Stedman and Some of His British Contemporaries [pp. 17-24]

Stedmatn Iand Sonie of His Br-itisli Contem1poraries.
STEDMAN AND SOME OF HIS BRITISH CONTEMPORARIES.
' Thle nineteenth centuiy, too, uwill be fotund to have
ha~l its style, justified 1)by necessity."- Ite; Pale;-.
SI-xcI the rise of the" Edinburgh Reviex," the art of criticism has occupied
a uniqiclue place in the literature of Great
IBritain. Jeffrey, De;.uincey, Coleridge,
Hazlitt, Macautlay, and Carlyle wcre the
forerunners, from whom Matthewv Arinolcd, WValter Pater, John Addington
Symonlds, George Saintsbury, Andrew
ILangi, and Autgustinie Birr-ell have descecnded in a direct line. The whole
r-ealmi of ancient, mecditval, and modern
lore, down to the Victorian Era, would
seem to have been explored in this centur) by1 some British critic or poet-interi)rcter. Ecldwarcld litzgeralcl's perfect
translations of Calderon and the Rubaiy,at of OmarKha) yim; Edward Arnold's
less scholarly but more popular translations from the fla/,;b/(uiata,~ Lang's collaboi-atecl prose translation of Homer;
the Scotch ballad of "The King's Tragedv,' in which "RI? ossetti has dexterously
inter-voven some irelics of James' own
exquisite early verse"; the graphic portr-aits of modern French novelists by
Saintsbur' \\;"alter- Pater-'s " Studies
in the History of the Renaissance," and
Adding gton S iymonds' re-creation of the
character of MIchael Angelo,- vii-ile
and grand, but, like Buonarroti's own
conceptions, destitute of the softerg-iaces,- are but a handful of the gems
from a by-gone clda \vhich have been
collected for the centurty's treasury.
tBut when the British critics reached
the Victorian Era, and the time (durin-i
th1e early sev-enties) seemed opportune
for a classification and record of Nineteenth CentLury song, no British critic
was prepared to undertake the task.
The \-riter oishe to acklnowledge lei indebtedness to
Ho,Ighton, Nliffiin'& Co., Stone & Iximhl)al], Iis. Jloia
<. l\. I)orr, and to her to other, I). I<.\ ottg, oI sonne
ot the miaterialt usel in this.,ketch.
VOI. XXV-.
"Young England," as Saintsbury has
noted, was not John Bullish, and he
adds: "It might perhaps have been a
little more so with advantage." LangT,
at a later date, certainly voiced the Oxford division of Young England, when
he cynically wvrote in his letter to Poe
(" Letters to Dead Authors "):
"About the writers of his own generation a leader of that generation should
hold his peace. He should neither
praise, nor blame, nor defend his equals.
. (reat minds should only criticise the great who have passed beyond
the reach of eulogy or fault-finding."
Another great critic, Matthew Arnold, sympathized so fully with his
father's age, that loyalty to the poets of
his own time seemed like disloyalty to
his predecessors, particularly to his
master, \Vordsworth. Stedman has
mildly censured Arnold's failure to follow the /icit-Gcist, the Time Spirit, in
the following,- words
"While admiring Matthew Arnold's
delineations of Heine, the De Gu6rins,
Joubert, and other- far-away saints or
heroes, we feel that he possibly may
overlook some pilgrim at his roadsidedoor."
But the feeling, which Stedman attribuLtedC solely to Arnold has been universal in England during the last halfcentury. Out of forty-nine essays by
Augustine Birrell, the most modern of
English critics, but eight are upon his
own contemporaries; and although WValter Pater's cr-itiqc upon Rossetti is the
most appreciative which has yet appearedcl, he undoubtedly preferred to use
his own age simply as a back-ground
for the delineation of the past.
If we g,o back to a period immediately
aftertheCivil \\:ar, we will find that Amer
ican literary life, East, WVest and South,
1895.]
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