6 - Victorian Criticism

Summary

Wordsworth died in 1850, and although the nineteenth century still had half its course to run, the writings of its greatest poet had already penetrated so deeply into the body of British aesthetics that, like Burke’s Enquiry a century before, their influence would be felt long after their author had passed on. The principal writers who came to bear the legacy of Wordsworth and the early Romantics were not poets, nor were they, strictly speaking, philosophers; one of their number – John Stuart Mill – obviously qualifies for that epithet, but his contribution to the tradition bears little resemblance to the works on ethics, politics, and logic for which he is remembered and read. The body of writings in question is better thought of as “criticism,” and the first proponent of the trade, William Hazlitt, holds sufficient credentials to be considered the father of the modern, professional variety with which we are familiar today.

To characterize these writers as “Victorian critics” – the epithet under which I propose to collect them – is not to deny that they developed striking and theoretically sophisticated views, nor is it to suggest – especially in the case of John Ruskin – that they did not hearken back to eighteenth-century themes and thinkers. Their work, however, is focused primarily on understanding and appreciating the form and content of creative work: poetry and literature in the case of Hazlitt and Mill; art and architecture in that of Ruskin; and for Walter Pater, in his idiosyncratic and rebellious assessment of the Renaissance, the entire range of the fine arts from medieval French prose to the Herculean scholarship of the nineteenth-century classicist, Joachim Winckelmann. As we shall see throughout this chapter, the faculty of imagination championed by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley remains center stage albeit now manifest as the creative and expressive power of the artist; in Ruskin one finds the full realization of the picturesque, in whose hands it undergoes a startling transformation from the “aesthetic” version familiar from Gilpin through Stewart and into its moral or “Turnerian” alternative.