47. H. W. Garrod, Collins
‘I was chidden for being academic . . . I was speaking to an academy’. The second sentence is Professor Garrod's unanswerable defence, and it is also the key to his whole book, and to his earlier book on Keats. His method is that of the enlightened scholiast: to read his Collins is like reading one's own copy of Collins enriched with marginalia, as though from an etesian borrowing.
Eschewing generalization, he takes the odes to pieces, stanza by stanza, and often line by line, and examines them with the determination (too rare in English criticism) of understanding what every sentence means: and when the result of this process is to reveal incurable confusion in the poet, the scholiast does not spare the moderate and considered rebuke.
The reader will gather that Professor Garrod, as against the romantics, agrees with Dante's stern dictum – it is a disgrace for a poet to hide under ‘figura o colore rettorico’ that which, when stripped of its ornaments, cannot exhibit a clear meaning to the prose consciousness. However we may quarrel with this doctrine in its universal application, it is certainly applicable to a poet like Collins. The result of its application may, for the moment, be chilling to the poet's admirers, but we hardly deny the critic's plea that the good can be adequately praised only by a separation of the less good, and if we are honest with ourselves we shall be constantly made aware, in reading these criticisms, how slovenly and unawakened our own reading of the poets has often been. The book is naturally provocative and controversial.
Everyone will have his own say about some of the professor's suggested emendations, and I, for one, will go to the stake in defence of the passage quoted from W. P. Ker on p. 49. The earlier chapters, which are the most important for the general history of the early romantics, bristle with challenges. Whether Thomas Warton, the elder, was really as poor a poet as Professor Garrod thinks – whether a movement in poetry is necessarily shallow because it is not preluded by ‘the crash of thrones’ – whether Swinburne was really ‘not inferior’ to Tennyson ‘in the music of verse’ – but it is impossible within the limits of a review to attack these questions. That we inevitably raise them is a testimony to the abundant interest of the book, and a proof, if proof were needed, that Professor Garrod's coolness has nothing to do with dullness.