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These may seem lofty words, but I do not think they are likely to make us 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 sympathise they are admirable. They become childish only when they resolve to bind all by maxims which may suit themselves.

We must then, I think, absolutely eschew any abstract rules as starting-points. What rules we may require, we must neither borrow nor invent, but discover, during the course of our reading. We must take passages whose power and beauty is universally acknowledged, and try by reverently and patiently dissecting them to see into the secret of their charm, to see why and how they are the best possible expressions of the author’s mind. Then for the wider laws of art, we may proceed to examine whole works, single elegies, essays, and dramas.

In carrying out all this, it will be safest, as always, to follow the course of nature, and begin where God begins with us. For as every one of us is truly a microcosm, a whole miniature world within ourselves, so is the history of each individual more or less the history of the whole human race, and there are few of us but pass through the same course of intellectual growth, through which the whole English nation has passed, with an exactness and perfection proportionate, of course, to the richness and vigour of each person’s character. Now as in the nation, so in the individual, poetry springs up before prose. Look at the history of English literature, how completely it is the history of our own childhood and adolescence, in its successive fashions. First, fairy tales–then ballads of adventure, love, and war–then a new tinge of foreign thought and feeling, generally French, as it was with the English nation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries–then elegiac and reflective poetry–then classic art begins to influence our ripening youth, as it did the youth of our nation in the sixteenth century, and delight in dramatic poetry follows as a natural consequence–and last, but not least, as the fruit of all these changes, a vigorous and matured prose. For indeed, as elocution is the highest melody, so is true prose the highest poetry. Consider how in an air, the melody is limited to a few arbitrary notes, and recurs at arbitrary periods, while the more scientific the melody becomes, the more numerous and nearly allied are the notes employed, and the more complex and uncertain is their recurrence–in short, the nearer does the melody of the air approach to the melody of elocution, in which the notes of the voice ought continually to be passing into each other, by imperceptible gradations, and their recurrence to depend entirely on the emotions conveyed in the subject words. Just so, poetry employs a confined and arbitrary metre, and a periodic recurrence of sounds which disappear gradually in its higher forms of the ode and the drama, till the poetry at last passes into prose, a free and ever-shifting flow of every imaginable rhythm and metre, determined by no arbitrary rules, but only by the spiritual intent of the subject. The same will hold good of whole prose compositions, when compared with whole poems.