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fashion, and disposed to give ourselves airs on very small grounds." Stephen's father was even more contemptuous. Writing to John Venn (August 25, 1838), he said: "Reviewing is an employment which I have never held in great esteem. It is generally a selfsufficient, insolent, superficial, and unedifying style of writing, and I fully persuaded myself that I should never be enlisted among the craft." The most scornful opinion is that of one of the "Rossetti-Swinburne school," William Morris: "To think of a beggar making a living by selling his opinion about other people! And fancy any one paying him for it!"

In short, criticism is one thing to Arnold and quite another thing to Mr. Howells and Morris, and their views are perhaps no more opposite than those of Pater and Mr. Robertson. What to Arnold is noble and elevating, at least ideally, is to Mr. Howells, in practice at least, impotent, and to Morris an affair of commercial convenience. Whereas Pater holds faith in the sensitive individual judgment, Mr. Robertson deems such judgments merely data for further analysis. In the face of so great a divergence of opinion as to the function and the potency of criticism it is well to inquire what such views have in common and how criticism may be defined.

II

The most obvious answer to the foregoing query is that each of these writers is expressing what is for him a reality, or truth, or fact, with regard to the theory of criticism or, in its application, to a particular author or book. Furthermore, for every one of the opinions quoted above there is abundant historical evidence, and it remains true that criticism should be "disinterested," that it should be "in able and honest hands," that it should "endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world," that "the critic should possess . . . a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects," that it should "get behind spontaneous judgment," that it is as a whole impotent in the presence of genius, and that many critics are merely commercial.

All this means that criticism is, in the first instance, merely the

1 Maitland, Life of Leslie Stephen, p. 14.

2 J. W. Mackail, The Life and Letters of William Morris, Vol. I, p. 134.

expression of opinion about authors, books, and theories of art generally. The opinion is usually expressed dogmatically; that is, it is expressed as if it were a fact, a reality. It is a reality in so far as it has existence in the mind of the critic who utters it; it is a fact of what has been happily called the "existential" sort.1 In this sense, any chance saying about an author or a book is criticism: it states a fact, a reality, a truth present in the mind of the speaker. That opinion may be modified by further reading and by the clash of opinion with opinion, but the resulting judgment, if sincerely held, will be true, as an "existential" fact. This primary conception of criticism as an expression of personal opinion is admirably phrased by Professor Saintsbury in his History of Criticism, when, speaking of the object of his work, he says, "In the following pages it is proposed to set forth . . . what Plato, Aristotle, Dionysius, Longinus, what Cicero. and Quinctilian, what Dante and Dryden, what Corneille and Coleridge, with many a lesser man besides, have said about literature." " These words supply a handy definition of literary criticism; it is talk about the things of literature, haply with a view to stating what seems to the critic to be true. This definition is, of course, very vague; it does not distinguish good criticism from bad criticism, except in respect to sincerity. One must, therefore, inquire further into the matter.

Before taking up that task one or two general observations may be made by way of clearing the ground. The most evident cause for the discrepancies noted in the foregoing paragraphs lies in the diversity of the human temperament. No two men will be struck

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by precisely the same thing, by the same body of facts, in precisely the same way. Just as no two critics write about the same set of objects or authors, so no two critics would hold identical views with regard to a book that they happen to be treating in common. principle is a very obvious one, but it is so often lost sight of that it seems necessary to exploit it once more; for people are prone to cling to the word of distinguished critics and catchpenny reviewers as if it contained final, universal, and unexpugnable truth. Such things the opinion of any critic does not and never can contain; indeed the moment a dictum becomes a dogma, the moment an opinion, though uttered with, is found really to contain, finality, it ceases to be interesting; for the history of literary criticism shows

1 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 4.
Vol. I, p. 5.

that method of human expression to have thriven on variousness of belief.

Since, then, no two men's interests or ideas of value are just the same, it is a good practice in studying critics, to see on what ideas they lay stress. It is always the proper method of procedure in observing people to note what things they love, hate, fear, and cherish. It will be seen that the opinions heretofore quoted have body and existence as reality of different sorts: some concern themselves with what is loosely called impression, as with Pater; others, like those of Arnold, relate to moral value and significance; for Mr. Howells good criticism is, by implication, that which lends the helping hand to the next generation of writers; bad, that which is practically impotent.

Another very obvious reason for the discrepancy under discussion lies in the pleasing vagueness of some of the major terms; vagueness is often a source of disagreement as well as of peace. What, for example, are "beautiful objects"? What is "the best that is known and thought in the world"? What, so to speak, are the finger-marks of the "able and honest hand"? What is the "spontaneous judgment" and by what subtle by-path may one "get behind it"? Over such questions much discussion naturally arises. Mr. Chesterton1 would undoubtedly say that they are part and parcel of the common sense, and are therefore understood by everybody, without thinking. They are like our own names, which seem the most familiar and appropriate things in the world—until we begin repeating them and revolving them in our minds, when they lose all semblance of rime and reason. The moment one begins to ponder these terms they become vague. It is the task of each critic to illustrate his conception of these terms by his essays: but the fact remains that no two critics would agree in their illustrations of the general idea or in their special examples of beauty and the best.

For these and other reasons too numerous to mention a deal of disagreement and conflict is the by-product of literary opinion. We are all, let us repeat, literary critics whenever we express an opinion about general or specific literary things. Some of us are ready and proud to abide by our opinion in the face of the whole world, nay, even more, are eager to air our differences; others are keen to cover ourselves with the cloak of authority and to take

1 As in Heretics.

refuge in an ex cathedra personality. A study of the origins of criticism would be very interesting, but this is not the place for so pregnant piece of illustration. Suffice it to say that there has in all probability been in criticism, as in all human affairs, a conflict between liberty and authority.1 The timid must always have sought refuge in the dicta of some more expressive and powerful personality; others, more independent, have been the iconoclasts and heretics of literary opinion, have claimed the right to say plainly what they felt. In the nature of things, a body of opinion about literary matters would arise, this tradition would be perpetuated by men who found in that a profitable way to gain their livelihood or who had real zeal for the cause, and in time the class of professional critic would emerge from chaos - of the tribe held in disesteem by the author of The Earthly Paradise.

Aside from this tradition, best expressed in such a phrase as the history of taste, there have been many attempts, from before the days of Aristotle down, to rationalize the whole matter, to show what laws, what principles, what common human motive, underlie our critical ideas and are the sanction for authority. Not only have rules been given "for not writing and judging ill," but the problem of the fundamental law which shall enable us to know the truth has been, somewhat unsuccessfully, the object of search to many philosophical critics. Abandoning as futile for our present purposes, though interesting, any effort to theorize along that line, let us turn to criticism as a body of specific actual fact, and illustrating the matter by a pretty wide variety of specimens from well-known English criticism of high quality, let us see what, in general, criticism means, what are the sanctions of critical opinion, what objective reality means in criticism, and what are some of the categories actually employed in this pleasing science.

III

Criticism is both a matter of process and a matter of form. As to the first of these, if the foregoing analysis be sound, criticism may be said, broadly, to aim at establishing fact; it is a method of demonstration. Viewed in this light, criticism may be applied

1 For an able statement of the essence and merits of this conflict, see W. P. Trent, The Authority of Criticism.

2 See, for example, C. T. Winchester, Some Principles of Literary Criticism, and W. J. Courthorpe, Life in Poetry, Law in Taste.

to any branch of human thought or activity; any idea or process may be subject to it; one may criticise the latest findings of astronomy or the making of armor-plate and automobiles, may criticise oatmeal as a food or Ossian as an oasis in an alleged age of prose. The object of the process is to approximate some reality underlying these institutions. Truth, that is what criticism is seeking. Criticism, then, like truth, may be classified according to the material with which it deals. Literary criticism is one of these classes; it enjoys the distinction of being at once the most conspicuous entity among the various branches of criticism and the most inaccurate and indefinite in the application of its tests. Literary criticism stumbles at the starting line in its attempt to define literature, and its tests are evidently not so precise as may be applied in a matter of natural or chemical science. For some expounders of literature will have it that the ideas are the main thing, others, that the expression of personality is what counts, still others, that one must seize the "inner" meaning and the spiritual significance. In the main, however, literary criticism, like other forms of criticism, seeks (1) to establish the facts of literature and (2) to pass judgment on the value and significance of those facts. Since passing judgment on the worth or value of a fact or body of facts is really nothing but establishing another fact, though in a different category, the aim of literary criticism may be defined as, broadly, that which we stated at the beginning of this paragraph - the establishing of facts, of whatever sort, so they be facts—that is, truths, realities — about literature. Like any intellectual process, literary criticism may therefore be defined by (1) the material with which it deals and (2) the methods which it used to establish its conclusions, the cogency of which varies greatly with the material.

Under the head of material, a large number of classes may be recognized and commonly are recognized. Textual criticism, for example, aims to establish the correctness of the text of an author; it employs, very usefully, much human energy. Biographical criticism tries to establish the facts of the life of an author and to show how they are related to his writing; Stephen's account of Swift's work in behalf of Ireland in this volume is an illustration of this sort of essay, and it shows the relation of criticism to biography. Akin to this are facts of personality, of temperament and the like. Facts of vogue are a source of material not to be neglected; indeed, these facts, like those of the life of the

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