action and the fable are the end of trag. edy. But the end is the greatest of all things. Moreover, without action, tragedy cannot exist; but it may exist without manners. Further, if any one place in a continuous series moral speeches, sayings, and sentiments, he will not produce that which is the work of a tragedy; but that will be much more a tragedy which uses these things as subordinate, and which contains a fable and combination of incidents. The fable, therefore, is the principal part, and, as it were, the soul of tragedy; but the manners are next in rank... The sentiments rank third."

To this conclusion, then, we seem to have travelled, by natural if not by easy stages, that the highest and greatest poetry is dramatic poetry, epic poetry, and whatever other form of poetry, if there be such, which permits the imaginative representation of great action in a great and adequate manner. Applying the rea sons which have led us to this conclusion, we should find that, descending the scale, we come next to reflective poetry, or the poetry of transfigured thought; then to | lyrical poetry, or the poetry of transfigured emotion; finally to descriptive poetry, or the poetry of transfigured perception. Perhaps one qualification should What is this, I ask, but to say that the here be made. Though transfigured cardinal distinction of dramatic poetry is, thought or reflective poetry, pure and simthat it deals in a special, more enlarged, ple, must be ranked higher than transfigand more complete manner, with the great- ured emotion, or lyrical poetry, pure and est of all human functions, action-in simple, I am not sure there does not exist other words, with "whatever men do", poetry, to which a distinctive appellation at the same time that it deals incidentally has not yet been given, in which thought with perception, emotion, and thought, or and emotion are fused in equal propor"whatever they perceive, feel, or think "?tions, and which is higher in quality than This it is which constitutes its greatness; this it is which establishes its superiority. I can scarcely believe that Mr. Matthew Arnold would dispute this conclusion. Indeed, does he not allow us to perceive that he was conscious of it, when he affirms that what constitutes the relative greatness of a poet is "an ample body of powerful work," and the fact that he "deals with more of life"? Such language as this we can have no difficulty in endorsing; indeed, we must endorse it, for it tallies exactly with the conclusion at which we have arrived. But how, I venture to ask, shall we succeed in applying it to Wordsworth, or to any poet who has not coped with action at all? I should have thought that the one obvious, glaring defect of Wordsworth's poetry is that it does not deal with enough of life, or, as Mr. Arnold confessed more than a century ago," averts its ken from half of human fate," and, if I may be allowed a familiar solecism, by far the larger half. Think of how Shakespeare deals with the most meditative of men, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark! And then think how Hamlet would have been dealt with by a purely meditative or reflective poet. The whole secret is there. It is the difference between movement and still-life; the difference between Claude's "Arcadia," and Raphael's "Battle of the Milvian Bridge;" the difference between a smiling pastoral by Constable, and one of Turner's stormy landscapes, with all the elements visibly at work upon the canvas.

either the poetry in which thought plainly predominates, or than the poetry in which emotion plainly predominates; just as we often feel, in conversation, that the finest and most impressive thinker is the man who thinks emotionally without ceasing to think justly. In that case we might have to say that though purely reflective poetry must be ranked higher than purely lyrical poetry, a compound of the two lyrical-reflective poetry-of which Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations of Immortality" is a capital instance, would have to be placed before either.

I think we have now reached our goal, and that I may venture to formulate that third proposition which I said remained to be added. I would state it thus:

3. In valuing the amount of life a poet has transfigured, in other words, in estimating the relative greatness of a poet, the place of honor, dignity, and importance must be assigned to action, the next to thought, the next to emotion, and the last to perception or observation.

It will now be evident that, between Mr. Matthew Arnold and myself, there are both identity and divergence of opinion. Did we differ wholly and entirely, I should necessarily be obliged to suspect that he was right and I was wrong. But we agree in insisting upon the importance of what he calls "the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty," and what I call "transfiguration or imagination," and we seem to be at one where he dwells upon "a sound subject-matter," and reiterates the

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phrase "deals with more of life," and or the prevailing spirit of any current age, where I dwell upon "the amount of life" by referring to which we may ascertain with which a poet has dealt, giving the with sufficient fairness and tolerable accuplace of honor to that which, it seems to racy the rank of any particular writer in me, is the highest function of life viz., the poetic hierarchy." That such an obaction. We appear to go apart in this, ject will ever be attained by affirming that, whereas he affirms that poetry is a that poetry is a criticism of life, and that criticism of life, and the greatness of a the greatness of a poet depends on the poet depends upon how he has criticised truth and healthfulness with which he has it, I venture to affirm that poetry is a rep-criticised life, I could not and I cannot resentation of life, and that the greatness believe. Such canons of criticism are of a poet depends upon how much of it ready-made weapons for the critical partihe has represented; the poetic manner being, in either case, presupposed.

san. If poetry be a criticism of life, then critics may, and assuredly will, estimate poets according to their own criticism of life. Is not that an appalling prospect?

These, then, are the canons of poetical criticism I would venture to advance. Whether they present any novelty, either Unhappily, the evil is not prospective in their conclusions or in the methods by only. It is rampant amongst us, and which these have been reached, it is not probably was always more or less rampant for me to say. But I think I may venture in every controversial age. Incidental to assert that they are not arbitrary can- reference has been made to the epics of ons, nor based on any individual predilec- Sir Richard Blackmore, a Whig writer tion; that they have their analogy, their who flourished in the reign of Queen foundation, and, to that extent, their justi- Anne. By a writer, himself of Whig fication, in the laws of human nature and opinions, but living not in the reign of human development; and that, though Queen Anne but in the reign of Queen possibly it may be found difficult to rec- Victoria, or a hundred and fifty years later, oncile with them certain opinions about they are described as "works which enpoets and poetry, which have been exten-joyed great reputation in their own day, sively disseminated during, say, the last but have long been condemned as flat, quarter of a century, they will be found in strict harmony with all previous opinions concerning poets and poetry that have resisted the ordeal of time, and will leave Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, on the thrones that have been assigned to them, while placing upon somewhat lower seats those poets who have failed to "deal with as much of life," and to bequeath as "ample a body of powerful work." If, in travelling towards these conclusions by a road of his own, the writer had found that he was deviating from the critical judgments of the past, and the accumulated consensus of successive generations, then, indeed, he would have been satisfied that somehow he had missed his way. But if the worst that befalls him, from frankly pursuing this road, is to diverge in some degree from the prevailing judgments of the age in which he happens to live- well, he must bear that result, and its well-known consequences, as best he can.

I trust the object of these two papers is now plain to those who have been good enough to accompany me thus far. The object was, in the words with which the former of them was concluded, " to provide ourselves with certain critical canons, raised above the bias of individual taste,

inelegant, and wearisome." With the candor that usually comes with flux of time, this critic adds: "The admiration which they once enjoyed is not wholly to be attributed to the low state of public taste, but in great measure to the spirit of party. Blackmore, being a zealous Whig, and a friend of the king, who knighted him, it became a kind of political duty with one set of people to read and praise his works, while another set heartily despised them."

This is by no means a singular instance of the effect of party spirit in corrupting literary judgment. What the Whigs are here described as doing at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Tories did with equal vigor and equal unfairness at the beginning of the nineteenth century. That the genius of Shelley should have passed almost unnoticed in his lifetime, and not have been noticed at all except to be pooh-poohed, remains an eternal opprobrium to contemporary criticism, and an enduring evidence of the invincible dishonesty of party spirit. He was reputed to be an atheist and a republican, and so there was an end of the matter. Tory criticism of life soon made up its mind about his poetry. In the case of Wordsworth, the same cause operated, though in a lesser degree, to defraud an

entire generation of the privilege of read- | individual, that protests have to be made ing his poetry. Though he became a against canons of criticism which would pretty good Tory before his life ended, he countenance and encourage literary judgwas, in the commencement of his career, ments saturated with prejudice and associated with Jacobin opinions, and it steeped in party spirit. It is for the was not till the critics of life discovered sake of the public and of critics themhow orthodox were his views, that they selves. Against the foibles of human discovered how exquisite was his poetry. nature, against personal grudge or the Thanks to the whirligig of time which partiality of cliques, no precautions are brings in its revenges, the situation is possible. But let us at least deprive once more changed. Literary criticism criticism of all excuse for the bias that is, at present, mainly governed by Liberal springs from community or conflict of opinion; and, hence, were some poet, who opinion. A brilliant, but I cannot honhad not concealed his opinion that Liber- estly say a judicial critic, has asked us to alism, in its more recent development, is regard Collins as the greatest English a sort of softening of the intellect, to pub-poet of the eighteenth century, because lish, let us say, a great epic poem, I suspect it would meet with that mixture of skilful neglect and damning faint praise, in which party spirit is invariably so expert.

he was more or less a republican! Similarly we are invited to esteem a certain French poet as the greatest singer of his time, because he denounces kings and glorifies the people. From a literary and critical point of view, this is deplorable. But it would have a good deal to say for itself, if poetry were really a criticism of life, and if the relative greatness of the poet depended on the truth and healthfulness with which any of us happened to think life had been criticised by him.

The wrong thus done to the individual is a matter of small moment, if indeed it be of moment at all. I have neither sympathy nor pity for the fretful pinings of unrecognized genius; and as a rule they are indulged in only by those unfortunate persons whose sole gift of imagination is to imagine that they have it. Shelley and Wordsworth bore the neglect of their contemporaries with the patient dignity of genius that is genuine. As Mr. Tenny-mother-and meditating afresh upon the son, who possesses both in abundance, has finely said, –

To have the great poetic heart

Is more than all poetic fame;

and a man who has the rare privilege of genius, deserves to be deprived of it, if he craves uneasily for its prompt recognition, or cares one single line, should recognition be withheld. Moreover, he must be singularly unfortunate, if he be not told by some one or other what he already knows; if some gentle spirit, gifted with the foreknowledge that affection inspires, does not crown him with premonitory laurel. Pity Shelley indeed! Shelley, in whom Mary Godwin believed, though she had not seen! Let us rather keep our pity for Byron, for whom the loveless applause of the world was the hollow din of a reverberating drum. Who can doubt, when Petrarch was crowned upon the Capitol, that his thoughts, like those of the dying gladiator, were "far away," and that he would gladly have forfeited the plaudits of the Roman people, if, in the solitude of Vaucluse, he could have once heard Laura exclaim, "O my poet!"

It is, therefore, not for the sake of the

It is narrated of St. Augustine that, walking one day upon the shore at Ostia just after, I suppose, the death of his

intellectual doubts that still withheld him
from embracing Christianity, he suddenly
perceived a child that, with a shell, was
ladling the sea into a hole in the sand.
"What are you doing, my child?" asked
the saint. "I am emptying the ocean,"
was the reply, "into this hole."
"That
is impossible." "Not more impossible
than for you to empty the universe into
your intellect," said the child, and van-
ished. Poetry is the ocean. Criticisms
of life are holes in the sand, which the
next tide of human emotion will level and
abolish.

It is idle to hope that criticism will ever be able to do full justice to great works of imagination. Something however, may be done towards guarding it against doing them injustice; and once more I venture to say that if we are to ascertain with sufficient fairness and tolerable accuracy the rank of any particular writer in the poetic hierarchy, we must provide ourselves with critical canons, that, raised above the bias of individual taste or the prevailing spirit of any current age, and that having their foundation in permanent laws of human nature, will bear being tested by the consensus of critical opinion in past genera tions. Such canons I have attempted to

propound, and to every critic who desires
to judge, without fear or favor, I can only
say, in conclusion,

Vive, vale. Si quid novisti rectius istis,
Candidus imperti; si non, his utere mecum.
Farewell. If better system's thine,
Frankly impart it, or use mine.

ALFRED AUSTIN.

From The Cornhill Magazine.

THE MAN WITH THE RED HAIR.

I.

ABOUT a score of us men, women, and children were eating our breakfast at Toogood's place down in Suffolk, one September morning, when Toogood, who had been reading his letters, looked up, rubbing his bald head and frowning, as he does in moments of distress, and called out across the table to his wife, "I say, mother, Percival's coming to-morrow."

"Percival? Percival?" repeated Mrs. Toogood vaguely. "Oh, do you mean the man with the red hair? I am so sorry!"

Now that, again, is not the sort of thing that I should have said with a view to making sure of Florry's behaving herself; but dear old Toogood is always saying things that he ought not to say.

"Percival isn't a bad fellow," he continued pensively, "so long as you don't rub him the wrong way; only, unfortu nately, it takes very little to rub him the wrong way; and when he gets into one of his tempers-well, it's uncommonly disagreeable for everybody."

After that I suppose we all felt an increased curiosity to behold the man with the red hair; and I can answer for one of us who was not without hope that he might be attacked by some extraordinary fit of fury before he went away. I must confess that I take a great delight in seeing things broken (of course I don't mean my own things); and sincerely as I The Toogoods are such extremely hos- should have deplored the annihilation of pitable people that it is hardly possible to Mrs. Toogood's best dessert service, conceive such a thing as that either of still, if such a calamity was bound to them should feel sorry at the prospect of take place, I should certainly have wished receiving an additional guest in their to be there to look on at it. I imagined capacious house, and Florry Neville only the redoubtable Percival as a brawny made herself the spokeswoman of the en- giant with a flaming mane and beard, and tire company by asking in a tone of aston-after breakfast I found in one of the ishment, " Why? Because he has red children's picture-books a representation hair?" of an ogre which seemed so exactly like what he ought to be that I pointed it out to Florry Neville, who was so kind as to say that she would take an early opportunity of showing it to him and telling him that I had supposed it to be his por

"Well, yes; partly because of that," answered Mrs. Toogood with a sigh.

"Now mind, children," said Toogood in a loud voice; "not a word about red hair so long as Mr. Percival is here."

However, when he did come, he turned

I don't know how many children Too-trait. good has I have never attempted to Count them but I do know that, if there out, like so many things that one has was anything which I particularly wished | looked forward to, to be a disappointment to prevent them from alluding to, the very at all events so far as appearances last course that I should adopt would be went. He was not in the least like the to tell them of it. ogre in the picture-book, nor like any ogre at all, but was a tall and well-made fellow of six or seven and twenty, whom nine people out of ten would have pronounced decidedly good-looking. Certainly his hair was red; but it was cut so short that its color hardly attracted attention, and he wore neither beard nor moustache. It was just before dinner that we had our first view of him, and I scrutinized him then and throughout the evening rather narrowly without discovering anything

"The first child," continued Toogood resolutely, "who mentions the subject of red hair during Mr. Percival's visit will be whopped, or confined to the nursery, or made to learn the first six propositions of Euclid by heart according to age and sex. So now you know."

"And how about adults?" Miss Neville inquired. "What is to be done to them if they hurt your carroty friend's feelings?"

about him different from the rest of the | Evidently the desire to break something world, except that his eyes were a little was strong upon him; but he spared the restless, and that he spoke with a certain china. All he did was to snatch up the hurried excitability when he was inter- poker, and begin hammering at the coals ested in his subject. If he had been a with a violence which sent some red-hot horse, you would have said that he was a cinders flying out on to the hearthrug. high-couraged animal, nothing more. At This was certainly a breach of good mandessert the children stared at him with ners; and when I mildly asked him round eyes, and I could see that my feel- whether anything was the matter, he ining of disappointment was shared by quired savagely what the devil I meant by them ; but they made no dreadful re- that which was worse. However, he marks, nor was the harmony of the even- begged my pardon presently, and I said it ing in any way disturbed. As for his was of no consequence. manners, nothing could have been more pleasant. His voice was rather loud, but not disagreeable; he talked a good deal -chiefly about sport and was very cheery and unaffected and ready to make friends with everybody.

After dinner Florry Neville took him away into a corner and began to flirt with him outrageously; but that I had known beforehand that she would do. I may mention that Florry is my cousin, and that I have been acquainted with her little ways for many years. Rufus appeared to be much taken with her. I don't know whether she chaffed him or not; but, if she did, her chaff must have been of a very mild order, for no one could have looked more complacent than he did when the ladies went up-stairs and we adjourned to the smoking-room.

The next day he came out shooting with us, and shot uncommonly well; and in the evening we played pool, and although he was fluked twice and sold once, he did not break the lamps. After he had been three days in the house he had made himself quite a popular person, having spoken no uncivil word to anybody, nor offended against a single law of good breeding, unless it were in his attentions to Florry, which were perhaps just a shade too conspicuous, and which seemed to cause Mrs. Toogood some anxiety. But on the fourth day something happened which was quite certain to happen sooner or later. Florry grew tired of her red-haired admirer and took up with a more recent arrival. As soon as dinner was over, I saw Percival make for the sofa upon which she was sitting with his supplanter; I saw her look up at him over her fan with that air of innocent surprise and inquiry which she knows so well how to assume when it suits her purpose; and then, after saying a few words to her, he suddenly whisked round upon his heels and came striding towards the fireplace, with a scowl upon his face which boded no good to the Dresden shepherdesses on the mantelpiece.

On the following morning we went out after the partridges again, and I don't think I ever in all my days saw a man shoot so wildly as Percival did. He had started in a bad temper, and the worse he shot the more angry he became. Everybody who spoke to him got sworn at for his pains, and he ended by pulling up in the middle of a turnip-field, pitching his gun half-a-dozen yards away, and marching off, with his hands in his pockets, growling and muttering to himself.

"Dear me!" said Toogood, rubbing his head, as he gazed after his retreating guest, "how ridiculous it is, to be sure! Fancy a man of his age behaving like a spoiled child in that way!

"Ah," said Moreton, "6 I told you how it would be. Now you'll see. He'll go back to the house and kill the first person he meets."

"I suppose I ought to go after him," sighed Toogood ruefully.

But I said I would go ; and my offer was accepted with alacrity.

66

Do, like a good fellow, Oliver," answered Toogood; "I believe you can quiet him down better than anybody."

The truth is that our irascible friend had taken rather a fancy to me. Far be it from me to suggest that my own personal attractions were not amply sufficient to account for this; still, I have observed that, when I happen to be staying in the same house with Florry Neville, men often do take a fancy to me. I don't know why they should imagine that because she is my cousin it is worth their while to worm themselves into my good graces; but the fact remains that they do.

I overtook Percival in the adjoining field, where he had stopped short and waited for me, after having been shouted at three or four times.

"Well," he said, looking anything but amiable, "what's the row? What do you want?

"I have brought you your gun," said I ; "you may want it again perhaps. I'm not