Noel in
one of his essays speaks with much severity of those who prefer sound to
sense in poetry and, no doubt, this is a very wicked thing to do; but he
himself is guilty of a much graver sin against art when, in his desire to
emphasise the meaning of Chatterton, he destroys Chatterton's music. In
the modernised version he gives of the wonderful Songe to AElla, he mars
by his corrections the poem's metrical beauty, ruins the rhymes and robs
the music of its echo. Nineteenth-century restorations have done quite
enough harm to English architecture without English poetry being treated
in the same manner, and we hope that when Mr. Noel writes again about
Chatterton he will quote from the poet's verse, not from a publisher's
version.

This, however, is not by any means the chief blot on Mr. Noel's book. The
fault of his book is that it tells us far more about his own personal
feelings than it does about the qualities of the various works of art
that are criticised. It is in fact a diary of the emotions suggested by
literature, rather than any real addition to literary criticism, and we
fancy that many of the poets about whom he writes so eloquently would be
not a little surprised at the qualities he finds in their work. Byron,
for instance, who spoke with such contempt of what he called 'twaddling
about trees and babbling o' green fields'; Byron who cried, 'Away with
this cant about nature! A good poet can imbue a pack of cards with more
poetry than inhabits the forests of America,' is claimed by Mr. Noel as a
true nature-worshipper and Pantheist along with Wordsworth and Shelley;
and we wonder what Keats would have thought of a critic who gravely
suggests that Endymion is 'a parable of the development of the individual
soul.' There are two ways of misunderstanding a poem. One is to
misunderstand it and the other to praise it for qualities that it does
not possess. The latter is Mr. Noel's method, and in his anxiety to
glorify the artist he often does so at the expense of the work of art.

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.