Note 961 — Chapter II · BETWEEN COLERIDGE AND ARNOLD.

See his Early Essays in Bohn’s reprint. The criticism of certain romantic poets of the mid century would make an interesting excursus of the kind which I have indicated as (if it were possible) fit to be included in a fourth volume of this work. Horne’s New Spirit of the Age (1845), though exhibiting all the singular inadequacies, inequalities, and inorganicisms of the author of Orion, does not entirely deserve the severe contrast which Thackeray drew between it and its original as given by Hazlitt. Mrs Browning, who took some part in this, has left a substantive critical contribution in The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets, in which again the weaknesses of the writer in poetry are interestingly compensated by weaknesses in criticism, but in which again also, and much more, “the critic whom every poet must [or should] contain” sometimes asserts himself not unsuccessfully. W. C. Roscoe, whose verse is at least interesting, and has been thought something more, is critically not negligible. But perhaps the most interesting document which would have to be treated in such an excursus is Sydney Dobell’s Nature of Poetry, delivered as a lecture (it must have been something of a choke-pear for the audience) at Edinburgh in 1857. Here the author, though not nominatim, directly traverses Matthew Arnold’s doctrine in the great Preface (see next chapter), by maintaining that a perfect poem will be the exhibition of a perfect mind, and, we may suppose, a less perfect but still defensible poem the exhibition of a less perfect mind—which principle, no doubt, is, in any case, the sole possible justification of Festus and of Balder. Others (especially Sir Henry Taylor) might be added, but these will probably suffice.