ment. II. "I warn thee," says Edward Irving, CHAPTER against criticism, which is the region of pride and malice." of each Nor is this merely the judgment of poets and what artists upon their tormentors. The critics have critics think passed sentence upon each other with equal other. severity. One of the mildest statements which I can call to mind is that of Payne Knight, who opens an essay on the Greek alphabet with the assertion that what is usually considered the higher sort of criticism has not the slightest value. It was but the other day that a distinguished living critic, Mr. G. H. Lewes, found occasion to write-"The good effected by criticism is small, the evil incalculable." -Critics have always had a strong cannibal instinct. They have not only snapped at the poets they have devoured one another. seems as if, like Diana's priest at Aricia, a critic could not attain his high office except by slaughter of the priest already installed; or as if he had been framed in the image of that serpent which, the old legends tell us, cannot become a dragon unless it swallow another serpent. It is not easy to connect the pursuits of such men with the notion of science. The truth, however, is that criticism, if it merit half the reproaches which have been cast upon it, is The doom of not fit to live. It is not merely unscientific: it is inhuman. Hissing is the only sound in nature that wakes no echo; and if criti It criticism. CHAPTER cism is nought but hissing, can do nought but hiss, it is altogether a mistake. II. Summary of the forms It may be hard for the critics to be measured of criticism. by the meanest of their tribe and by the worst of their deeds; but if we put the meanest and the worst out of sight altogether, and look only to the good, we shall still find that criticism, at its best, is a luxuriant wilderness, and yields nowhere the sure tokens of a science. Take it in any of its forms, editorial, biographical, historical, or systematic, and see if this be not the case. Editorial criticism. Editorial criticism, whether it takes the course of revising, or of reviewing, or of expounding the texts of individual authors, has, even in the hands of the ablest critics engaged upon the works of the greatest poets, yielded no large results. It is very much to this kind of criticism, at least when it points out a beauty here and a blemish there, that Payne Knight referred, when he declared that it is of no use whatever. A good editor of poetry is, indeed, one of the rarest of birds, as those who have paid any attention to certain recent issues must painfully know. Sometimes the editor is an enthusiastic admirer of his author: in this case he generally praises everything he sees, and edits in the style of a showman. Sometimes he is wonderfully erudite: in this case he rarely gets beyond verbal criticism, and edits on the principle of the miser, that if you take care of the II. How un satisfactory. halfpence the pounds will take care of them- CHAPTER selves. The appearance of one edition after another of the same poets and the same dramatists proves how unsatisfactory was each previous one, and how exceedingly rare is that assemblage of qualities required in a poetical editor -ample knowledge combined with depth of thought, imagination restrained by common. sense, and the power of being far more than the editor of other men's work, united with the will to forget oneself and to remain entirely in the background. Perhaps this last is the rarest of combinations. Why should a man, who is himself capable of producing a book, be content with the more humble labour of furbishing up other men's productions? The result is nearly worthless, unless there is some sort of equality, some appearance of companionship and brotherhood between the poet and his editor; but the chances are that only those will undertake the responsibility of editing poetry who are fit for nothing else, who could not by accident write two passable couplets, who could not assume to be the poet's friend, but who, perchance, might lay claim to the dignity of being the poet's lacquey-which Sir Henry Wotton had in his mind when he said that critics are but the brushers of noblemen's clothes. The modern author who has been most read An example and criticised is Shakespeare. There is a well- Shake of it in CHAPTER known edition of his works in which nearly II. every line has a bushel of notes gathered from the four winds-from the two and thirty spearian criticism. winds. All the wisdom of all the annotators is winnowed, and garnered, and set in array. After all, what is it? That which one critic says, the next gainsays, and the next confounds. On reading a dozen such pages, we close the volume in despair, and carry away but one poor idea, that Shakespearian criticism is like the occupation of the prisoner in the Bastile, who, to keep away madness, used daily to scatter a handful of pins about his room, that he might find employment in picking them up again. Strangely enough, it is not the men of highest intellect that in this way have done the most for Shakespeare. Pope was one of his editors; so was Warburton; Johnson another; Malone too, a very able man. Mr. Charles Knight is correct in saying that the best of the old editors of Shakespeare is Theobald—“ poor piddling Tibbald.” Whatever be the abstract worth of such editorial researches, their scientific worth is fairly estimated by Steevens, one of the by Steevens, most eager of his race, when he claims the merit of being the first commentator on Shakespeare who strove with becoming seriousness to account for the stains of gravy, pie-crust, and coffee, that defile nearly all the copies of the First Folio. Its worth estimated Another ex Nor can it be said that there is any more cerample of it tain appearance of science when the ancient II. in classical authors are subjected to the same strain of criti- CHAPTER cism. Witness the famous critics of the Bentley and Porson mould. Giant as he was, Porson criticism. had but small hands, that played with words as with marbles, and delighted in nothing so much as in good penmanship. One is astonished in reading through his edition of Euripides, to see how he wrote note upon note, all about words, and less than words-syllables, letters, accents, punctuation. He ransacked Codex A and Codex B, Codex Cantabrigiensis and Codex Cottonianus, to show how this noun should be in the dative, not in the accusative; how that verb should have the accent paroxy tone, not perispomenon; and how by all the rules of prosody there should be an iambus, not a spondee, in Porson's this place or in that. Nothing can be more the Hecuba. masterly of its kind than the preface to the Hecuba, and the supplement to it. The lad who hears enough of this wonderful dissertation from his tutors at last turns wistful eyes towards it, expecting to find some magical criticism on Greek tragedy. Behold it is a treatise on certain Greek metres. Its talk is of cæsural pauses, penthemimeral and hephthemimeral, of isochronous feet, of enclitics and cretic terminations; and the grand doctrine it promulgates is expressed in the canon regarding the pause which, from the discoverer, has been named the Porsonian, that when the iambic trimeter, after a word of more than one syllable, has the cretic termina preface to |