But though it is not original, it is very far from superfluous to point out that these poor old unjust judges, these Doubters and Bloodmen of the poetic Mansoul at this crisis of its history, were by no means without their excuses. The original form of The Ancient Mariner is only less inferior to the later form which most people know now than Tennyson’s Poems[[826]] as they appear in the editions since 1842 are superior to themselves as they appeared to risk the knout of Wilson and the thumbikins of Lockhart. Southey’s unrhymed vers libres in Thalaba are, when all is said and done, a mistake: and their arrangement is sometimes as unmusical as the least successful parts of Mr Arnold’s followings of them. Exquisite as are the beauties, intoxicating as is the atmosphere, of Endymion, no one nowadays could pronounce it free from faults of taste of more kinds than one, or deny that as, after all, it holds itself out to be a story, the demand for some sort of intelligible narrative procession is not so irrelevant as when it is put to a lyric, in even the widest sense of that word. And the critics were, in every one of these cases, justified of their victims. Coleridge and Tennyson altered into perfection the poems which had been so imperfect. Southey added rhyme and better rhythm in Kehama; Keats grew from the incoherence of Endymion, and its uncertain taste, to the perfection of Lamia and the great Odes and the Eves of St Agnes and St Mark. “They also serve, who only stand and—whip.” But it is better to have a soul above mere whipping.
[806]. II. 216.
[808]. See the Addenda-Corrigenda in this vol. for Dennis’s counter-assertion.
[809]. Certain persons would, of course, omit even the provisos here: but of them I take no keep.
[810]. The Germans did it rather earlier but not so well: the French almost if not quite as well and more voluminously, but later.
[811]. The second Essay of the Miscellanies, vol. i.
[812]. A hit, of course, at Coleridge, as, I suppose, is that above about “the nature of the poet.”
[813]. This celebrated tractate, which cannot be too much honoured as a Counsel of Perfection, may be said to have started the belief, comfortable for those who entertain it, that all who follow not their notion of “Philosophy” and “the Idea” are “Completed Bunglers.” “Perhaps so, my dear! perhaps so,” as an excellent Bishop of the Roman branch of the Catholic Church is said to have once remarked to a little vulgar boy who told him he was “no gentleman.”