Page:Studies of a Biographer 2.djvu/93

 residuum of sophistical paradox. In the long-run, the prosaic weigher and measurer has one advantage: he is generally in the right as far as he goes. His tests may be coarser, but they are more decisive and less dependent upon his own fancies; but, when he tries to understand his rival, to explain how at a bound the intuitive perception has reached conclusions after which he can only hobble on limping feet, he is apt to make a bungle of it: to despise the power in which he is so deficient: and probably to suggest unreasonable doubts as to its reality and value.

Here is, I feel, my real weakness in speaking of Arnold; for I may certainly say at once that Arnold, whatever else he was, was a genuine poet. I do not dispute the general opinion of the day that there were only two poets of the first rank in his generation. Arnold must, on the whole, take a lower place than Tennyson and Browning. But, though I cannot avoid falling into the method of comparison, I do not accept with satisfaction the apparently implied doctrine that poets can be satisfactorily arranged in order of merit. We cannot give so many marks for style and so many for pathos or descriptive power. It is best to look at each poet by himself. We