The Romantic Age PDF

8 The Romantic Age The Romantic age was an age of revolution, social and technological, philosophical and literary. The harnessing of steam-power, the consequent development of mass-produc- tion, and the movement of population from rural areas to the growing...

8 The Romantic Age The Romantic age was an age of revolution, social and technological, philosophical and literary. The harnessing of steam-power, the consequent development of mass-produc- tion, and the movement of population from rural areas to the growing urban areas of industry and commerce, marked one of the crucial turning-points in modern history. Cities were built, fortunes made, and workers' lives rendered dismally laborious in applying the laissez-faire principles of the economist Adam Smith ( 1723-90), whose study The Wealth of Nations ( 1776) encouraged the pursuit of individual profit as the route to national prosperity. The Industrial Revolu- tion transformed the face of the countryside and thrust workers together in the new urban environments, packed and smoky. When we read how Sir Charles Grandison looked after his tenants in his mini-welfare-state, we realise that the picture is a highly idealised one, but at the same time we get the genuine feel of the settled society for which eighteenth- century literature catered. We cannot but sense that the critical controversies themselves - about ancients and mod- erns or about the mingling of tragedy and comedy - are aptly suited to the country-house library or the London coffee-house. The world of Wordsworth's Prelude, of Shelley's Revolt of Islam, and Holcroft's Hugh Trevor is a very different one. Never again will a French royal court provide the image and model for mind and manners in the ultimate state of refinement. The French Revolution, with its incongruous spectacle of fervour for liberty and thirst for blood, heart- ened and appalled the watching world. It could not but be an issue in the careers of alert contemporaries. It fed two 217 H. Blamires, A History of Literary Criticism © Harry Blamires 1991 218 A HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM contrary impulses, the demand for political and social reform, and the determination to avoid a blood-bath. The rise of Napoleon and the war with France cast a shadow over many idealistic libertarian movements in England. Yet the intellectual ferment of which the revolution was born infected thinking men and women with disturbing uncertainties, not only about the inherited social fabric of society, but also about the inherited fabrics of belief and morality. The ferment was inspired by powerful literary figures, going back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), the apostle of individual autonomy in the face of corrupting civilisation. At home controversy was fuelled by thinkers such as Tom Paine ( 1737-1809) with his book The Rights of Man ( 1791 ), William Godwin (1756-1836) with his Political Justice (1793), and Mary Wollstonecraft ( 1759-97) with her Vindication of the Rights of Woman ( 1792). A new connotation was given to the concept of truth to nature. Nature is no longer primarily the principle of simplicity which fashionable society offends against with its ornaments and fopperies. It is the force which binds man to mother earth, which surrounds him with hills and covers him with the sky. And what offends against it is the mill chimney and the steam engine, factory-labour and the city slum. Indeed, for some thinkers, what offends against it is also that conjunction of man and wife in holy matrimony which for Sir Thomas Elyot symbolised and epitomised the principle of universal order. We do not expect to find in literary criticism a straight record of the basic controversies that rocked the foundations of social and moral life, but the casting off of mental fetters together with the commercialisa- tion of publishing transformed the critical scene. I William Wordsworth When William Wordsworth (1770-1850) prefixed an 'Advertisement' to the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads ( 1798) which he and Coleridge had written, he addressed the reader with·some caution.  THE ROMANTIC AGE 219 The majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purpose of poetic pleasure. But the tone quickly changes. It is readers 'accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers' who may wonder whether what they are reading is poetry at all. They would do well to forget the word 'Poetry' and simply ask themselves whether what they read 'contains a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents'. In the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1800) Words- worth expanded his observations into a full-blown 'Preface'. He declares that he has purposely chosen 'incidents and situations from common life' and endeavoured to deal with them 'in a selection of language really used by men'. A novel 'colouring of imagination' gives this material distinctiveness. And the incidents are made 'interesting' because 'the primary laws of our nature' are traced through them. Poets confer honour neither on themselves nor on their work by using a sophisticated diction. In fact it alienates natural human sympathy. Simple rural people are less restrained and artificial in their feelings and in their utterance, and those feelings are more at one with their environment. Wordsworth is at pains to point out that his is neither a recipe for nor a justification of 'triviality' or 'meanness': for each of his poems has a worthy purpose. Indeed, though 'all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings', the poet's sens- ibility, and his long training in deep reflection, cannot but bear on his subjects in such a way that the reader is enlightened and emotionally purified. And a distinctive feature of his poems is 'that the feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feelings'. In a challenging parenthesis, Wordsworth comments on the evil effects of contemporary developments, notably the spread of industrialisation, the over-standardisation of urban life, and the consequent thirst for stimulation by sensational news. His poems represent a slight effort to refocus people's 220 A HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM minds on the 'inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind, and likewise of certain powers in the great and permanent objects that act upon it'. In expanding the apologia for his rejection of 'poetic diction' in favour of 'the very language of men', Words- worth asserts that 'there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition', and repeats that the language of poetry should as far as possible be 'a selection of the language really spoken by men'. If true taste and feeling are applied to the process of 'selection' then what results will be firmly distinguished from the 'vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life', and if metre is 'superadded', then what other possible distinction can poetry have? Wordsworth insists that if the subject is properly chosen, it will naturally itself lead the poet to feelings whose appropriate expression will have dignity, beauty, and metaphorical vitality. Moreover he speaks of how unfortu- nate it would be were the poet to 'interweave any foreign splendour of his own with that which the passion naturally suggests'. The words seem to imply that anything deriving directly from the poet's contrivance will vulgarise rather than enrich. Yet when Wordsworth comes to answer the question, 'What is a Poet?' the claims made are almost awesome. He is a man speaking to men; a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually compelled to create them, where he does not find them. The poet also has the ability to conjure up passions in himself which resemble those produced by real events, and has a greater readiness and power in expressing what he feels. Nevertheless, however great the poet, his language will often 'fall short of that which is uttered by men in real life' under the actual pressure of passion. Wordsworth will have nothing  THE ROMANTIC AGE 221 to do with the suggestion that the poet should take the same liberties as the translator and, where he cannot match certain excellencies, substitute others, or even try to surpass the original in places to compensate for inadequacies elsewhere. Such policies totally misread the character of poetry. It is not 'a matter of amusement and idle pleasure'. It is 'the most philosophic of all writing': 'its object is truth, not individual and local, but general and operative'. It is 'the image of man and nature'. The poet's only duty is to give 'immediate pleasure to a human Being possessed of that information which may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a natural philoso- pher, but as a Man'. The duty of producing immediate pleasure is no degradation of the poet's art. It is 'an acknowledgement of the beauty of the universe'... and 'it is a homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man'. For Wordsworth, the poet's speciality is the interaction between man and his environment, the complexities of pleasure and pain that arise therefrom, and the deep sympathies by which they are interrelated. The poet's special knowledge is of what is inalienably ours by natural inheritance, while the scientist's special knowledge is a slowly gathered individual acquisition involving no sympathetic connection of man with man. The poet thus joyfully makes of truth a constant companion, while the scientist seeks it as a remote benefactor: 'Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge... Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge - it is as immortal as the heart of man.' It is by virtue of this sublime concept of the poet that Wordsworth decries as utterly unworthy any descent to the manipulation of verbal artifices. There is a sanctity and truth about the poet's descriptions which it would be sacrilege to try to trick out with 'transitory accidental ornaments'. Thus the sense of the poet as craftsman is anathema to Words- worth. The qualities that make a poet are not different in kind from what other men have. The only difference is a difference of degree. The sum of what was said is, that the Poet is chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater promptness to think and feel without 222 A HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM immediate external excitement, and a greater power in expressing such thoughts and feelings as are produced in him in that manner. But these passions and thoughts and feelings are the general passions and thoughts and feelings of men. And with what are they connected? Undoubtedly with our moral sentiments and animal sensations, and with the causes which excite these; with the operations of the elements, and the appearances of the visible universe; with storm and sunshine, with the revolutions of the seasons, with cold and heat, with loss of friends and kindred, with injuries and resentments, gratitude and hope, with fear and sorrow. Wordsworth strains every nerve to give the poet a status far removed from that of the craftsman in words who observes and 'imitates' nature, guided by long-established rules. The poet is a human being whose speciality is humanity. He is a man whose focus is upon man, and not man in society but man in nature. And the poet's function is not limited to recording, however faithfully, however sym- pathetically. In a letter written to the reviewer John Wilson (Christopher North) in 1800, Wordsworth remarks: You have given me praise for having reflected faithfully in my Poems the feelings of human nature. I would fain hope that I have done so. But a great Poet ought to do more than this; he ought, to a certain degree, to rectify men's feelings, to give them new compositions of feeling, to render their feelings more sane, pure, and permanent, in short, more consonant to nature, that is, to eternal nature, and the great moving spirit of things. He ought to travel before men occasionally as well as at their sides. Now the reader may well reflect that this lofty moral duty of the poet to correct and refine human feelings consorts ill with the claim that the poet must not, like the free translator, tamper with the original that is presented to him. And indeed Wordsworth's critical statements do not add up to a logical thesis. His standing as a critic reflects his standing as a poet. It derives from the scattered, often fragmentary, flashes of insight by which he presented mankind in detachment from the sophistications of social class and social artifice, and involved by links of beauty and feeling with the ordered elemental world of nature. The egalitarian implications of his  THE ROMANTIC AGE 223 insights drove him at first to sympathy with the French Revolution. The literary implications drove him to mark out humble rustic life as the subject matter of his poetry and the language of ordinary men as its vehicle. II Samuel Taylor Coleridge There is a good deal in the Biographia Literaria ( 1817), the major critical work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge ( 1772-1834), that arises from the collaborative friendship with Words- worth. It is, however, a frankly formless book. It directly reflects Coleridge's tendency to make great designs which his temperament never allowed him to fulfil. Yet it is a most fascinating book. Like Johnson, Coleridge was a great talker. What flows from his pen in this book is a mixture of autobiography, literary theory, and metaphysical specula- tion. The literary criticism, when disentangled from its context, constitutes a healthy menu of logic and sensibility. In speaking of his early years Coleridge tells how the sonnets of William Lisle Bowles captivated his adolescent mind. He was quick to react against the poetry of the school of Pope. He recognised that its quality lay in 'just and acute observations on men and manners in an artificial state of society', and in the logic of wit and smooth epigram. However it seemed to consist not of 'poetic thoughts' but of 'thoughts translated into the language of poetry'. Like Wordsworth too he disliked the prevalence of 'dead' perso- nification such as is found in Gray ('Youth' and 'Pleasure' capitalised but not effectively conceptualised). Lines that can be paraphrased without loss of meaning are to that extent 'vicious in their diction'. You cannot interfere with a single word in Shakespeare or Milton without changing the mean- ing. The characteristic faults of former and more recent poets are contrasted. In the former, from Donne to Cowley, we find the most fantastic out- of-the-way thoughts, but in the most pure and genuine mother English, in the latter the most obvious thoughts, in language the most fantastic and arbitrary. 224 A HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM The older poets, at their worst, may have sacrificed the heart to the head; the moderns sacrifice 'both heart and head to point and drapery'. Coleridge praises Cowper and Bowles for effecting a reconciliation between heart and head, and combining natural thoughts with natural diction. It is characteristic of Coleridge's method that, having reached this point at the end of his first chapter, he inserts a chapter on a scarcely relevant subject. Supposedly tackling the question, Are men of genius irritable? it is in fact an onslaught on critics. For Coleridge argues that in matters pertaining to themselves (as opposed to, say, issues of principle or of public weal), geniuses tend to be men of 'calm and tranquil temper'. Even Milton 'reserved his anger for the enemies of religion, freedom, and his country'. It is not genius that produces irritability, but the lack ofit in men who want it. The mediocre and worse, who long for poetic reputation and are devoid sometimes of even the modestest talents, awake from their 'dream of vanity to disappointment and neglect with embittered and envenomed feelings'. They turn critic to work off their envy and malevolence. Coleridge now pays an ironic tribute to contemporary critics who have so persistently attacked him, thereby keeping his name before the public, for 'the reader will be apt to suspect that there must be something more than usually strong and extensive in a reputation, that could either require or stand so merciless and long-continued a cannonading'. Looking at his personal relationships and achievements, he is at a loss to account for the degree of hostility. There can be but one explanation of it. 'I was in habits of intimacy with Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Southey!' The argument turns into a substantial defence of Southey's achievements, talents, and personality. Coleridge argues that neither Southey's output nor his own justifies the 'fiction of a new school of poetry'. Nor do Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads in themselves. It was Words- worth's preface which sparked off the unprecedented opposi- tion. Critics seized on the 'humbler passages' in his poems in order to ridicule the theory. Indeed simplicities which could have been overlooked as lapses provoked hostility when they were defended as deliberate and intentional. Coleridge turns  THE ROMANTIC AGE 225 with withering scorn on the critics' untenable assumption that what they saw as sheer childishness and silliness in style and trivial and degrading in substance should succeed in forming a 'school' of ardent, educated young men. Can it indeed be bogus and worthless poetry that has obsessed critical reviewers for nearly twenty years? Looking more closely at Wordsworth's earliest work, Coleridge explains that 'the language is not only peculiar and strong, but at times knotty and contorted, as by its own impatient strength'. It was not just Wordsworth's freedom from false taste that won Coleridge's admiration: It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying, the objects observed; and above all the original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew drops. Determined to plumb the nature of Wordsworth's gifts, Coleridge concluded 'that Fancy and Imagination were two distinct and wildly different faculties'. Milton, for instance, 'had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind'. Anxious to pursue this issue to its roots, Coleridge plunges into six chapters of philosophical enquiry. Where earlier, eighteenth-century critics might have dug down into the works of the ancients in order to discover the origins of literary forms, Coleridge explores the works of the philoso- phers in order to shed light on the vital driving force in the mind which begets a work of art. It is not until he gets to chapter XIII that Coleridge launches into the main thesis for which all that has gone before has but laid the foundations. He defines 'Imagination' as the 'Esemplastic' power, coining the word to mean 'unifying' or 'building into one'. The imagination is primary or secondary. The primary imagination is the 'living power and prime agent of all human perception'. It is 'a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM'. The secondary imagination is its echo, alike in kind 226 A HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM with the primary but different in degree and in mode of operation. It dissolves and diffuses in order to recreate. It 'struggles to idealize and to unify'. It is essentially vital. 'Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definitions.' It is just 'a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space'. Like the memory, it receives 'all its materials ready made from the law of association'. Armed with this definition, Coleridge turns to describe how he and Wordsworth conceived the Lyrical Ballads. The two of them had discussed the 'two cardinal points of poetry'. These were 'the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature', and 'the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination'. They decided on a series of poems of two sorts, one involving the supernatural, the other on subjects drawn from ordinary life. Coleridge was to handle the supernatural with sufficient semblance of truth to produce 'that willing suspension of disbelief... which constitutes poetic faith'; while Wordsworth was to 'give the charm of novelty to things of every day'. Such was the genesis of Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth however added his lengthy preface to the second edition in which the defence of experimentation with poems in the language of ordinary life was blown up into a doctrine for poetry in general. With this Coleridge could not concur. And in order to clarify his position he once more dives back into laying philosophical foundations. What is a Poem? And what is Poetry? Since a poem contains the same elements as a prose composition, the distinction must lie in a difference in their combination and in the objective. The communication of pleasure is one object of poetry, but it might also be the object of a piece of prose. Coleridge thrashes his way through to this conclusion: A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species - (having this object in common with it) - it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a strict gratification from each component part.  THE ROMANTIC AGE 227 The parts must mutually support and explain each other, and the reader should be carried forward not just by curiosity but by the 'pleasurable activity of mind' aroused by its journey. Having so defined a poem, Coleridge decides that the question What is Poetry? is virtually synonymous with the question What is a poet? The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination... Finally, Good Sense is the Body of poetic genius, Fancy its Drapery, Motion its Life, and Imagination the Soul that is everywhere and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole. Coleridge now turns his attention to practical criticism, making a critical analysis of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece in order to pinpoint 'promises and specific symptoms o[poetic power' as opposed to mere talent for versifying. The first indication is 'sweetness of versifica- tion'. There must be music in the soul of the poet. The sense of musical delight is one of the gifts of imagination. The second indication is the ability to deal with a subject remote from 'the private interests and circumstances of the writer himself. The poet stands back and what reaches the reader directly is the characters and incidents. The third indication is the handling of imagery. Images in themselves do not characterise the poet. It is the way they are 'modified by a predominant passion', the way they are moulded and coloured to match the circumstances and feeling foremost in the mind. And the fourth indication is 'depth and energy of thought'. 'In Shakespeare's poems the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a warm embrace.' There is one more interlude before Coleridge tackles Wordsworth in detail. It is a chapter commenting on the differences between recent poets and poets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In particular Coleridge remarks how formerly 'novelty of subject' was avoided. 'Superior excel- 228 A HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM lence in the manner of treating the same subjects was the trial and test of the artist's merit.' The essence of poetry lay 'in the art', in polished phrases, in melodious cadences, and in gentlemanly vocabulary. And so to Wordsworth. In so far as he contended for a reformation of poetic diction, he undertook a useful task. Moreover he has had an influence on other poets, even on some who professed hostility to his theories. But Coleridge cannot accept the doctrine that the proper diction for poetry in general is what comes from the mouths of men in real life. In the first place, the rule could apply only to a certain kind of poetry. In the second place, even there it applies only in a sense which has always been recognised. And in the third place, it is a useless rule. Coleridge looks at such 'dramatic' poems as 'The Brothers', 'Michael', 'Ruth', and 'The Mad Mother'. The characters there are not taken from low or rustic life. They are distinguished by the independence of the Cumberland and Westmorland shepherd-farmers and by familiarity with the language of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Nature alone cannot influence an unschooled yokel. Some degree of education and native sensibility is necessary. Poetry is essentially ideal. Characters must be representative of a class, as Wordsworth's Michael is, or explore 'human feelings in general', as Wordsworth does in 'Harry Gill' and 'The Idiot Boy'. In the case of the latter, Coleridge feels that Wordsworth did not take adequate steps to eliminate in advance the prevalent 'disgusting' associations of idiocy. In 'The Thorn', Wordsworth made the mistake of thinking that a boring, garrulous narrator could be given his head without becoming boring. On the general question of the language of rustics; if it is purified and grammatically corrected, it will not differ from the language of other men, however learned or refined, except in so far as it covers a smaller range of ideas. Nor can communication with nature be said to furnish a rustic with anything but a scanty vocabulary. Uncivilised tribes, surrounded by magnificent scenery, have the utmost difficulty in receiving the simplest moral and intellectual concepts. Indeed the language which Wordsworth has in mind is certainly not the real language of rustics. As for Wordsworth's reference to the language used by rustics 'in a  THE ROMANTIC AGE 229 state of excitement', Coleridge insists that the heat of passion can bring only a known vocabulary into play. Coleridge now turns (chapter xvm) to deny Wordsworth's claim that there can be no 'essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition'. Here Coleridge clears the ground. The question in not whether poetry might not contain prosaic passages (such as Wordsworth illustrated from Gray), but whether there may not be modes of expression acceptable in prose which would be inappropri- ate in poetry. Metre, 'the language of excitement', frequency and intensity of imagery, vivacity, vividness of description, and wholeness of organisation are characteristics of poetry. It is when poetry lapses into the verbal triteness of prose that we declare it 'unpoetic'. Coleridge surmises, however (chapter xix), that what Wordsworth was really after was that quality in which conversational naturalness is sustained in rhymed verse that is dignified, attractive and metrically correct. Such is the charm to be found in Spenser, Chaucer, and George Herbert. But in fact (chapter xx) this is not the characteristic excellence of Wordsworth's style. And it is remarkable that a defence of 'lingua communis' should have come from a poet whose diction, after Shakespeare's and Milton's, is 'of all others the most individualised and char- acteristic'. Indeed literal adherence by Wordsworth to the principles of his own 'Preface' would exclude at least two thirds of the marked beauties of his work. Coleridge ends his work on Wordsworth with a substantial chapter (xxu) examining in turn the defects and beauties of his poetry. And first defect is that 'inconstancy of style' whereby Wordsworth's poetry suddenly lapses from what is felicitous into what is quite 'undistinguished'. The second defect is a 'matter-of-factness' in certain poems, which involves too much 'minuteness and fidelity' in description of objects and also the insertion of excessive detail in the characterisa- tion. In this respect Wordsworth does not leave enough to the imagination. And he particularises in a way proper to the historian rather than to the poet. The treatment of pedlars and leech-gatherers is such that 'truth' rather than 'pleasure' becomes the immediate object, and this is more proper to a sermon than to poetry. The world does not abound in 230 A HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM ploughmen-poets like Burns. Biography is acceptable in fictions like Defoe's, but not in Fielding's Tom Jones where characters remain representative. Excessive verisimilitude can be an obstacle to that poetic faith which transcends historic belief. And anyway, is there, for instance, one word attributed to the pedlar in The Excursion characteristic of a pedlar? The third defect is 'an undue predilection for the dramatic form in certain poems'. It produces incongruity of style where the thoughts and diction differ from the poet's own. And where they are indistinguishable from the poet's, 'then it presents a species of ventriloquism'. The fourth defect is 'an intensity of feeling disproportionate' to the knowledge and value of objects described. And the fifth defect lies in the 'thoughts and images too great for the subject'. It is 'mental bombast' as opposed to verbal bombast, and it is a 'fault of which none but a man of genius is capable'. The characteristic excellencies of Wordsworth's poetry are listed with repeated emphasis that they far outweigh the defects. The first is 'an austere purity of language' and 'a perfect appropriateness of the words to the meaning'. The second is the 'correspondent weight and sanity of the Thought and the Sentiments' which spring not from books but from the poet's own meditative observation. 'They are fresh and have the dew upon them.' The third beauty lies in 'the sinewy strength and originality of single lines and paragraphs'. The fourth is 'the perfect truth of nature in his images and descriptions'. The fifth is 'a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with sensibility; a sympathy with man as man'. Wordsworth can detect the image and superscription of the Creator 'under the dark lines with which guilt or calamity has cancelled or cross-barred it'. And finally, Wordsworth has 'the gift of Imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word'. Coleridge illustrates his points with reference and quotation which reveal how deeply and thoroughly Wordsworth's poems have permeated his thinking. The acumen he brings to bear and the illumination he sheds give this study its rank beside the finest criticism of Dryden and Johnson.  THE ROMANTIC AGE 231 III Romanticism at bay The other major Romantic poet to issue a manifesto on the nature of poetry was Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). Shelley's Defence of Poetry, written in 1821 but not published until 1840, was a direct reply to 'The Four Ages of Poetry', an essay by Thomas Love Peacock ( 1785-1866) which was published in Ollier's Literary Miscellany in 1820. Nowhere is the collision between neoclassical detachment and Romantic fervour more acutely represented than in these two essays. Peacock's is essentially comic, yet it conveys a penetrating critique of many fashionable Romantic assumptions. The 'four ages' are those of Iron, Gold, Silver, and Brass. The iron age is the age of primitive panegyric supplied by bards under pressure from royal warriors and in exchange for liquor, itself an inspiration. The golden age is the age in which poetry becomes retrospective. Something like a civil polity has been established, individual heroism has given place to institutionalism. So poets acclaim an early foundt;r whose courage and glory in the misty past can be celebrated as represented in his current successor. 'This is the age of Homer, the golden age of poetry.' In the silver age there are two kinds of poetry; the imitative which recasts the poetry of the age of gold as Virgil recast Homer, and the original, chiefly comic, didactic, and satiric, in which there is fastidiousness of style and a choice harmony of expression that bores by its repetitiveness. It is only obvious moral truisms that lend themselves to poetic expression, and as the sciences of morals and of mind mature, they move beyond the reach of imaginative and emotional treatment. Since there is a limited scope for polished versification of good sense and elegant learning, poetry declines towards extinction. In conclusion comes the age of brass. It rejects the 'polish and learning of the age of silver' and regresses to the crude barbarisms of the age of iron, which pretending 'to return to nature and revive the age of gold'. So far as modern literature is concerned, Peacock identifies the mediaeval age of romance, chivalry and knightly honour as the age of iron. The golden age was the Renaissance when the riches of all ages and nations were compounded in such 232 A HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM writers as Ariosto and Shakespeare. The silver age was the reign of authority, the age of Dryden and Pope. But soon the influence of Hume and Gibbon, Rousseau and Voltaire brought every authority into question. The changes had been rung on conventional pastoralism. Even poets began to think it necessary to know something of what they talked about. Thomson and Cowper actually looked at trees and hills instead of just being content to write about them. The effect of this change was revolutionary. Poetical genius began to be reckoned the finest of all things, and only poetical impres- sions could nourish it. Poetical impressions can be received only among natural scenes: for all that is artificial is anti-poetical. Society is artificial; therefore we will live out of society. The mountains are natural, therefore we will be in the mountains. There we shall be shining models of purity and virtue, passing the whole day in the innocent and amiable accupation of going up and down hill, receiving poetical impressions, and communicating them in immortal verse to admiring generations. Peacock's attack is wholesale yet good-natured. He ridicules the notion of a poetic return to nature in nineteenth-century England. Historians and philosophers are making progress while poets are 'wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance'. Mr Scott digs up the poachers and cattle-stealers of the ancient border. Lord Byron cruizes for thieves and pirates on the shores of the Morea and among the Greek islands. Mr Southey wades through ponderous volumes of travels and old chronicles, from which he selects all that is false, useless, and absurd... Mr Wordsworth picks up village legends from old women and sextons... Coleridge, Moore and Campbell all come in for scathing ridicule. 'A poet in our time is a semi-barbarian in a civilised community', obsessed with the barbaric and superstitious past. The true philosophic poise which surveys the world coolly and justly, gathers and analyses data, and thus develops new and useful thinking is the direct opposite of the poetic mind. For the inspiration of poetry lies in 'the rant of unregulated passion, the whining of exaggerated feeling,  THE ROMANTIC AGE 233 and the cant of factitious sentiment'. Poetic composition is simply a waste of time that might be given to useful work. 'Your anathemas against poetry itself excited me to a sacred rage,' Shelley wrote to Peacock, recommending him to read Plato's Ion; and the Platonic influence on Shelley's Defence is evident. He contrasts the synthetic principle of imagination with the analytical principle of reason. 'Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance.' Poetry is 'the expression of the imagination'. In the widest sense of the word, not only artistic creators but the founders of laws and civilisation, as well as other inventors, are all poets. For the poet 'participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one', and he seeks to express the order and beauty he discerns. The poet in the more restricted sense uses language as his medium. 'A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth.' It is creating 'actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator', that distinguishes a 'poem' from that 'dialogue of detached facts' which constitutes a 'story'. A 'story of particular facts' obscures and distorts what should be beautiful: poetry makes what is distorted beautiful. Shelley's definitions preclude the distinction between poets and prose writers as 'a vulgar error'. Great philosophers and historians have been poets. Shelley's idealism is such that he speaks as though the poet is generally reduced to making do with inadequate contemporary morals and fashions as his material. Few poets have 'chosen to exhibit the beauty of their conceptions in its naked truth and splendour'. Indeed 'the alloy of costume, habit, &c' is probably 'necessary, to temper this planetary music for mortal ears'. So the mystic's sense that, as T. S. Eliot puts it, 'humankind / Cannot bear very much reality' is appropriated by Shelley as an equi- valent limitation on the poet. He seems obsessed by the sheer potency of poetry. Ethical science can provide us with schemes and models, but poetry acts in a 'diviner manner', awakening and enlarging the mind, and lifting the 'veil from the hidden beauty of the world'. Shelley's prose is nothing if not inspired and inspiring. The imagination is 'the great instrument of moral good' which strengthens man morally as 234 A HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM exercise strengthens him physically. Shelley seems to be close to Wordsworth here: but he makes clear that direct moral instruction demeans poetry and diminishes the poet. As Peacock made a comic survey of the history of poetry, Shelley now makes a serious one. He gives due praise to Greek poetry, but insists that King Lear is 'the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world'. Tracing the connection between great drama and the moral health of society, he notes that in our own age 'the greatest degrada- tion of the drama is the reign of Charles II' in which only Milton stood aloof from acclaiming the defeat of liberty and virtue by monarchy. But the peculiar stamp of Shelley's theorising about poetry emerges most clearly when, compar- ing the Romans with the Greeks, he argues that 'the true poetry of Rome lived in its institutions'. The disinterested achievements which built the empire amounted to poetry. 'They are the episodes of that cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of men.' Likewise whatever evil there was in the darkness of the dark ages 'sprang from the extinction of the poetic principle'. It seems that Shelley's concept of what constitutes poetry embraces everything that is good. Small wonder, then, that he rejects Peacock's challenge to poets 'to resign the civic crown to reasoners and mechanists', and the argument that denies poetry its usefulness. On the contrary, 'whatever strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful'. Those who serve society in seemingly more practical ways merely follow in the footsteps of poets. In fact we have more moral, political and historical knowledge than we can handle. It is for lack of the creative faculty and imaginative power that our civilisation remains enslaved to materialism. It is precisely at such periods as the present that the cultivation of poetry is most desperately necessary. Shelley's rhetoric takes wing as he proclaims his gospel: Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. Even so, the most glorious poetry is probably but a 'feeble shadow' of the poet's original conceptions. 'Poetry is the record  THE ROMANTIC AGE 235 of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.' It represents 'the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own'. It immortalises all that is best and most beautiful in the world. The poet therefore must be incontro- vertibly 'the wisest, the happiest, and the best' of men. Indeed poets are 'the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration'. 'Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.' There was a Shelleyan hot-headedness about some of the critical aphorisms of William Blake (1787-1827). He de- clared Reynold's Discourses to the Royal Academy to be the 'Simulations of the Hypocrite' because Reynolds thought that 'Genius May be Taught & that all Pretence to Inspiration is a Lie & a Deceit'. Reynold's Discourses derived from Burke's treatise On the Sublime, and Burke's treatise from Newton and Locke. All such books are abhorrent because 'they mock Inspiration & Vision'. Like Shelley, Blake defines imagination in Platonic terms. 'This world of Imagination is the World of Eternity...' The realities of Eternity are reflected in the mirror of Nature. But for Blake, eternity is 'the divine bosom into which we shall go after the death of the Vegetated body', and 'all things are comprehended in their Eternal Forms in the divine body of the Saviour'. Though all forms of art are 'visions of eternity', the reflection of the eternal in the natural is such that the imagination reaches outside the world apprehended by the senses into the spiritual sphere. Blake, therefore, is unhappy with the way Wordsworth pins down the operation of the imagination in natural objects. 'Natural Objects always did & now do weaken, deaden & obliterate Imagination in Me.' Wordsworth ought to be aware that what he has to reveal is not something that can be found in Nature. 'I see in Wordsworth the Natural Man rising up against the Spiritual Man Continually, & then he is No Poet but a Heathen philosopher at Enmity against all true Poetry or Inspiration.' Thus, in 1826, Blake annotated his copy of Wordsworth's Poems volume I (1815). In particular he could not abide Wordsworth's prayer And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety 236 A HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM declaring, 'There is no such thing as Natural Piety because The Natural Man is at Enmity with God.' Blake had early come across the work of Thomas Taylor (1768-1835), the mathematician and philosopher who translated Plato and Plotinus and has been credited with playing an influential part in bringing about the revival of mythology in the poetry of Shelley, Coleridge, and Blake himself. Nearly a century later, the poet W. B. Yeats was to find Plotinus's thought inadequate to his needs because the philosopher postulated a real existence to which there was no substantial antagonism. Yeats's own religious thought was antithetical and demanded antagonism. In the same way Blake's vision of human wholeness involved accepting antinomies without diluting them. The contradictory potencies of the spiritual and the physical could not be reconciled by recourse to easy evasions such as the notion of 'natural piety'. Blake's emphasis on imagination and inspiration, and Wordsworth's emphasis on the primacy of feeling ('the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling') acquired in the one case a mystical dimension and in the other case a moral dimension which introduced an element of self-discipline. The exaltation of emotion and intuition above logical reasoning can readily disentangle them from any such disciplinary anchorage. John Keats ( 1795-1821) committed himself in letters to generalisations which seem to show this process at work: 'I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of Imagination.' So Keats wrote to Benjamin Bailey on 22 November, 1817. Our passions are 'all in their sublime creative of essential Beauty', and it is in beauty that truth is to be found. '0 for a Life of Sensation rather than of Thoughts,' Keats declared, ham- mering home his suspicion of the intellect. And he defined the essential quality of Shakespeare as 'negative capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason... ' Thus Keats distinguished his own poetic character from what he called 'the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime' as that of a characterless, identity less being to whom true poetry will come effortlessly as he submits his imaginative sensitivi- ties to the sphere of sensation. 'The Genius of Poetry must  THE ROMANTIC AGE 237 work out its own salvation in a man...' Keats felt no obligation to accommodate himself, this way or that, to Christianity. The frameworks of belief which Blake, Words- worth, and even (though perversely) Shelley grappled with, meant nothing to him. There is a curious air of modernity about his willingness to theorise directly from self, as poet and man of feeling, in a kind of philosophical vacuum. IV Hazlitt and De Quincey We turn from poets, for whom criticism was in most cases an offshoot of poetic endeavour, to prose writers who made their names as essayists, critics and journalists. William Hazlitt (1778-1830) was a radical with a social conscience who fervently supported the French Revolution and Napoleon, and continued to do so when fellow-enthusiasts all around him were repelled by the excesses of both. The edgy, rebellious streak in his character could only be intensified by his somewhat beleaguered isolation in this respect. But his combativeness, like his positive enthusiasms, often served him well as a writer. Vitality, enthusiasm, ardour, gusto - such terms spring to mind in characterising Hazlitt's work. He is not the kind of critic to examine basic principles. He is no theoretician. Indeed he can be careless, slapdash, and prejudiced. He is essentially a descriptive critic, who fastens on the beauties and defects of literary works with fluent outpourings of praise or blame, and above all with flashes of acumen, of inspired aphoristic brilliance which can illumi- nate aspects of a writer's work unforgettably. It is easy to pick holes in Hazlitt's critical reputation by pointing to his lack of philosophical discrimination and his tendency to let his rhetoric run away with him, but his work remams obstinately readable. There is no question in Hazlitt of appealing to rules or models, theories or systems. His critical works are the record of his own personal response to what he has read. In his Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817) he takes his starting- point from a statement by Pope that 'every single character in Shakespeare is as much an individual as those in life itself and proceeds through the plays in turn, illustrating the depth 238 A HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM of Shakespeare's penetration of the human heart and the subtlety ofhis exploration of the human mind. Admittedly the descriptive technique is a matter of exploiting a ready-made emotive vocabulary. We read about the 'uncontrollable anguish in the swollen heart of Lear' and 'the petrifying indifference, the cold, calculating, obdurate selfishness of his daughters', not to mention their 'stony hearts'. The commen- tary on behaviour, of course, too readily assumes a tendency to distribute praise and dispraise, moral approval and disapproval, in a vein which blurs the distinction between literature and real life. But this kind of excited appreciation of naturalism in characterisation was not yet hackneyed. We ought not to blame Hazlitt for the fact that the brand of criticism he launched was to become the stock-in-trade for candidates in public examinations a century after this death. There are sections of Hazlitt's critical work which fasten on more general issues. Sometimes a sub-heading will seem to forecast a more abstract and theoretical examination of a literary quality. For instance, in Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819) there is a chapter 'On Wit and Humour'. Yet what gives the piece its vitality is, not the thoroughness of the enquiry into the question, but the sheer charm and abun- dance of the anecdotes and illustrations which flow from Hazlitt's pen. Hazlitt was sufficiently well-read to be able to cite examples from a wide range of literature, and he was also sufficiently sensitive and responsive to the quirks and oddities encountered in daily life to be able to rustle up an apt analogy to press home a point vividly and memorably. In illustrating the relationship of tears to laughter he produces lively examples of the way children respond to different kinds of surprises in games of hide-and-seek or blindman's buff, or when a masked face is pressed to theirs. The effect of contrast and seeming absurdity is revealed in vivid examples. We laugh at the dress of foreigners, and they at ours. Three chimney- sweepers meeting three Chinese in Lincoln's-inn Fields, they laughed at one another until they were ready to drop down. Thus Hazlitt piles up instances of how humour results from surprise, incongruity, absurdity and misunderstanding.  THE ROMANTIC AGE 239 He does not shirk abstract definition and clarification when it is needed. Humour is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy. He accepts that wit most often produces its effect by comparison. But he rejects as too wholesale the definition of wit emanating from Locke and Hobbes - a business of 'finding out striking and unexpected resemblances in things', which contrasts with the business of judgment and reason in separating things and distinguishing differences. On this principle 'demonstrating the equality of the three angles of a right-angled triangle to two right ones' would be a piece of wit. Hazlitt reveals himself a true romantic when he stresses 'the intrinsic superiority of poetry or imagination to wit'. Wit operates on a more superficial level than imagination. It tends to deflate rather than to exalt, 'to disconnect our sympathy from passion and power' rather than 'to attach and rivet it to any object of grandeur and interest'. Hazlitt's finest criticism is to be found in his Lectures on the English Poets (1818) and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), two books which overlap in that the former ends with a chapter 'On the Living Poets'. The English Poets opens with a chapter 'On Poetry in General' in which Hazlitt piles up testimony to his enthusiasm: Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions... Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. History treats of 'the empty cases' into which the world's affairs are packed, but poetry is 'the stuff of which our life is made'. It represents 'the excess of the imagination beyond the actual or ordinary impressions of any object or feeling'. The imagination represents things 'not as they are in themselves, but as they are moulded by other thoughts and feelings'. Though poetry is 'the highest eloquence of passion', yet impassioned poetry emanates from the moral and 240 A HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM intellectual as well as the sensitive part of our nature. That is why the tragedy of Lillo weighs so heavily on the mind while Shakespeare stirs 'our inmost affections'. In considering whether verse is essential to poetry, Hazlitt insists that the prose works that come nearest to being poetry are the Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe and Boccaccio's Tales. By contrast Richardson comes under censure. And we see Hazlitt at his liveliest when he turns to characterise some- thing he does not like. The repetitious blows rained on Clarissa 'have no rebound'. The sympathy they excite 'is not a voluntary contribution but a tax'. Clarissa, the divine Clarissa, is too interesting by half. She is interesting in her ruffies, in her gloves, her samplers, her aunts, and uncles - she is interesting in all that is uninteresting. In the subsequent lectures, Hazlitt works through from Chaucer and Spenser to the present day. He praises not only Chaucer's 'downright reality', but also the 'depth and pathos and intensity of conception' in which none, not even the Greek tragedians, come near him. Spenser, by contrast, takes us into an 'ideal world', and it is a revealing commentary on the Romantic mind that the allegory is undervalued. Readers should not worry about it. 'If they do not meddle with the allegory, the allegory will not meddle with them.' This was to be a nineteenth-century estimate of grave moral Spenser. In the same way Hazlitt's claim for Paradise Lost that 'Satan is the most heroic subject that ever was chosen for a poem' was to supply his successors with the ideal excuse for not taking Milton's theological scheme too seriously. Moreover, the lectures on Dryden and Pope, and on Thomson and Cowper, set the guide-lines for distinguishing the qualities of successive ages which have become cliches of the history of literature. It is when he comes to his last lecture 'On the Living Poets' that Hazlitt's persona shines through at its freshest and sharpest. Judgments tend to be simplistic, but there are neat thumb-nail sketches of Tom Moore ('Everything lives, moves, and sparkles in his poetry', but his facility, his 'graceful ease', and his fluency preclude 'momentum and  THE ROMANTIC AGE 241 passion'), of Byron (he has 'more depth of passion, more force and impetuosity, but the passion is always of the same unaccountable quality'), and of Scott and Southey. There is also a sly summary of what the 'Lake school of poetry' represents which has a positively Peacockian flavour. But there is more subtlety and penetration in Hazlitt's full-scale survey of his contemporaries in The Spirit of the Age (1825). Here, in terms more measured and mature, Hazlitt gives us a gallery of portraits of astonishing clarity and firmness. He makes a just estimate of Scott's poetry and then acclaims the novels. They are 'like the betrothed of our hearts, bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, and we are jealous that anyone should be as much delighted or as thoroughly acquainted with their beauties as ourselves'. After working up to a climax of praise - 'His works (taken together) are almost like a new edition of human nature' -he turns to rend Scott the man to pieces as a person utterly degraded by fanatical Toryism. In a succeeding contrast with Byron, Scott the writer comes off unquestionably the better for the sheer range of his interests. Lord Byron makes man after his own image, woman after his own heart; the one is a capricious tyrant, the other a yielding slave; he gives us the misanthrope and the voluptuary by turns; and with these two characters, burning or melting in their own fires, he makes out everlasting cantos of himself. Hazlitt cries out for quotation. On page after page of his work sentences leap out at the eye to be noted and remembered. Of Wordsworth he wrote, 'Remote from the passions and events of the great world, he has communicated interest and dignity to the primal movements of the heart of man...' Rogers's Pleasures of Memory is 'a tortuous, tottering, wriggling, fidgetty translation of everything from the vulgar tongue, into all the tantalising, teasing, tripping, lisping nimminee-pimminee of the highest brilliancy and fashion of poetical diction'. We can forgive Hazlitt for being preju- diced and for making severe misjudgments. He launched on its course a species of criticism in which the writer romps 242 A HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM across the literary scene shouting to the world at large about the fervent delight he takes in what he reads, and scattering gems of imaginative insight. If Bloomfield is too much the Farmer's Boy, Crabbe is too much the parish beadle, an overseer of the country poor. He has no delight beyond the walls of a workhouse, and his officious zeal would convert the world into a vast infirmary. While his work testifies chiefly to his zest, those who knew Hazlitt personally made much of his gloomy irritability. He figured in George Gilfillan's 'A Gallery of Literary Portraits' in Tail's Edinburgh Magazine in 1845. In reviewing the portrait, De Quincey insisted that for Hazlitt 'Whatever is - is wrong'. He compared Hazlitt with Rousseau in this respect, but to Hazlitt's advantage. Where Rousseau inter- preted his acquaintances' acts and motives as designed to damage him personally, Hazlitt saw 'all personal affronts or casual slights towards himself as covers for deep antagonism to the social causes he advocated. 'It was not Hazlitt whom the wretches struck at; no, no; it was democracy, or it was freedom, or it was Napoleon... ' Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) tended thus to encapsu- late psychological aspects of the writers he judged. His own experience as an opium-addict led him to focus on states of mind, and explore what the feelings and the imagination could effect in defiance of reason. Hazlitt's studies of Scott and Southey in the one case showered praise on the work and scorn on the man, in the other case praise on the man and scorn on !Iis work. No unity of interpretation threads the judgments together. While it would be idle to deny that De Quincey's studies of contemporaries abound in entertaining personal anecdotes that are irrelevant to any commentary on their work, nevertheless De Quincey often revealed the itch to define the writer's mind as operative in his work. Alongside this psychological interest, De Quincey shared in the romantic reappraisal of the relationship between reason and imagination: 'Here I pause for one moment, to exhort the reader never to pay any attention to his understanding, when it stands in opposition to any other faculty of his mind.'  THE ROMANTIC AGE 243 So he remarks at the beginning of his celebrated essay 'On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth' (London Magazine, October 1823), where he argues that Shakespeare's poetry takes us into the company of two murderers bereft of human feelings, transfigured by fiendish evil. It was necessary to insulate this horror from the ordinary current of human life. The knocking at the gate recalls us by force of contrast to the world of daily affairs, making us 'profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them'. De Quincey evolved a definition of what is and what is not 'literature'. In 'Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been neglected' in the London Magazine, March 1823, he declares that the 'antithesis of literature is books of know- ledge' - all books in which the matter to be communicated is paramount to the manner or form of its communication'. The old formula distinguishing the motive to instruct or to amuse is of no service. 'The true antithesis to knowledge, in this case, is not pleasure, but power. All that is literature seeks to communicate power; all that is not literature, to commu- nicate knowledge.' Thus in an essay in Blackwood's Magazine in December 1839, he declares that Milton is 'not a poet amongst poets, but a power amongst powers' and Paradise Lost 'not a poem amongst poems, but a central force amongst forces'. And, in reviewing a new edition of Pope's works in the North British Review in August 1848, he develops the thesis: What you owe to Milton is not any knowledge... what you owe is power, that is, exercise and extension to you own latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite, where every pulse and each separate influx is a step upwards- a step ascending as upon a Jacob's ladder from earth to mysterious altitudes above the earth. Where the literature of knowledge speaks to the 'mere discursive understanding', the literature of power speaks ultimately, perhaps, 'to the higher understanding, but always through affections of pleasure and sympathy'. De Quincey became deeply attached to a principle of literary power which he called 'antagonism'. It is present, in his view, in the reaction represented by the knocking on 244 A HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM the gate in Macbeth, when the human makes 'its reflux upon the fiendish'. It is present in those rich descriptive passages in Paradise Lost where 'images of elaborate architecture and of human workmanship' impi~ge on the scene of mere natural beauty in the Garden of Eden. This represents no display of pedantry and erudition, as critics such as Addison and Johnson suggested. It was a conscious determination that imagery of cities, crowds, and artistry should collide with the imagery of rest, solitude, and primal innocence. De Quincey illustrates this point by citing a current fashion for using phrases like 'amphitheatre of hills'. Its piquancy lies in the 'evanescent image of a great audience' half flashed upon the eye in powerful collision with the silence of the hills. De Quincey was no master of keeping to the point. He enters upon long digressions, and his illustrative anecdotes expand into separate episodes. So lively they generally are, however, that the reader would not sacrifice them. The rich jumble of autobiography, character studies, accounts of social life, anecdote, gossip, and literary comment found in the Recollections of the Lake Poets gathered into a volume by E. Sackville-West in 1948, makes it one of the most fascina- ting books in our literature. But generally speaking, with De Quincey the choice pieces of literary criticism are scattered nuggets. This applies often to even the most substantial essays on literary personalities or topics. They were the product of his long years as a contributor to magazines such as the London Magazine, Blackwood's, and Tait's. And they frequently took the form of reviews of recent books, so that the weightier critical comment is incidental to the main argument. One such review, of Richard Whately's Elements of Rhetoric ( 1828), published in Blackwood's (December 1828), amounted to a substantial treatise, 'Rhetoric'. The distinctiveness of De Quincey's concept of rhetoric emerges when he argues that Milton's prose is sometimes so sublime in its colouring that it rises to the raptures of poetry; conversely, that Milton's poetry lapses into rhetoric in the debates in hell and the councils in heaven. For what should be intuitive - that is knowledge apprehended immediately - becomes discursive - that is knowledge apprehended mediately. What is meant here becomes clearer when De Quincey turns to praise  THE ROMANTIC AGE 245 Edmund Burke for the largeness of his understanding. He derides those who laud Burke's 'fancy', as though he were the kind of man 'to play with his fancy for the purpose of separable ornament'. The notion of 'separable ornament' is anathema to De Quincey. Burke's distinction was that he- 'viewed all objects of the understanding under more relations than other men'. He had a 'schematizing' or 'figurative' understanding. He did not deliberately lay figures on by way of enamel or ornament. He thought in and by his figures. Imagery did not dress his thoughts but incarnate them. By comparison with Burke, even as a conversationalist, De Quincey disparages Dr Johnson. He cites a biographic obituary which set out to expose Johnson's tautologies, quoting, 'Let observation, with extensive view,/ Survey mankind from China to Peru;' and arguing that this in effect says: 'Let observation with extensive observation observe mankind extensively.' Elsewhere, in a piece compar- ing the conversation of Burke and Johnson in Tail's Edinburgh Magazine, October 1847, De Quincey sees Burke's style as moving forward, 'governed by the very necessity of growth', whilst Dr Johnson's 'never, in any instance, GROWS a truth before your eyes'. Johnson's memorabilia represent the briefest of flights. There is 'no process, no evolution, no movement': He dissipated some casual perplexity that had gathered in the eddies of conversation, but he contributed nothing to any weightier interest; he unchoked a strangulated sewer in some blind alley, but what river is there that felt his cleansing power? When he presses his favourite or unfavourable judgment to a conclusion that image or anecdote can illuminate, De Quincey's touch has vitality and conviction. Whether right or wrong, the flavour of personal experience carries his judgment on the current of that 'power' he so valued in others. V Journalists and reviewers De Quincey toiled laboriously for many years in the world of journals and reviews. The Romantic age was a period in 246 A HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM which periodical magazines flourished. The Scottish journals in particular had great influence on the fortunes of con- temporary writers. But in addition to the Scottish reviewers, there was one English journalist who was a lively participant in the literary controversies of the day and he had the perspicacity to champion both Shelley and Keats in resis- tance to the prevailing tide of critical opinion. Leigh Hunt ( 1784-1859) started the Examiner in 1808, and later edited the Reflector (1810-11), the Indicator (1819-20), and the Liberal (1822-3). The literary controversies involving the Romantic writers cannot be wholly disentangled from the political dissensions of the day. Leigh Hunt was a radical. He and his brother got themselves imprisoned for two years for an attack on the character of the Prince Regent in 1813. Nothing could more surely exalt a man to the status of heroic martyr in the eyes of Shelley. Nothing could have been more abhorrent to the Tory journalists. The curious fact is that the championing of Keats by Leigh Hunt was enough to bring down coals of fire on Keats's head. The Quarterly Review wrote of Keats as Hunt's 'simple neophyte'. Hunt's role in the history of literary criticism is not that of a profound illuminator of what he read. It is rather that he showed taste and commonsense in acclaiming the great poets among his contemporaries, often in the face of ridicule. In a piece on Byron in the Examiner Uuly 29, 1821) he reversed the current view of what mattered in the poet's output, and was right. He likes the last canto of Childe Harold but thinks little of the romantic narratives with their 'over-easy eight-syllable measure'. They are 'like their heroes, too melodramatic, hasty, and vague'. As for Byron's dramas, though they contain such good passages as a good poet will naturally write, they are not the work of a true dramatist. 'His Don Juan is perhaps his best work, and the one by which he will stand or fall with readers who see beyond their times and toilets.' In an earlier Examiner (October 31, 1819) Hunt had reviewed the first two cantos of Don Juan and cited instances of excessive suddenness in the transitions from 'loveliness and grandeur to ridicule or the mock-heroic'. In his sensitivity to the various aspects of Byron's 'heterogeneous mixture', Hunt detected a struggle in the poet's feelings  THE ROMANTIC AGE 24 7 between the man of compassion and the satirist. He pictured Byron as a man whose early hopes were blighted. In veins of passion the poet works himself up to a point of emotional tension too powerful to be tolerable in the recollections aroused. So he dashes aside into some totally incongruous train of thought. This attempt to psychologise Byron as a deeply vulnerable soul at loggerheads with himself and his past hints at Hunt's potential as a critic. In the same piece he rounds on those who would label the first two cantos of Don Juan immoral: There are a set of prudish and very susp1c10us moralists who endeavour to make vice appear to inexperienced eyes more hateful than it really is. They would correct Nature- and they always over- reach themselves. 'They' of course include Southey, for whom Hunt nourished a withering contempt. That is, once the revolutionary radical had become the Tory Laureate. In the Examiner of April 13, 1817, a quarter of a century before Southey's life ended, Hunt published an account of the 'Death and Funeral of the Late Mr. Southey'. The funeral procession figures 'Jacobins with their coats turned' as well as a deputation of papists dragging the effigy of Voltaire through the mud, and 'Dr Paracelsus Broadhum Coleridge, holding an enormous white handkerchief to his eyes, and supported by two Bottle- holders'. As for Shelley, Hunt was already proclaiming him 'a very striking and original thinker' shortly after the publication of Alastor (1816). And in February and March, 1818, Hunt devoted spaces in three issues of the Examiner to an apprecia- tive account of The Revolt of Islam, illustrated with extracts. Plainly Shelley's dissatisfaction with the social and political status quo and his towering revolutionary fervour were what most surely won Hunt's sympathy. But he has high praise too for the 'grandeur of imagery' and the musical appeal of the versification. Shelley is declared to be like Lucretius in 'the boldness of his speculations', like Dante in his 'gloomier and more imaginative passages'. But in one respect he has Dante beaten. 248 A HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM The sort of supernatural architecture in which he delights has in particular the grandeur as well as the obscurity of that great genius, to whom however he presents this remarkable and constructive contrast, that superstition and pain and injustice go hand in hand even in the pleasantest parts of Dante, lik~ the three Furies, while philosophy, pleasure, and justice, smile through the most painful passages of our author, like the three Graces. Of the Scottish reviewers the most eminent was Francis Jeffrey (1773-1850) who rose to be ajudge and a Member of Parliament. Jeffrey founded the Edinburgh Review in 1802 with the aid of Sidney Smith (1771-1845). The Edinburgh Review, published by Archibald Constable (1774-1827) was a Whig journal. Its great rival was the Quarterly Review founded by the publisher John Murray (1778-1843) in 1809, and firmly Tory. The Edinburgh acquired a second Tory rival in 1817, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Where Leigh Hunt's Examiner lasted until 1881, the three Scots journals survived into the twentieth century, the Edinburgh until 1929, the Qy.arterly until 1967, and Blackwood's until 1980. These journals, flourishing at a time of literary rebellion and innovation, inevitably became involved in heated controversy over the reputation of new writers. Never before or since, it would appear, have the fortunes of major writers been so inter- twined with the careers of critics. In English Bards and Scotch Reviewers ( 1809) Byron hailed Jeffrey as the inheritor of 'bloody' Judge Jeffreys, sentencing letters as the former once sentenced men 'With hand less mighty, but with heart as black,/ With voice as willing to decree the rack... ' It is true that the motto of the Edinburgh Review, judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur ('the judge condemns himself when the guilty man is acquitted') advertised a principle of critical rigour, and some scathing reviews, of Wordsworth especially, made it tempting to picture Jeffrey as Byron pictured him. But Jeffrey was a discerning and judicious reviewer who studied what he passed judgment on with great care. His highly sympathetic review of Keats's Poems of 1820 (August 24, 1820) followed hard on the celebrated assault on Keats in the Quarterly. Jeffrey concedes that the 'imitation of  THE ROMANTIC AGE 249 our older writers' has produced 'a second spring in our poetry' and few of its blossoms are 'either more profuse in sweetness, or richer in promise' than what is contained in Keats's volume. Defects are pointed out, but Jeffrey speaks lyrically of the 'intoxication' of the sweetness of the poems, and 'the enchantments they so lavishly present'. There are plenty of learned people, jeffrey argues, who are insensitive to the 'true genius of English poetry' and its 'most exquisite beauties'; but Keats is 'deeply imbued with that spirit': We are very much inclined indeed to add, that we do not know any book which we would sooner employ as a test to ascertain whether any one had in him a native relish for poetry, and a genuine sensibility to its intrinsic charm. Jeffrey's appreciative range was not narrow. He repeatedly reviewed Crabbe favourably. He was genuinely appreciative of Crabbe's realistic portraiture, and he made his tribute in April, 1808 an opportunity to lambaste Wordsworth. From his 'childish and absurd affectations we turn with pleasure to the manly sense and correct picturing of Mr. Crabbe'. He was sensitive to Byron's qualities, and prepared to subject to thorough analysis, balanced and penetrating, the charge that Byron's poetry might corrupt by its immorality. He wrote a review of Scott's Marmion which combines due praise of the powerful poetry in 'the picturesque representation of visible objects, in the delineation of manners and characters, and in the description of great and striking events' with a rigorous enumeration of defects such as a modern critic might point out. What is most perceptive here is Jeffrey's insistence that Scott is misapplying the extraordinary talents. And when he reviewed Waverlry in 1814 he immediately recognised it as a work which 'cast the whole tribe of ordinary novels into the shade'. Jeffrey had a blind spot so far as Wordsworth was concerned. He identified Wordsworth and his followers as the 'Lake School of Poetry' in a review of Southey's Thalaba in October, 1802. With much that Jeffrey says of Thalaba the modern reader would be sympathetic. But Jeffrey takes the opportunity to question the 'peculiar doctrines' of the sect of 250 A HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM which Southey is regarded as 'one of the chief champions'. Jeffrey's starting-point is a dogmatic one: Poetry has this much, at least, in common with religion, that its standards were fixed long ago, by certain inspired writers, whose authority it is no longer lawful to call in question... For Jeffrey, the Lake poets have broken from authority and 're-asserted the independence of genius' without creating any new models. They voice the 'antisocial principles and distempered sensibility of Rousseau', they affect simplicity and familiarity of language and then lapse into 'mere slovenliness and vulgarity'. Their simplicity is not just a rejection of excessive ornament, it is a rejection of art altogether. And not only is language depraved, but the distinction between refined and low-bred people is oblitera- ted in the choice of 'low-bred heroes and interesting rustics'. Jeffrey took up the case against Wordsworth in a review of his Poems in Two Volumes in October, 1807. Wordsworth, he protests, seems determined on a kind of wilful 'literary martyrdom' by 'connecting his most lofty, tender, or impas- sioned conceptions, with objects and incidents, which the greater part of his readers will probably persist in thinking low, silly, or uninteresting'. By the time he came to review Wordsworth's The Excursion in November, 1814, Jeffrey had concluded that it was a waste of time to argue with one so irredeemable. 'This will never do!' he began. Wordsworth's case was 'hopeless', 'incurable'. 'Why should Mr. Words- worth have made his hero a superannuated Pedlar?' There is of course some sense in Jeffrey's objection: 'A man who went about selling flannel and pocket-handkerchiefs in this lofty diction, would soon frighten away all his customers.' Hazlitt paid tribute to Jeffrey's qualities in The Spirit of the Age: 'His strength consists in great range of knowledge, an equal familiarity with the principles and details of a subject, and in a glancing brilliancy and rapidity of style.' By contrast, he poured scorn on the pretensions of William Gifford ( 1756-1826), the first editor of the Quarterly Review: 'Mr. Gifford has no pretensions to be thought a man of genius, of taste, or even of general knowledge.'  THE ROMANTIC AGE 251 It is now generally accepted that the editorship was a post for which Gifford was quite unfitted by his hostility to what was new or experimental. Yet he was capable of appreciating Byron. When, in September 1816, John Murray wrote to tell Byron about his reader's reception of the manuscript of Childe Harold canto III, he said: Never, since my intimacy with Mr Gifford, did I see him so heartily pleased, or give one-fiftieth part of the praise, with one-thousandth part of the warmth... When he called upon me some time ago, and I told him that you were gone, he instantly exclaimed in a full room, 'Well! he has not left his equal behind him- that I will say!' But Don Juan disillusioned Gifford. 'I read the second canto this morning,' he wrote to Murray in 1819, 'and I lost all patience at seeing so much beauty wantonly and perversely disfigured.' One of the regular contributors to the Quarterly was John Wilson Croker ( 1780-185 7). A Member of Parliament, and a scholar with a special interest in eighteenth-century litera- ture, he left valuaole personal records behind him which were published as The Croker Papers (1884). He seems to have seen his work for the Quarterly as an extension of his political activities in staunch Tory defence of established institutions and traditional morality, at a time when they were much under threat from contemporary developments in Europe. His Anglicanism gave a religious dimension to his assaults on what he saw as subversive and corrupting tendencies in contemporary literature. His name has come down to posterity linked with the notorious attack on Keats's Endymion in 1818, which Byron and Shelley saw as fatally wounding. His antagonism to Leigh Hunt is explicable enough, and he saw Keats as one of his camp. Croker's defensiveness on behalf of English political moderation linked itself with a dread of excess, libertarianism, and anti- traditionalism in literature. He saw the increasing concern of contemporary novels with themes of adultery, incest, and sexual licence as a grave threat to public morality and especially to female chastity. Thus, while he could give generous approval to novelists such as Scott and Maria 252 A HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM Edgeworth, he poured abuse on such writers as Charles Maturin and Lady Morgan. (In Melmoth the Wanderer 'the new ravings of the unhappy patient exceed the old folly and indelicacy', and Lady Morgan is guilty of 'Bad taste - Bombast and Nonsense - General Ignorance - Jacobinism -Falsehood- Licentiousness, and Impiety'.) But Croker was a lively and valued reviewer, and his very venom testifies to his comprehensive awareness of the binding links between the tremendous political and social upheavals of his day and the outburst of innovation in literature and philosophy. Croker, of course, does not fairly represent the attitude of the Quarterly over the whole field of literature. Its most distinguished contributor was Sir Walter Scott (1771- 1832). A Tory, like Croker, Scott nevertheless managed to display a magnanimity in ideological matters and in literary judgments which together mark his critical works with good temper and persuasiveness. His critical output was consider- able. It included the various introductions he wrote to his novels and poems, the learned editions of Dryden and Swift, and the numerous biographical and critical sketches he wrote for Ballantyne's Novelists' Library, as well as the reviews and the scattered comments on writers found in his Letters and his Journal. Scott belonged to the Romantics in his conviction that poetry springs from impulse and emotion, and that the poet cannot be fettered by the hackneyed regulations of the critics. His own writing was rapid and unpremeditated. He valued what he called the 'hurried frankness' of his composi- tion which was calculated to please youthful, active and vigorous personalities. He recognised that the writer might have to pay a price in mental and nervous strain for his commitment to the 'feverish trade of poetry'. He observed this phenomenon in the case of Burns, Monk Lewis, and Byron. For Scott, what disciplines the spontaneous outflow from the restless emotional deeps and the powerful imagina- tion of the artist is his sure contact with the outer world. This involves observant appreciation of the natural world, sym- pathetic entry into the minds and hearts of his fellow beings, and a sense of the influence of historic background and local environment. The good taste of the artist and the gentleman will ensure that he subjects the liberty of the writer to the  THE ROMANTIC AGE 253 dictates of prudence and morality. In Scott's judicious blend of the man of feeling, the conscious artist, and the gentle- manly citizen, one modern critic has seen him as balancing the views of Wordsworth with those of Jeffrey. 1 Scott's Lives of the Novelists represents a worthy successor to Johnson's Lives of the Poets, not in exuding the same aphoristic brilliance, but in showing a comparable weight of good sense and literary sympathy brought to bear on a variety of writers. Scott does justice to Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne with touching objectivity. Richardson's power in scenes of tragedy is accepted, but a sly note sometimes intrudes into the account of Sir Charles Grandison, especially of the hero, 'the twenty-thousand prize, which was to be drawn by either of the ladies who might be so lucky as to win it'. And Scott's observation on the 'numerous and long conversations upon religious and moral topics' is to recall the case of an old lady for whom Sir Charles Grandison was her favourite book, because if she fell asleep while it was being read, she found on waking that the story remained where it was when she dropped off. Fielding gets his due of praise as 'the father of the English novel' and Scott makes short work of the complaint by Richardson's admirers that Fielding encouraged licentiousness. He quotes Dr Johnson. "Men... will not become highwaymen because Macheath is acquitted on stage" and they will not become 'licentious debauchees because they read Tom Jones'. If there is prejudice in Scott, it emerges in his readiness to put his compatriot Tobias Smollett on a level with Fielding. It is the sheer range and fertility of Smollett's inventiveness which in Scott's eyes counterbalances 'Fielding's superiority of taste and expres- sion'. As for Sterne, Scott believes that the characters of 'Uncle Toby and his faithful squire' are so delightful as to far outweigh anything negative in Sterne's 'literary peculations, his indecorum, and his affectation'. The Gothic order of architecture is now so generally, and, indeed indiscriminately used, that we are rather surprised if the country- house of a tradesman retired from business does not exhibit lanceolated windows, divided by stone shafts, and garnished by painted glass, a cupboard in the form of a cathedral stall, and a pig-house with a front borrowed from the facade of an ancient chapel. 254 A HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM So Scott wrote in his study ofHorace Walpole, but it did not prevent him either from designing Abbotsford or from relishing the powerful preternatural element in Gothic novels. In his study of Ann Radcliffe, he attacks those who rail against her novels, stressing the sheer pleasure they gave the reader. He praises her skill in working on her reader's feelings. He acclaims her as 'the first poetess of romantic fiction'; but, in comparing her with Walpole, he condemns her practice of finally explaining mysteries away in naturalis- tic terms. The 'reader feels indignant at discovering that he has been cheated into sympathy with terrors' now disinfec- ted. Moreover 'these substitutes for supernatural agency are frequently to the full as improbable as the machinery which they are introduced to explain away and to supplant'. Scott has been accused of being too nice a man to be a good critic of his con tern poraries. It is true that his public judgments were dexterously arranged to give as little offence as possible. 'The last part of Childe Harold [meaning canto III] intimates a terrible state of mind' he wrote to Joanna Baillie on November 26, 1816. His review in the Quarterly ofFebruary 1817 does justice to Byron's poetic genius, to 'the deep and powerful strain of passion' and to 'the original tone and colouring of description', before going on to lament Byron's political prejudice and, with great delicacy, to suggest that he ought to moderate his darkness of spirit and his scepticism, to tame the fire of his fancy, and to narrow his desires within practicable compass. It is an urgent moral exhortation, but so deftly presented that Byron liked it and was gracious enough to tell Tom Moore that the article was more honourable to Scott than to himself. Scott returned to the velvet-gloved fray in reviewing canto IV of Childe Harold in September, 1818. He notes that, since Cowper, Byron is the first poet who has 'directly appeared before the public, an actual living man expressing his own sentiments, thoughts, hopes, and fears'. He willingly renders 'to this extraordinary poem the full praise that genius in its happiest efforts can demand from us', yet he gently registers his protest, questioning 'the justice and moral tendency of that strain of dissatisfaction and despondency, that cold and sceptical philosophy which clouds our prospects on earth, and closes them beyond it'.  THE ROMANTIC AGE 255 Scott's son-in-law, John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854) was editor of the Quarterly from 1825 to 1853. He had already distinguished himself as a prominent reviewer for Blackwood's from the time ofits foundation in 1817, and it was there that the 'Cockney School of Poetry' was ridiculed, and Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and Keats were pilloried as its representatives. Lockhart's principles as an Anglican and a conservative were combined with a high degree of sensitivity to the emotional and imaginative content of literature. Hence we find him beginning his review of Shelley's Revolt of Islam in Blackwood's Qanuary 1819) with firm condemnation of the poet's pernicious opinions, 'superficial audacity of unbelief and general 'uncharitableness'. Yet he then turns to the poem: As a philosopher, our author is weak and worthless; our business is with him as a poet, and, as such, he is strong, nervous, original; well entitled to take his place near to the great creative masters, whose works have shed its truest glory around the age wherein we live. As evidence of Shelley's greatness Lockhart cites his portrayal of the 'intense, overmastering, unfearing, unfading love' of Laon and Cythna. He appreciates how 'in the midst of all their fervours' Shelley has shed around the lovers 'an air of calm gracefulness, a certain majestic, monumental stillness, which blends them with the scene of their earthly existence'. His final advice to Shelley, however, is to cease to pervert his talents. Mr Shelley, whatever his errors may have been, is a scholar, a gentleman, and a poet; and he must therefore despise from his soul the only eulogies to which he has hitherto been accustomed - paragraphs from the Examiner, and sonnets from Johnny Keats. Lockhart was a well-read, lively-minded writer of diverse talents. His novel Adam Blair ( 1822) is a story of adultery with passages of intense emotional profundity, and his massive Life of Sir Walter Scott ( 1837-8) brought powers of thoroughness, organisation and personal sensitivity into play which permanently institutionalised the impressive public image of the Wizard of the North and Laird of Abbotsford. 256 A HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM There was too in Lockhart a vein of satmc insight and psychological subtlety which, when combined with his play- fulness and not marred by antipathy, could produce gems such as his anonymously issued Letter to the Right Han. Lord Byron. By John Bull ( 1821). Adopting an intimate, man-to- man, word-in-your-ear, elbow-in-your-side tone to begin with, it manages to be utterly inoffensive in declaring: Come off it! Drop the pose! Lockhart moves from direct address to dramatised fantasy like a twentieth-century novelist: How melancholy you look in the prints! Oh! yes, that is the true cast of face. How tell me, Mrs Goddard, now tell me, Miss Price, now tell me, dear Harriett Smith, and dear, dear Mrs Elton, do tell me, is not this just the very look, that one would have fancied for Childe Harold? Oh what eyes and eyebrows... Perhaps her Ladyship was in the wrong after all. - I am sure if I had married such a man, I would have borne with all his little eccentricities... So Lockhart 'rags' the moody Lord for laughing up his sleeve while picturing such scenes as this, for the 'triumphs of humbug'... 'you ought to be ashamed of them'. Lock- hart's advice is 'Stick to Don Juan: it is the only sincere thing you have ever written'. Indeed, in Lockhart's opinion, there is not much in present day literature that will 'stand the test of half a century' except the Waverley Novels and Don Juan. Byron understood the 'spirit of England', its society, its ladies and gentlemen. So, after ribbing Byron for pretending to admire Rogers and disparaging Words- worth, he ridicules those who would denigrate Byron now for ·sticking to what is 'coarse, comic, obvious' and having 'neither heart nor soul for the grand, the sublime, the pathetic, the truly imaginative'. And here he makes his firmest claim on Byron's behalf. Longinus's idea of 'the sublime' is essentially 'the energetic'; and this Byron well knows himself. In giving its lively, contentious flavour to Blackwood's in its early days, Lockhart was aided by James Hogg ( 1770-1835) and John Wilson (1785-1854). Wilson used the pseudonym 'Christopher North'. The two collaborated over 'The Chal- dee MS', a spoof which appeared in Blackwood's in 1817 over  THE ROMANTIC AGE 25 7 the conflict with the Edinburgh Review, and made well-known Edinburgh personalities look ridiculous. Wilson was also responsible for a large part of the series of dialogues, 'Noctes Ambrosianae', which appeared in Blackwood's between 1822 and 1835. These are conversations in a tavern which feature Wilson as 'North' and James Hogg as the 'Shepherd' among the speakers. Wilson's critical reviews were somewhat un- predictable. He was an early enthusiast for Wordsworth whom he revered as a potential guide for the young at a time of moral and social decomposition. Yet some articles of his in 1817 so offended Wordsworth that Blackwood's was banned from Rydal Mount. In july 1819 we find him writing an appreciative review of Crabbe's Tales of the Hall. Crabbe 'has evidently an intense satisfaction in moral anatomy; and in the course of his dissections, he lays bare, with an unshrinking hand, the very arteries of the heart'. Wilson recognises the intimacy and thoroughness of Crabbe's por- traiture ('He seems to have known them all personally') and a note of surprise seems to be audible as he marvels at the revelation of passions that cut across class barriers in 'scenes and characters from which in real life we would turn our eyes with intolerant disgust'. Wilson has much to his credit. It was he who persuaded De Quincey to come to Edinburgh and contribute to Blackwood's. De Quincey, speaking later of Blackwood's, said that Wilson had been 'its intellectual Atlas'. He was the authority responsible for a shift of attitude by Blackwood's after 1830. The long record of abusing the 'Cockneys' came to an end. By 1834 (Blackwood's XXXVI, 273) Wilson was replying angrily to someone wanting to abuse Leigh Hunt. 'Hunt has more talent in his little finger than the puling prig...' It is not easy to decide how to place in the history of criticism a man whose commentaries on literary figures of his age came publicly to light only after the age had passed away. Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867), a lawyer, kept diaries in which he recorded impressions of contemporary writers and their works. The Diaries and Journals, edited by Thomas Sadler, were first published in 1869. Robinson is a man whose friendly personality intrudes repeatedly into the story of Wordsworth and his circle. He seems to know 258 A HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM everybody. He visits Blake and reads Wordsworth's 'Intima- tions of Immortality Ode' to him. He is Coleridge's good friend. He turns up at Charles Lamb's. He calls upon Keats. He is dining at William Godwin's when Shelley is letting off political steam. He is visiting the Isle of Man, Staffa and Ion a or Italy with Wordsworth, and he is comforting Wordsworth at Rydal Mount after Dora's death. His jottings abound in fresh reactions to first readings. 'With a few energetic lines expressing a diseased state of feeling, the thing is as worthless and unmeaning as I should have expected.' That is the reaction to Byron's The Giaour in 1813. As for Cain, in 1822, 'It is certainly a mischievous work calculated to do nothing but harm'. In Shelley he finds much that is delightful. Even in The Cenci he finds 'all is well- conceived and the tragedy is a perfect whole'. When first reading Prometheus Unbound he cannot get on with it, and throws it aside, encouraged to do so by the review in the Quarterly ('It is good to be now and then withheld from reading bad books'), but three years later, in 1824, he is enjoying 'Lines Written among the Euganean Hills' and 'The Sensitive Plant' and deciding that Shelley is 'worth studying and understanding if possible'.