That is the essential distinction between the school of Johnson and the school of Sainte-Beuve.  No one can doubt the greater width and profundity of the modern method; but it is not without its drawbacks.  An excessive sympathy with one’s author brings its own set of errors:  the critic is so happy to explain everything, to show how this was the product of the age, how that was the product of environment, and how the other was the inevitable result of inborn qualities and tastes—­that he sometimes forgets to mention whether the work in question has any value.  It is then that one cannot help regretting the Johnsonian black cap.

But other defects, besides lack of sympathy, mar the Lives of the Poets.  One cannot help feeling that no matter how anxious Johnson might have been to enter into the spirit of some of the greatest of the masters with whom he was concerned, he never could have succeeded.  Whatever critical method he might have adopted, he still would have been unable to appreciate certain literary qualities, which, to our minds at any rate, appear to be the most important of all.  His opinion of Lycidas is well known:  he found that poem ’easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting.’  Of the songs in Comus he remarks:  ’they are harsh in their diction, and not very musical in their numbers.’  He could see nothing in the splendour and elevation of Gray, but ’glittering accumulations of ungraceful ornaments.’  The passionate intensity of Donne escaped him altogether; he could only wonder how so ingenious a writer could be so absurd.  Such preposterous judgments can only be accounted for by inherent deficiencies of taste; Johnson had no ear, and he had no imagination.  These are, indeed, grievous disabilities in a critic.  What could have induced such a man, the impatient reader is sometimes tempted to ask, to set himself up as a judge of poetry?

The answer to the question is to be found in the remarkable change which has come over our entire conception of poetry, since the time when Johnson wrote.  It has often been stated that the essential characteristic of that great Romantic Movement which began at the end of the eighteenth century, was the re-introduction of Nature into the domain of poetry.  Incidentally, it is curious to observe that nearly every literary revolution has been hailed by its supporters as a return to Nature.  No less than the school of Coleridge and Wordsworth, the school of Denham, of Dryden, and of Pope, proclaimed itself as the champion of Nature; and there can be little doubt that Donne himself—­the father of all the conceits and elaborations of the seventeenth century—­wrote under the impulse of a Naturalistic reaction against the conventional classicism of the Renaissance.  Precisely the same contradictions took place in France.  Nature was the watchword of Malherbe and of Boileau; and it was equally the watchword of Victor Hugo.  To judge by the successive proclamations of poets,