Some Diversions of a Man of Letters | Page 4

the remark that "almost any young gentleman with a sweet tooth might
be expected to write such things." Mrs. Carlyle was a very clever
woman, but she was not quite "educated up to" Keats. The history of
letters is full of these grotesque limitations of taste, in the presence of
great art which has not yet been "classed." But we are here considering
the much stranger and indeed extremely disconcerting case of a product
which has been accepted, with acclamation, by the judges of one
generation, and is contemptuously hooted out of court by the next. It is
not, on this occasion, Sully-Prudhomme whom we are considering, but
his critics. If Théophile Gautier was right in 1867, Rémy de Gourmont
must have been wrong in 1907; yet they both were honourable men in
the world of criticism. Nor is it merely the dictum of a single man,
which, however ingenious, may be paradoxical. It is worse than that; it

is the fact that one whole generation seems to have agreed with Gautier,
and that another whole generation is of the same mind as Rémy de
Gourmont.
Then it is that Mr. Balfour, like Galuppi with his "cold music," comes
in and tells us that this is precisely what we have to expect. All beauty
consists in the possession of certain relations, which being withdrawn,
beauty disappears from the object that seemed to possess it. There is no
permanent element in poetic excellence. We are not to demand any
settled opinion about poetry. So Mr. Balfour seems to creak it, and we
want the heart to scold. But is it quite so certain that there is no fixed
norm of beauty imaginable? Is it the fact that poetic pleasure cannot "be
supposed to last any longer than the transient reaction between it" and
the temporary prejudice of our senses? If this be true, then are critics of
all men most miserable.
Yet, deeply dejected as it leaves me to know that very clever people
despise the "genteel third-rate mind" of Wordsworth, I am not quite
certain that I yield to Mr. Balfour's brilliant and paralysing logic. That
eminent philosopher seems to say "you find the poets, whom you
revered in your youth, treated with contempt in your old age. Well! It is
very sad, and perhaps it would annoy me too, if I were not a
philosopher. But it only shows how right I was to tell, you not to expect
permanent relations behind the feeling of beauty, since all is illusion,
and there is no such thing as a principle of taste, but only a variation of
fashion."
Is it, however, quite so certain, after all, that there is no standard? It
must be admitted that there seems to be no fixed rule of taste, not even
a uniformity of practice or general tendency to agreement in particular
cases. But the whole study of the fine arts would lead to despair if we
allowed ourselves to accept this admission as implying that no
conceivable principle of taste exists. We may not be able to produce it,
like a yard-measure, and submit works of imagination to it, once and
for all, in the eyes of a consternated public. But when we observe, as
we must allow, that art is no better at one age than at another, but only
different; that it is subject to modification, but certainly not to

development; may we not safely accept this stationary quality as a
proof that there does exist, out of sight, unattained and unattainable, a
positive norm of poetic beauty? We cannot define it, but in each
generation all excellence must be the result of a relation to it. It is the
moon, heavily wrapt up in clouds, and impossible exactly to locate, yet
revealed by the light it throws on distant portions of the sky. At all
events, it appears to me that this is the only theory by which we can
justify a continued interest in literature when it is attacked, now on one
side, now on another, by the vicissitudes of fashion.
The essays which are here collected deal, for the most part, with figures
in the history of English literature which have suffered from the
changes of fortune and the instability of taste. In every case, there has
been something which is calculated to attract the sympathy and interest
of one who, like myself, has been closely concerned with two distinct
but not unrelated branches of his subject, the literary character and the
literary craft. More than fifty years have passed--like a cloud, like a
dream!--since I first saw my name printed below a passage of critical
opinion. How many reputations, within that half-century, have not been
exalted, how many have not been depressed! We have seen Tennyson
advanced beyond Virgil