tation of your words is of higher and more intrinsic importance than the denotation; in these "irresponsible sympathies that seem to rest on divination" the element that can be defined by single words is small and insignificant beside that which lies in the implication of the phrases. Accordingly, for these subtle and elusive feelings about your book or your picture, feelings so subtle and individual that they have never entered even that stage of metaphor which is the beginning of recorded knowledge for these most impalpable impressions your task is to find phrases that can carry fine and exact knowledge. Instead of naming facts you have to suggest shades of feelings: instead of abstracting ruthlessly from the living body of facts mere aspects and qualities you have to set forth the evanescent suggestions of the living reality.

Obviously after all that has been said, the danger in this kind of criticism lies in the excess of self-consciousness. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one's own delight that an interpretative critic must always cultivate modesty and self-effacement. Unless you can make your delight delectable to other people, keep it to yourself. Moreover, a habit of introspection pretty surely leads to a distorted view of the proportions of things. Just as soon as the facts of your own consciousness loom up bigger than the external facts which gave them birth, then distrust your judgments. Too close communion with books or with any other form of art will make your judgments jar with those of mankind in the long

run. And the judgment of mankind in the long run is the sanest and most trustworthy test: it upsets all fashions, it finds the weak places in passing affectations; and on the other hand it brings to light all that is in harmony with the lasting verities of human nature. Of course there will always be esoteric schools who will have their Pater to lead them in the way of all that is precious; but they cannot live in the broad and free air in which the progress of the race is carried on.

27. In all these kinds of criticism, since you are explaining something, you cannot be too careful to make what you write clear to your reader; and you can hardly make it too methodical. Professor Lamont has shown in his "Selections of Exposition how searching an analysis the plan of Arnold's "Essay on Wordsworth" will stand. The very fact that in writing a criticism you are explaining a far more subtle and elusive fact than a machine makes it the more necessary for you to keep your explanation lucid. Accordingly all that you have learned about writing expositions applies to writing criticisms: they must have unity, both in point of view and in substance; they must be logically and clearly arranged ; above all they must be written in the most carefully defined terms, and they must not ramble off into unmeaning abstractness.

When you come to the explanation, estimate, or interpretation of the work before you, your problem is to discriminate and name its qualities. This is

essentially a process of comparison. Compare the opening of Professor Gates's introduction to his "Selections from Newman." 1

"Newman's style unites in an exceptional degree the qualities of an academic style with those of the style of a man of the world. It has the accuracy, the precision of outline, and the fine conscientiousness of the scholar's style, as well as the ease, the affability, and the winning adroitness that come from much human intercourse. In its union of scholarliness and urbanity it is unique. The style of another Oxford man, whose work almost necessarily suggests itself for comparison with that of Newman, attempts very much this same combination of qualities. Matthew Arnold's ideal of good writing involves, like Newman's, a perfect union of strength and grace. But Arnold is never comparable to Newman in strictness and certainty of method; he is always so afraid of pedantry and scholasticism as to assume even greater desultoriness than is natural to him. His urbanity, too, has not quite the genuineness of Newman's; it is a somewhat costly affair. He prides himself on it too palpably. He is too consciously debonair. There is always a suspicion of self-assertion in his work that does more to detract from perfect grace of demeanor than a great deal of severity of method and strenuousness of logic would detract. In Newman's writings, even in his most personal works and in his most intimate moments, there is a curious lack of this self-assertion. Probably no book so uncompromisingly autobiographical as the 'Apologia' seems from first to last so free from egotism and leaves so charming an impression of frankness and simplicity."

1 New York, 1895.

Such minuteness of specification and distinction is the highest achievement of criticism: to say that Cardinal Newman's writing has "scholarliness and urbanity" does not distinguish his writing from that of many other cultivated Englishmen; and to leave the definition there would have been to leave it undone. The comparison brings out the distinctive quality of these characteristics in the work of Cardinal Newman. Many men can discourse at large on the history of literature or of art in general, or can explain the genesis of the drama in a given nation; but the same men when they come to specify the individual virtues and failings of a single play or of a single playwright are at a loss for the shrewd phrase which alone can define the delicate idiosyncrasies of a work of art. Professor Gates had the same problem to solve that Green had in his explanation of Elizabeth's character; and just as Green made his explanation vivid and satisfying by the specific details of Elizabeth's actions, so Professor Gates makes his explanation of the quality of Cardinal Newman's style satisfying by this illuminating comparison with a man grown up in the same environment. In practice, comparison is the most fruitful of all the methods of criticism. Whenever you are at a loss to express your thought or your feeling about a work of art, compare it with some other work which is nearly like it the mere naming of the difference between them gives you the definition you are looking for. In this task of keen and penetrating discrimination the judicial and the generalizing criticism come into

relation with the interpretative criticism, and the lines are rubbed away between them. Indeed the emphasis which I have laid on the different kinds of criticism by treating them separately is misleading. For just as any hard line between exposition and criticism or between exposition and narrative is artificial, so you will find in practice that when you sit down to write your opinion or your impression of a book, you will never think to yourself whether what you write is subjective or objective, judicial or scientific. Just as soon as criticism begins to have theories which it hesitates to override, it becomes pedantic and meaningless.

To all these modes of criticism, therefore, each of which will seem admirable and improving to various men according to their temperaments, there is in common a certain body of necessary rules and precautions. In the first place, it need hardly be said, there is the need of a thorough knowledge of the work which you are going to criticise. In all good writing thoroughness and scrupulousness as to fact are the first commandment. Moreover, from your own point of view the work of criticism will not be worth doing unless by exercise of your mental fibre it results in a clearer, more thorough thought. Your first rule, then, is to master your subject. In the second place, whatever mode of criticism you affect, your view must be wide and impartial. Criticism is at best ephemeral enough; but when it takes the form of special pleading or is ruled by prejudice it cannot pass into oblivion too soon. The