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.

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.

for the pen. Your impression must be soberly and reverently clarified; and your expression of it laboriously and delicately wrought out: then, if you care for it, you may hope to gain some share of that fineness of appreciation and exquisiteness of expression which are the rewards and the justification of this most painstaking of all the kinds of criticism. Its two prime requisites are sensitiveness to artistic effects, and the command of an exceedingly refined expressiveness of style.

Of these requisites the sensitiveness, which is largely a gift from above, must be sedulously cultivated. If a picture or a poem or a symphony set you vibrating with pleasure and emotion, you must let your impression crystallize by patient study. Mr. James says of Flaubert, "To no one at any rate need it be denied to say that the best way to appreciate him is, abstaining from the clumsy process of an appeal and the vulgar process of an advertisement, exclusively to use him, to feel him, to be privately glad of his message." And again a few lines further on, "The sweetest things in the world of art or the life of letters are the irresponsible sympathies which seem to rest on divination." It is these "irresponsible sympathies" which you are trying to grasp and make palpable; and the only way to do it is to keep them in your mind until at last they clarify themselves.

Then with your impression duly and delicately crystallized in your own mind, you have the further laborious task of expression. Here the problem is so intimately concerned with the feelings that the conno