Beside these French critics, the best of our own seem
either fragmentary or provincial--yes, curiously provincial. Except
Hazlitt we have, I believe, no even approximately first-class writer who
devoted his main activity to criticism. And Hazlitt, though he is very
readable, has neither the urbaneness, nor the science, nor the learning,
nor the wide grasp of life and of history that characterizes the three
above-named. Briefly, he didn't know enough.
* * * * *
Lamb would have been a first-class critic if he hadn't given the chief
part of his life to clerkship. Lamb at any rate is not provincial. His
perceptions are never at fault. Every sentence of Lamb proves his taste
and his powerful intelligence. Coleridge--well, Coleridge has his
comprehensible moments, but they are few; Matthew Arnold, with study and
discipline, might perhaps have been a great critic, only his passion for
literature was not strong enough to make him give up
school-inspecting--and there you are! Moreover, Matthew Arnold could never
have written of women as Sainte-Beuve did. There were a lot of vastly
interesting things that Matthew Arnold did not understand and did not
want to understand. He, too, was provincial (I regret to say)--you can
feel it throughout his letters, though his letters make very good quiet
reading.
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