MR. RODEN NOEL'S ESSAYS. 4 TBE old question as to whether
the artist is the best or the worst critic of the work of his fellow-artists, is ooe which at this time of day may be profitably left to the debating societies. A good deal of talking may be done in support of either answer, and talk is what the debating societies want ; but it is the first answer for which all the facts speak. All other things being equal, the critic with practical knowledge must always be a better judge than the critic who has no such knowledge ; and if the poet in appraising poetry, or the painter in appraising painting, betrays a want of catholicity and a prejudice in favour of certain subjects or methods, his special knowledge does not generate the prejudice—in fact, it tends to free him from though it may enable him to enunciate it with greater skill and persuasiveness. Some of the best, and much of the most interesting, poetical criticism of our own day has been written by such men as Mr. Matthew Arnold, Mr. Swiuburne, Mr. Robert Buchanan, Mr. E. W. Gorse, Mr. Edward Dowden, and others who have to a greater or less extent cultivated poetry on their own account ; and now Mr. Roden Noel adds his name to the list of poet-critics. We do not coincide with all his verdicts ; but even when he seems to us to go astray, we cannot attribute the deviation to his poetical endowment, and certainly it has not led him into the sin of narrowness and emotional inflexibility.
A hearty and ungrudging catholicity of appreciation is, indeed, one of the most prominent merits of this interesting volume. Mr. Noel seems to recognise the truth, very finely expressed by the last of the above-named writers, that " the best criticism is not that which comes out of profound cogitation, but out of immense enjoyment ;" and accordingly he, very wisely as it seems to us, writes only of poets whose work he really admires and loves. There is no lack of liberality of imaginative receptiveness in a critic who can speak with admiration, often warming into enthusiasm, of such widely differing poets as Chatterton, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, Hugo, Tennyson, and Whitman ; one might suggest, on the contrary, that there is a certain want of fixity, an excess of fluidity, in a sensibility which can extend the same cordiality of welcome to the tranquil and restful reverence of the "Ode to Duty "and the high- faluting platitudes and coarse defiances of the Leaves of Grass. Mr. Noel would doubtless reply that the right state of mind is one that leaves us free to accept what we see to be good or true or beautiful wherever it is to be found, and that wholesome fruit can be gathered both in the trim garden and in the wild wood- land. This is a very just plea, and the truth it expresses is one that we are all at times, some of us constantly, tempted to forget and ignore. We do not, however, think that the plea is a relevant answer to our objection. Mr. Noel does not merely in a spiiit of ecclecticism accept something of Wordsworth's and something of Whitman's ; be accepts, or seems to accept, Wordsworth and Whitman as wholes, though the entire moral and emotional genius of the one is not only so unlike, but so antagonistic to that of the other, that there seems to be no common ground upon which they can meet. It may be, and we think it is, the one weakness of a poet when he seats himself in the chair of a critic, that the very fineness of his sensibility, combined with his imaginative power, betrays him into a false idealisation. Mr. Noel, for example, finds in Whitman's book certain beautiful or weighty utterances—for we will not be guilty of the exaggera- • E.says on Poetry and Poets. By the Hen. Roden Noel. London: Ke;an Paul, Trench, and Co.
tion of saying that these do not exist—and then in the light of these utterances Whitman becomes so transfigured that he appears as a great poet and a great seer. Nothing can be surer than that Mr. Noel, though not in the least a finikin person, is a man of genuine delicacy and refinement ; and yet when Whit- man is transfigured before him he seems half insensible to the nasty side of the man. Blind to it he is not ; he speaks of it with regret. But Whitman holds him as the ancient mariner held the wedding guest, and while he is under the spell he can speak with calmness of filth that in an ordinary mood would simply upset his stomach. A man who could be guilty of the outrage of that inconceivably silly and noisome line in which he declares that " the scent of these arm-pits is an aroma finer than prayer," should be awarded severer treatment than an acquittal with faint condemnation. We are ready to concede to Mr. Noel that, in the worst sense of the word, Whitman is not prurient ; but, after all, the absence of pruriency is no excuse for the presence of dirt.
We have the same feeling of exaggeration and lack of perfect critical poise when we read the surely too wholesale apology for Byron. With many of Mr. Noel's estimates of Byron's poetical work we are in agreement, and we welcome them as a timely protest against a very foolish freak of contemporary literary fashion. Specially do we endorse without any reservation the verdict concerning Byron's supremacy as a wit, a humourist, and, above all, as a satirist; indeed, we should place him even above Butler, one of the three men with whom he is classed, the other two being, of course, Swift and Pope. Nay, we should go further than Mr. Noel, and say that with the exception of a few immortal pieces of passionate description or apostrophe, it is the satirical and humorous side of Byron's genius which will best preserve his fame. But of Byron as a man, it can only be said that he combined in one character the profligacy of the youthful rake with the cold cynicism of the worn-out roue; and even to hint that such a character as this is needed to balance the prosaic selfishness of respectable money-grubbing, is surely to introduce that dangerous confusion between essential good and essential evil which is, as Mr. Noel himself sees, Walt Whit- man's besetting weakness.
Enough, however, of a discussion which, if unduly prolonged, would give the reader an entirely erroneous idea of a volume through the greater part of which we can follow Mr. Noel with pleasure, profit, and entire accord. The first essay, one of the two papers in the book not devoted to the work of a single poet, deals with "The Poetic Interpretation of Nature," and is, in the main, a refutation of the somewhat wilful and fantastic passage, in the third volume of 3fodern, Painters, where Mr. Ruskin sets himself to denounce what he calls the "pathetic fallacy." Mr. Ruskin maintains that imagery which attributes to Nature human attributes and emotions is false in fact, therefore wanting in true imagination, and a note of second- rateness in poetry. Keats, for example, speaks of a wave break- iug with "wayward indolence," and it is pointed out that Homer, who is for the moment Mr. Ruskin's typical great poet, never employed, never could have employed, such a metaphor as this, always using as he does the most simply descriptive terms, and calling the waves " over-roofed," " full-charged," "wine-coloured," and so on. Therefore, and this is the special point, Keats shows himself a comparatively less truthful and inferior poet,—a quibble, for a quibble it assuredly is, which Mr. Noel answers in the following passage. After quoting Keats's lines,— "Down whose green back the short-lived foam, all hoar, Bursts gradual with a way ward indolence,"— he goes on to say :— " Now, salt water cannot be either wayward or indolent ; on this plain fact the charge of falsehood in the metaphor is grounded. Yet this expression is precisely the most exquisite bit in the picture. Can plain falsehood then be truly poetic and beautiful ? Many people will reply, certainly,' believing that poetry is essentially pleasing by the number of pretty poems told or suggested. I believe, with Mr. Ruskin, that poetry is only good in proportion to its truth. Now, we mast first inquire what the poet is here intending to describe. If a scientific man were to explain to us the nature of foam by telling us that it is a wayward and indolent thing, this would clearly be a false- hood. But does the poet profess to explain what the man of science would profess to explain, or something else ? What are the physical laws according to which water becomes foam, and the foam falls along the back of a wave,—that is one question ; and what impres- sion does this condition of things produce on a mind which observes closely, and feels with exquisite delicacy of sense the beauty in the movement of the foam and its subtle relation to other material things, as well as to certain analogues in the sphere of spirit, to certain functions and states of the human spirit,—this is a totally different question. I submit that the office of the poet in this connection is to answer the latter question, and that of the scientific man to answer the former."
This is very clearly and convincingly put ; indeed, the idea expressed in Mr. Noel's sentences is so obvious to any one who will think the matter out, that it would hardly have called for elucidation had not Mr. Ruskin's whimsical dictum created the necessity. If Keats spoke of Nature in a manner that was different from the manner of Homer, it was because Keats's emotions in the presence of Nature were more complex than Homer's, and the new sensibilities demanded a new language. Mr. Ruskin himself falls into the "pathetic fallacy," and achieves some of his greatest expressional triumphs thereby, not because he is a writer " of the second rank," but because he is a man of the nineteenth century, and must speak in its vocabulary or be silent.
There is a great deal of valuable criticism in the essay on Robert Browning, into which Mr. Noel introduces one of his many vigorous protests against the pestiferous nonsense of the "Art-for-Art" school, which is happily becoming generally discredited by everybody except a few affected young versifiers and their equally affected admirers. He blows the trumpet with no uncertain sound when, in answer to the wearisome babble about "form," he declares that the degree of abiding value in any man's poetry will inevitably and only be in proportion to his spiritual and intellectual calibre :—
" And so," he continues, "for critics to commend us to poets with- out moral sense is more ridiculous than for them to commend us to painters affected with colour-blindness, or musicians without ear. If a man is to represent more than the mere surface of life, he must see it truly, or else distort it—must discriminate light from shadow, spiritual beauty from deformity, variety of moral as well as mental shape, and tone, and tint, all the soul-notes that contrasted and com- bined make human music, the inevitable consequences that Nature has assigned to moral good and evil. Else you will have reiterated photographs of low passions and mean motives, which, except as a foil to the higher aspects of life, and either as assisting to develop, or, at least, as antagonistic to the nobler elements of our nature, palpably corrupting and disintegrating, can only be repulsive to sane people, and therefore bad as art. Would you call a man a great painter if he (though never so skilfully) could paint you only varieties of leprosy and skin disease ? Besides, without a clear vision of what conscience reveals, of its compensations and reproaches, of the dread- ful dragon-brood engendered by sin and sin's congeners, no tragedy, no moving picture of life is possible."
We are drifting into criticism by quotation, a rather lazy method, but perhaps more profitable in the case of a work like the present than criticism by comment or discussion, for Mr. Noel devotes himself less to abstract scientific appraisement than to what we may describe as an intellectual vindica- tion of emotional preferences. We may, however, say that Mr. Noel's verdicts and the reasons given for them generally commend themselves to us ; and we would specially direct attention to the essay on Mr. Robert Buchanan, not be- cause it is superior to its companion papers, but because we think that Mr. Buchanan's really noble poetry has met with scant justice from critics of repute. In Mr. E. C. Stedman's Victorian Poets, for example, the pages devoted to Mr. Buchanan are strikingly wanting in appreciation, and we therefore extend a hearty welcome to an essay which, in its recognition of the veracity of Mr. Buchanan's imaginative realism, and the charm of his Celtic mysticism, is not less just than generous. A sketch of a holiday in Cornwall, which comes at the end of the book, is a thoroughly enjoyable piece of descriptive writing, and is instinct with that intense sympathy with the passion of Nature (it is impossible to escape from the " pathetic fallacy ") which makes some of Mr. Noel's lyrical Nature-poems so impressive and fascinating ; and the writer's true appreciation of all beauty and nobility of sentiment will make his book pleasant reading for those who love poetry, and love it best when it celebrates things lovely and of good report.
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