CHAPTER mere pigeon-holing of words and other technical details, such criticism is unsatisfactory and does not reach the truth, because it has no root, because it forgets the substance and is all for form as form. mary of modern cri ticism as No one has more pungently and truthfully described the critical science of what may be termed the Renaissance than Mr. Ruskin. Mr. Rus Nearly the whole body of criticism comes from the kin's sum- leaders of the Renaissance, who "discovered suddenly," says Mr. Ruskin," that the world for ten grammar. centuries had been living in an ungrammatical manner, and they made it forthwith the end of human existence to be grammatical. And it mattered thenceforth nothing what was said or what was done, so only that it was said with scholarship, and done with system. Falsehood in a Ciceronian dialect had no opposers; truth in patois no listeners. A Roman phrase was thought worth any number of Gothic facts. The sciences ceased at once to be anything more than different kinds of grammar-grammar of language, grammar of logic, grammar of ethics, grammar of art; and the tongue, wit and invention of the human race were supposed to have found their utmost and most divine mission in syntax and syllogism, perspective, and five orders." * * Sir Joshua Reynolds's remarks on one of the greatest pictures of Rubens are a fair speci men of the best criticism of his time. We are anxious to learn what so fine a judge as Reynolds II. The sys Germany. Almost the only systematic criticism of modern CHAPTER times which is not of the Renaissance, and not entitled to this appraisement is that of Germany, tematic eriwhich is, if possible, infected with not a worse, but ticism of a less manageable, disease. If the criticism of the Renaissance is afflicted with a deficiency of thought, the new epoch of criticism, which the Germans attempted to inaugurate, is charged The defect. with a superfecundity of thought tending to overlay the facts that engage it. Mr. Arnold complains of the want of idea in English criticism. "There is no speculation in those eyes." The same complaint certainly cannot be brought has to say of the Taking Down from the Cross. Observe how instinctively he goes to the grammar of Rubens's treatment. His first thought is for the white sheet. "The greatest peculiarity of this composition is the contrivance of the white sheet, on which the body of Jesus lies. This circumstance was probably what induced Rubens to adopt the composition. He well knew what effect white linen, opposed to flesh, must have with his powers of colouring; a circumstance which was not likely to enter into the mind of an Italian painter, who probably would have been afraid of the linen's hurting the colouring of the flesh, and have kept it down of a low tint... His Christ I consider as one of the finest figures ever invented; it is most correctly drawn, and, CHAPTER against German criticism. It is all idea. It II. begins with hypothesis and works by deduction downward to the facts. The most elaborate, the most favoured, and the most successful system in As in Hegel. Germany is that of Hegel. To follow it, however, with understanding, you have first to accept the Hegelian philosophy, of which it is a part. It begins by declaring art to be the manifestation of the absolute idea, and when we ask what is the absolute idea, we are told that it is the abstraction of thought in which the identical is identical with the non-identical, and in which absolute being is resolved into absolute nothing. And Schel- Schelling may not be so wild as this; but he, too, sets out from an absolute idea, and works not from facts to generalisation but from generalisation to facts. The German constructs art as he constructs the camel out of the depths of his moral consciousness. Out of Germany it is impossible and useless to argue with these systems. We can only dismiss them with the assurance that if this be science, then ling. Suggestion Thinking is but an idle waste of thought, And nought is everything and everything is nought; and that between the Renaissance, or grammatical method of criticism, which busied itself too Sin much with forms-the mere etiquette or ceremocourse benial of literature-and the German, or philosocriticism of phical method of criticism, which wilders and and that of flounders in the chaos of aboriginal ideas, there tween the Germany the Renais sance. must be a middle path-a method of criticism II. that may fairly be called scientific, and that will CHAPTER weigh with even balance both the idea out of which art springs and the forms in which it grows. value of the most recent criticism. Recent criticism, even when it eschews philo- Method and sophy, cuts deeper than of yore, both in Germany and out of it, and cannot be content to play with questions of mere images and verses; but it avoids system. It has never been so noble in aim, so conscientious in labour, so large in view, and withal so modest in tone, as now. In point of fact, philosophy, baffled in its aims, has passed into criticism, and minds that a century back might have been lost in searching into the mystery of knowledge and the roots of being, turn their whole gaze on the products of human thought, and the history of human endeavour. But the philosophers turning critics are apt to carry into the new study somewhat of the despair The despair learned from the old, and, I repeat it, carefully avoid system. The deeper, therefore, their criticism delves, the more it becomes a labyrinth of confusion. Fertile in suggestions, and rioting in results, it is a chaos in which the suggestions, though original, do not always connect themselves clearly with first principles, and in which the results, though valuable, are reft of half their importance by the lack of scientific arrangement. Nor is this all; for we too often see critics toiling in ignorance of each other's of system. And want Ulrici. CHAPTER work, lauding in one country what is slighted in II. another, and void of any general understanding of concert, as to the division of labour, and the correlation of isolated studies. A fair example offers itself in the criticism of Shakespeare. In England we are most struck with Shakespeare's knowledge of human nature, and power of embodying it in the characters of the drama. We rank this above all his gifts, even above his wondrous gift of speech. Pass over to Germany and note how one of the latest critics there, Ulrici, like a true German, admires Shakespeare chiefly for his ideas. When he is pretty sure that the countrymen of the dramatist will object to some of his criticism to his fathering spurious plays on Shakespeare, and to his finding in genuine ones the most far-fetched ideas; he says that the English critics are not to be trusted, because they look to the truth of the characters as the chief Shakespearian test. Instead of the truth of the characters, what has he to show? He shows the doctrine of the Atonement preached in one play, the difference between equity and law set forth in another, and in all the plays a shower of puns that continually remind us of the Original Sin of our nature, the radical antithesis between thought and action, idea and reality, produced by the Fall. Go then to France, and see there the well-known writer, M. Philarète Châsles. Frenchmanlike, he regards the plot as all-important in the drama, and says that Lear, Hamlet, and Othello are not French criticism. |