poets, he asserts, have 'a wide view of humanity,' 'a large view of
life'--a profound sense, in short, of the relations between man and the
universe; and, since Racine is without this quality, his claim to true
poetic greatness must be denied. But, even upon the supposition that
this view of Racine's philosophical outlook is the true one--and, in its
most important sense, I believe that it is not--does Mr. Bailey's
conclusion really follow? Is it possible to test a poet's greatness by
the largeness of his 'view of life'? How wide, one would like to know,
was Milton's 'view of humanity'? And, though Wordsworth's sense of the
position of man in the universe was far more profound than Dante's, who
will venture to assert that he was the greater poet? The truth is that
we have struck here upon a principle which lies at the root, not only of
Mr. Bailey's criticism of Racine, but of an entire critical method--the
method which attempts to define the essential elements of poetry in
general, and then proceeds to ask of any particular poem whether it
possesses these elements, and to judge it accordingly. How often this
method has been employed, and how often it has proved disastrously
fallacious! For, after all, art is not a superior kind of chemistry,
amenable to the rules of scientific induction. Its component parts
cannot be classified and tested, and there is a spark within it which
defies foreknowledge. When Matthew Arnold declared that the value of a
new poem might be gauged by comparing it with the greatest passages in
the acknowledged masterpieces of literature, he was falling into this
very error; for who could tell that the poem in question was not itself
a masterpiece, living by the light of an unknown beauty, and a law unto
itself? It is the business of the poet to break rules and to baffle
expectation; and all the masterpieces in the world cannot make a
precedent. Thus Mr. Bailey's attempts to discover, by quotations from
Shakespeare, Sophocles, and Goethe, the qualities without which no poet
can be great, and his condemnation of Racine because he is without them,