I.

INTRODUCTORY.

EVERYONE who shares the instincts of humanity looks with interest on a quarrel between authors. It arouses excitement of the same kind as that which in old days-for I believe I am speaking of the manners of the past-used to be felt when a whisper ran through the form that there was to be a fight after school was over, or as that which still rises when every corner of the House of Commons fills in anticipation of 'a scene.' We know that there will be an exhibition of human nature as it really is, not merely as it strives to appear. The record of such combats proved a fruitful topic to the industry of Disraeli the elder. But a portion of the subject is still unexhausted, and a chapter of literary history almost equally entertaining might

be written respecting quarrels about authors. If a dispute between authors has all the interest of a duel, the other attains the magnitude of a battle. As one thinks of the desperate encounters in foot-notes between rival editors of the classics, or of all the arguments discharged by the Academies that fought over the merits of Tasso and Ariosto, vast materials of literary history at once present themselves. And all for the sake of some favourite poet or novelist who may have been dead and buried a hundred years ! The matter-of-fact spectator of wars of this kind is apt to lift up his hands in amazement at the passions which are excited, and to wonder whether they might not be composed by some intervention like that which Virgil recommends for the pacification of belligerent bees.

So, doubtless, wondered many a sober reader while considering the astounding invectives with which Mr. Swinburne has lately been endeavouring to befoul Byron's memory. 'Doest thou well to be angry,' he may have been inclined to ask, because Mr. Arnold has preferred Byron to Shelley as a poet?' poet?' The question sounds

reasonable enough, yet it would betray but an imperfect appreciation of the real causes of Mr. Swinburne's violence. The fact is that, under a controversy apparently involving only individual preferences, radical antipathies of taste and feeling are latent which are as old as the history of art, and which have, in the present instance, been brought into collision by the operation of historic causes as closely connected with each other as the Thirty Years' War was with the Reformation. If anyone questions the accuracy of this assertion he has but to refer to the controversy about Pope in 1820, and he will find that the respective positions of the disputants of that period are substantially identical with those now severally occupied by Mr. Arnold and Mr. Swinburne.

It is worth while to recall for a moment the outlines of a dispute which attracted great attention in its day, both from the eminence of the combatants and from the intrinsic interest of the issues that were raised. The occasion of the war was the supposed attempt of Bowles to detract from the poetical reputation of Pope, whose

works he had edited. Bowles's real intention was to prove that Pope was not a poet of the highest order, a proposition which everyone would have accepted without argument, if he had not thought fit to force an open door by laying siege to it with a whole park of artillery. Nothing would satisfy him but to take the position he desired by slow and regular approaches, and he advanced under cover of two prodigious axioms which he loudly proclaimed to be 'invariable principles of poetry. These ran as follows: 'All images drawn from what is beautiful and sublime in the works of Nature are more beautiful and sublime than images drawn from Art, and are therefore more poetical.' And: 'Subject and execution are equally to be considered; the one respecting the poetry, the other the art and talents of the poet.' From these he concludes: With regard to the first, Pope cannot be placed among the highest order of poets; with regard to the second, none was ever his superior.'

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I think it is obvious that if Bowles's antagonists had fixed their attention on the really

weak points in his two positions, he might have suffered instant and disastrous defeat. It is improper to speak of a subject as being intrinsically poetical; it may be sublime per se, but it becomes poetical in consequence of the conception and execution of the poet. There is nothing beautiful or sublime in the subject of the Rape of the Lock,' and yet few would deny that the subject is treated in an exceedingly poetical manner. It is, in fact, merely begging the question to assume that the sole sources of poetry are the beautiful and the sublime.

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Roused, however, to indignation by what they considered an insidious attempt to detract from the reputation of their favourite, Pope's champions either fell upon Bowles at those points where he was really impregnable, or advanced counter-propositions which could not be sustained. Bowles had argued that 'all images drawn from what is beautiful and sublime in Nature are more beautiful and sublime than images drawn from Art.' This is substantially undeniable. Pope, however, drew his images largely from art; therefore Campbell felt it in