From a Cornish Window / A New Edition - Arthur Quiller-Couch

The last image involves a change of sex in personified Autumn: an awkwardness, I allow. But if the awkwardness of the change can be excused, Hood's lines excuse it:—

"O go and sit with her and be o'er-shaded
Under the languid downfall of her hair;
She wears a coronal of flowers faded
Upon her forehead, and a face of care;
There is enough of wither'd everywhere
To make her bower,—and enough of gloom.…"

In spite of its ambiguity of sex and in spite of its irregular metre, I find, with Mr. Ellwanger, more force of poetry in Hood's ode than in Keats's; and this in spite of one's prejudice in favour of the greater poet. It came on me with a small shock therefore to find that Mr. Bridges, in his already famous Essay on Keats, ranks 'Autumn' as the very best of all Keats's Odes.

Now whether one agrees with him or not, there is no loose talk in Mr. Bridges's criticism. He tells us precisely why he prefers this poem to that other: and such definiteness in critical writing is not only useful in itself but perhaps the severest test of a critic's quality. No task can well be harder than to take a poem, a stanza, or a line, to decide "Just here lies the strength, the charm; or just here the looseness, the defect." In any but the strongest hands these methods ensure mere niggling ingenuity, in which all appreciation of the broader purposes of the author—of Aristotle's 'universal'—disappears, while the critic reveals himself as an industrious pick-thank person concerned with matters of slight and secondary importance. But if well conducted such criticism has a particular value. As Mr. Bridges says:—

"If my criticism should seem sometimes harsh, that is, I believe, due to its being given in plain terms, a manner which I prefer, because by obliging the writer to say definitely what he means, it makes his mistakes easier to point out, and in this way the true business of criticism may be advanced; nor do I know that, in a work of this sort, criticism has any better function than to discriminate between the faults and merits of the best art: for it commonly happens, when any great artist comes to be generally admired, that his faults, being graced by his excellences, are confounded with them in the popular judgment, and being easy of imitation, are the points of his work which are most liable to be copied."

Further, Mr. Bridges leaves us in no doubt that he considers the Odes to be in many respects the most important division of Keats's poetry. "Had Keats," he says, "left us only his Odes, his rank among the poets would be not lower than it is, for they have stood apart in literature, at least the six most famous of them."

These famous six are: (1) 'Psyche,' (2) 'Melancholy,' (3) 'Nightingale,' (4) 'Grecian Urn,' (5) 'Indolence,' (6) 'Autumn'; and Mr. Bridges is not content until he has them arranged in a hierarchy. He draws up a list in order of merit, and in it gives first place—'for its perfection'—to 'Autumn':—

"This is always reckoned among the faultless masterpieces of English poetry; and unless it be objected as a slight blemish that the words 'Think not of them' in the second line of the third stanza are somewhat awkwardly addressed to a personification of Autumn, I do not know that any sort of fault can be found in it."