“That by much engine-driving at intricate junctions
One learns to drive engines along with the best.”
And if this seem small comfort to the suffering author, who thinks that he has had too great a share of the bad criticism and too little of the good—if it make him think of that inspiriting substitute in the Secularist hymn for our old-fashioned Glorias—
“The social system keep in view!
Good night! dear friends, good night!”—
there are two other consolations which may suit him according to his temperament. The one is that under any other system his book would very probably have received no notice at all, which would in some cases (not in all) annoy him worse than blame. If he be of another sort, he may perhaps anticipate the all-healing question to any alma passably sdegnosa, “Would you rather not have written so, and be praised?”
One very necessary branch of the new criticism, as regarded poetry, the average critic, whether in or out of periodicals, was sadly slow to learn—indeed for the most part he recalcitrated furiously against learning it. This was the proper appreciation of the new effects in verbal painting and verbal music. There had always, of course, been much of this in the great old masters: but there had not been so much of it, and the critic had been wont to treat it alternately in a peddling and in a high-sniffing fashion.[[819]] On the musical side especially, theory had chiefly confined itself to the remarks on “suiting the sound to the sense,” in a comparatively infantine fashion—putting plenty of ss's into a line about a snake or a goose, and plenty of r's into a line about a dog; giving trisyllabic feet in a line that meant swift movement, and clogging it with consonants when effort or tardiness came in. The new poets—Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson,—in increasing degree, changed this simple and rudimentary proceeding into a complicated science of word-illumination and sound-accompaniment, which the new critics perhaps could not see or hear, and at which they were by turns loftily contemptuous and furiously angry. That there was some genuine inability in the matter may appear from looking back to Johnson’s well-known and very interesting surprise at Pope’s fondness for his couplet—
“Lo! where Mœotis sleeps, and hardly flows
The freezing Tanais, through a waste of snows.”
This couplet is beautiful, though the homœoteleuton of “Mœotis” and “Tanais” is a slight blemish on it. But its beauty arises from such subtle things as the contrast of the metrical rapidity of “Tănăĭs” and the sluggish progression of its waters, and from the extremely artful disposition and variation of the vowel notes o, a, ee.