CRITICISM AND THE MAN 93 



about the merits of Browning, Ibsen, Tolstoi. Lan- 

 dor could not tolerate Dante, and even the great 

 Goethe told Eckermann that Dante was one of the 

 authors he was forbidden to read. In Byron's judg- 

 ment, Griffiths and Rogers were greater poets than 

 Wordsworth and Coleridge. The German Professor 

 Grimm sees in Goethe " the greatest poet of all 

 times and all people," which makes Matthew Arnold 

 smile. Chateaubriand considered Racine as much 

 superior to Shakespeare as the Apollo Belvidere is 

 superior to an uncouth Egyptian statue. Every na- 

 tion, says a French critic, has its chords of sensi- 

 bility that are utterly incomprehensible to another. 

 " Many and diverse," says Arnold, " must be the 

 judgments passed upon every great poet, upon every 

 considerable writer." And it seems that the greater 

 the writer or poet, the more diverse and contradic- 

 tory will be the judgments upon him. The small 

 men are easily disposed of, — there is no dispute 

 about them ; but the great ones baffle and try us. 

 It is around their names, as Sainte-Beuve some- 

 where remarks, that there goes on a perpetual critical 

 tournament. 



It would seem that the nearer we are, in point of 

 time, to an event, a man, a book, a work of art, the 

 less likely we are to estimate them rightly, especially 

 if they are out of the usual and involve great ques- 

 tions and points. Such a poet as Dante or Victor 

 Hugo or Whitman, or such a character as Napoleon 

 or Cromwell or John Brown, or such an artist as 

 Angelo or Turner or Millet, will require time to 



