_March 21_.--It is maintained by some that every great poet is a great critic. I fail to see it. For the most part I suspect the poetry of the great critic and the criticism of the great poet. There can be no more instructive series of documents in this matter than the enthusiastic records of admiration which P. H. Bailey collected from the first poets of his time concerning his _Festus_. That work was no doubt a fine achievement; when I was fifteen I read it from end to end with real sympathy, and interest that was at least tepid. But to imagine that it was a great poem, or that there was so much as a single line of great poetry in all the six hundred pages of it! It needed a poet for that.
If we consider poets as critics in the field of art generally, where their aesthetic judgment might be less biassed, they show no better. Think of the lovely little poem in which Tennyson eulogised the incongruous façade of Milan Cathedral. And for any one who with Wordsworth's exquisite sonnet on King's College Chapel in his mind has the misfortune to enter that long tunnel, beplastered with false ornament, the disillusion is unforgettable. Robert Browning presents a highly instructive example of the poet as critic. He was interested in many artists in many fields of art, yet it seems impossible for him to be interested in any who were not second-rate or altogether inferior: Abt Vogler, Galuppi, Guercino, Andréa del Sarto, and the rest. One might hesitate indeed to call Filippo Lippi inferior, but the Evil Genius still stands by, and from Browning's hands Lippi escapes a very poor creature.
Baudelaire stands apart as a great poet who was an equally great critic, as intuitive, as daring, as decisively and immediately right in aesthetic judgment as an artistic creation. And even with Baudelaire as one's guide one sometimes needs to walk by faith. In the baroque church of St. Loup in Namur he admired so greatly--the church wherein he was in the end stricken by paralysis--I have wandered and hesitated a little between the great critic's insight into a strange beauty and the great artist's acceptance of so frigidly artificial a model.
Why indeed should one expect a great poet to be a great critic? The fine critic must be sensitive, but he must also be clear-eyed, calm, judicial. The poet must be swept by emotion, carried out of himself, strung to high tension. How can he be sure to hold the critical balance even? He must indeed be a critic, and an exquisite critic, in the embodiment of his own dream, the technique of his own verse. But do not expect him to be a critic outside his own work. Do not expect to find the bee an authority on ant-hills or the ant a critic of honeycomb.