John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections

52 PHILOSOPHIZES IN LITERATURE AND POETRY. 1820-1844.
The number for April, this year, opens with one of his
literary articles, reproduced in the Dissertations Alfred de
Vigny . This article is his latest and most highly elaborated
attempt to philosophize upon Literature and Poetry. The
Thoughts on Poetry is his only other paper that he has
deemed worth preserving. The reviews of Tennyson and
Carlyle s French Revolution are replete with just criticism, but
do not reach the height of philosophical explanation. In his
philosophy of style, there are many good points, but, as I con
ceive, some serious omissions. I doubt if he gave enough
thought to the subject. The earlier part of the De Vigny
article on the influence exerted on Poetry by Political changes,
such as the French Revolution, is, I think, very happily express
ed ; and is quite equal to any other similar dissertations by our
best historians and critics. It is when he comes to state the
essential quality of the poetic genius or temperament, that I
think his view defective. In the first place, he puts too much
stress on the Emotional quality, and too little on the Intel
lectual. In the second place, he is wrong in identifying the
poet intellectually with the philosopher or thinker : he regards
genius, whether in poetry or in philosophy, as the gift of seeing
truths at a greater depth than the world can penetrate. On
the former of these two heads he accepts De Vigny s emotional
delineation
"
the thrill from beauty, grandeur, and harmony,
the infinite pity for
"
mankind as the tests, or some of the
tests, of the poetic nature ; but he takes no direct notice of the
genius of expression, the constructive or creative faculty, with
out which emotion will never make a poet, and with which the
grandest poetry may be produced on a very slight emotional
basis. To criticize Shelley without adducing his purely intel
lectual force, displayed in endless resources of language, is to
place the superstructure of poetry on a false foundation.
Shakespeare, in any view of him, was ten parts intellect for one
emotion ; and his intellect did not, so far as I am aware, see
truths at a greater depth than the worM could penetrate.