquhar, and with bourgeois tragedies, but we have no extended
criticism of a single one. His extremely favorable introduction to
the translation of James Thomson's Tragedies (1756), which today
are rightly forgotten, is practically a translation from the English,
at least in regard to the judgments on the plays. 38
Nor is an examination of Lessing's criticism of English poetry
more fruitful. There is an extended account of Pope's Eloisa to
Abelard in Kritische Nachrichten (1751), praising its tenderness,
and there is, of course, the famous answer by Lessing and Mendels-
sohn to the Berlin Academy's prize question on the metaphysics
of Pope. Pope ein Metaphysiker! (1755) is a brilliant attack on
the claims made for intellectual coherence in Pope's Essay on Man,
and an analysis which sharply points to the difference between
Pope's eclecticism and Leibniz' metaphysical system. There are, in
the course of the Laokoon, references to Dryden's "musical paint-
ing" in the "Ode in Honour of St. Cecilia's Day" and most in-
terestingly in view of T. S. Eliot's discussion there are remarks on
Milton's Paradise Lost as an example of the nonvisual imagination,
or rather of the right kind of "progressive paintings," which are
not merely static descriptions. A note on Milton's blindness tries
to show that it had an effect on the way Milton described some
scenes that the poet would, to use a modern term, "compensate"
for his lack of sight by elaborating on visual subjects. 8 *
Lessing's criticism of English prose is not extensive or impor-
tant. Like so many of his contemporaries, he thought very highly
of Richardson, while he disparaged Smollett's Roderick Random 85
LESSING 155
as being far below Lesage. There is a review highly praising
Johnson's Rambler 36 without, however, mentioning his name. We
must not forget that Lessing translated such books as Francis
Hutcheson's System of Moral Philosophy (1756) and William Law's
Serious Call (1756), and that he had a wide acquaintance with
English critical and aesthetic literature. A study of his dramas
reveals many English sources in the comedies (Farquhar) and
bourgeois tragedies (Lillo), though the source hunting has ob-
viously been overdone. But there is little literary criticism in the
strict sense.
It would be easy to show this with respect to the other literatures
too. It seems significant that Lessing, though he devoted much of
his efforts to an attack on French drama, wrote no real discussion
of either Racine or Moliere. The references to Moliere are quite
unimportant, and when, in the Hamburgische Dramaturgic, Les-
sing had an opportunity to discuss L'cole des femmes he merely
repeated some information from a French source. 87 He seems to
have preferred Destouches (of whom he compiled a Life early in
his career) and Marivaux, and they certainly are the models of his
own early comedies. He admired Diderot as a critic and playwright,
but there is no extended discussion of the plays. Corneille and
Voltaire draw Lessing's whole fire.
There is little on Italian literature: the Ugolino episode in
Dante's Inferno aroused Lessing's disgust. 38 Ariosto's description
of the fay Alcina is singled out in the Laokoon as an example of
ineffective description of female beauty. 89 There is also an elab-
orate analysis of Maffei's tragedy Merope, which aims to show
the dependence of Voltaire's own tragedy on it and the absurdities
of Voltaire's deviations. Maffei is treated with respect but hardly
with great interest. Lessing has nothing to say on Gozzi or Goldoni,
though he once started to translate one of the latter's plays.
He shows some interest in Spanish literature; he certainly knew,
through a French translation, Lope de Vega's Arte nuevo de hacer
comedias, and in the Hamburgische Dramaturgic he gives an elab-
orate description, with a very free and loose translation, of a 17th-
century Spanish play, El Conde de Sex, by Antonio Coello (1652),
which interested him as a contrast to Thomas Corneille's French
and John Banks's English tragedies on Essex. Lessing also knew
something of Cervantes and Calderon, but his Spanish was meager
156 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
and faulty and his information mostly secondhand and inaccurate.
One cannot speak of any criticism of Spanish literature or say that
Lessing prepared the way for the Schlegels* appreciation of the
Spanish drama. 41
We expect more of Lessing's literary criticism of classical writers,
but are hardly rewarded, though there are frequent discussions of
philological points and many references. Lessing obviously ad-
mired Homer beyond any other author and uses him in the
Laokoon as a constant illustration of what poetry can and should
do: how he describes Helen by her effect on the old men, how he
singles out one trait in an object by a single adjective, how he
builds up an elaborate description like that of the shield of
Achilles by telling of its manufacture. The praise of Homer is al-
ways generous, and the consideration, though never directed at
the totality of either the Iliad or the Odyssey, is certainly literary
in its attention to descriptive technique. The discussion of Greek
tragedy is, however, disappointing as such. Aeschylus is hardly
mentioned, and then Lessing commits the gross error of referring
to the poet's Perserinnen, a confusion of the sex of the chorus
which seems derived from D'Aubignac. 42 Sophocles fares somewhat
better: Lessing compiled a very learned Life of Sophocles which
has, however, no critical content; in the Laokoon he uses Philoc-
tetes and the Trachinians as illustrations for the treatment of
bodily pain in drama. The Hamburgische Dramaturgic contains,
in different contexts, speculations on some of the lost plays of
Euripides and on the reasons why Aristotle called him "the most
tragic of all the tragedians." 44 But there is no extensive discussion
of Greek tragedy. As for comedy, Aristophanes is totally ignored,
if we disregard the passage in which Lessing objects to the view
that Aristophanes drew the caricature of an individual in the Soc-
rates of the Clouds** Roman comedy obviously interested him
more: we have from him a fine analysis of Terence's Adelphi,
especially of the intrigue and the main character, Demea. 46 Among
Lessing's early writings is a Life of Plautus, a translation of his
Captivi and a discussion of its merits 47 which has some critical
interest. There is plenty of other evidence to show his wide ac-
quaintance with classical antiquity and its literature: a defense of
Horace against charges of immorality; a condemnation of Seneca
LESSING 157
as an ancestor of Corneille. 48 But there is not much that could be
called literary discussion.
Most of Lessing's literary criticism, of course, concerns German
literature, much of which is now of no interest except to specialists.
He did not know anything of older German literature, though late
in his life he looked at Bodmer's garbled edition of the Nibelun-
genlied, and his own antiquarian studies led him to a study of
German fables of the 1 5th century, on which he published a small
discovery of authorship and date: "Uber die sogenannten Fabeln
aus den Zeiten der Minnesinger" (1773). Lessing showed some in-
terest, mainly of a theological or philological nature, in some of
the literature of the German Reformation and Humanism, and he
edited the epigrams of a 17th-century German poet, Friedrich
Logau: thus he is touched by the new spirit of patriotic antiquari-
anism.
But mostly Lessing wrote about his immediate elders or his con-
temporaries. He is implacable in his condemnation of Gottsched.
Surveying the contemporary German stage, he criticizes many
minor authors whose very names are forgotten. This was part of his
duty as the Hamburg Dramaturge. He constantly attacked the
young Wieland both for his shoddy didactic poems and for his
imitative dramas, though later he defended Wieland's translation
of Shakespeare and called Agathon the "work of the century. 49
He admired Klopstock, mainly as a master of diction and verse,
though he recognized his lack of epic talent and the dangers of his
pietistic sentimentality. 50
Lessing did not live long enough to sec the new Storm and
Stress movement as a unity. His opinions of his younger contempo-
raries were either barely crystallized or not recorded. He liked
Leisewitz's Julius von Tarent B1 and admired the art of Gcrsten-
berg's Ugolino as "nourished on the spirit of Shakespeare," r>J but
in a long letter to the author he disapproved of its main theme
passive, innocent suffering as undramatic/ 3 Lcssing's attitude
toward the early Goethe is ambiguous: he calls him a genius, 51 but
in the same context disapproves of his "silly" and "malicious at-
tack" on Euripides' Alcestis. Goetz seems to be alluded to in
Lessing's condemnation of plays in which "the poet puts the biog-
raphy of a man into dialogue and pretends that the thing is
158 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
drama"; 8fl and Werther is criticized for moral reasons and, doubt-
less, because Lessing knew the model of Werther, Karl Wilhelm
Jerusalem, and respected his intellect and memory. "Do you be-
lieve that a Roman or Greek youth would have taken his life in
this way and for that reason? Certainly not. They knew how to
guard themselves quite differently against the extravagance of
love . . . Only Christian education succeeded in producing such
big-little, disdainfully worthy originals, as it knows how to turn a
physical need so beautifully into a spiritual perfection. So, dear
Goethe, I want a little chapter added at the end, and the more
cynical the better." e7 Like most professional critics, he could not
really relish the taste of a new generation.
Thus the individual critical pronouncements of Lessing do not
add up to a corpus of sensitive evaluation or close discussion of
great works. But it is impossible to overrate his importance in the
raising of the general level of German criticism. Negatively his
attack on the French classical tragedy must have meant a great
deal; and positively his recommendation of Shakespeare was im-
portant for the time, though he had precursors such as Gersten-
berg even in Germany. There were, besides, traces in Lessing even
of interest in folk poetry: in Brief e die neueste Litcratur betreffend
(No. 33) he praises a Lapland song and a Latvian dainos (a kind of
elegy) for their "native spirit and charming simplicity/' conclud-
ing that "poets are born under any climate, and vivid sentiments
are not the privilege of civilized nations." 58 This opinion is all the
more striking since Lessing obviously cared little for lyrical poetry:
his interests were in the drama, the epic, and such semididactic
genres as the fable and the epigram. On these last Lessing wrote
learned theoretical and historical dissertations full of overly ingen-
ious distinctions and subdivisions.
If Lessing had left us only a body of special pronouncements and
criticisms of plays forgotten in many cases, he would have merely
a historical importance: only historians of German literature
would make the effort to read his dissections of German and French
plays, even though they are always done with great shrewdness and
dialectical power. But Lessing is, of course, far more than just a
practical critic. He is a theorist of literature, on the borderline of
aesthetics. He cannot be relegated to general philosophical aesthet-
ics with Kant: there are hardly any general speculations on beauty
LESSING 159
or taste as such in Lessing. Rather he takes up very concrete prob-
lems of literary theory, and even those not in any systematic fash-
ion. The Laokoon was originally to bear the name of Hermaea,
and it is described as "collectanea for a book." The Hamburgische
Dramaturgic by its very plan lent itself to casual discussion, and
when Lessing got involved in an abstract problem like that of
generality he could break off and say: "I here remind my readers
that these sheets are to contain anything rather than a dramatic
system. I am therefore not bound to resolve all the difficulties I
raise. My thoughts may seem less and less connected, may even
seem to contradict themselves. What matter? If only they are
thoughts amid which may be found food for independent think-
ing. I only want here to scatter fermcnta cognitionis." 60 But in
spite of this lack of system we get close discussions of several prob-
lems: in the Laokoon of the relations between poetry and painting,
in the Hamburgische Dramaturgic of the function of tragedy, the
meaning of pity and fear, purgation, problems which Lessing had
discussed years before in an extensive correspondence with Men-
delssohn and Nicolai. 61 Besides, in these writings and even scattered
through the letters there are many pronouncements on basic prob-
lems of iSth-century criticism: on the rules, on genius, on the na-
ture of poetry. Thus something like a picture of Lessing's literary
theory can be pieced together.
Laokoon oder uber die Grcnzcn dcr Malcrci und Poesic (1766)
starts with an empirical problem suggested by the statue of Lao-
coon, the Trojan priest, depicted as two huge snakes attack him
and his two sons at the bidding of Apollo, who wanted to punish
his warnings against the taking of the wooden horse into Troy.
This marble group was found in Rome in 1506 and was quickly
identified as the work referred to by Pliny, 62 who mentions its
sculptors, Hagesandros, Polydoros, and Athenodoros of Rhodes.
The statue was admired throughout the i6th and i7th centuries as
one of the foremost known works of classical sculpture: a Latin
poem composed in the year of its discovery by Giacopo Sadoleto
bears witness that the group was admired for its violent expres-
sion, its naturalistic depiction of horrible pain. In their exag-
gerated stress on muscles, 17th-century copies show the cult of
anatomy and the baroque taste for horror which the group seems
to have satisfied. But J. J. Winckelmann, in his Gcdankcn uber die
l6o A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bild-
hauerkunst (1755), challenged the current interpretation. Laocoon
to him shows "a great and composed soul despite all passions . . .
this pain does not reveal itself with any fury either in the face or in
the whole posture." The Laocoon of the statue "does not intone a
fearful shout, as Virgil sings of his Laocoon. The opening of the
mouth does not allow it; it is rather an anxious and oppressed
groan. The pain of the body and the greatness of the soul are dis-
tributed and, so to speak, balanced throughout the entire frame of
the figure with equal strength. Laocoon suffers, but he suffers like
the Philoctetes of Sophocles. His misery touches our soul, but we
would wish to be able to bear misery like this great man." es Thus
Laocoon confirms Winckelmann's generalization about Greek art,
its "noble simplicity and calm grandeur." 64 Lessing accepts
Winckelmann's description of the statue, but objects to the com-
parison with Philoctetes and to the generalization about Greek
art and literature. Philoctetes shouts, laments, curses, groans, and
howls. Venus, though only scratched, screams in Homer. Mars
roars, the dying Hercules cries and bellows with pain. Lessing con-
cludes his first chapter saying: "If it be true that a cry at the sensa-
tion of bodily pain, particularly according to the ancient Greek
way of thinking, is quite compatible with greatness of soul, it can-
not have been for the sake of expressing such greatness that the
artist avoided imitating this shriek in marble." 65 Rather, sculpture
and painting were limited to the depiction of beautiful bodies.
Beauty (and here this obviously means physical beauty) was the
highest law of the plastic arts. In an ancient picture of the sacrifice
of Iphigenia, Agamemnon is shown hiding his face, and the sculp-
tor of the Laocoon likewise had to reduce the pain. "He must
soften the shrieks to sighs, not because a shriek would have be-
trayed an ignoble soul, but because it would have produced a
hideous contortion of the countenance." 66 Virgil can tell us of
Laocoon shrieking: it does not occur to anybody that a wide-open
mouth is necessary for shouting and that a big mouth is ugly. 67
Slowly Lessing works up to a theoretical statement:
If it is true that painting and poetry in their imitations make
use of entirely different means or signs ... if these signs in-
LESSING l6l
disputably require an adequate relation to the thing signified
. . . then it is clear that signs arranged in juxtaposition can
only express subjects of which the wholes or parts exist in
juxtaposition; while consecutive signs can only express sub-
jects of which the wholes or parts are themselves consecutive.
Subjects whose wholes or parts exist in juxtaposition are called
bodies. Bodies with their visible properties are the peculiar
subjects of painting. Subjects whose wholes or parts are con-
secutive are called actions. Actions are the peculiar subject of
poetry. Still, bodies do not exist in space only but also in time.
They endure, and in each moment of their duration may as-
sume a different appearance, or stand in different combina-
tion. Each of these momentary appearances and combinations
is the effect of a preceding one, may be the cause of a subse-
quent one, and is therefore, as it were, the center of an action.
Consequently, painting too can imitate actions, but only in-
dicatively, by means of bodies. On the other hand, actions
cannot exist by themselves, they must depend on certain
beings. So far, therefore, as these beings are bodies, or are
regarded as such, poetry depicts bodies, but only indicatively,
by means of actions. Painting can only make use of a single
instant of the action, and must therefore choose the one which
is the most pregnant . . . Poetry in its progressive imitations
is confined to the use of a single property of bodies, and must
therefore choose that which calls up the most sensuous image
of the body . . . 68
This central distinction has practical consequences of consider-
able importance. For painting, it means the condemnation of alle-
gory and of much of what the time considered the highest genre
of painting, history painting, as well as sequences of scenes in one
picture, which Lessing calls "an intrusion of the painter into the
realm of the poet which good taste will never approve of." 69 It
leads to speculations about the fruitful, the most pregnant mo-
ment. In literature it leads to a condemnation of enumerative de-
scription and implicitly of the descriptive poetry of the time, which
had flourished since the enormous success of Thomson's Seasons
in Germany with such imitators as Brockes, Haller, and Ewald von
162 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
Kleist. The Horatian saying ut pictura poesis, which had served
for centuries as the basis for comparison of the arts, is thus rejected
both for painting and for poetry. Lessing is also arguing here
against theories widely held at the time. Joseph Spence's Polymetis
is specifically condemned, because Spence had stated that "scarce
anything can be good in a poetical description which would ap-
pear absurd if represented in a statue or a picture." 70 The Comte
Caylus had argued in his Tableaux tirds de Vlliade (1757) that the
more a poem furnishes images and actions which can be painted
the greater it is as a poem, and he had gone through the Iliad, the
Odyssey, and the Aeneid making suggestions for paintings. Thus
Lessing was not tilting at windmills. He quotes a descriptive pas-
sage from Albrecht von Haller's Alpen enumerating plants and
flowers, and insists that unless we have seen them before we can-
not get any kind of visual image from it. 71 He quotes Ariosto's
description of the fay Alcina 72 to prove that we cannot visualize
her, even though the author describes her hair, her forehead, her
eyebrows, her lips, her teeth, her neck, and her breasts in great
detail. Such enumerative description is contrasted with the method
employed by Homer to suggest beauty. Helen appears in the assem-
bly of the Trojan elders, and the elders speak to each other: "No-
body should blame the Trojans and Achaeans for suffering misery
so long for such a woman.'* 73 "What Homer could not describe by
its constituent parts he lets us acknowledge in its effect. Paint for
us, you poets, the delight, the affection, the love, the rapture, which
beauty produces, and you have painted beauty itself." 74 The poet,
beside showing the effects of beauty, can also show us beauty in
motion, namely charm. Poetry, unlike painting, can also afford to
depict extreme ugliness, thus to arouse mixed feelings of laughter
and terror, as for Thersites in Homer or Richard III in Shake-
speare. Yet Lessing condemns the repulsive and disgusting both in
painting and poetry, quoting for poetry descriptions of hunger
from Dante (Ugolino) and from Beaumont and Fletcher (The Sea
Voyage). The last chapters of the Laokoon are taken up with
archaeological points, e.g., an argument against Winckelmann's
view that the statue of Laocoon belongs to the time of Alexander
the Great. Lessing is anxious to date it after Virgil's Aeneid and
puts it as late as the reign of Emperor Titus. Modern archaeolog-
ical research has found inscriptions in Rhodes which show that the
LESSING 163
sculptors must have worked about the year 50 B.C., thus preceding
the Aeneid.*
One must acknowledge the high importance of Lessing's central
problem: the differences and limits of the arts. It is impossible to
agree with Croce, who refuses to recognize any classification of the
arts, putting artistic creation purely in the mental act of the artist,
which is assumed to be unaffected by the medium. Lessing himself
in Emilia Galotti seems to endorse the view that "Raphael would
have been the greatest genius among painters, even if he had un-
fortunately been born without hands/' 75 But Lessing's whole the-
ory runs counter to this view: it can even be said that he seems
uninterested in or vague about the question: what is the common
element in all the arts? Lessing's main distinction between the arts
of space and time, though debatable, is basically sound. His ob-
jections to static descriptions in literature were not only salutary
in their time, but, if properly qualified, are applicable even today:
most of us skip the formal descriptions in the novels of Scott or
Balzac. Lessing is certainly putting his finger on the issue when he
points to the difficulty of our forming a whole from an accumula-
tion of traits, and he is also right in opposing the stress on visualiza-
tion in literature, which in the i8th century was favored by the
current interpretation of the term "imagination" as practically
identical with visual imagination. Literature does not evoke sensu-
ous images, or if it does, does so only incidentally, occasionally, and
intermittently. Even in the depiction of a fictional character the
writer need not suggest visual images at all. We can scarcely visual-
ize most of Dostoevsky's or Henry James's characters, while we
know their states of mind, their motivations, evaluations, attitudes,
and desires very completely. Lessing stresses characterization by
the single trait, by the one Homeric epithet, the method which is
substantially that of Tolstoy or Thomas Mann.
Lessing formulates his view best in one of the notes for the con-
tinuation of the Laokoon. "I assert that only that can be the aim
of an art to which it is uniquely and alone fitted, and not that
which the other arts can do just as well or even better. I find a
simile in Plutarch which illustrates this very well. A person, he
* Published after Virgil's death in 17 B.C. Thus neither Winckel-
mann nor Lessing was right. Winckelmann dated the group far too
early, Lessing slightly too late.
164 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
says, who tries to chop wood with a key and open a door with an
axe, not only spoils both tools, but deprives himself of the use of
both tools." 76 Purity of effect is what we sympathize with if we
dislike literary painting, program music, poetic architecture, and
similar mixtures of the arts. Yet Lessing's conception of what is
peculiarly literary will not strike us as convincing. It is, in effect,
the view that drama is the highest and the central genre of litera-
ture. Part of this is simply due to his equation of action (Hand-
lung) with drama, though he recognizes that action in poetry is
not necessarily outward, external motion. And part must be due
to the insensitivity of Lessing and his contemporaries to the lyric,
which to modern readers seems the center of poetry. Part again is
due to Lessing's preoccupation with a form which was his own
field of creative endeavor and to the central position drama held
in the Aristotelian theory of poetry. Lessing's own view is most
clearly stated in a letter to Nicolai (May 26, 1769), which comments
on a review of the Laokoon by Garve. Lessing recognized that his
book does not answer all questions; after all, a sequel was planned,
and the Laokoon was called Part I. He admits that the view ex-
pounded in the text needs qualification: painting is not actually
confined to natural signs, poetry is not confined to arbitrary signs.
But it is certain that "the more painting gets away from natural
signs, or mixes natural signs with arbitrary signs, the more it gets
away from its highest point of perfection; while poetry approaches
perfection the more nearly, the more its arbitrary signs approxi-
mate natural signs. Thus the higher painting is that which uses only
natural signs in space and the higher poetry that which uses only
natural signs in time." Lessing does not deny the effects of historical
and allegorical painting, but they seem to him impure.
Poetry must try to raise its arbitrary signs to natural signs:
that is how it differs from prose and becomes poetry. The
means by which this is accomplished are the tone of words,
the position of words, measure, figures and tropes, similes, etc.
All these make arbitrary signs more like natural signs, but
they don't actually change them into natural signs; conse-
quently all genres that use only these means must be looked
upon as lower kinds of poetry; and the highest kind of poetry
will be that which transforms the arbitrary signs completely
LESSING 165
into natural signs. That is dramatic poetry; for in it words
cease to be arbitrary signs, and become natural signs of arbi-
trary objects. Aristotle said that dramatic poetry is the high-
est, even the only, poetry, and he assigns second place to the
epic only insofar as it is for the most part dramatic or can be
dramatic. 77
This is an extremely revealing letter. It needs some interpretation:
certainly the term "natural signs," derived from Dubos, is used
here strangely and very broadly. The passage just quoted men-
tions onomatopoeia, the use of language as directly imitating an
object; it mentions meter, which is natural because physical in its
effect; and it also mentions, curiously enough, metaphors, which
are considered (as a discarded draft shows) a device to raise arbi-
trary signs to the value of natural signs. "As the power of natural
signs consists in their similarity with things, metaphor introduces,
instead of such a similarity, which words do not have, another
similarity, which the thing referred to has with still another, the
concept of which can be renewed more easily and more vividly." 78
A simile is nothing but an extended metaphor. This is a strange
theory of imagery which would reduce metaphor to the compari-
sons of unfamiliar with more familiar objects, and even with this
restriction the theory seems incapable of establishing the claim
that metaphorical language is natural and not arbitrary. Lessing's
view is closely related to the common 18th-century view of primi-
tive, natural, poetic language as metaphorical. But he appears to
look on such language as merely a makeshift for the employment
of natural signs in the drama. There, if I understand Lessing
rightly, language is natural because it is spoken by characters and
in character, with gestures and expressions of the face as in real
life, and thus it loses the fatal quality of conventionality which
inheres in all other uses of language; spoken language is the nat-
ural language of emotion and thus can communicate the emotions
of sympathy and pity, the highest object of the drama. Thus the
Laokoon is not unrelated to Hamburgische Dramaturgic: we pass
logically from one to the other.
Lessing's conception of the fine arts is undoubtedly far more
narrow than his conception of literature, which argues precisely
for a latitude of emotional effects. In the fine arts he holds to a
l66 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
very abstract ideal of physical beauty to which expression is strictly
subordinated. Even his interpretation of the Laocoon group seems
mistaken: good modern photographs show that Laocoon's face is
distorted by violent pain. "He draws in air through the slightly
opened mouth, draws in his abdomen, thus pushing up his breast,
and throws his head back upon the nape of his neck." 79 The whole
group seems rather a crass example of Hellenic "baroque" than of
classical repose. Lessing in any case confines the plastic arts to the
depiction of physical beauty so narrowly that he totally obliterates
the distinction between sculpture and painting. He discusses sculp-
ture in a way which assumes that what he says of it applies to paint-
ing, and thus he creates a confusion of two arts which runs counter
to his avowed purpose of differentiation. In painting itself, Lessing
obviously preferred mere design and did not recognize composition
by color. Design would be confined to human figures, because the
"highest bodily beauty exists only in man and even in him only
by virtue of the ideal." 80 The painting of animals, flowers, and
landscapes is rejected because these are not capable of the ideal. 81
Here Lessing seems to share the Renaissance view of painting as a
liberal art which must tell a story of human significance. But at the
same time he explicitly rejects history painting, along with still-
life and landscape. He is thus left with the mere depiction of phys-
ical bodies, which, according to the theory of the pregnant mo-
ment, may convey a human meaning by suggestion. It is not sur-
prising that Lessing should ask "whether one would not wish that
the art of oil painting had never been invented." 82 This is a dreary
ideal which even the best designs by Flaxman, David, or Ingres
do not make attractive. It sacrifices the humanistic values of the
old ut pictura poesis theory without replacing it by a new ideal
of pure painterly values.
A good deal of evidence has been accumulated to show that
Lessing's ideas were not entirely new. It is obviously true that
many of his questions and some of his solutions had been sug-
gested before. In Shaftesbury, for instance, there is an elaborate
discussion of the "fruitful moment," and there are numerous anti-
cipations of Lessing's distinctions between the fine arts and poetry
in Dubos, James Harris, Diderot, and, especially, in Edmund
Burke. 88 But scattered anticipations can be found of almost any
LESSING 167
idea. Lessing certainly formulated his main argument strikingly
and persuasively.
The influence of the Laokoon, in Germany especially, was pro-
found, and not only in arresting the vogue of descriptive poetry.
Herder, we shall see, started his critical theory in reaction to the
Laokoon, Goethe in his autobiography paid generous tribute to its
revelations and wrote his own piece on Laocoon (1798). German
poetry quite consciously turned to drama, and even in the lyric it
required movement, motion, dynamism at any price.
But the Laokoon is only part of Lessing's critical work. The
theory of tragedy and the interpretation of Aristotle expounded
in the later sections of the Hamburgische Dramaturgic were al-
most equally influential. Some of its central views are anticipated
in his i7th Literaturbrief and in his correspondence with Mendels-
sohn and Nicolai in 1756-57. A close study would have to define
the differences between these early discussions and the mature
views in the Dramaturgic. Lessing, in the correspondence, is still
fumbling. He defines the aim of tragedy merely as the arousing of
pity: "It must extend our capacity for feeling pity. The most com-
passionate man is the best man . . . and he who makes us com-
passionate, makes us better and more virtuous/' 84 Dramas which
arouse only admiration for sufferings heroically borne, as do those
of Corneille, are not really tragic. On this evidence Lessing would
emerge as a defender of domestic tragedy, even of the view that
tragedy must be judged by the degree of emotion it evokes, the
number of tears it draws. His polemics would merely be directed
against "admiration" for the Cornelian Stoic hero, whom we can-
not pity but rather must envy and emulate as if he were the hero
of an epic. 85 In the Laokoon Lessing gives the example of the
Roman gladiator who had to suffer silently, because if he had ex-
cited compassion the games would have been stopped. The exist-
ence of these gladiatorial games proves to Lessing that the Romans
could not have had true tragedy. Senecan tragic heroes are nothing
but pugilists (Klopffechter) 8fl on buskins.
The Hamburgische Dramaturgic resumes this argument but for-
tunately goes far beyond it. The reason that the Dramaturgic is in
many ways a disappointing book may be understood in terms of
its genesis. Lessing was invited in 1767 to become the dramatist of
l68 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
a newly founded National Theater in Hamburg. As he did not
wish to be obliged to supply a stated number of plays, the idea
was accepted that he would write a kind of theatrical journal
which would comment on the plays performed, thus fulfilling an
advertising function, helping to influence the taste of the public,
and advising the actors who owned the theater. Lessing actually
began by reviewing plays regularly twice a week, also criticizing the
performances of the actors. But the journal soon ran into trouble,
and he abandoned criticism of the acting because he had caused
bad blood among his employers. He also fell considerably behind
in his commentaries on the plays. The numbers were reprinted
piratically, which caused financial losses. Thus after No. 32 the
pretense of periodical publication was abandoned: Lessing more
and more gave up following the repertory. After No. 52 he dis-
cussed only seven plays and felt far freer to indulge in general re-
flections on the nature of tragedy, the meaning of Aristotle's
Poetics, and similar topics. The journal came to an end with Nos.
100-4, dated April 19, 1768, which nominally discussed a perform-
ance given in the preceding July. The theater itself failed within
a year. As Lessing reflects in the concluding number, "What a
good-natured idea, to establish a National Theater for us Germans,
when we Germans are not yet a nation. I am not speaking about
political constitution, but only about the moral character. One
could almost say we have none. We are still the inveterate imita-
tors of everything foreign." 87
Thus the Dramaturgic must be judged as originally designed for
day-by-day reviewing of plays on whose selection Lessing had no
influence. This alone explains the choice of Corneille's Rodogune
and the emphasis on Voltaire. They were produced and Racine
was not. This explains the attention to French and German plays
now totally forgotten; it also explains the general polemical under-
current against the French drama, from whose fetters Lessing
wants the Germans to be freed. The arguments against the French
stage are not merely nationalistic, though Lessing challenges his
readers: "Mention any play of the great Corneille which I would
not improve upon ["besser machen" must mean "write a better
play on the subject" and not merely "improve"]. What will you
bet?" 88 They are based on a different conception of the nature of
tragedy and a different interpretation of Aristotle (which undoubt-
LESSING 169
edly is nearer the meaning of the text than Corneille's). What is
new and surprising in Germany, and has led to the error of iden-
tifying Lessing simply with neoclassicism, is his stress on Aristotle
as the master. "I don't hesitate to admit (even if I should be there-
fore laughed to scorn in these enlightened times) that I consider
the work [the Poetics] as infallible as the Elements of Euclid . . .
I would venture to prove incontrovertibly, that tragedy cannot de-
part a step from the plumb line of Aristotle, without departing
thus far from its own perfection." 89 This, of course, is not au-
thoritarianism but trust in absolute truth. "I would dispose of his
authority," Lessing says elsewhere, 00 "easily enough if I could only
dispose of his reasons." He describes his procedure thus:
In this conviction I set myself the task of judging in detail
some of the most celebrated models of the French stage. For
this stage is said to be formed quite in accordance with the
rules of Aristotle, and the attempt has been made particularly
to persuade us Germans that only by these rules have the
French attained to the degree ot perfection from which they
can look down on all the stages of modern peoples. We have
so long firmly believed this that our poets regarded imitating
the French the same as working according to the rules of the
ancients. But this prejudice could not eternally survive against
our feelings. These were fortunately roused from their slum-
bers by some English plays, and we at last realized that tragedy
was capable of another effect, quite different from that
achieved by Corneille and Racine. Then, dazzled by this sud-
den ray of truth, we rebounded to the brink of another abyss.
An opinion arose that there was no need of any rules; Germans
were on the point of "wantonly throwing away the experience of
all past times" and demanding from the poet that "each one
should discover the art anew." Lessing hopes to have checked this
"fermentation of taste" by combating the delusion of the regular-
ity of the French stage. "No nation has more misapprehended the
rules of ancient drama than the French." 91 This seeming paradox
underlies the arguments against the rules. He constantly dispar-
ages the mechanical rules: in the discussion of Voltaire's Merope
an elaborate attempt is made to show that his preservation of the
unity of place, time, and action leads really to improbabilities and
170 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
even absurdities. "As far as I am concerned Voltaire's Meropc and
Maffei's Merope may extend over eight days and the scene may be
laid in seven places in Greece, if only they had the beauties to
make me forget these pedantries." 82 But Lessing's argument is not
the common one that genius can transcend the rules or that rules
are narrow. He would occasionally say something which sounds
deceptively romantic: "Genius laughs at all the boundary lines of
criticism." M "Genius is permitted not to know a thousand things
that every schoolboy knows. Not the accumulated stores of his
memory, but that which he can produce out of himself, out of his
own feelings, constitutes his riches." 9 * But most commonly he
stresses the compatibility of genius and the rules, of imagination
and judgment.
We have now, thank heaven, a generation of critics whose
highest criticism consists in making all criticism suspicious.
They vociferate: "Genius! Genius!" "Genius transcends all
rules." "What genius produces is rules." Thus they flatter
genius, in order, I fancy, that they also may be held geniuses.
But they too evidently betray that they do not feel a spark of it
in themselves, when they add in one and the same breath:
"Rules oppress genius." As if genius could be oppressed by
anything in the world, and furthermore by something that, as
they themselves admit, is deduced from it. Not every critic is
a genius, but every genius is a born critic. He has the proof
of all rules within himself. 95
"Whoever reasons rightly, invents too, and whoever wants to in-
vent, must be able to reason." 98 Thus Lessing develops the view
that the poet acts with purpose and must create a world which is
also purposeful and coherent.
The mechanical rules do not matter. Nor does even the purity
of genres, as one surprising passage states:
In our textbooks it is right that we should separate them from
one another as carefully as possible, but if a genius, for higher
purposes, amalgamates several of them in one and the same
work, let us forget our textbook and only examine whether
he has attained these higher purposes. Why should I care
whether a play of Euripides is neither wholly a narrative nor
LESSING 171
wholly a drama. Call it a hybrid; it is enough that this hybrid
pleases me more, edifies me more, than the most lawful births
of our correct Racines or whatever else they may be called.
Because the mule is neither a horse nor an ass, is it therefore
the less one of the most useful beasts of burden? 9T
What matters is the coherence of the poet's world, its probability
and the purity and specificity of its effect. Lessing constantly re-
peats that an action must have its logical course. "Genius can bother
only with events that are rooted in one another, with chains of cause
and effect: to reduce the latter to the former, to weigh the latter
against the former, everywhere to exclude chance, to cause every-
thing to occur so that it could not have happened otherwise, this
is the business of genius." 98 There must be no miracle in the
drama, not even mere historical accuracy, because there are many
historical events which are entirely inexplicable, incomprehen-
sible, and incoherent. Tragedy is not "history put into dialogue." "
This is a point which Lessing argues at great length in connection
with Thomas Corneille's Essex and Voltaire's historical objections
to that play. Where the poet is confronted with improbable events,
such as Cleopatra's murdering her husband and two sons in Cor-
neille's Rodogune, he must invent a series of causes and effects by
which these improbable events can be made to seem necessary.
"Not satisfied with resting their probability on historical authority,
he will endeavor so to construct the characters of his personages, so
to necessitate, one from another, the events that place these char-
acters in action, so to define the passions of each character, and to
lead these passions through such gradual stages, that we shall every-
where see nothing but the most natural and common course of
events." 10 The poet must develop the "hidden organization" of
his plot 101 because he needs this "inner probability" 102 to achieve
that identification with the character which is the ground of pity
and hence of the effect of tragedy. We must recognize that a
"similar stream might also have carried us away to do deeds which
in cold blood we believe far removed from us." 108
Thus the question of the effect of tragedy, of purgation through
pity and fear, is tied in with the question of the structure of trag-
edy. Lessing has now discovered that it is impossible to define the
tragic effect as mere pity or compassion. He interprets the crucial
172 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
passage in Aristotle to mean "pity with fear" in a situation where
fear is a necessary concomitant of pity. The fear is not terror, but
fear which "arises for us from our similarity with the suffering
person . . . the fear that we ourselves could become this object
of pity"; 104 we must pity the hero if the hero is "of the same wheat
and chaff," 10B is "one of us" 106 and thus is not above or below
common humanity. The martyrs and monsters of Corneille are
not pitiful and therefore not tragic, just as Richard III is not
tragic. Such tragic pity with fear must be distinguished from what
Lessing calls "philanthropy," the compassion which, as men, we
would extend even to the worst criminal, though we could not fear
for ourselves in witnessing his fate. But what is meant by "purga-
tion" of such pity and fear? The term "catharsis" has given rise to
the most diverse interpretations: to some it has meant inuring,
hardening our minds against the feeling of pity and fear. To others
it has meant almost the opposite: a tempering, a purification, a
cleansing of pity and fear, or even an increase in these feelings. By
modern Aristotelians such as Bernays 107 it has been convincingly
interpreted in medical terms as a homeopathic cure. The mind is
to be purged of pity and fear. Catharsis is a process of healing.
Lessing has his own interpretation, which hardly commends itself
as historically correct but fits into his own scheme: he equates pur-
gation with the right mean of the passions as taught by the Nico-
machean Ethics. "Purification consists in nothing else than the
transformation of passions into virtuous habits." 108 We must
achieve the golden mean of pity and fear: those who feel too much
must learn to feel less, those who feel too little must learn to feel
more. Tragedy is thus a "school of the moral world." 109 This, of
course, is basic to the neoclassical view of all literature. "All species
of poetry are intended to improve us"; it is lamentable "that there
are poets who doubt even this." 110
All genres exist for the purpose of improving us. Tragedy, how-
ever, has this specific means of improvement: the purgation of pity
and fear. Lessing insists in apparent contradiction to the passage
where he admits a mixture of kinds that "all genres of poetry
cannot improve all things, at least not every genre so perfectly as
another; but what each can improve most perfectly, and better
than any other genre that alone is its peculiar aim." ni He be-
comes quite indignant at the view that the theater needs only to
LESSING 173
amuse by telling a story. "To what end the hard work of dramatic
form? Why build a theater, disguise men and women, torture their
memories, invite the whole town to assemble in one place, if I
intend to produce nothing more with my work and its representa-
tion than some of those emotions that would be produced about
as well by any good story that everybody could read by his chimney
corner at home?" 112 This strange complaint overlooks the exist-
ence and attraction of comedy, and ignores the simple fact that
actors don't torture their memories but like to learn their roles and
that people love to disguise themselves and to assemble in one
place.
But it is not possible to dismiss Lessing's theory of tragedy as
simple didacticism or even as reducible to the balancing of pity
and fear which he interprets as "purgation/ 1 Tragedy achieves all
this because it creates a world analogous to the real one. The
world of drama is
another world, a world whose chance events may be connected
in a different order, but must still be connected logically as
they are here: a world in which cause and effect may follow in
different order but yet lead to the general effect of good; in
short a world of genius, which (if I may be permitted to desig-
nate the creator, without naming him, by his most noble crea-
tion) in order to imitate the highest genius in miniature,
transposes, reduces, increases the particles of the present world
in order to form a whole therefrom that shall harmonize with
his own aims and ends. 113
Tragedy, it appears, is thus a justification of God, a theodicy, a
world inherently ethical, just as God's created cosmos is good even
though we may not see the ultimate goodness of any individual
evil. In history there may be monsters such as Richard III, and
there may be innocent suffering. But then history
has its good reason in the eternal and infinite connection of
all things. In history all is wisdom and goodness, though it
may appear to us that there is blind fate and cruelty in the
few links picked out by the poet. Out of these few links the
poet ought to make a whole, rounded in itself and complete,
fully explained in itself, where no difficulty arises to which a
174 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
solution is not found in his plan. We ought not to be forced
to seek a reason outside of the general plan of things. The
whole fashioned by this mortal creator [the poet] should be
a silhouette of the whole of the eternal Creator. It should ac-
custom us to the thought that as in Him all things are resolved
for the best, so also will it be on earth. The poet forgets his
most noble calling when he forces into a narrow circle the in-
comprehensible ways of Providence and deliberately awakens
our shudder thereat . . . To what end these sad emotions?
To teach us submission? Cool reason alone could teach us
this, and if the teachings of reason are to have any hold on us,
if we for all our submission are to retain confidence and joy-
ful courage, it is most necessary that we should be reminded
as little as possible of perplexing examples, of unmerited ter-
rible fates. Away with them from the stage, away with them,
if possible, from all books 1 114
Drama then shows us the world rational, transparent to the ethical
will, subservient to it. There must be no innocent suffering on the
stage because reason and religion should have convinced us that
the very idea of human beings as wretched because of no guilt of
their own is "as false as it is blasphemous." 11B Tragedy has the high
function of revealing the order of the universe. Lessing, with the
optimism of the i8th century and its peculiar kind of belief in a
benevolent God and His universe, dissolves the conception of
tragedy: in his tragedy there can be no free will, no conflict be-
tween man and God or fate or the universe.
Lessing's conception of tragedy is a deeply ethical one. It agrees
with Butcher's later interpretation of Aristotle, according to which
"the dramatic action must be so significant, and its meaning ca-
pable of such extension, that through it we can discern the higher
laws which rule the world." 116 But unfortunately Lessing betrays
the limitations of his temper and his time in his conception of
these higher laws. His is the 18th-century universe of a benevolent
God, a benevolent Nature, and a basically good man. Tragedy is
deprived of its connection with sacrifice, with the grandly heroic,
the marvelous and divine, the mysterium tremendum, and is re-
duced to an object lesson in humanitarianism. Lessing's emphasis
on the coherence and wholeness of the world of drama, its inner
LESSING 175
probability, actually justifies any art which is psychologically true
and consistent, which is a fully motivated portrayal of life even
though it be not tragic or even dramatic at all. The hero is reduced
in stature: he cannot be either a martyr or a criminal; he must be
a middling man, whose guilt is only an understandable failure, a
mistake committed under mitigating circumstances of strain or
ignorance. His pathos is that of mere suffering. The auditor is con-
ceived as a virtuoso of pity, a man who has to exercise his humanity
and train it in virtuous habits, not a man who is to be either shaken
up and torn by tragedy or healed to Stoic endurance and indiffer-
ence. Thus Lessing illustrates the same failure of his age to grasp
the nature of art which we found in Dr. Johnson and in Diderot.
Along with them, he prepares the conception of literature under-
lying the psychological and social realism of the igth century.
p: STORM AND STRESS, AND HERDER
LESSING tried to restate the neoclassical creed by abandoning its
French version and substituting a liberalized interpretation of
Aristotle which allowed him to satisfy his desire for an ethical
realism. He thus upheld the basic principle of mimesis, the con-
cept of rules (however much he wanted to change them), and the
view that literary creation is a work of judgment as well as talent.
But this revised neoclassicism soon proved unacceptable in Ger-
many. The reaction against French taste and the Enlightenment
imported from France became more and more radical, until in
the early 1770*5 it broke out in a movement known as Storm and
Stress. The group of writers associated with this title of a play can
hardly be described as critics. Their ideas are all substantially de-
rived from the French sentimentalists and the British primitivists,
though they reworded them much more sharply and pronounced
them much more shrilly: the rules were completely rejected by
Lenz; * Burger preached popular poetry; 2 Stolberg glorified divine
poetry as "streaming from the fullness of the heart." 3 "Genius"
became a slogan in which complete rejection of discipline and
tradition was linked with belief in creative spontaneity. 4 Nature
now meant raw nature, naturalness, naturalism. The tone, the
violence, even the shriek do not make criticism: a body of thought,
a new taste, a philosophy of literature was not formulated until
Herder.
The English preromantic view was introduced into Germany by
Heinrich Wilhelm Gerstenberg (1737-1823) who, however, re-
stated it much more radically. His Brief e uber Merkwurdigkeiten
der Litteratur (1766), almost at the very beginning, report on War-
ton's Observations on the Fairie Queene, ridiculing Warton for his
timidity, his admission of Spenser's faults, and his whole hesitating
attitude toward the demand for unity of composition. Spenser, ac-
cording to Gerstenberg, must not be judged by such irrelevant
176
STORM AND STRESS 177
standards: he had no other intention than to give us an anthology
of romantic adventures. Spenser pleases by "graces beyond the
reach of art," he carries us away by the marvelous power of crea-
tive imagination. 5 In recommending Shakespeare to the Germans
in a series of letters beginning with a criticism of Wieland's prose
version, Gerstenberg, with a typical salto mortale into opposite ex-
tremes, brushes aside all questions of genre, rules, and composition.
"Away with the classification of the drama"; "call them plays, his-
tory, tragedy, tragicomedy, comedy, what you will: I call them
living pictures of moral nature/* 6 Gerstenberg rejects the idea of
considering catharsis, or even the moving of the emotions pity and
fear. Lear, MacbetJi, Hamlet, Richard III, Romeo, and Othello
are rather character plays than tragic fables. 7 This does not mean
that Shakespeare is artless or savage: just the other way: "I see
everywhere a certain whole, beginning, middle and end, propor-
tion, intentions, contrasting characters and groups." 8 There is
picturesque unity of intention and composition, a "poetical illu-
sion," which to Gerstenberg is totally untheatrical, even anti-
theatrical. "Tragedy," meaning French tragedy and its imitations,
"is not poetry." Shakespeare, he tries to show in a series of quota-
tions illustrating his art of characterizing speakers according to
their age, is a master of psychological portraiture, not a play-
wright. 10
Gerstenberg added Nordic poetry to Shakespeare and Spenser.
He lived in Denmark, knew Danish, and thus was able to describe
the Danish folk ballads (Kaempe Viser) collected in the i6th cen-
tury, and to translate something from the Edda. What he quotes
seems to him truly Pindaric, highly metaphorical like early poetry
and Shakespeare, whose puns he was one of the first to defend. 11
This poetry of nature is poetry of genius, contrasted with that of
bel esprit or a witty mind. Genius is Gerstenberg's watchword as it
was Hamann's: it is inspiration, imagination, fire, the creation of
illusion, invention, novelty, originality. 12 Poetry is the higher epic
(Homer) and the high ode (Pindar) not drama. "Among witty heads
there are grades, but none among poetic geniuses. A poet without
great genius is no poet." 1S All the new terms of the time are here
assembled.
Yet Gerstenberg was not always as radical as these pronounce-
ments sound. One could easily collect from his scattered writings,
178 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
which include a long series of reviews for the Hamburgische Neue
Zeitung (1767-71), opinions favorable to Dryden, Pope, Johnson
(he admired the Rambler), Richardson, Sterne, Goldoni, and even
Wieland. 14 They show that Gerstenberg's taste was eclectic and
that he also liked, besides Homer, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Cer-
vantes, realism, sentiment, and rococo playfulness. But all these
uncertainties should not obscure the glowing passages on Shake-
speare and genius which proved to be most influential. They sug-
gested the curious image of Shakespeare which also became Her-
der's and the young Goethe's: Shakespeare as the poet, the char-
acter writer, divorced from the stage. The reflections on genius set
the tone for the glorification of spontaneity, creativeness, and un-
reflecting fervor which the new generation expected from poetry.
Johann Georg Hamann (1730-88) is usually considered Her-
der's spiritual father. He differs profoundly from Herder, how-
ever, and must be discussed separately. Hamann was one of the
first Germans to arrive at a complete rejection of the Enlighten-
ment; this occurred after a religious conversion he experienced
during a journey to London (1758). His theory of literature (inso-
far as he has one) is strictly part of a religious philosophy which
implied a rejection of the whole of modern civilization. Hamann
thus cannot be judged as a literary critic or even as a man of letters;
he was and wanted to be a religious prophet. Culturally he belongs
in the company of Jakob Bohme and similar Renaissance mystics.
He combined, in a weird mixture, elements derived from gnosti-
cism, neo-Platonism, etc., with a strong dose of Lutheran pietism,
and added to them something of recent sensualism. His writings,
as published by himself, were merely a series of small pamphlets,
sometimes issued anonymously in a few copies, which therefore
could not have reached a wider audience. They present no con-
tinuous arguments but usually are only a series of aphorisms or
jocular and grotesque polemics, full of the most local and tem-
poral allusions and the most abstruse, often Greek and Hebrew,
quotations. Hamann's reputation in his time was purely personal,
even legendary, yet his influence was profound, as Herder was his
pupil and Goethe and Jacobi learned from him. Not until long
after his death, when in 1821-25 Friedrich Roth published a col-
lected edition, could Hamann's writings be read and studied. Then
slowly his position in Protestant theology became established and
STORM AND STRESS 179
he acquired a group of enthusiastic followers who studied his
works as if they were the Bible. This limited cult has only in this
century been replaced by an objective study of Hamann's historical
role and thought. But it has led to the magnifying of his position
into the magnus parens of the whole great age of German literature.
Goethe's saying that he was the greatest man of the century is
again taken seriously. 10
Whatever his importance as a religious thinker may be, we must
pronounce on his role in a history of criticism. It can be con-
sidered only that of an inciter. His remarks on poetry could be
collected in two pages, though it is possible to add a good many
opinions on specific writers which, however, are never developed
or substantiated. Thus Shakespeare, though highly admired, re-
mains in Hamann's writings hardly more than a synonym for
genius. 10 The two pages of sayings, largely in the "Aesthetica in
nuce," a section of Kreuzzuge des Philologen (Crusades of the Phi-
lologist, 1762), are, however, startling. The whole world is the
language of God and poetry is therefore nothing but the imitation
of this language. Logos is Reason, but also the Word and Christ.
Thus "all our knowledge is sensuous, figurative." 1T Poetry speaks
only in images. "Senses and passions speak and understand nothing
but images. In images is the whole treasure of human knowledge
and happiness." 18 Poetry, historically, is one with human knowl-
edge, religion, and myth. "Poetry is the mother tongue of the hu-
man race; just as gardening is older than agriculture, painting than
writing, singing than declamation, similes than syllogisms, barter
than commerce/' 19 "Mythos, fable and invention, always seem to
precede pathos and the rush of sentiment." 20 "Epic and fable are
the beginning, and besides them nothing but ode and song." 21
Poetry is thus the same as religion, it is original religion, a "natural
kind of prophesying." 22 All poetry is sacred; the Bible is not only
the Word of God but also the highest poetry. Hamann preaches
what he calls "salvation by the Jews," "pilgrimages to Arabia felix,
crusades to the East," for "Nature and the Holy Writ are the ma-
terials of the beautiful creating imitating spirit." 28 Thus Oriental
poetry and the Bible, together with Homer and Shakespeare, are
the great models. They are all parabolic poetry, not folk poetry as
Herder later proclaimed them. In Hamann there is only a passing
glance at Latvian folk songs which points in this direction. 24
l8o A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
Lowth, with his Lectures on Hebrew Poetry and Bacon and his
interpretation of ancient myths, are referred to, but not Percy or
Ossian. 25
Hamann thus can condemn imitation of nature, probability,
la belle nature, and all the assumptions of neoclassicism. Voltaire
he calls the "Lucifer of the century." 26 He condemns the new in-
terpretation of the Bible that seeks only one meaning in a text; he
believes in allegories and parables, as all nature is one great
parable of God's power. 27 "The summary of the newest aesthetics,
as of the oldest, is: Tear God and render Him homage/ " 28
This world view, with its identification of reason and language,
implies the exaltation of genius, and of all of Hamann's literary
ideas proved most influential in his time. His idea of genius is all
feeling, imagination, fire, inspiration, originality, creativeness.
"My coarse imagination has never been able to imagine a creative
genius without genitals.' 7 29 But sensualism and emotionalism are
combined with mysticism. Hamann's genius is also the Socratic
daimon and its "ignorance." "Genius plumbs all things, even the
profound things of God." 80 Genius is almost the same as prophet
and inspired fool. For literature it means the rejection of the rules.
"What makes up in Homer for his ignorance of the rules which an
Aristotle thought out after him, and what in a Shakespeare makes
up for the ignorance or transgression of those critical laws? Genius
is the unanimous answer." 31 "Those who want to deprive the arts
of caprice and fancy are assassins that attack their very honor and
life." 82
These are the main motifs of Hamann's thought that are of
literary interest. In their radical anti-intellectualism they seem the
fountainhead of much that immediately followed in Germany.
Hamann links a dim past of mysticism, neo-Platonism, and pietism
with German Romanticism. Goethe wanted to edit Hamann and
gave him a prominent place in his description of the literary situa-
tion of his youth. 38 Hegel reviewed him with reservations, but ad-
miringly. 84 Kierkegaard was one of his most assiduous readers. 85
Still, one should not overlook the profound differences between
Hamann and later critical thought. Even his pupil Herder differed
from him on important points: with Herder the lyric, not myth, is
at the origin of poetry, and it is surely a symptom of their basic
disagreement that Hamann violently attacked Herder for denying
STORM AND STRESS l8l
the divine origin of language. 86 Hamann criticized Kant's Critique
of Pure Reason with arguments which, in themselves, suffice to
exclude him from any understanding of German idealistic philos-
ophy. 87 He remained a mystic, a strict supernatural dualist, for
whom anguish, as for Kierkegaard, is the only proof of our double
nature, without which there would be no homesickness for
heaven. 88 This mystical world view is necessarily static and unhis-
torical. There are in Hamann pronouncements to the effect that
an author should be interpreted in the spirit of his age (as Pope
and many other good 18th-century minds recommended), but he
has no real interest in development or in historical change. 89
Poetry is religion and myth; it was so at the beginning of creation
and should be now. "All aesthetic juggling cannot replace imme-
diate feeling." 40 Hamann thus disclaimed being a critic, though
he wrote numerous reviews, did translations, and was a learned,
widely read student of literature. 41 Like everybody who wanted
to be a real reformer of criticism or the propounder of a new
philosophy of literature, Herder had to tread different paths and
look for other ancestors.
Though the name ot Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) was
not mentioned in my account of the late iSth-century English and
Scottish critics, they provide the background for Herder's ideas
and, in combination, represent almost the totality of his critical
thought. There is scarcely any idea in Herder which could not be
traced back to Blackwell or Harris, Shaftesbury or Brown, Blair
or Percy, Warton or Young. Herder read them all, and of course he
read his German predecessors and contemporaries, especially Les-
sing, Hamann, and Winckelmann. He sat at Hamann's feet and felt
himself to be his personal disciple. He read the French Rousseau,
of whom he disapproved for a time, 42 Diderot, and many others;
and echoes of Vice's thought seem to have come to him through
Cesarotti's notes to Ossian, which he read in the German transla-
tion by Michael Denis.* 8
But it would be a mistake to consider Herder merely the synthe-
sizer of what could be vaguely called preromantic criticism in
Europe. He is not only a synthesizer whom none of his predecessors
can approach in sweep and scope, he is also the first who sharply
breaks with the neoclassical past, who abandons that curious
double point of view which we found in writers such as Warton or
l82 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
Kurd. The whole scale of values is completely reversed, though
even in Herder we can, of course, find survivals and accommoda-
tions to the older views. Herder differs from all other critics of the
century not only in his radicalism but also in his method of presen-
tation and argument. In his writings there is a new fervid, shrill,
enthusiastic tone, an emotional heightening, a style which uses
rhetorical questions, exclamations, passages marked by dashes in
wearisome profusion, a style full of metaphors and similes, a
composition which often abandons any pretense at argument and
chain of reasoning. It is that of a lyrical address, of constant ques-
tions, cumulative intensifying adjectives, verbs of motion, of meta-
phors drawn from the movement of water, light, flame, and the
growth of plants and animals. There is a constantly shifting use
of terminology in which ancient words lose their original meaning,
in which "drama," "ode," "elegy" may mean almost anything the
author wants them to mean in his context. There is hardly a real
book among the thirty-three volumes of Herder's Collected Works.
Many of them are called quite rightly Fragmente, Torso, Wdlder,
Briefe, Zerstreute Blatter, Ideen zur . . . ; or they have fancy
titles such as Adrastea, Kalligone y Terpsichore, which often con-
ceal an extremely miscellaneous content. With the exception of a
few treatises definitely devoted to theology, it is not safe to ignore
any of his writings in a study of his literary criticism. Opinions
and pronouncements on literary questions can occur in any con-
text. Besides, Herder constantly rewrote what he had written: the
second edition of the Fragmente differs profoundly from the first,
and materials are often moved from one book to another. The
exclamatory style, the shifting terminology, the fragmentariness
of the arguments, the constant oscillation and flitting from one
topic to another are extremely irritating and justify Saintsbury's
charge of "fearful wooliness," 44 but they do not justify a neglect
of Herder. Saintsbury dismisses him without proper examination,
obviously having read not more than a few pages, and discussing
him after Sainte-Beuve and Hugo, Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Not only is Herder of considerable intrinsic interest and, in spite
of his incoherent style, of great inner intellectual cohesion and
simplicity, but he has been enormously influential: the effect of
his contact with the young Goethe in the winter of 1 770-7 1 in Stras-
bourg is very well known; it is obvious that Herder's ideas were
STORM AND STRESS 183
the great quarry for the German romantics, for Jean Paul, for No-
valis, and especially for the two Schlegels. It seems to me an ex-
aggeration to claim that Herder was the first modern historian of
literature and the first man with historical sense: but he is certainly
the one who has most clearly been the fountainhead of universal
literary history. He has also undoubtedly been the most influen-
tial force for stimulating interest in folk poetry and in establishing
it as the ideal of poetry, though he himself was, of course, stimu-
lated by the halfhearted Percy and the much more fervid Scottish
primitivists. Herder's influence on the whole revival of folk poetry
its collecting and imitating, its interpretation and evaluation
is immeasurable, especially in the Slavic and Scandinavian coun-
tries. His influence was often indirect and anonymous, combined
with that ol predecessors, contemporaries, and followers; it is
almost underground, for reasons which are in part due to the char-
acteristics of Herder's writings and in part to extraneous circum-
stances such as the intermittent hostility of Goethe and Schiller.
While his influence was obscured in the early iQth century, he has
again been studied intensively in recent decades, especially in Ger-
many, and has been played up as a sort of counterweight to Goethe
and Schiller. The revival of Herder, which came originally from
historians with religious interests (Nadler and Unger), was later
taken up by the Nazis, who saw in him a source of German nation-
alism, of a national conception of literature and of the "blood and
soil" ideology. They conveniently ignored or minimi/ed his cen-
tral teaching of Humanitat. From the very nature of Herder's
manner of thinking it is almost impossible to isolate his literary
criticism and theory from the general body of his thought, from
his philosophy of history, his theology, psychology, linguistic specu-
lations, and aesthetic. We shall try, however, to do so, paying only
minimal attention to the background and implications of his
literary ideas for a general philosophy or Weltanschauung.
What has been said before suggests that Herder's conception of
the aim of criticism differs from that of the main neoclassicists, the
whole tradition which attempted to build up a rational structure
of coherent and systematic literary theory and of immutable stand-
ards of judgment. Herder conceives of criticism mainly as a process
of empathy, of identification, of something intuitive and sub-
rational. He constantly rejects theories, systems, faultfinding. In
184 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
an early piece, the preliminary discourse to the second collection
of Fragmente uber die neuere deutsche Literatur (1767), he de-
scribes his views of the function of criticism: the critic should be a
"servant of the author, his friend, his impartial judge. He should
try to get acquainted with him, make a thorough study of him as
a master, not seek to be your own master. ... It is difficult but
reasonable that the critic should transfer himself into the thoughts
of his author and read him in the spirit in which he wrote." 40 In
praising Gerstenberg's Ugolino (1770) he says that "we do not
criticize from Hedelin [= D'Aubignac] or Racine, but from our
feeling." 40 What matters is to "live in the spirit of an author, to
make one's own his manner of speaking, to be informed, so to say,
of the plan and aim of his work out of his own soul." 47 No wonder
that Herder quotes Leibniz with approval. Leibniz says that he has
little "censorious spirit. It is strange. But I like most things I
read. I always like to seek out and note what is praiseworthy
rather than what is blameworthy." 48 In Herder we have the criti-
cism of beauties rather than faults of which Chateaubriand is sup-
posed to be the originator. It is actually not so much criticism as
understanding, empathy (Einfuhlimg), submission to the author.
"If there need be criticism of poets, then criticism which traces the
steps of the original, which feels after it is the best." 40 Herder has
glimpses of a science of interpretation, heimeneutics, as it had
been developed especially in Protestant theology. He constantly
asks for "living reading," for a "divination of the soul of an
author," for a consideration of every book as the imprint of a liv-
ing human soul. "Such reading is emulation, heuristics . . . the
more we know a living author and have lived with him, the more
vital will be our contact." eo Thus "criticism without genius is
nothing. Only a genius can judge and teach another." 61 These
were important sayings, salutary in their time for their stress on
understanding, but they also contain the germs of much that is
bad in criticism since Herder's time: mere impressionism, the idea
of "creative" criticism with its pretensions to duplicating a work
of art by another work of art, the critical errors of excessive atten-
tion to biography and the intention of the author, mere apprecia-
tion, and complete relativism.
This empathic conception of criticism is closely related to
Herder's historical sense, his insistence that every work of litera-
STORM AND STRESS 185
ture needs to be seen and interpreted in its historical setting.
"Every sound critic in the whole world says that, in order to under-
stand and interpret a piece of literature, it is necessary to put one-
self ... in the spirit of the piece itself." D2 "The most indispen-
sable explanation especially of a poet is the explanation of the
customs of his age and nation." 53 In the late Briefe zur Beforde-
rung der Humanitdt (1796) Herder expressly discusses methods of
literary study. He rejects classification by genres and finds division
into types such as "subjective" and "objective" (in Schiller) vague
and unprofitable. The correct method is the "natural method,
which leaves each flower in its place, and contemplates it there
just as it is, according to time and kind, from the root to the
crown. The most humble genius hates ranking and comparison.
He would rather be the first in a village, than the second after
Caesar. Lichen, moss, fern, and the richest scented flower: each
blooms in its place in God's order." M The natural method is
Herder's own, the historical method, which sees each work as part
and parcel of its milieu and hence feels that each is in its place,
fulfills its temporary function, and thus really needs no criticism.
Everything had to be the way it has been: there is no need of
judging, no need ot standards, as all ages arc equal. In Auch cine
Philosophic der Geschichtc zur Bildung der AlenschJieit (1774) he
defended the Middle Ages and rejected the idea of uniform prog-
ress. "Nothing in the whole kingdom of God is ... a means only
everything is means and end at the same time, and certainly also
these centuries," r>B a saying which anticipates Ranke's famous
phrase that every age is "immediate to God." Luckily Herder did
not develop the full consequences of his historical relativism,
though his sympathies and taste were catholic beyond that of any
critic of the i8th century.
We can describe his conception and ideal of poetry quite con-
cretely. Herder's aesthetic is curiously sensualistic: he tried to de-
duce the individual arts from their respective senses, distinguish-
ing sharply between painting the art of the eye, music the art
of the ear, and sculpture the art of touch. The last idea, later de-
veloped in a little work on Plastik (1778), was especially new at the
time. At first Herder saw no way of reducing poetry to one of the
senses and did not even classify it with the arts. Later he concluded
that poetry has a special position in being the art of imagination,
l86 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
the "only fine art immediate for the soul," the "music of the
soul" B6 which "affects the inner sense, not the external eye of the
artist." B7 This view is effectively used in Herder's attempt at a
refutation of the Laokoon, in the first Kritisches Wdldchen (1769),
which, though diffuse, is one of his most impressive and coherent
performances. He argues that Lessing's contrast between painting
as an art of space and poetry as an art of time is specious. The mere
succession in time is not central to the effect of poetry. Succession
in time he assigns, unconvincingly, to music, forgetting about har-
mony and ignoring the tact that his arguments on poetry apply
also to the forms ot music. Sounds in poetry and language have
meaning or soul. Poetry differs from the other arts by being energy,
not work, a distinction Herder drew from James Harris* Three
Treatises and ultimately from Aristotle (energeia vs. ergon).
Herder's spontaneous energy is an obscure idea which removes
poetry irom the other arts, each correlated to a sense, merely on
the analogy of the triad "time, space, and energy." fiy He seems to
moan an organi/ing power, a coherence of imaginative ideas, 59
which makes it possible for poetry to express not only actions in
succession but also bodies, images, pictures. "I learn from Homer
that the effect of poetry is never that ot sound upon the ear, nor
is it upon the memory, however long I can retain any partk ular
detail out of the whole succession of details, but upon my imagina-
tion. ... I thus oppose it to painting, and regret that Mr. Lessing
has not paid attention to this central point ol the nature ot poetry,
this 'effect on our soul, or energy/ " 60
Herder never gave up the view that poetry stands apart as the
art ot emotion, expression, and energy, appealing to the imagina-
tion. Nevertheless he recognized more and more its basis in lan-
guage and in the sound ot language. He asks us to read a poet
(Jakob Balde) "not with the eyes alone." "Hear him simultane-
ously, or, as far as possible, read him aloud to somebody else. Lyri-
cal poems should be read that way. . . . With the sound emerges
their spirit, movement, life." 61 He can advise a friend to whom
he has sent his translations of Shakespeare's lyrics: "You must only
sing, not read." 62 He constantly stresses the sound and meter of
poetry, and criticizes the inappropriate meter of Denis' German
translation of Ossian. His own numerous verse translations all at-
tempt first to imitate the sound, the tone, and the meter. Such a
STORM AND STRESS 187
conception o poetry is, ot course, lyrical. "Lyrical poetry is the
perfect expression ot an emotion or representation in the highest
euphony of language." 63 This is a late definition, but even among
the earliest fragments of Herder we find two sketches for a history
of the ode and the lyric. The ode is "the firstborn child of emotion,
the origin of poetry, the germ of its life." 64 This view is associated
with the view that there was an original unity of poetry and music,
that poetry was never more powerful than when it was combined
with music, that the poet and the composer were originally the
same: all ideas suggested by John Brown and known to anybody
who had studied the Greek drama. Herder would say even that
the "Greek theater was song," 6n and would refer to the tragedy
of Sophocles as "heroic opera." 6(J
Language is associated in Herder's mind with literature from
the very beginning. The first collection ot the Fragmente opens
with the statement that the "genius of a language is also the
genius of the literature ot the nation." 7 Hence the origins of
poetry and ot language are one and the same. Herder's treatise
Vber den Ursprung der Sprache (i 772) is thus a speculative history
not only of language but also of poetry. The first language was
nothing but a collection ot elements of poetry. A "dictionary of the
soul, it was at the same time mythology and a marvelous epic of the
actions and speeches of all beings thus a constant fable with
passion and interest," song, poetry, and music all rolled into one. 08
Herder here rejects both the divine origin of language and the old
rationalistic compact theory, at the same time improving on Con-
dillac's sensualistic theory which derived language from cries.
Man, according to Herder, invented language "from the tones of
living nature [and made them] signs of his governing reason." 69
Consciousness (Besonnenheil) made signs out of cries. Thus poetry
is not merely a lyrical cry but also fable and myth, and is shot
through and through with metaphor. In Herder's theory of knowl-
edge 70 the role of imagery and analogy is central. "What we know,
we know from analogy, from creature to us and from us to the
creator." There is no other key to the interior of things than im-
agery, analogy. "I am not ashamed ... of running after images,
similarities, after .laws of agreement with the One, because I know
no other play of my thinking powers (if we must think at all) and
because I believe that Homer and Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare,
l88 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
and Klopstock have furnished more matter to psychology and the
knowledge of man than even the Aristotles and Leibnizes of all
nations and times." 71 A late piece, "Uber Bild, Dichtung und
Fabel" (1786), expounds this in some detail. "Our whole life is,
so to speak, a poetics. We do not see, we create images ourselves." 72
Poetry is naturally metaphorical and allegorical (Herder, it seems,
does not distinguish between allegory and symbolism). Primitive
man thinks in symbols, allegories, and metaphors, and their com-
binations make fables and myths. Thus poetry is not an imitation
of nature but an "imitation of the creating, naming Godhead." 73
The poet is a "second creator, poietes, maker," 74 a saying which
associates the poet with Prometheus and which comes from Shaftes-
bury. The poet is an original, an individual, and in Herder's mind
this is not incompatible with his creating unconsciously and intui-
tively: Shakespeare "paints passion to its deepest abysses without
his knowing" of it and describes Hamlet "unconsciously" up to his
hair. 76 Later Herder became disgusted with the excesses of the
Sturm und Diang cult of pure genius and began to rcaffiim the
role of reason and judgment, but he never gave up his view that
genius is mainly instinctive, even sensuous. In long-winded and
often quibbling polemics directed against Kant's conception of
genius in the Kritik der Urteilskrajt, Herder reaffirms his view
that genius is inborn, that it expresses itself and possesses not
merely imagination and reason but also a "disposition of sensuous
sensibilities as well as that divine urge, that quiet mental warmth
which is enthusiasm but not rapture." 70
It is no chance, of course, that the concept of poetry and the poet
here expounded is seen in terms of a history of poetry in which the
origins of poetry describe its nature. Herder is convinced that "it
is absolutely impossible to have a philosophical theory of the
beautiful in all arts and sciences without history." 77 The concepts
of a theory of literature "grow out of manifold concrete things, in
many kinds and phenomena, in which genesis is the All-in-All." 78
"If we want ever to achieve a philosophical poetics or a history of
poetry, then we must begin with the individual genres and trace
them back to their origins." 79 He would say that as the "tree from
the root, so must the progress and the flowering of an art be de-
duced from its origin. It contains the whole being of its product
just as a whole plant is hidden with all its parts in a grain of
STORM AND STRESS 189
seed." 80 "Origins show the nature of a thing." 81 This is the doc-
trine which the igth century was to push to the extreme of neglect-
ing the problems of description and evaluation in contemporary
terms in favor of explanation by remote prehistory. It was to lead
to an emphasis on Sanskrit and Proto-Indo-European rather than
the study of contemporary speech, of Anglo-Saxon literature as
compared to the study of the literature of our own time.
This evolution of literature is conceived of by Herder as literal
evolution, as the growing of a germ, on a completely biological
analogy. In describing the followers of Homer in Greece Herder
says, "where an cpigenesis, i.e., a living additional growth in regu-
lar form or powers and limbs, should occur, there must be, as the
whole of nature shows, a living germ, a shape of nature and art,
whose growth all elements joyously favor. Homer planted such a
germ, an epic art form. His family, the school of the Homerids,
brought up the tree." 82 Though this biological parallel permeates
all of Herder's writings on literary history and history in general,
he does not quite draw the fatalistic conclusions which are implied
in any view of the growing, maturing, and aging of poetry. Actu-
ally Herder does not believe in uniform degeneration from the
glories of the age of poetry, though there are many passages 83 in
his writings which would suggest this view, common at that time.
It was argued that there used to be an age of imagination, that we
have now entered an age of reason and are thus fatally committed
to further progress and hence to the drying up of the sources of
imagination. We found this view in Vico and Fontciicllc's Traite
de la poesie en general. To Vico and Herder poetry belongs to the
past, since it requires contact with nature, emotion, and spontane-
ity, which modern civilization stifles and kills. 84
The biological view of the evolution of poetry should logically
produce resignation to an inevitable development. Poetry is the
language of primitive man, of the childhood of mankind, and 110
return is possible since none of us can become young again. But
Herder's view is not logical: first of all, he has recourse to the
theory of cycles. Humanity is not conceived of as a single indi-
vidual there are as many humanities as there are nations. After
the decline of Rome, there came the new flowering of the Middle
Ages; after the degeneracy of the Renaissance and its artificial
literature, there may come a new flowering of the imagination.
190 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
Moreover, Herder frequently forgets the implications of his deter-
ministic biological point of view and simply appeals to the will
to change the direction of development, asking for a return to the
age of poetry. "Let us return to the oldest human nature and every-
thing else will be all right." 85 In this view the Germans have a pe-
culiar position. They seem to him in the greatest danger of losing
their individuality and forgetting the treasures of their past.
"Now," he shouts, mixing his metaphors more than usually, "Now!
The remnants of all living folkways are rolling with a last hurried
plunge into the abyss of oblivion. The light of so-called culture
corrodes everything like a cancer." 86 "We are at the very edge of
the abyss: another half a century and it is too late." 87 Herder, after
all, was a practical critic, a reformer who wanted to change the
direction of literature and influence his time. It could not be done
by resigned fatalism. The whole argument of the Fragrnente, his
first important publication, is directed against imitation, especially
that of French and Latin literature. There also, for the first time,
he publicly points to the regenerative power of folk poetry and
recommends collecting it, not only in Germany but among "Scyths
and Slavs, Wends and Bohemians, Russians, Swedes, and Poles." 88
Thus a turn in the development of literature is possible it we re-
turn to our own past and to the past of humanity which lies all
around us, in folk poetry, songs, legends, and myths, even in super-
stitions and in the character of the language. Herder is one of those
who believe that the German language is somehow peculiarly abo-
riginal because it is not derived from the Latin and is not a mixture
of Latin and Germanic as is English. Thus Germans should culti-
vate its peculiarities, its idioms, its wealth of synonyms, its inver-
sions, all its illogicalities, which arc a source of poetry compared to
the clarity, straightforwardness, poverty, and shallowness of the
French language.
Throughout Herder's activity there runs this messianic desire to
be a reformer and restorer of German poetry, and one must recog-
nize that the advent of Goethe, who was Herder's personal pupil,
seemed to justify his optimism and prophecy. One can understand
how bitter was his disappointment when Goethe, and with him
Schiller, turned to what Herder considered sterile classicism and
aestheticism, thus denying all his teachings of a return to the folk
and the national past. 89 Herder had constantly condemned the
STORM AND STRESS igi
Latin influence in the Middle Ages and Renaissance and the
French influence in the i7th and i8th centuries: "O the cursed
word: Classic! It has made Cicero a classic orator; Horace and
Virgil classic school poets, Caesar a pedant, and Livy a word-
monger." 90 He had argued that the Germans were worse afflicted
than the English with the disease of the artificial. This is the point
of a remarkable paper, "Von Ahnlichkeit der mittleren englischen
und deutschen Dichtkunst" (1777), which tries to explain why
Germany had no Shakespeare. 91 According to Herder, English
civilization remained national and even managed to assimilate the
Renaissance. Shakespeare is to him a popular writer who draws his
materials from folk songs, ballads, romances, and popular chroni-
cles. 92 Shakespeare always looms in the background of English
poetry, and the English have never lost touch with their national
past. Herder constantly praises the efforts of the English antiquar-
ies and sees them as superior to those of their German colleagues.
"If we consider the learned industry which the English have lav-
ished on their old poets, e.g., Warton on Spenser, Tyrwhitt on
Chaucer, Percy on the ballads, and so many, many of their best
read men on their Shakespeare and their old drama: and then
consider ourselves what shall we say?" 93 The Germans were
overwhelmed by humanism, handicapped by a lack of a national
state, torn by the wars of religion.
Thus, from ancient times we have absolutely no living poetic
literature upon which our modern poetry might have grown,
as a branch upon the national stem; whereas other nations
have progressed with the centuries, and have shaped them-
selves upon their own soil, from native products, upon the
belief and taste of the people, from the remains of the past.
In that way their literature and language have become na-
tional, the voice of the people has been used and cherished.
They have secured far more of a public in these matters than
we Germans have. We poor Germans have been destined from
the start never to remain ourselves. 94
Thus Herder's theoretical historicism is offset by his practical pa-
triotism, by his belief that the Germans need to be saved from the
blight of civilization and returned to the wellsprings of their
power.
192 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
But it would be a mistake to think of Herder merely as a Teu-
tonizing nationalist: his whole conception of the nation was that
of a steppingstone toward "humanity." From a literary point of
view the German nation was inferior to those which had preserved
their individuality better and longer. Thus Herder constantly held
up the example of other nations, and tirelessly translated, col-
lected, and described the wealth of the world's literature. His
Volkslieder (1777-78), now best known under the title given to
them after Herder's death, Stimmen der Volker in Liedern, is the
first comprehensive anthology of world literature, animated by a
conception of folk poetry which was extremely broad and included
much which we would not today think of calling by this term.
Folk poetry is to Herder the fullest and most cherished embodi-
ment of a people's soul. "Unless we have a folk," he says, "we lack
also a public, a nation, a language, and a literature that are ours,
that live and work in us. We write eternally for desk students and
squeamish critics ... we write romances, odes, heroic epics,
church and kitchen songs, which no one understands, no one de-
sires, no one feels. Our classical literature is a bird of paradise,
gaily colored, very pretty, all flight, all elevation, but never with a
foot on German earth." 90 Herder thus does not confuse the folk
with the lower classes. "Folk does not mean the rabble on the
streets which never sings and creates, but roars and mutilates." 96
Folk poetry is a highly inclusive concept: it includes Genesis, the
Song of Songs, the Book of Job, the Psalms, in fact nearly all of the
Old Testament. It includes Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus and Soph-
ocles, Sappho and the Greek Anthology, Chaucer, Spenser, Shake-
speare, and the contents of Percy's Reliques (not only English and
Scottish ballads but Elizabethan songs). It includes medieval ro-
mances, the German Heldenbuch, the troubadours, the Minne-
sang. Burger's ballads, and Klopstock, whom Herder admired be-
yond any of the German poets. It includes even Dante 97 and of
course Ossian.
Ossian crystallized Herder's conception of folk poetry. The repu-
tation of these monotonous, melancholy, sentimental rhythmic
compositions by James Macpherson was tremendous all over
Europe. Herder first read them in the hexameter translation by
Denis, turning also to Hugh Blair's Dissertation on the Poems of
Ossian (1763), which gave him all the materials for the comparison
STORM AND STRESS 193
with Homer. He read, besides, the notes supplied by Denis, repro-
ducing those of the Italian translation by Cesarotti. There he could
read that "Imagination was the first philosophy of nations. Here
one must look for the origin of myth. One must agree with Vico
when he says: Raw nature produces poets/' B8 Herder, without as
yet knowing the original English, condemned the artificial transla-
tion of Denis and created for himself the image of a natural poet
through the mist of what he considered the translation of a transla-
tion. He himself adopted passages from Denis, translating them
into a style which he fancied that of folk poetry, a style much
more abrupt, more obscure, halting, and "wild" than the fluid and
placid Ossian of Macpherson. 99 When Herder saw the originals at
last, he experienced a disappointment he laid to Macpherson's
"translation." But his suspicions began to be aroused by contact
with an eccentric Scotchman, Baron de Harold. In the Volkslieder
Ossian is represented only by three specimens, and in the prefaces
he is passed over with surprising silence. Herder never quite gave
up the view that Macpherson was not an inventor but a reworker,
a collector, and did not live to see the full evidence which demon-
strated on how slender a basis Macpherson had constructed his edi-
fice of supposedly third-century Gaelic epics. Herder's astonishing
enthusiasm for Ossian was the basis for his conception of folk and
national song. Even the Creation story in the Book of Genesis he
thought of as developed out of a number of primitive folk songs. 100
This conception of folk poetry is most conspicuous and most one-
sided in Herder's view of Shakespeare. A paper entitled "Shake-
speare" was contributed by Herder to a collection called Von
deutscher Art und Kunst (1773), which included Goethe's lyrical
address on the Strasbourg cathedral: "Von deutscher Baukunst."
The Shakespeare piece is a most characteristic performance, a
lyrical rhapsody rather than a piece of criticism. It begins with a
vision of Shakespeare sitting high on the summit of a rock, at his
feet storm, thunder, and the roaring of the sea, but with his head
in the rays of heaven. The question of the unities is then brushed
aside by the historical argument: in Greece the drama arose in a
way in which it could not arise in the North. Nordic drama can-
not be the same as Greek. The drama of Sophocles and that of
Shakespeare are two separate things, which from a certain point
of view should hardly have the name in common. The unities
A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
were necessary in Greece from their origin in the chorus. The
whole French tragedy is a "glistening classic thing," "without na-
ture," "absurd," "disgusting." Shakespeare did not find a chorus,
he found puppet shows and chronicle plays before him. His dramas
are "dark little symbols of an outline for a theodicy" (an allusion
to Lessing's conception of tragedy). Lear, Othello, and Macbeth
are described by evoking their setting: e.g. the heath with lightning
and thunder, the swallows nesting in Macbeth's castle. In each play
there is, according to Herder, a pervading mood which permeates
it like the soul of the world. "Take the soil, the sap, and the energy
from this plant, and you have planted it in air: take away place,
time, individual status from these men, and you have taken away
their breath and soul." How absurd is the question of the unity
ot time! What must be the illusion experienced by a man who
after every scene will look at his watch to see whether it could have
happened in the time elapsed. For a poet, a creator, a "dramatic
God" no clock strikes on spire or temple: he has to make his own
measures of space and time to produce a world which will move
the audience. How Shakespeare has transformed a miserable ro-
mance, novel, or fabulous history into a living whole is the ques-
tion Herder would consider the heart of the investigation. But he
docs not really attempt it and ends with a suggestion on the classi-
fication of Shakespeare's plays. They are all "history in the widest
sense," the "greatly portentous happening of a world event, of a
human fate." 101 The view that Shakespeare's plays are dramatiza-
tions of ballad materials was, of course, not Herder's only. There
are many suggestions along these lines in English iSth-century
editions. Even Johnson thought that Shakespeare took the story
of King Lear "perhaps immediately from an old historical ballad."
The Reliques of Percy contained a whole section on "Ballads That
Illustrate Shakespeare." Both in Percy and in Herder's Volkslieder
Shakespeare is represented by scenes such as the Willow Song from
Othello or the songs of Ophelia in Hamlet. One sees what further
motive there was in Herder's call for a collection of German folk
songs. Such a collection, he must have felt, might stimulate the new
German Shakespeare. That is why he urged Goethe to collect folk
songs in Alsace. That is why he hailed Goetz von Berlichingen,
based on an ancient chronicle, and Faust, which is drawn from a
STORM AND STRESS 195
puppet play and includes songs, one of them imitated from Ham-
let.
It would be easy to criticize Herder's conception of folk poetry,
or rather of nature poetry. The overrating of Ossian seems the
most incomprehensible: "There will be times," he prophesied,
"that will say: let us close Homer, Virgil, and Milton, and judge
from Ossian." 102 The view that poets such as Chaucer or Dante
were in any way popular seems to us totally mistaken. Herder cer-
tainly has a very one-sided conception of Shakespeare or Homer:
he overrated or started the overrating of all kinds of folklore
without being able to distinguish genuine productions from artifi-
cial derivatives and even fakes such as Ossian. His criticism of
much neoclassical literature seems to us grossly unjust. His concep-
tion is too indulgent toward the purely naive, the mere lyrical cry,
the merely spontaneous, and too inimical to great art, which may
be intellectual, sophisticated, ironical, grotesque. But we must
realize that Herder was struck with the novelty of his discoveries,
which were fresh and appealing against the background of a decay-
ing neoclassicism, while we are inured to many romantic charms by
a century and a half of their vulgarization. We must not underrate
the historical importance of Herder's conception of poetry, which
certainly widened the horizon immeasurably and brushed aside
many narrow or false conceptions of the neoclassical creed: its
stress on the unities, its preoccupation with pure genres, its limita-
tion to upper-class literature. In spite of the excesses of his primi-
tivism and lyricism, Herder had a clearer and truer conception of
poetry than all the critics we have discussed hitherto. His concep-
tion of poetry is centrally true: he is right in his stress on the role
of metaphor, symbol, and myth, on poetry's essential function in
a healthy society.
But Herder's importance lies not merely in his new conception
of poetry or even in his general scheme of its origins. He is also,
in many ways, the first modern historian of literature who has
clearly conceived of the ideal of universal literary history, sketched
out its methods, and written outlines of its development which are
not merely an accumulation of antiquarian research, as the works
of Warton and Tiraboschi, or the Histoire litteraire de la France
tended to be. Herder certainly raised a great many of the prob-
igf) A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
lems of literary history and suggested what should be done and
what questions should be answered. Literary history should trace
the "origins, the growth, the changes and the decay [of literature]
according to the different stales of the regions, times, and poets." 10S
"How has the spirit of literature changed in the different languages
into which it entered? What did it take along from all the places
and regions which it deserted? . . . What kind of a thing arose
from the mixture and fermentation of such diverse matter?" 104
Herder rejects the ordinary literary history, which, "laden with
learning, paces through nations and times in the quiet step of a
miller's animal, with its eyes too close to the ground to see any of
the visions that hover even a little above it." 105 He wants to grasp
the spirit of literature and wishes the historian to hold "time
against time, country against country, and genius against gen-
ius." 10 Literary history thus will "ennoble the desecrated phrases
histoire de I'esprit humain and 'History of the Human Mind/ " 10T
In theory, then, Herder's literary history is cultural history in the
broadest sense. One sees its aim when he describes the procedure.
In reading Dante or Petrarch, Ariosto or Cervantes he first sees
only the poet, as a unique person; then he sees everything which
has contributed to his formation or misformation.
The whole world of poetry before and after him disappeared
from my eye: I saw only him. But soon I was reminded of the
whole course of the ages which came before him and a[ter
him. He learned and taught, he followed others, others fol-
lowed him. His language, his ways of thought, his passions,
were ties which connected him at first with a few other poets
and in the end with all others. Because he was a man, he wrote
for men. Thus unawares we are led to investigate how each
poet stands in relation to those similar to him in his nation
and outside of it, while his nation is compared to theirs both
before and afterwards; and thus an indivisible chain pulls us
into pandemonium, the realm of spirits. 108
Literary history is thus conceived of primarily in sociological
terms. There are impressionistic analyses of works of literature
scattered through Herder's writings. The evocation of Sophocles'
Philoctetes in the argument against Lessing is very suggestive and
sensitive. Vom Geist der ebraischen Poesie (1782-83) contains
STORM AND STRESS 197
many penetrating, but also many fantastic, interpretations of the
Old Testament. Elsewhere there are comments on the odes of
Horace. The taste and sensitivity of Herder could be most amply
demonstrated and investigated by an examination of his numerous
poetic translations, which are, on the whole, extremely successful,
though he suffered from a lack of access to the originals or from
inadequate philological knowledge. But there is nowhere in
Herder an attempt to interpret a work ot art as a total organism,
to analyze its structure or composition. His literary history is one
of broad vistas, wide sweeps, bold generalizations.
He has been considered a forerunner of Taine in his stress on
milieu. There is in Herder much about climate (hot, cold, and
temperate), 109 landscape, race (nations), customs, and even political
conditions such as Athenian democracy in their relations to litera-
ture. One of his prize essays, called Vber die Wirkung der Dicht-
kunst auf die Sitten der Volker in alien und neuen Zeiten (1778),
is a survey of the history of literature with stress on its educative
and civilizing function. But Herder rarely analyzes the environ-
mental factors and never brings them into close relationship with
the actual literature. He constantly argues in a circle: i.e., he
explains a work of literature by history and then utilizes the work
to throw light on history. In the case of Ossian, for instance, since
there exist no early documents about ancient Scottish history,
Herder derived all the information about the social setting from
the poems, and that was extremely vague and baffling. He uses such
criteria as climate and landscape very loosely, and even the racial
point of view amounts to little more than the old contrast be-
tween North and South, the Germanic and the Latin nations.
In a paper on Homer and Ossian, Herder tries to derive the
poetic differences between the two from differences in climate and
national stock. 110 But "Nordic," as often at that time, is a vague
grandiose conception which includes not only the Germans but
also the Celts and the English. We ought not to torget that Herder
praised the Slavs as the great new peace-loving nation for which he
prophesied a glorious future and which seemed to him still origi-
nal and spontaneous. 111 Instead of climate, race, and concrete social
conditions, Herder mostly operates with terms such as "spirit of
the time/* "spirit of a nation." He would say that "each age has
its own tone, its color," and that it gives us "peculiar pleasure to
ig8 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
characterize it correctly in contrast to other times." 112 He would
generalize recklessly about the national taste of every one of the
great European nations. "The Italian sings; the French prose-
poetry reasons and narrates; the English thinks in his most un-
musical language/' 11S
But whatever the shortcomings of Herder's method which to
us, after 150 years of unparalleled accumulation of information
and research, must appear dilettantish, arbitrary, and indiscrimi-
nate the value for the times of his sketches of literary history can-
not be doubted. What was needed was a premature synthesis, an
asking of questions, without which literary history would have
been totally swamped by antiquarianism. Indeed, the bold sketches
of the Schlegels are directly inspired by Herder. One of the best
of Herder's outlines is in the 7th and 8th collections of Briefe zur
Befordcrung dcr Humanitat (1796). He starts with the reasons for
the decay of Greece and Rome and thus of Greek and Roman
poetry, gives an enthusiastic account of Latin Christian hymns
such as "Dies irae," sketchily describes Nordic sagas and myth-
ology, and then, in some detail, Provencal poetry and the Minne-
sang. The description of medieval poetry, with its stress on love,
courage, and piety, and the suggestion of a connection between
courtly love and the cult of the Virgin Mary, was certainly highly
important tor the romantic conception of the Middle Ages which
only a few years later was in full bloom in Novalis' Christenheit
und Europa. Much is then made of the good and evil influence
of the invention of printing, the Reformation, and humanism.
Shakespeare is again explained as coming at the right moment be-
tween the age of imagination and the age of reason, a "dramatic
minstrel." 114 "Poetry of reflection" was soon to replace the "poetry
of pure fable." Milton is to Herder the first and greatest of the
poets of reflection, who created his own artificial language and
wrote in a heroic measure, "monotonous, pompous, and noble." ll5
Cowley is condemned because of his Pindarics, Pope's poetry is
mildly praised as versified common sense, successful in satire and
the burlesque. Young is condemned as a forced and strained hyper-
bolical author, and even the praise of Thomson is only lukewarm.
The treatment of English prose, of Swift, Richardson, and Field-
ing, though laudatory, is only perfunctory and could not be sub-
stantially supplemented from Herder's other writings.
Herder has been acclaimed as the father of Germanistics. But his
STORM AND STRESS igg
several attempts at histories of German literature are hardly sys-
tematic and well informed, even for the time. He begins a history
of German poetry with the Edda and reflections on the loss of
ancient German poetry. He translated the Ludwigslied and
strangely enough thought Otfried was writing in Bardic meter. But
his knowledge of Old High German and Middle High German
literature was apparently quite scanty. Once he examined the
famous Jena manuscript of the Minncsanger and transcribed
rather badly some poems of Henry VI, King Conrad, and Duke
Henry of Breslau. He was still untouched by the enthusiasm for
the Nibelungen and the German court epic, and did not know
Walther von der Vogelwcide. His main interest was in the didactic
literature of the later Middle Ages and in Reineke Fuchs, which he
extravagantly praised as a German Homer. Among Reformation
forms of literature Herder lavishly praises German church song,
and among 17th-century authors he took an especial liking to a
Jesuit writing in Latin, Jakob Balde, whom he translated and
recommended late in his life. This is Herder's one close contact
with a writer whom today we would call baroque, but an examina-
tion of his translations shows how much he shared the prejudice
of his time against the wit and conceit of Jesuit poetry. It is no
chance that he endorsed Johnson's discussion of the metaphysicals
and went out of his way to condemn Cowley's Pindarics, calling
them a "Gothic building, incoherent and obscure in its details, ex-
aggerated in its metaphors, overladen with ornament." llfi There
are many survivals of iSth-century taste in Herder's predilection
for didactic and moralistic poetry. For instance the taste for Metas-
tasio, the "poetic mastcrwork of his nation," is surprising. 117
Herder is, of course, most disappointing when he discusses the
French, for here his national and literary prejudices are greatest.
He could not have known much of the French Middle Ages: he is
obviously full of disgust for the "pomp" and "show" of the French
drama of the i7th and i8th centuries. For the Pucelle d' Orleans
Voltaire is praised only as a witty storyteller. Diderot, whom
Herder met in Paris as a youth (1769), remained one of his favorite
authors, and late in life he planned a translation of his writings
which apparently would have extended to some of the novels, such
as Jacques le Fataliste. Among the French writers Herder singles
out for praise La Fontaine, as their "most original genius, whose
charm will never become obsolete, as long as the French language
20O A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
lasts." 118 Herder seems not to have known anything about the
Spanish drama; but his last work, shortly before his death, was a
free translation of the Cid romances, which unfortunately was
based on a collection of late Spanish poetical versions and a French
prose rendering.
This survey of Herder's literary opinions serves to illustrate
more concretely his conceptions of literary history and poetry. It
also serves, if we add what we have said before about his ideas
about Shakespeare and folk poetry, to point up the radical revalua-
tion of the past in which he was engaged and to exemplify the shift
of sensibility which had occurred in Germany around the year
1770: the turn toward the individual, the characteristic, the lyrical,
and the popular. In Herder the poetics of neoclassicism is, if not
dissolved completely, in the process of dissolution. He rejects all
its main tenets: the imitation of nature, decorum, the unities,
probability, propriety, clarity of style, purity of genre. Though he
speculates a good deal on genre and of course uses the names of the
genres, they constantly melt into one another in his discussions:
epic, drama, and lyric are almost the same to him. Herder obvi-
ously was not much interested in Aristotle, whom he called once
"a stiff man of bones like a skeleton: nothing but disposition, noth-
ing but order." 119 Aristotle's theory of tragedy he considered a
mere deduction from the practice of the Greek theater, of no
validity whatever for later times. Only very late in his life, in
Adrastea, does Herder discuss catharsis, and then apparently just
to attack the drama of Goethe and Schiller with a new argu-
ment. 120 On the whole, he endorses Lessing's view of Aristotle, for
didacticism was apparently the strongest neoclassical conception
(and incidentally the strongest religious preconception) surviving
in Herder. In him we see then the ruins of neoclassical poetics: he
himself began to build a new romantic poetics on the conception of
a natural poetry, sensuous, metaphorical, imaginative, spontane-
ous, with a standard of judgment based on historical relativism and
an implicit distaste for the poetry of statement, reasoning, or re-
flection. But Herder's terminology is very loose: his concepts are
shifting, his language is emotional and rhapsodical. While he was
the great initiator, he left to others the task of formulating a new,
coherent, systematic theory of poetry and literature. His first disci-
ple was Goethe, who proved an unfaithful one.
io : GOETHE
GOETHE (1749-1832) wrote a whole library, and an even larger
library has been written about him. It is thus surprising to dis-
cover that there is no extended systematic discussion of his literary
criticism, though Sainte-Beuve called him the "greatest critic of
all ages" and Matthew Arnold "the supreme critic." i The reasons
for this failure of Goethe scholarship are not far to seek: the mere
bulk of his production, the fact that his literary pronouncements
are rarely stated in a systematic context, the difficulty of isolating
his strictly literary criticism from his speculations on the plastic
arts and on art and nature in general, and finally the span of his
life, the constant shifts and changes in his views, are obstacles
which could be overcome only by long study and meditation. A
full treatment would require a volume in itselt. To be methodo-
logically sound it would have to proceed on chronological lines,
carefully distinguishing between the time before his arrival in
Weimar (1775), the time in Weimar before the Italian journey
(1786-88), the Italian journey itself, the period after the return
to Weimar before the association with Schiller (1794), the friend-
ship with Schiller to the time of Schiller's death (1805), and the
last years, in which one could again discover several stages. A
monographic treatment would make a distinction between
Goethe's formal pronouncements in works such as Dichtung und
Wahrheit, his more occasional journalistic writings, his private
letters and diaries, and finally his conversations, among which
those reported by Eckermann hold a special place because of their
substantial accuracy. As we do not have the space to make these
distinctions, we shall discuss Goethe first before his journey to
Italy and then as the mature writer, without much regard to chro-
nology or source of information.
The young Goethe, after he had freed himself from the conven-
tional rococo taste of his student years at Leipzig, was converted by
2O2 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
Herder during their association in Strasbourg in the winter of
1770-71. Goethe completely adopted the Herderian point of view.
He collected and imitated folk songs, shared Herder's enthusiasm
for Ossian and a primitive Homer, was carried away by Rousseau,
and adored Shakespeare. In the speech Zum Schakspears Tag
(1771) he made a fervent profession of personal indebtedness.
The first page I read of him made me his own for life, and
when I had finished the first play I stood there as a man born
blind to whom a miraculous hand had returned sight in an
instant. ... I did not doubt for a moment that I must give
up the regular theater. The unity of place seemed to me nar-
row as a prison, the unities of time and action obnoxious
chains for our imagination. . . . Shakespeare's theater is a
beautiful peepshow, in which the history of the world passes
by our eyes on the invisible thread of time. His plans are, to
speak in the vulgar style, no plans, but his plays turn all
around the hidden point (which no philosopher has seen and
defined) in which the specific quality of our ego, the assumed
freedom of our will clashes with the necessary course of the
whole.
Echoing the praise heaped upon Shakespeare since Dryden, Goethe
rapturously exclaims, ''Nature, Nature! Nothing is as much
Nature as Shakespeare's men. . . . He competes with Prometheus,
he forms his men after him trait by trait, only in colossal si/e." Be-
hind Shakespeare looms Greek tragedy: "Originally an intermezzo
in the cult of the god, then solemnly civic, the tragedy presented
to the people certain great actions of their forefathers with the
pure simplicity of perfection, and stirred whole, great emotions
in their souls, for it was itself whole and great." Shakespeare and
this religious, national drama written for Greek souls (and what
souls!) dwarf French tragedy which Goethe had hitherto admired.
"Little Frenchman, what do you want with the Greek armor? It is
too big and heavy for you/' It would be easier for a marquis to
imitate Alcibiades than for Corneille to follow Sophocles. "Arise,
Gentlemen!" Goethe concludes his exhortation: "trumpet all noble
souls out of the paradise of so-called good taste!" 2
The agreement with Herder's piece on Shakespeare is obvious.
There is the same emphasis on Shakespeare as a "historian" of
GOETHE 203
humanity. Like Herder, Goethe always sees in Shakespeare's plays
some hidden unity, some prevailing tone. Among the excesses of
the Sturm und Drang Goethe preserves a feeling for form, both in
his writings and in his literary theory. When commenting on Hein-
rich Leopold Wagner's translation of Mercier, he says that "it
is at last time to stop talking about the form of dramatic plays,
their length and shortness, their unities, their beginning, their
middle and end." He would rather have a confused play than a
cold one. But he sees that nothing much is achieved by stretching
every tragic event to a drama, by compressing every novel to a play,
as his friends and contemporaries were doing. An "inner form" is
required: and if "form, even the most felt form, has something
untrue to it, still it is, once for all, the burning glass, through
which we draw the holy rays of scattered nature to the heart of
men in a fiery locus." 3
The term "inner form," derived from Shaftesbury, only hints
at the problem with which the young Goethe was faced: if we
reject (he system of neoclassicism what is there to replace it? In
the meantime he could say only: let us have feeling, inspiration,
genius, "adoration tor the creative man," 4 nature in the sense of
simplicity and truth, even naturalism. Goethe then defends the
Dutch peasant women representing Madonnas in Rembrandt's
pictures and wants to leave Rubens his fleshy women, because they
are his women. 5 Generality is empty, "characteristic art is the only
true art," says Goethe in his ecstatic praise of Strasbourg cathedral,
which defies all 18th-century scorn for the Gothic. 6 Aesthetics mean
little to the young Goethe. Theory, he asserts, blocks the way to
true enjoyment. 7 In reviewing one of the works of Sulzer, Goethe
rejects the concept of la belle nature, didacticism, and the whole
psychological approach to the response of the audience. "What
does the gaping audience matter?" The only function of theory is
to "free the energies of the artist, to make air for his natural fire
that it may spread and be active." 8
The thirty-odd reviews which Goethe wrote for the Frankfurter
Gelehrte Anzcigen (177273) are the most formal pronouncements
of his early years on literature: e they are all cither satirical squibs
or lyrical meditations rather than critical analyses. They all assert
his dislike of the rationalistic, rococo civilization around him,
and contrast the artificial with the natural and genuine, the great-
2O4 A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM
ness of the past with the littleness of the present. Sulzer is ridiculed
for an adaptation of Shakespeare's Cymbeline. "Shakespeare, who
felt the worth of several centuries in his breast, through whose soul
the life of whole centuries was stirring! and here comedians in
silk and buckram and daubed scene paintingl" 10 An imitation of
Sterne's Sentimental Journey by J. G. Schummel is judged by the
criterion of spontaneity and sincerity. "Yorick felt, and this one
sat down to feel: Yorick was seized by a mood, cried and laughed
in a minute, and through the magic of sympathy we laugh and cry
with him: but here stands somebody and reflects: how do I laugh
and cry? What will the people say when I laugh and cry? What will
the reviewers say?" " Sterne, one of the most histrionic, self-
conscious writers of the time, becomes the model of genuine feel-
ing and sincerity; so in Werther's heart the contrivances of Ossian
expel Homer, and the sentimentalities of The Vicar of Wakefield
transfigure Goethe's love for the rector's daughter of Sesenheim.*
But amidst this cult of feeling Goethe preserves some critical sense
and a feeling for form. In a review of Gessner's idylls he applies
the standard of totality effectively; in Gessner "the spirit is lacking
which weaves together the pieces so that each could become an
essential part of the whole. Gessner cannot fuse scene, action and
feeling." He remains in the land ot ideas, of the shadows of abstract
beauty. 12
This standard of totality and wholeness conceived on the anal-
ogy of nature is also the most remarkable feature of the famous
discussion of Hamlet in Wilhelm Meister. As Wilhelm Meisters
Lehrjahre was published as late as 1 795, these passages are usually
considered the work of the mature Goethe. But a practically iden-
tical discussion is in the earlier version, Wilhelm Meisters Thea-
tralische Sendung, composed between 1778 and 1785, the years in
Weimar before the Italian journey. 18 It shows the beginnings of the
change in Goethe's literary views. The unity of action is recog-
nized as necessary and there is praise for Corneille, his 4 "noble
soul," his "great vein." 14 But what is said about Shakespeare is still
in the tone of the early years. Through the mouth of his hero
* See Goethe's famous account in Dichtung und Wahrheit, Bk. 10,
and the praise of Goldsmith in a letter to Zelter, Dec. 25, 1829. Weimar,
Pt. 4, 46, 193-4. Goethe classed Goldsmith with Shakespeare and Sterne.
Cf. Eckermann, 2, Dec. 16, 1828; Houben, p. 239.
GOETHE 205
Goethe describes the effect of Shakespeare on himself. The plays
"are not fictions. You would think while reading them that you
stood before the open enormous Books of Fate, while the whirl-
wind of the most impassioned life was howling through the leaves
and tossing them to and fro." 1C The echo 
