Even this is not very complicated: and it occurs with Pope and his clan once in a thousand or ten thousand lines. The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan are simply compact of the colouring symphonies of sound: and the palette becomes always more intricate, the tone-schemes more various and more artful, as you journey from the Eve of St Agnes to the Palace of Art, and from the Dream of Fair Women to Rose Mary. In the Palace especially[[820]] the series of descriptions of the pictures pushes both these applications of the two sister arts towards—almost to—the limits of the possible. Rossetti alone has since surpassed them. Take, for instance, the cunning manipulation of the quatrain stanza[[821]] itself to begin with; the figures and colour of the actual designs; and the sound-accompaniment, to suit these figures and colours, in such a stanza as—

“One seemed all dark and red: a tract of sand,

And some one pacing there alone,

Who paced for ever in a glimmering land,

Lit with a low large moon.”[[822]]

Now the “values” of this are not really difficult to make out: they can be thoroughly mastered for himself, without book or teacher, by an intelligent boy of sixteen or seventeen, who, having a taste for poetry, has read some—and who happens to have been born within the nineteenth century. But they do need intelligent, sympathetic, and to a certain extent submissive, co-operation on the part of the person who is to enjoy them. The adjustment of the stanza, with its successive lines of varying capacity and cadence; the fitness of those lines themselves to receive and express more or less detailed images, and add, as it were, not merely stroke after stroke, but plan after plan, to the picture; the monosyllables; the alliteration of the last line, and the crowning effect whereby the picture is lightened after being displayed in shadow; the trisyllabic foot thrown in by “glimmering,” whether you take it in the last or the last but one of the third verse; the atmosphere-accompaniment,—all these things might well be almost invisible and inaudible to a critic brought up on eighteenth-century principles. And if he saw or heard them at all, they might affect him with that singular impatience and disgust at refinement and exquisiteness in pleasure which was affected by ancient philosophers, and which seems to be really genuine in many excellent Englishmen whom the Gods have not made in the very least philosophical. I have never myself understood why it is godliness to gulp and sin to savour; why, if a pleasure be harmless in itself, it becomes harmful in being whetted, and varied, and enhanced by every possible innocent agency. But there are doubtless some people who think it a “poisoning of the dart too apt before to kill.” And there are, I strongly suspect, a good many more whose senses are too blunt to taste or feel the refinements, and who receive the attentions of the poetic fairies with as little appreciation, though usually with by no means as much good-humour, as Bottom showed to those of Titania and her meyny.

This, however, is undoubtedly something of a digression, perhaps something too much of it. But it illustrates the perils to which the new reviewers were exposed, and at the same time (which is the excuse for the divagation) the constant opportunity of salvation which reviewing provides.

Saws and instances.

Nor need much be said of the general quality of the articles in these famous collections. Persons of enterprise have sometimes gone “exploring,” like Mrs Elton (on or off their donkeys, and with or without their little baskets), in this direction, and have come back saying, more or less wisely, that the land is barren. Some of the more practical of them have brought back specimens of its flora and fauna, its soil and its rocks.[[823]] It is perhaps more profitable to digest some of the general considerations which have already been stated or indicated than to dwell on particulars. Not that these particulars are useless or always uninteresting. It is good to know that The Monthly Review, in an article which could not be called unfriendly, thought The Ancient Mariner “a rhapsody of unintelligible wildness and incoherence” [the whole thing is as clear to us as a proposition in Euclid], with “poetic touches of an exquisite kind.” It is very interesting, and not at all surprising (especially when we remember Voltaire) to find the Edinburgh, the oracle of political Whiggery, enunciating the doctrine of Poetical Divine Right in its article on Thalaba.[[824]] It is interesting, again, and almost more instructive, to find the Quarterly, in the article which did not kill John Keats, finding fault with that poet and his master Leigh Hunt, not (as might have been done plausibly enough) for a flaccid mollities, for the delumbe and the in labris natantia,[[825]] but, of all things, for “ruggedness.” If we have pursued our critical studies aright, we know the symptoms, we know the diseases. They are all varieties of Kainophobia,—the horror and the misunderstanding of the unaccustomed.

Their justification, such as it is.