During the closing years of the last century certain critics contracted a rather depressing habit of numbering men of letters, especially poets, as though they were overcoats in a cloak-room, or boys competing in an examination set by themselves.  ‘It requires very little discernment,’ wrote the late Churton Collins, A.D. 1891, ’to foresee that among the English poets of the present century the first place will ultimately be assigned to Wordsworth, the second to Byron, and the third to Shelley.’  Matthew Arnold, I fear, was the first to make these unsafe Zadkielian prognostications.  He, if I remember correctly, gave Byron the first place and Wordsworth the second; but Swinburne, with his usual discernment, observed that English taste in that eventuality would be in the same state as it was at the end of the seventeenth century, which firmly believed that Fletcher and Jonson were the best of its poets.

But when is Ultimately?  Obviously not the present moment.  Byron does not hold the rank awarded him by the distinguished critic in 1891.  The cruel test of the auctioneer’s hammer has recently shown that Keats and Shelley are regarded as far more important by those unprejudiced judges, the book-dealers.  Wordsworth, of course, is still one of the poets’ poets, and the Spectator, that Mrs. Micawber of literature, will, of course, never desert him; but I doubt very much whether he has yet reached the harbour of Ultimately.  His repellent personality has blinded a good many of us to his exquisite qualities; on the Greek Kalends of criticism, however, may I be there to see.  I shall certainly vote for him if I am one of the examiners—­or one of the cloak-room attendants.

It was against such kind of criticism that Whistler hurled his impatient epigram about pigeon-holes.  And if it is absurd in regard to painting, how much more absurd is it in regard to the more various and less friable substances of literature.  By the old ten-o’clock rule (I do not refer to Whistler’s lecture), once observed in Board schools, no scripture could be taught after that hour.  Once a teacher asked his class who was the wisest man.  ‘Solomon,’ said a little boy.  ‘Right; go up top,’ said the teacher.  But there was a small pedant who, while never paying much attention to the lessons, and being usually at the bottom of the form in consequence, knew the regulations by heart.  He interrupted with a shrill voice (for the clock had passed the hour), ’No, sir, please, sir; past ten o’clock, sir . . .  Solon.’  Thus it is, I fear, with critics of every generation, though they try very hard to make the time pass as slowly as possible.

But if invidious distinctions between great men are inexact and tiresome, I opine that it is ungenerous and ignoble to declare that when a great man has just died, we really cannot judge of him or his work because we have been his contemporaries.  The caution of obituary notices seems to me cowardly, and the reviews of books are cowardly too.  We have become Laodiceans.  We are even fearful of exposing imposture in current literature lest we get into hot water with a publisher.