re critical method--the
method which attempts to define the essential elements of poetry in
general, and then proceeds to ask of any particular poem whether it
possesses these elements, and to judge it accordingly. How often this
method has been employed, and how often it has proved disastrously
fallacious! For, after all, art is not a superior kind of chemistry,
amenable to the rules of scientific induction. Its component parts
cannot be classified and tested, and there is a spark within it which
defies foreknowledge. When Matthew Arnold declared that the value of a
new poem might be gauged by comparing it with the greatest passages in
the acknowledged masterpieces of literature, he was falling into this
very error; for who could tell that the poem in question was not itself
a masterpiece, living by the light of an unknown beauty, and a law unto
itself? It is the business of the poet to break rules and to baffle
expectation; and all the masterpieces in the world cannot make a
precedent. Thus Mr. Bailey's attempts to discover, by quotations from
Shakespeare, Sophocles, and Goethe, the qualities without which no poet
can be great, and his condemnation of Racine because he is without them,
is a fallacy in criticism. There is only one way to judge a poet, as
Wordsworth, with that paradoxical sobriety so characteristic of him, has
pointed out--and that is, by loving him. But Mr. Bailey, with regard to
Racine at any rate, has not followed the advice of Wordsworth. Let us
look a little more closely into the nature of his attack.

'L'epithete rare,' said the De Goncourts,'voila la marque de
l'ecrivain.' Mr. Bailey quotes the sentence with approval, observing
that if, with Sainte-Beuve, we extend the phrase to 'le mot rare,' we
have at once one of those invaluable touch-stones with which we may test
the merit of poetry. And doubtless most English readers would be
inclined to agree with Mr. Bailey, for it so happens that our own
literature is one in which rarity of style, pushed often to the verge of
extravagance, reigns supreme. Owing mainly, no doubt, to the double
origin of our language, with its strange and violent contrasts between
the highly-coloured crudity of the Saxon words and the ambiguous
splendour of the Latin vocabulary; owing partly, perhaps, to a national
taste for the intensely imaginative, and partly, too, to the vast and
penetrating influence of those grand masters of bizarrerie--the Hebrew
Prophets--our poetr