greatness by the largeness of his ‘view of life’?  How wide, one would like to know, was Milton’s ‘view of humanity’?  And, though Wordsworth’s sense of the position of man in the universe was far more profound than Dante’s, who will venture to assert that he was the greater poet?  The truth is that we have struck here upon a principle which lies at the root, not only of Mr. Bailey’s criticism of Racine, but of an entire 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 poetry, our prose, and our whole conception of the art of writing have fallen under the dominion of the emphatic, the extraordinary,