much less than the omniscient
observer of universal life: and indeed, if we may judge by what he says
in the preface to the Dictionary, hardly thought of him as a master of
poetic language at all. He had evidently no appreciation of the Greek
dramatists. The thing that moves him in poetry is eloquence of
expression and energy of thought: both good things but things that can
exist outside poetry. The arguments {205} in which he states his
objections to devotional poetry in the life of Waller show that he
regarded poetry as an artful intellectual embroidery, not as the only
fit utterance of an exalted mood.

To such a conception we can never return after all that has been done
for us by Wordsworth and Coleridge and Matthew Arnold, to say nothing
of some living critics like Mr. Yeats. No one who cares at all for
poetry now could think of regretting an unwritten epic in the language
Johnson uses about Dryden's: "it would doubtless have improved our
numbers and enlarged our language; and might perhaps have contributed
by pleasing instruction to rectify our opinions and purify our
manners." It is not that such criticism is false but that it is beside
the mark. An epic poem may do all these things, as a statesman may
play golf or act as churchwarden: but when he dies it is not his golf
or his churchwardenship that we feel the loss of. Put this remark of
Johnson's by the side of such sayings as have now become the
commonplaces of criticism. We need not go out to look for them. They
are everywhere, in the mouths of all who speak of poetry. One opens
Keats' letters at random and finds him saying, "Poetry should be great
and unobtrusive, a thing that enters {206} into one's soul." One takes
up the work of a living critic, Mr. Eccles, and one finds him saying,
in his book on French poetry, that when we go to the very root of
poetry one of the things we discern is the "mystical collaboration of a
consecrated element of form in the travail of the spirit." Language of
this sort is now almost the ordinary language of criticism. Blake and
Wordsworth did not conquer the kingdom of criticism in a moment or a
year: but when at last they did its whole tone and attitude necessarily
changed. Where Johnson, even while praising Milton's "skill in
harmony" as "not less than his learning," discusses it merely as
"skill," as a sort of artisanship, and misses all its subtler and rarer
mysteries, we see in it an inspiration as much an