I

CRITICISM1

THE subject upon which I am about to offer you a few observations is one which I have selected because it has always appeared to me that, if what is called "the higher education" is worthy of the name, it ought to stimulate and guide the power and practice of criticism in its best and largest sense. I cannot profess to treat the matter in the exhaustive and scientific fashion which it deserves. What I have to What I have to say has been hastily put together under the storm and stress of pressing occupations, and if you find, as I fear you will, that it is at the same time desultory and dogmatic, I must ask you to be indulgent to one who has got out of the practice of lecturing.

What do we mean by Criticism? What are its functions and its limits? These are the questions which I propose briefly to discuss. Let us upon the threshold disabuse our minds of one or two misleading and narrowing associations

1 Delivered to the students of the London Society for the Extension of University Teaching, April 23, 1898.

which have gathered round the term Criticism in popular thought and speech. In the eyes of a great number of people a critic is nothing more than a censor, a critical attitude is equivalent to an attitude of disparagement, and criticism is only another name for the science of finding fault. According to the famous gibe of Lord Beaconsfield, himself a great man of letters and a great man of action, who in both characters had had more than his share of ungenerous treatment from the commentators of the day, "the critics are the men who have failed in literature and in art." Whether the phrase is his own, or, as we are told, borrowed from Landor or from Balzac, it expresses a view of the professors of criticism which is neither uncommon nor unnatural in those who are their favourite targets. It is of course true that there have been eminent men in whom their own want of success in the sphere of action or production has at once stimulated and soured the critical faculty. But it is not in this dwarfed and distorted sense that we are using the term to-day. Denigration, whether it springs from baffled rivalry, or from a morose and cynical temper, or from honest shortsightedness, often amuses, is sometimes useful, may now and then-in the hands of a writer like Junius-exhibit some of the highest qualities of literary art; but it is not criticism.

There is another and a more legitimate applica

tion of the word which nevertheless requires to be closely watched. No antithesis is commoner than that between criticism and construction. We say of writers, of literatures, of epochs, that one is constructive and another critical, as though the faculties of creation and judgment could not be brought to their highest perfection in the same mental climate and environment. Such a theory squares very ill both with the psychology of intellectual production, and with the facts recorded in the history of literature and art. It is true that there are unique outbursts of creative genius which baffle the analysis and defy the so-called laws of the philosophical historian. The wind blows where and when it lists, and no formula of heredity or of adaptation will account for the appearance at a particular time and place of a Dante or a Shakespeare. But the most conspicuous eras of intellectual fecundity-the ages of Pericles and Augustus, of Elizabeth and Louis XIV., of the Sturm und Drang, of Scott and Byron-have produced not only great poets and great historians, but great critics also. It is not even true that in the intellectual world itself the division of labour has ever been carried to such a point that one set of men produce works of art, while another set theorise about its principles and formulate its canons. Look at Plato, Bacon, Goethe-to take only names which stand in the front rank-and ask yourselves how much

of their work, if it came to be analysed, would be found to be creative and how much critical. A great artist may be incapable of criticism, and a good critic may be incapable of creation. But neither in the individual nor in the generations of men does the one set of gifts exclude the other. Criticism in the true sense has a positive as well as a negative function. By discriminating between that which is true and that which is false, between good and bad art, between reality and imposture, by dethroning the ephemeral idols of fashion, and recalling the wandering crowd to the worship of beauty and of greatness, criticism plays the part of a vitalising and energising force in social and intellectual progress. It performs the double duty of solvent and stimulant. To take a single example, it was the essentially critical speculations of Hume which, as we know from their own avowal, awoke Kant from his "dogmatic slumber," and first "caused the scales to fall from the eyes " of Bentham, and thereby became, at any rate, the indirect occasion for two rival schemes of constructive philosophy. There is no emptier fallacy than to suppose that criticism is merely a form of intellectual gymnastic-the appropriate pastime of epochs of torpor and stagnation—the business of second-rate minds in the relatively barren intervals which separate the great vintage years in the history of human culture. The business