Mr. Noel also is constantly the victim of his own eloquence.  So facile is his style that it constantly betrays him into crude and extravagant statements.  Rhetoric and over-emphasis are the dangers that Mr. Noel has not always succeeded in avoiding.  It is extravagant, for instance, to say that all great poetry has been ‘pictorial,’ or that Coleridge’s Knight’s Grave is worth many Kubla Khans, or that Byron has ’the splendid imperfection of an AEschylus,’ or that we had lately ’one dramatist living in England, and only one, who could be compared to Hugo, and that was Richard Hengist Horne,’ and that ’to find an English dramatist of the same order before him we must go back to Sheridan if not to Otway.’  Mr. Noel, again, has a curious habit of classing together the most incongruous names and comparing the most incongruous works of art.  What is gained by telling us that ‘Sardanapalus’ is perhaps hardly equal to ‘Sheridan,’ that Lord Tennyson’s ballad of The Revenge and his Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington are worthy of a place beside Thomson’s Rule Britannia, that Edgar Allan Poe, Disraeli and Mr. Alfred Austin are artists of note whom we may affiliate on Byron, and that if Sappho and Milton ’had not high genius, they would be justly reproached as sensational’?  And surely it is a crude judgment that classes Baudelaire, of all poets, with Marini and mediaeval troubadours, and a crude style that writes of ‘Goethe, Shelley, Scott, and Wilson,’ for a mortal should not thus intrude upon the immortals, even though he be guilty of holding with them that Cain is ‘one of the finest poems in the English language.’  It is only fair, however, to add that Mr. Noel subsequently makes more than ample amends for having opened Parnassus to the public in this reckless manner, by calling Wilson an ‘offal-feeder,’ on the ground that he once wrote a severe criticism of some of Lord Tennyson’s early poems.  For Mr. Noel does not mince his words.  On the contrary, he speaks with much scorn of all euphuism and delicacy of expression and, preferring the affectation of nature to the affectation of art, he thinks nothing of calling other people ‘Laura Bridgmans,’ ‘Jackasses’ and the like.  This, we think, is to be regretted, especially in a writer so cultured as Mr. Noel.  For, though indignation may make a great poet, bad temper always makes a poor critic.

On the whole, Mr. Noel’s book has an emotional rather than an intellectual interest.  It is simply a record of the moods of a man of letters, and its criticisms merely reveal the critic without illuminating what he would criticise for us.  The best that we can say of it is that it is a Sentimental Journey through Literature, the worst that any one could say of it is that it has all the merits of such an expedition.

Essays on Poetry and Poets.  By the Hon. Roden Noel. (Kegan Paul.)

COMMON-SENSE IN ART

(Pall Mall Gazette, January 8, 1887.)