lofty-minded. I think that the belief of them will tend to
make us all more reverent and earnest in examining the utterances of
others, more simple and truthful in giving vent to our own, fearing
equally all prejudiced and hasty criticism, all self-willed
mannerism, all display of fine words, as sins against the divine
dignity of language. From these assertions I think we may conclude
what is the true method of studying style. The critical examination
of good authors, looking at language as an inspiration, and its laws
as things independent of us, eternal and divine, we must search into
them as we would into any other set of facts, in nature, or the
Bible, by patient induction. We must not be content with any
traditional maxims, or abstract rules, such as have been put forth in
Blair and Lord Kaimes, for these are merely worked out by the head,
and can give us no insight into the magic which touches the heart.
All abstract rules of criticism, indeed, are very barren. We may
read whole folios of them without getting one step farther than we
were at first, viz. that what is beautiful is beautiful. Indeed,
these abstract rules generally tend to narrow our notions of what is
beautiful, in their attempt to explain spiritual things by the carnal
understanding. All they do is to explain them away, and so those who
depend on them are tempted to deny the beauty of every thing which
cannot be thus analysed and explained away, according to the
established rule and method. I shall have to point out this again to
you, when we come to speak of the Pope and Johnson school of critics,
and the way in which they wrote whole folios on Shakespeare, without
ever penetrating a single step deeper towards the secret of his
sublimity. It was just this idolatry of abstract rules which made
Johnson call Bishop Percy's invaluable collection of ancient ballads
"stuff and nonsense." It was this which made Voltaire talk of
"Hamlet" as the ravings of a drunken savage, because forsooth it
could not be crammed into the artificial rules of French tragedy. It
is this which, even at this day, makes some men of highly-cultivated
taste declare that they can see no poetry in the writings of Mr.
Tennyson; the cause, little as they are aware of it, simply being
that neither his excellences nor his faults are after the model of
the Etonian classical school which reigned in England fifty years
ago. When these critics speak of that with which they sympa