Page:Books and men.djvu/146

 136 But there is another style of enigma with which critics are wont to harry and perplex us, and one has need of a "complication-proof mind," like Sir George Cornewall Lewis, to see clearly through the tangle. Mr. Churton Collins, in his bitter attack on Mr. Gosse in the Quarterly Review, objected vehemently to ever-varying descriptions of a single theme. He did not think that if Drayton's Barons' Wars be a "serene and lovely poem," it could well have a "passionate music running through it," or possess "irregular force and sudden brilliance of style." Perhaps he was right; but there are few critics who can help us to know and feel a poem like Mr. Gosse, and fewer still who write with such consummate grace and charm. It is only when we pass from one reviewer to another that the shifting lights thrown upon an author dazzle and confuse us. Like the fifty-six different readings of the first line of the Orlando Furioso, there are countless standpoints from which we are invited to inspect each and every subject; and unless we follow the admirable example of Mr. Courthope, who solves a difficulty by gently saying, "The matter is one not for argument,