case of excellence seems to come before us
staggering under the weight of its relations to
other cases. We never lose the feeling that it is
being backed against something else, or something
else against it—that some act of fealty is being
demanded of it or for it; and though Mr. Swin-
burne is the last man deliberately to dwarf any
greatness that he recognises, we tire of the way
in which authors are hurried off, on any pretence,
to make their genuflexions before one or another
of his gods. In his company we lose the power
of admiring our heroes directly and naturally; from
the free citizenship of an intellectual republic we
and they seem to pass to the slavery of a
hierarchy, in which the rank of everybody and
&c., as though words could annul the fact of its having been
both debated and disputed by many very capable judges.
'It ought
to be, if it be not, superfluous to set down in words the assurance
that we claim for no living poet a place beside the Master.' 'We
have no poet comparable' to Mr. Arnold for power and perfection
of landscape.' A hymn of Miss Rossetti's is so much the noblest
of sacred poems in our language that there is none which comes
near it enough to stand second.' Two odes of Keats are 'poems
which for perfect apprehension and execution of all attainable in
their own sphere would weigh down all the world of poetry.' And
again, with regard to Keats we hear of that especial field of work
where all the giants and all the gods of art would fail to stand
against him for an hour. . . There he is unapproachable; this is

his throne, and he may bid all kings of song to come bow to it.'
One need not differ very widely from these dicta to smart under
the ill-usage of their style.

1

everything is as precisely assigned as in the ritual of some Eastern religion, and no one can walk for bowings and scrapings. The very mention of a poet or of a poem seems to imply for him a sense of their place, accurately fixed by a combative examiner, in about twenty different triposes. Sogreat is the air of exactitude which, with the turn of a phrase, Mr. Swinburne can give to his classlists, and so multifarious are the aspects and qualities in respect of which works and workers are classed, that the reader's endeavours to adjust his judgment resemble a perpetual process of pulling and wrenching. Nor can one ever be sure when one is at the end of this Procrustean process. One never knows what new department of excellence may not at any moment crop up, in which some poet will turn out to be 'out of all sight or comparison' superior to all his compeers, except, of course,' this, that, or the other of them.

Gentler methods would surely be in every way an advantage; for this exaggeration of positiveness and detailed precision in undemonstrable matters not only weakens the force of the judgments, by suggesting that they would never have been thus pronounced had not their author felt that they were bound to be differed from, but actually

prompts the difference. Mr. Swinburne has himself remarked on the falseness of the verdicts which great artists have not infrequently passed on one another; and in so doing he has admitted, as completely as his general tone denies, the justice of our main conclusion, that even among 'capable articulate creatures' there is a large amount of necessary divergence of intuition in Poetry. But our argument will yield a further corollary, of which he, of all others, should reap the benefit-namely, that one who at any point perceives and enjoys more than others establishes a claim not so much to be differed from as envied by them. This truth, which lies at the very root of the infectious influence of mind on mind, might perhaps help most of us here and there to a slight though salutary lift in each other's estimation; but Mr. Swinburne in particular, should he realise it, might make his wonderful range of poetic insight and sympathy contribute almost as much to our admiration of him as (what he cares far more about) our admiration for the many objects of his generous and enthusiastic praise. And the first condition—to give the keynote of this Essay its final due-would be to strike a pen through nine out of every ten of his comparatives and superlatives.

191

THE APPRECIATION OF POETRY.

WE were mainly occupied in the last Essay with the nature of what I called the non-reasonable element' in Poetry, and its distinction from the merely musical element with which it is often identified. This alternative was put that the complete result of any Poetry which moves us in the most distinctive way-i.e. in the way which most distinguishes Poetry from prose—either is or is not something more than the effect producible by the sense, as expressed in unmetrical language, plus the extremely slight pleasure producible by the mere metrical sound in itself, as tested for instance in an unknown tongue. To express the alternative in another way-if any passage of Poetry which we select as characteristically impressive be deprived of its metre, the change is felt in one of two ways: either as a change of sound, merely defrauding the bodily organ, or as entailing a loss beyond that of the bodily organ. If there are any

persons who feel it only in the former way, which may be doubted, there are large numbers who feel it in the latter, and who would be entitled by their larger perception to hold the others defective in distinctive feeling for Poetry.

The chief conclusion to which this remarkable fact led us was that the combination of the elements of sound and sense has a transfiguring influence, whereby the final result is made quite other than our knowledge of the respective elements could have taught us to expect; and that therefore the transfiguring power of Poetry, and the distinctively poetical imagination, cannot be confined in their operation to one of the elements-namely, the sense -nor identified with any imaginative power which might be revealed in prose, but must embrace the whole of the distinctively poetical result. However large a part of the imaginative virtue still survives, in company with the logical meaning, when a poem is rendered in an unmetrical version, yet if (as we have agreed) the loss thereby entailed extends beyond the sensory organ, there is no escape from the admission that with the sensory element of the metre vanishes a genuine part of the imaginative or supersensory quality. This is the part that I have felt justified in