generation had arisen, and one of its leaders, with
cruel wit, transferred to the reputation of the author his own most
famous line:--"N'y touchez pas, il est brise."

It is necessary to recollect that we are not dealing with the phenomenon
of the inability of very astute literary people to recognise at once a
startling new sort of beauty. When Robert Browning lent the best poems
of Keats to Mrs. Carlyle, she read them and returned them with the
remark that "almost any young gentleman with a sweet tooth might be
expected to write such things." Mrs. Carlyle was a very clever woman,
but she was not quite "educated up to" Keats. The history of letters is
full of these grotesque limitations of taste, in the presence of great
art which has not yet been "classed." But we are here considering the
much stranger and indeed extremely disconcerting case of a product which
has been accepted, with acclamation, by the judges of one generation,
and is contemptuously hooted out of court by the next. It is not, on
this occasion, Sully-Prudhomme whom we are considering, but his critics.
If Theophile Gautier was right in 1867, Remy de Gourmont must have been
wrong in 1907; yet they both were honourable men in the world of
criticism. Nor is it merely the dictum of a single man, which, however
ingenious, may be paradoxical. It is worse than that; it is the fact
that one whole generation seems to have agreed with Gautier, and that
another whole generation is of the same mind as Remy de Gourmont.

Then it is that Mr. Balfour, like Galuppi with his "cold music," comes
in and tells us that this is precisely what we have to expect. All
beauty consists in the possession of certain relations, which being
withdrawn, beauty disappears from the object that seemed to possess it.
There is no permanent element in poetic excellence. We are not to demand
any settled opinion about poetry. So Mr. Balfour seems to creak it, and
we want the heart to scold. But is it quite so certain that there is no
fixed norm of beauty imaginable? Is it the fact that poetic pleasure
cannot "be supposed to last any longer than the transient reaction
between it" and the temporary prejudice of our senses? If this be true,
then are critics of all men most miserable.

Yet, deeply dejected as it leaves me to know that very clever people
despise the "genteel third-rate mind" of Wordsworth, I am not quite
certain that I yield to Mr. Balfour's brilliant and paralysing logic.
That