n 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--