Professor Courthope delivered last Saturday his inaugural lecture in the
Chair of Poetry in the University of Oxford on the subject of "Liberty and Authority in Matters of Taste." Professor Courthope is not only learned in English literature, but be is a man of some original genius, as his delightful "Paradise of Birds,"—a sort of happy modern recast of the " Birds " of Aristophanes,—showed ; but we cannot say that his inaugural lecture was composed in his happiest mood. He dwelt far too long in the vague, and came far too slowly to concrete illustrations of the difference between liberty and license in matters of taste. He admitted, of course, that you cannot deny men the liberty of enjoying what really stirs in them literary life and activity, whether it ought to do so or not. But he maintained that to be able to discriminate the good from the bad in literature, you ought to have steeped yourself in the life of the great artists, and therefore to be able to discriminate between what is really up to a high standard of excellence, and what is shallow, feeble, and frivolous. But he was too long in coming to concrete illus- trations of what is truly great and what is artificial and affected in any field of imaginative expression ; and he closed his lecture before he had got beyond the thresboll of his subject. We waited for some practical illustrations of the principles of a just criticism,—to know, for instance, why Wordsworth was so incomparably great in his "Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle," so unequal in "Peter Bell" and "The Idiot Boy," so flat and wearisome in long reaches of "The Excursion" ? Why was Arnold so great in "The Scholar Gipsy" and " Thyrsis," so ineffectual and even vapid in " Merope "P The answers to questions of this kind would at least open up the criteria of true taste. Mr. Courthope should have plunged in med4as tea, and not lingered so long in the approaches to his true subject. Prolegomena are generally mistakes.
Previous page
