the standards of poetry not in the hands of the poet, but in the hands of the grammarians.  It is a Procrustes’ bed which mutilates the poet’s vision.  Luckily, England has always been a rather lawless country, and we find even Pope insisting that “to judge ... of Shakespeare by Aristotle’s rules is like trying a man by the laws of one country who acted under those of another.”  Dennis might cry:  “Poetry is either an art or whimsy and fanaticism....  The great design of the arts is to restore the decays that happened to human nature by the fall, by restoring order.”  But, on the whole, the English poets and critics have realized the truth that it is not an order imposed from without, but an order imposed from within at which the poet must aim.  He aims at bringing order into chaos, but that does not mean that he aims at bringing Aristotle into chaos.  He is, in a sense, “beyond good and evil,” so far as the orthodoxies of form are concerned.  Coleridge put the matter in a nutshell when he remarked that the mistake of the formal critics who condemned Shakespeare as “a sort of African nature, rich in beautiful monsters,” lay “in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic form.”  And he states the whole duty of poets as regards form in another sentence in the same lecture: 

    As it must not, so genius cannot, be lawless; for it is
    even this that constitutes its genius—­the power of acting
    creatively under laws of its own origination.

Mr. Cowl enables us to follow, as in no other book we know, the endless quarrel between romance and the rules, between the spirit and the letter, among the English authorities on poetry.  It is a quarrel which will obviously never be finally settled in any country.  The mechanical theory is a necessary reaction against romance that has decayed into windiness, extravagance, and incoherence.  It brings the poets back to literature again.  The romantic theory, on the other hand, is necessary as a reminder that the poet must offer to the world, not a formula, but a vision.  It brings the poets back to nature again.  No one but a Dennis will hesitate an instant in deciding which of the theories is the more importantly and eternally true one.

XXIII.—­THE CRITIC AS DESTROYER

It has been said often enough that all good criticism is praise.  Pater boldly called one of his volumes of critical essays Appreciations.  There are, of course, not a few brilliant instances of hostility in criticism.  The best-known of these in English is Macaulay’s essay on Robert Montgomery.  In recent years we have witnessed the much more significant assault by Tolstoy upon almost the whole army of the authors of the civilized world from AEschylus down to Mallarme. What is Art? was unquestionably the most remarkable piece of sustained hostile criticism that was ever written.  At the same time, it was less a denunciation of individual authors than an