into its flamboyant luxuriance; how it was carried successively into the various other countries of Europe, and sowed the seed for all modern literature: the rich harvest from this one field has proved the value of comparative criticism. Another achievement of historical criticism is the comparative accuracy with which we can now define the phases of action and reaction in literature or the other arts, between classicism and romanticism, realism and idealism, individualism and collectivism, the dominance of reason or feeling, as different men define the same phenomena. Professor Gates illustrates this study of successive schools at the end of his study of Newman;1 he shows "Newman's kinship with the Romanticists," and that his temperament and work are "expressions of tendencies widely operative throughout English life and literature." For such studies as these you must have ripe stores of knowledge, gained by concentrated and patient study; you must know not only the works of the larger men but also of the little men who surrounded them and made their background, whom they taught and from whom they had their own training. The explanatory criticism which defines and sharpens our knowledge of Shakspere, for example, showing, as Mr. Sidney Lee has shown, that the sonnets are merely the highest achievement in a wide-spread fashion of the day; giving us all the facts which can now be learned about his life, about the books he might have read, and what scholarship he had; all these little facts make us read the

1 "Three Studies in Literature," New York, 1898, p. 122.

plays with a finer and more thorough appreciation of all the allusions and suggestions of the words. This kind of explanatory criticism, then, is capable of the most substantial results.

Of the other kind of objective criticism the judicial criticism, which is more commonly known as dogmatic, there has been far more in the history of literature; indeed it is only within a few years that it has been supposed possible to deal with a book or a picture or a statue except by passing judgment on it in some way or other. In the days of old when there were still kings in literature like Ben Jonson or Dryden or Dr. Johnson who laid down the law for what the multitude should or should not like, criticism consisted in declaring that one thing was better than another that rhymed tragedies, for example, were nobler than blank verse, or that the heroic couplet was the only perfect form of verse. And this style of criticism, in all its fine self-sufficiency, persisted down through the Edinburgh reviewers, with their uncompromising judgments on the poetry and prose of their contemporaries; nor has it entirely disappeared in the present day of enlightenment and toleration. In general, however, we are more content to put up with our neighbors' opinions and tastes in such matters, even though they do not share our taste for Wordsworth or Thackeray or Dickens. Nevertheless, most of the reviewing, which includes most of the criticising, in bulk at any rate, is still a mild form of the old school: it aims to make clear, with more or less elaborate justifica

tion of the judgment, that a book is or is not what in moments of happy vagueness we call good. And this kind of judgment is often as serviceable a kind of writing about books as there is; for in the process of the judgment and of its justification, the critic must so explain and establish his standards that he throws much light on what literature and art are. It is this kind of objective criticism which, with the evolutionary criticism, seems likely to accomplish the most for literature. After all it is of little more importance to other people whether you like Dickens or whether you find Thackeray a snob than whether you like your coffee with or without sugar. If, on the other hand, you can point out in Dickens what you find admirable, and do it in an interesting way, you may not only find readers, but you may also make some one else's reading more profitable to him. In this judicial criticism, then, reduce the element of your personal taste to its least possible prominence; and make it give way to larger considerations that will fit it to the judgment of the greatest possible number of readers.

1

Objective criticism, when it aims at anything like completeness, stands in a peculiar way at the centre of the whole art of criticism. On the one side it satisfies the desires of some men to have their whole world rationalized, to have niches and categories for all the experience that comes to them; and on the other side it satisfies those who having certain impressions and inarticulate judgments about a book or a picture, lack the means to express what they feel and

think. Beyond these, on the one side, are the readers who are so taken up with the rationalizing and systematizing of things that they care little for analysis and interpretation; and on the other, those who are so full of the great beauty and significance of the work of art before them that they wish only for the reflection and interpretation of those feelings by a soul as sensitive as their own.

26. As we pass on to this interpretative or subjective criticism, the scientific mood disappears; for though in this kind of criticism as in the others you are trying to explain what you feel about the work of art before you, yet you are not trying to put this impression into the rational order of the universe. You are merely trying to get on paper a record of your emotions, without reference to their bearing on anything else. Accordingly, we are here more than half way over the border into the land of the feelings.

How dominantly personal, how deliberately careless of the objective attitude towards its work of art this kind of criticism may be, appears in the little essay on "Criticism" in Mr. Henry James's "Essays in London and Elsewhere."

"To lend himself," he writes, "to project himself and steep himself, to feel and feel till he understands, and to understand so well that he can say, to have perception at the pitch of passion and expression as embracing as the air, to be infinitely curious and incorrigibly patient, and yet plastic and inflammable and determinable, stooping to conquer and serving to direct - these are fine chances for

an active mind, chances to add the idea of independent beauty to the conception of success. Just in proportion as he is sentient and restless, just in proportion as he reacts and reciprocates and penetrates, is the critic a valuable instrument; for in literature assuredly criticism is the critic, just as art is the artist; it being assuredly the artist who invented art and the critic who invented criticism, and not the other way round."

Here is obviously little room for the spirit which looks on books and pictures and music as things which must be sorted out and explored until there is left no residuum of the inexplicable, and whose clear light is to shine on a world of art in which everything is brought under the yoke of the law of causation : on the contrary, it exalts and magnifies the bottomless mysteries of the feelings, and their recalcitrance to classification and generalization. It would be easy to burlesque such a passage as this, and one is tempted to use the epithet feminine to characterize it, in the sense that it is passive and dependent on sympathy, and for its "stooping to conquer and serving to direct." It is a mode of literature that is singularly characteristic of this end of the century with all its tense and carefully nursed self-consciousness and its curious and tender study of the inner life. Walter Pater has been its chief high-priest; and its tendencies are to morbidIn this kind of criticism, however, success is not to be attained by the cursory or the otiose study of him who reads as he runs; you must be content to give patient hours of study to your subject, and even more patiently to repress the itching of your fingers

ness.