bed,' as not only
'dull fools' suppose--beside the great poets who have been his
contemporaries, and to feel no impropriety in the comparison? That was
the question X and I found ourselves discussing, ten minutes later.

"Because," maintained X, "you feel at once that with Meredith you have
hold of a man. You know--as surely, for example, as while you are
listening to Handel--that the stuff is masculine, and great at that."

"That is not all the secret," I maintained, "although it gets near to the
secret. Why is it possible to consider Coleridge alongside of Wordsworth
and Byron, yet feel no impropriety? Coleridge's yield of verse was
ridiculously scanty beside theirs, and a deal more sensuous than
Wordsworth's, at any rate, and yet more manly, in a sense, than Byron's,
which again was thoroughly manly within the range of emotion? Why?
Because Coleridge and Meredith both have a philosophy of life: and he who
has a philosophy of life may write little or much; may on the one hand
write _Christabel_ and leave it unfinished and decline upon opium; or may,
on the other hand, be a Browning or a Meredith, and 'keep up his end' (as
the saying is) nobly to the last, and vex us all the while with his
asperities; and yet in both cases be as certainly a masculine poet.
Poetry (as I have been contending all my life) has one right background
and one only: and that background is philosophy. You say, Coleridge and
Meredith are masculine. I ask, Why are they masculine? The answer is,
They have philosophy."

"You are on the old tack again: the old 'to katholoy'!"

"Yes, and am going to hold upon it until we fetch land, so you may e'en
fill another pipe and play the interlocutor. . . . You remember my once
asking why our Jingo poets write such rotten poetry (for that their stuff
is rotten we agreed). The reason is, they are engaged in mistaking the
part for the whole, and that part a non-essential one; they are setting up
the present potency of Great Britain as a triumphant and insolent
exception to laws which (if we believe in any gods better than anarchy and
chaos) extend at least over all human conduct and may even regulate 'the
most ancient heavens.' You may remember my expressed contempt for a
recent poem which lauded Henry VIII because--"

"'He was lustful, he was vengeful, he was hot and hard and proud;
But he set his England fairly in the sight of all the crowd.'

"--A worse error, to my mind, than Froude's