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 THE TEMPLE PRIMERS 
 
 ON THE EXERCISE OF 
 JUDGMENT IN LITERATURE 
 
 By 
 W. BASIL W0R5F0LD
 
 L)^n 
 
 Mi^ 
 
 LITERATaRE 
 
 BY-W-BASIL 
 WORSFOLD 
 
 1900at 29 &30BEDFORD-STREET' LONDON
 
 All rights rtitrved
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 Art 
 
 Definition of Criticism and Critic — Principles of Criticism similar page 
 to principles of Morality— The distinction between the Fine Arts and 
 the Mechanical Arts— The Fine Arts classified as (i) Arts of the 
 "eye" and Arts of the "ear," (2) by reference to material basis — 
 Definition of Art — Architecture — Sculpture — Painting — Music — 
 Poetry ......... 1 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 Literature 
 
 The objective and subjective approaches to reality— Literature con- 
 tributes to the subjective outlook upon the world— A painting and 
 description of a battle compared — Nature and subject matter of 
 Literature— How books contribute to the subjective existence of 
 man ..'....... 10 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 The Criticism of the Ancient World 
 
 Two classes of Books, giving respectively the facts of life and 
 "pictures" of life — Non-creative literature employs method of 
 Science, creative literature method of Art— Three elements of ex- 
 cellence in works of literature ; matter, manner, capacity to please — 
 Plato's Criticism — Principle of the inter-dependence of art and 
 morals— His test of " truth" — His failure to distinguish between the 
 truth of logic and truth of art — His consequent condemnation of 
 Greek poetry — Aristotle's treatise " concerning poetry'' — He character- 
 izes all art as a process of imitation — His analysis of the constituent 
 elements of tragedy — He distinguishes the truth of Science from the 
 truth of Art and thus corrects Plato's misconception of the method 
 of creative literature— He justifies the appeal of poetry to the passions 
 (pathos) — Alexandrine and Roman criticism .... 15
 
 CONTENTS 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 Modern Criticism 
 
 The work of Plato and Aristotle — Modern Criticism commences with pacb 
 an application of the formal criticism of Aristotle to XVI and XVII 
 century literature— The French " CUttical" drama— The application 
 of Aristotle's rules often mistaken — Addison applies this formal 
 criticism to the study of " Paradise Lo>t " — Milton's excellences and 
 ilcfects as revealed by thi% criticism — Addison's contribution to th« 
 "-cience of criticism in the " E^say on the Pleasures of the Imagina- 
 tion " — He applies the new psychological knowledge to the study of 
 literature — Decides that the appeal to the Imagination is the 
 characteristic quality of poetry — The " images" reproduced in thought 
 due mainly to the sense of sight — The "primary" and ** secondary" 
 pleasures of the Imagination — The working of the Imagination in the 
 mind of the poet — The nature of the appeal to the imagination of the 
 reader— Its importance ...... 7j 
 
 CHAin'ER V 
 
 How Cre.\tive Litkrature Appeals to the Imagination 
 
 Three tests of merit ; truth, symmetry, and the appeal to the Imagina- 
 tion— Lessing and Cousin— The LaocJon—Tht respective methods 
 of painting and p>oetry contrasted— Poetry, employing articulate 
 sounds in time, imitates actions ; painting, employing form and colotir 
 in space, imitates bodies — How Homer gives a sense of the beauty of 
 Helen— Descriptions as such unsuitable for Poetry — Cousin gives an 
 outline sketch of a complete theory of beauty and art — His exposi- 
 tion of the process of idealization— It works most freely in poetry or 
 creative literature ........ 37 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 Contemporary Criticism 
 
 The blindness of great men in contemplating the work of their con- 
 temporaries — The failure of professional criticism— Characteristics of 
 journalistic criticism— Wordsworth insists upon the futility of judging 
 new works solely by reference to previously existing models — The 
 rules of formal criticism cannot measure the quality of giving pleasure 
 — Matthew Arnold the highest e.xample of contemporary' English 
 criticism — Emphasizes the connection between the author and his 
 age — Calls poetry a "criticism of life'' — Explains how the truth of 
 poetry is higher than the truth of science — Says poetry is essentially 
 moral — Mr Ruskin and William Morris assert the principle of the 
 interdependence of art and morality — The doctrine of art for art's sake
 
 CONTENTS ▼« 
 
 — Mr Swinburne's statement of it— Difficulty of distinguishing between page 
 a divergence from conventional standards and inconsistency with the 
 principles of morality — Charges of obscurity and immorality constantly 
 made against new writers— Value of the docirine as an assertion of 
 the freedom of art— Obedience to the laws of the special art not a 
 sufficient test of merit — A faculty of taste must be recognized — Mr 
 Ruskin's teaching — Neither Ruskin nor Swinburne are quite con- 
 sistent—Both views arc uue in part . • • • 45 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 The ExERCisK ok Judgment in Literature 
 
 The growth of critical ideas— Rules of criticism distinguished from 
 principles — Contemporary critics interpret rather than estimate — 
 Principles of criticism — Truth the final test of merit in literature— 
 But this truth is essential truth, and vaiies in its nature in different 
 forms of literature — Nature of the truth required in creative literature 
 — Examples of this truth i.e. the truth of idea. 'I he principle of 
 symmetry — Requires an appropriate form — And due selection and 
 arrangement of materials— The principle of idealization — Examina- 
 tion of the terms " realism " and " realistic " — Most important applica- 
 tion of principle is doctrine of '' poetic justice " — Bacon's statement 
 of this— Tragedy excepted — Reason for this— Limit to idealization — 
 Idealization must be controlled by the principle of truth — Knowledge 
 of principles not alone sufficient — Method by which these principles 
 are applied is comparison — Addison and Arnold — The study of the 
 masters forms " taste " in literature and art — Examples of comparisons 
 from works of " George Eliot" and Mr Meredith . . .60 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 Forms of Literature — Classical and Romantic Methods — Style 
 
 Poetry or creative literature in metre— Love of rhyme inherent — 
 Epic or narrative poetry — LyTic — Elegiac — Dramatic poetry — The 
 doctrine of Nemesis in Attic tragedy— Motive of tragedy, conflict of 
 man with circumstances— Motive of comedy, irony of circumstances 
 — Decline of literary element in modem drama— Creative literature in 
 prose — Development of novel in nineteenth century— Importance of 
 novel as vehicle of thought — History and biography — The Essay — 
 The classical method— The romantic method — Style . , ,81 
 
 LIST OF AUTHORITIES ..... 93 
 INDEX . 95
 
 LITERARY CRITICISM 
 
 Chapter I 
 
 Art 
 
 In nearly all large towns, and especially in the capital 
 cities of civilized nations, there are collections of statues, 
 pictures, and books. Even in the streets we see the forms 
 of men and women, wrought in marble or cast in bronze, 
 placed high upon pedestals to meet the gaze of every one 
 who may pass by them. In nearly every house there are 
 pictures upon the walls, and vases or other ornaments arranged 
 upon shelves, and books lying on the table ; and in large houses 
 there are whole chambers set apart solely for collections of 
 pictures and statuary, or lined with rows of books. The 
 mere existence of these objects shows us that Art is an 
 element in the life of civilized man, for we should not care 
 to surround ourselves with such things, unless we wished our 
 ninds to be sometimes occupied both with them and with 
 the thoughts which they suggest. 
 
 Criticism is the exercise of judgment in the province of 
 Art and Literature, and the Critic is a person who is possessed 
 jf the knowledge necessary to enable him to pronounce 
 ight judgments upon the merit or worth of such works 
 as come within this province. The term "judgment" — 
 A.piSig — was first used in this special sense by the Alexandrian 
 Scholars (300 B.C.-146 b.c), who approached the study of 
 --^ooks under five heads, the arrangement of the matter 
 idiopdojffig), the fixing of accents [uvuyuMffig), the syntax 
 {Tsx^rj), explanatory comment {sE,ri'yr,ffig), and "judgment" 
 on the merit and authorship of the work in question (xp/V/g). 
 'twas therefore primarily applied to judgment upon books, 
 
 A '
 
 2 ART 
 
 and indeed even now when we speak of " criticism " and 
 "critics," we generally refer to such literary judgment; 
 but when we wish to indicate a judgment on works of art 
 other than books, we place a qualifying word before the term, 
 and speak of Art Criticism, or Dramatic Criticism, as the 
 case may be. Here, too, we shall use the words " Criticism " 
 and *' Critic " chiefly, though not entirely, in this original and 
 specialized sense of " judgment *' and *' judges " of books. 
 
 Just as tiiere are certain principles of morality, recognized, 
 if not universally, at least very generally by all civilized men, 
 by reference to which we govern our conduct, so are there 
 certain principles of Criticism of wide, if not universal, validity, 
 by reference to which we guide our decisions in matters of 
 taste. A knowledge of these principles, by teaching us to 
 think rightly about works of art and literature, enables us to 
 gain the fullest enjoyment both from these works and from 
 the physical existences, or the facts of life, of which they 
 are re[)resentations, in the same way as the principles of 
 morality teach us to control our actions so as to be happy 
 ourselves and contribute to the happiness of our neighbours. 
 But while morality, or the art of right living, covers the 
 whole field of man's existence, criticism is concerned with 
 an element only of that existence ; and the first point which 
 we have to consider is, therefore, the nature and extent of 
 this element — in other words we must form some definite 
 notion of what Art is, and of the part which it plays in the 
 life of man. 
 
 In order to do this we will first recall the several arts 
 and the works which they respectively produce, and then 
 endeavour to collect the facts so recalled in a general idea. 
 
 At the outset we are met by a distinction which separates 
 works of art into two classes — the distinction between the 
 " Fine " Arts and the " Lesser " or " Mechanical '' Arts. 
 The Fine Arts are Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Music, 
 and Poetry.i The Lesser Arts are those of the smith, the 
 
 1 To these we might add the composite art called the Drama, the 
 art of Oratory, and the lost art of Dancing.
 
 ART 3 
 
 carpenter, the cabinet-maker, the mason, the potter, the 
 weaver, the glass-maker, the house painter, and others like 
 them. The distinction which separates these two classes is 
 based upon the fact, that broadly speaking the arts of the 
 first class minister to the enjoyment of man, while those of 
 the latter minister to his needs. They are both alike 
 manifestations of the development of man ; but the Fine 
 Arts are concerned mainly with his moral and intellectual 
 growth, and the Lesser Arts with his physical and material 
 well-being. And between these typical arts of the second 
 class and the Fine Arts, there are others, such as engraving 
 on wood or copper, painting on china or glass, carving in 
 wood, the designing of decorations for walls or patterns for 
 fabrics, which may belong to either class according to the 
 degree of merit displayed by the artist. 
 
 The origin and purpose of the Lesser Arts are simple 
 and easily understood. These arts, arising from man's 
 natural desire to provide himself conveniently with the 
 elementary requirements of food and shelter, clothing and 
 locomotion, grew with the growth of civilization. Their 
 purpose is no less definite ; and the principle which lies 
 at their foundation, and which itself furnishes a test of the 
 merit of the works which they severally produce, is utility. 
 So far-reaching is this principle that they are often (and 
 rightly) called the "useful" arts. The characteristic merit, 
 therefore, of a house, of a chair, or of a vessel in metal or 
 clay, is to fulfil the purpose for which it is intended ; and 
 beauty of form in them is nothing else than the instant 
 revelation of this capacity. It is mainly^ by virtue of this 
 revelation that such objects satisfy the eye and mind ; and 
 all decoration, or decorative effect, which does not contribute 
 to this revelation, being meaningless, lessens instead of increas- 
 ing the beauty of the objects it is intended to adorn. 
 
 We need say little, therefore, about the Lesser Arts : 
 but we must consider the Fine Arts more at length, for the 
 
 1 I say mainly, because colour and the lustre of polished metal, 
 are elements of beauty in themselves.
 
 4 ART 
 
 nature of these latter is more complex, and to this day there 
 is no complete agreement among critical writers concerning 
 either their precise origin, or their exact purpose. We 
 shall have to notice the significance of this disagreement with 
 respect to the art of Poetry, when we come to consider the 
 test of Merit in Literature. Henceforward, therefore, in 
 speaking of "the Arts" and of "Art," I shall refer exclu- 
 sively to the Fine Arts and to Fine Art. 
 
 There are two classifications of the Arts which are helpful. 
 The first divides them into the Arts of the " Eye " and the 
 Arts of the " Ear," according as they respectively use one or 
 other of the senses of sight or hearing as their primary 
 channel of approach to the mind. Thus grouped we get the 
 arts of Architecture, Sculpture and Painting placed in broad 
 contrast to the arts of Music and Poetry. By the second 
 they are arranged with reference to the greater or less degree 
 in which they severally depend upon a material basis for 
 the realization of their respective purposes. On this principle 
 Hegel places Architecture loivest^ and Poetry highest^ in 
 order of dignity. Architecture is placed lowest because in 
 the manifestations of this art, the material basis is most 
 prominent : and, indeed, it is only the purpose expressed in 
 the arrangement of the materials, which raises the masses 
 of stone or brick reared by the architect to the dignity of 
 works of Art. Next to Architecture is Sculpture. Here, 
 too, the basis is wholly material ; but the sculptor gives to the 
 marble or metal, which forms his medium, a significance 
 entirely unlike any which these materials possess in them- 
 selves. For out of the dead block he carves the semblance 
 of a living form. From Sculpture we advance to Painting, 
 where the material basis is reduced by the rejection of the 
 third dimension of space to the plane surface of the canvas — 
 that is, to length and breadth. But upon this surface the 
 Painter produces a semblance of material objects which is 
 possessed alike of substance, form, and colour. Then comes 
 Music, where the sole basis of material reality is the volume 
 of sound, but where the sounds are so arranged by the
 
 ART 5 
 
 Musician that they represent distinct emotions, and even 
 serve to create the actual emotions which they severally 
 represent in the mind of the hearer. Lastly, there is Poetry, 
 which is so far removed from the material, that its very 
 medium (with the exception of the element of metre) 
 consists solely of symbols — of words, or combinations of 
 words, which recall ideas to the mind. 
 
 These two classifications are helpful, as I have said. The 
 facts which they serve to bring into prominence are these. 
 First, the arts require a material basis to work upon, ranging 
 from the stone and brick of Architecture to the word- 
 symbols of Poetry. Second, the main channels by which 
 they approach the mind arc the sense of sight, and (in a much 
 less degree) the sense of hearing. Third, and most im- 
 portant, both this material basis and these two channels, are 
 merely the means by which the mind of the artist com- 
 municates with the mind of the spectator. Works of Art, 
 therefore, from a cathedral to a sonnet, are symbolic ; that is 
 to say they have a quality which is addressed to, and per- 
 ceived by, the mind, over and above the quality, or qualities, 
 which are perceived by the senses. Now, perhaps, having 
 got 80 far as this, we can gather up these facts in a general 
 idea and venture upon a definition of Art. y/r/, then, is the 
 presentation of the real in its mental aspect. 
 
 In order to realize the significance of this definition we 
 will take each of the Arts separately, and consider ( i ) its 
 material basis; (2) the means which it employs to bring this 
 material basis under the cognisance of the senses; and (3) 
 the greater or less prominence which it gives to the mental 
 aspect of the reality which it thus presents to the mind. 
 
 In Architecture the material basis is of the coarsest kind. 
 It consists of the stone, brick, metal and wood, which, with 
 other materials, are used in the erection of buildings. As this 
 medium is wholly material, the eye is affected in precisely the 
 same manner by the works which the architect produces, as 
 it is by any other external object. All the effects of sun- 
 shine, light and shade, colour, atmosphere, site or natural
 
 6 ART 
 
 position and surroundings, are at his disposal, and he does not 
 require any artifice, such as we shall see other artists require, 
 in using the channel of sight to approach the mind.^ And 
 this for two reasons : first, he does not represent life or 
 movement, and, second, his work is possessed of precisely the 
 same attributes of solidity, form, and colour, as any other inani- 
 mate external object. Nevertheless, the external masses which 
 he creates, though they are real, are also realities presented in a 
 mental aspect. In other words, they are expressive of ideas. 
 The Gothic Cathedral — to take the most familiar example — 
 is not merely a place where people worsliip, but it is itself 
 a place of worship — a building so constructed that it ex- 
 presses the aspirations of man for eternal life in its form and 
 features. This is the thought embodied alike in the profusion 
 of pinnacles, in the sky-piercing spires, and in the upward 
 springing shafts which carry its lofty roof. But, although 
 architecture here presents a place of worship in its mental 
 aspect — that is to say, the Cathedral which the architect 
 builds is representative of his idea of a place of Christian 
 worship — yet the material, or sensuous, element is so 
 prominent, that it is possible for the spectator to be im- 
 pressed and even delighted by works of architecture, without 
 having any consciousness of the ideas which the architect 
 intended them to severally represent. 
 
 In the art of Sculpture the material basis is the stone or 
 metal which is chiselled or moulded by various processes 
 into the forms of animate or inanimate objects. The sculptor 
 has all the attributes of reality, except movement, at his dis- 
 posal ; for his work possesses solidity, form, and, if he 
 chooses, colour, just as much as the real persons or objects 
 which he represents. It is only, therefore, when he repre- 
 sents persons in motion that he needs to employ any artifice 
 to beguile the eye of the spectator. But the absence of 
 this attribute of movement forms a natural limit to the field 
 
 1 Unless we make an exception of the "optical corrections" 
 employed by the Greek architects in the construction of certain 
 temples.
 
 ART 7 
 
 of external reality which he is free to represent ; and as a 
 result of this limit, the special and most appropriate subjects 
 of the art of 8cul])ture are separate figures, or separate busts, 
 or small groups of figures, all alike in repose. These figures 
 he represents with as little accessory detail as possible and in 
 the simplest possible manner ; and for this reason — and also 
 because it is difficult to represent drapery in so stubborn a 
 medium as stone or metal — the finest representations of the 
 human figure in sculpture are partially or entirely nude. 
 Nevertheless the mental aspect of the real is far more 
 prominent in the sculptor's work than it is in the architect's ; 
 for the 8Cul})tor endows the stone or metal figures which he 
 creates with the appearance of life, and presents the idea of 
 the highest perfection of the class of being which is in each 
 case represented. Physical beauty in repose is, therefore, the 
 special subject of the art of sculpture. 
 
 In Painting, the material basis is provided by the canvas, 
 board, or other surface, upon which the lines which indicate 
 space, and the artificial colours which represent the natural 
 colours of external objects, are respectively drawn or laid. 
 But in proportion as this basis is less material than that of 
 the sculptor, the painter requires a greater amount of artifice 
 in the means which he employs to bring these lines and 
 colours under the cognisance of the sense of sight : for he 
 has to represent solid objects and real colours by means of 
 lines and colours placed on a flat surface. In order to present 
 solid objects by lines only, he must draw these lines according 
 to rules of perspective — that is, he must draw the several 
 outlines of the external objects which form his picture, in 
 precisely the same positions on his canvas, as they would 
 occupy on the field of vision of a spectator who sees them 
 from a single point of view — and similarly, in order to 
 represent the real colours which external objects of varying 
 distance from the spectator assume, by his artificial colours 
 laid on a uniform surface, he must give the correct values to 
 the colours of each object — that is, he must make these 
 colours more or less bright or strong in proportion as the real
 
 8 ART 
 
 objects, whose colours he thus represents, would be more or 
 less distant from the spectator. In this way, by drawing 
 his lines in perspective and by giving the right value to his 
 colours, he makes the flat surface which he thus covers 
 present to the eye the appearance of a landscape or of an 
 interior. Moreover, in painting, the prominence given to the 
 mental aspect of the reality thus represented is greater than 
 in sculpture — and, of course, far greater than in Architecture 
 — for in all cases, whether a historical event or a landscape 
 be the subject of the picture, it is the painter's idea of the 
 event or of the scene, and not the bare external details of 
 the event — so far as they are known — or the exact appear- 
 ance of nature, that is represented in the picture. In other 
 words the painter idealizes in his representation of the real : 
 he does not merely copy or imitate, but he also interprets 
 and selects. He, like every other artist, presents the real in 
 its mental aspect, and he addresses his work not only to the 
 senses, but also to the mind and understanding of the 
 spectator. 
 
 So far we have been concerned with the " arts of the eye." 
 It remains to consider the " arts of the ear " — Music and 
 Poetry. In both of these the material basis is less prominent, 
 and the mental aspect of the realities represented is conse- 
 quently more significant. ' 
 
 The sole material basis which the musician employs is 
 sound ; that is, the sound produced by the human voice, or 
 by one or other of the musical instruments which have been 
 invented, and perfected, in the course of past ages; and this 
 sound is presented alone or in union with words, and is 
 arranged in notes and separated into intervals in accordance 
 with the rules of harmony and musical composition. But in 
 as much as the musician by employing words calls in to his 
 assistance the sister art of poetry, his most characteristic 
 medium is sound alone — inarticulate sound. The obvious 
 characteristic of this medium, considered as a means for the 
 expression of ideas, is its extreme indefiniteness, its vagueness ; 
 and corresponding to this vagueness is the characteristic valu,e
 
 ART 9 
 
 of music — its power to operate over a wild field of mind, to 
 address itself to the primordial aspects of the universal soul 
 of man. And so the charm of music appeals to the child or 
 the savage, as well as to the learned and highly civilized. 
 Nevertheless, the musician — apart from the rules of musical 
 composition or execution — uses an artifice in approaching the 
 mind through the sense of hearing. He can represent real 
 existences, but only under the conditions of his art. An 
 illustration will serve best to explain how he is limited by 
 these conditions. It is the account which Victor Cousin, the 
 French critic, gives us of the method by which Haydn, while 
 thus recognizing the limits imposed upon him by his art, 
 nevertheless represents a scene so material as the conflict of 
 the elements. 
 
 "Give the wisest symphonist a tempest to render. Nothing 
 is easier than to imitate the whistling of the winds and the 
 noise of the thunder. But by what combination of or-dered 
 sounds could he present to our sight the lightning flashes 
 which suddenly rend the veil of night, and that which is the 
 most terrific aspect of the tempest, the alternate movement 
 of the waves, now rising mountain high, now sinking 
 and seeming to fall headlong into bottomless abysses ? If 
 the hearer has not been told beforehand what the subject is, 
 he will never divine it, and I defy him to distinguish a 
 tempest from a battle. In spite of scientific skill and genius, 
 sounds cannot represent forms. Music, rightly advised, will 
 refuse to enter upon a hopeless contest ; it will not undertake 
 to express the rise and fall of the waves and other like 
 phenomena ; it will do better ; with sounds it will produce 
 in our soul the feelings which successively arise in us during 
 the various scenes of the tempest. It is thus that Haydn 
 will become the rival, even the conqueror of the painter, 
 because it has been given to music to move and sway the soul 
 even more profoundly than painting." ^ 
 
 In respect of Poetry I need say only just so much as is 
 necessary to complete this brief review of the arts ; for we 
 
 1 Du Flat, du Beau, et du B'len ; le(Jon ix. pp. I95-6. (ed. 27th).
 
 lo LITERATURE 
 
 shall have to consider the various aspects of this special art at 
 length in more than one of the succeeding chapters. Poetry, 
 then, of all the arts, has the least material basis. If we 
 except the element of musical sound contained in metre, 
 rhyme, and alliteration, it uses the senses of sight or hearing, 
 as the case may be, merely to convey its word-symbols to the 
 mind. It employs no artifice to bring these symbols to the 
 mind which it addresses; for the words are perceived naturally 
 by the eye or ear. But the mental aspect of the facts of life 
 and the scenes of external nature, which are thus presented 
 by the ideas, or combinations of ideas, of which these words 
 are the symbols, is all important. Poetry speaks directly to 
 the mind : for ideas, or mental pictures, are the rough 
 material of the poet, and no medium is so powerful to affect 
 the imagination as language. In representing reality the poet 
 is absolutely limited by the very conditions of his art to the 
 mental aspect of the external existences which he portrays. 
 
 Chapter II 
 
 Literature 
 
 We approach the world, that is, all reality external to our- 
 selves, from two sides — the objective and the subjective. 
 At every moment of our lives (except, of course, when 
 animation is temporarily suspended in sleep) we are con- 
 scious of the world around us in two separate ways ; for the 
 sum of the sensations which make man a sentient being is 
 derived in part from the presence of material existences, 
 animate or inanimate, — that is, from actual contact with so 
 much of the world as at any given moment impinges upon 
 his senses — and in part, from the mental images ever passing 
 and repassing through his mind, which are sometimes con- 
 nected with these material existences, and sometimes entirely 
 dissociated from them. Thus we have two outlooks upon 
 the world. From both we look out upon realities ; but
 
 LITERATURE n 
 
 while the former shows us these realities in their objective 
 aspect, the latter shows us them in their subjective aspect. 
 
 If we reflect a moment, we must feel that the outlook 
 upon the world which we get through our mind alone, that 
 is, through the images or notions of external existences 
 which we can call up at will by memory and reason, or 
 by both of these acting and reacting upon each other, is by 
 far the wider. As I write, the outlook upon the world 
 which I get through the immediate action of my senses, is 
 confined to the four walls of the room in which I sit, and 
 to such glimpses of buildings, trees, and passers-by, as I 
 chance to see through the open window. But if I turn my 
 mind away from these objects and reflect, my thoughts can 
 range at will over the objects and existences of every country 
 and every age — in fact, over so much of the world as is 
 known to me by my own experience or by that of others. 
 For in this subjective outlook I am no longer confined to 
 my own immediate sensations, but I can draw upon my 
 past sensations, and — what is more important still — upon the 
 sensations of other men — men of every age and every race, 
 whose thoughts and experience have been recorded in build- 
 ings, in works of art, in custom, and especially in the written 
 accounts of their opinions, or of their actions, which have 
 been preserved in books or manuscripts. And of all these 
 secondary sources of sensation, the last, which we can gather 
 up in the term literature, is by far the most effective and far- 
 reaching. All art reproduces external reality in its mental 
 aspect ; but the arts — except poetry, which is the highest 
 form of literature — employ representations of the objective 
 aspects of reality to assist in the presentation of this mental 
 aspect. But literature, with the sole exception (already 
 noted) of the element of musical sound, does not need this 
 assistance; for literature — as literature — is concerned solely 
 with the subjective outlook upon the world. 
 
 In order to make my meaning plain, I will take a simple 
 instance — let us say a battle — and I will try to point out 
 the difference in the manner in which the painter and the
 
 12 LITERATURE 
 
 historian respectively bring such an event before the mind. I 
 have on my wall a picture in which the painter, representing 
 the objective outlook, shows me the field of battle as I should 
 have seen it, if I had been present at a critical moment, and 
 if I had been placed in a convenient position for seeing what 
 was going on. He shows me the solid masses of men, the 
 flash of steel and the dashes of bright colour, the clouds of 
 smoke, the commander and his staff, with other prominent 
 figures or groups of figures, and the" prostrate bodies of the 
 dead and wounded ui)on the ground. If I look carefully at 
 his picture, he will give me some precise details, such as the 
 colour and form of the various uniforms, and the disposition 
 of the respective armies, as seen from this single point of 
 view and at this particular moment ; but all these details are 
 such only as can be perceived by the eye. When I turn 
 away from the picture, I sum up what 1 have learned by 
 saying, " Now, I know what the battle must have been like, 
 if I had been there." Then I turn to my bookshelves and 
 take down a volume of history which contains an account 
 of the same battle. As I read I find that the historian tells 
 me quite a different class of facts. In the first place he is 
 concerned with the subjective aspect of tlie event, and, 
 therefore, his outlook is not confined to a single point of 
 view or to a single moment of time. It covers the whole 
 range of facts which together make up the significance of 
 this battle as an event. He tells me the place where it took 
 place, the number and nationality of the respective com- 
 batants, the results, immediate and remote, of the conflict, 
 the names of the respective generals, their plans, and the 
 skill which they showed in putting these plans into execution 
 — all these and many other details. Moreover, he shows 
 me how this event is connected with other events which 
 preceded or followed it. Nevertheless, although I have 
 been told all these details, and, perhaps, the historian's own 
 opinions on the conduct of the respective armies, I have not 
 received such a vivid impression of the battle as that which 
 the painter gave me. But while this vivid impression lasted
 
 LITERATURE 13 
 
 only so long as I was actually looking at the picture, 
 it is far easier for me to recall the description of the 
 historian ; and the notion of the battle which has been thus 
 created in my mind, although it requires a longer time to 
 acquire, is, when once acquired, far more complete and 
 permanent. For the facts which he has told me, being all 
 such as I can grasp from my subjective outlook upon the 
 world, can be easily stored in the mind and readily called up 
 by memory to unite in forming a mental picture — that is, an 
 " idea," which is independent of the senses. To contrast the 
 results of the two methods in a single sentence; when I turn 
 from the picture I exclaim, *' I have seen the battle " : but 
 when I close the book I say, " I know all about the battle ; 
 for he has told me everything that took place." 
 
 What the writer, therefore, reproduces by his word 
 symbols, is not the external aspect of an event, not the 
 semblance of objects as they are perceived by the senses, but 
 the relationship of man to these events, and the impressions 
 produced upon his mind by these objects. He does not pre- 
 sent the building of the town, or the meeting of the council, 
 or the battle ; the mountain, or the river, or the valley, but 
 the purposes, the words and the thoughts, which such events 
 and scenes produce either in his own mind or in the minds of 
 others. 
 
 Literature, then, in the widest sense, is the record of the 
 impressions made by external realities of every kind upon 
 great men, and of the reflections which these men have made 
 upon them. The subject matter of literature covers the 
 whole range of human life and activity, as well as every 
 known manifestation of physical nature. For not only are 
 actual events and the doings and sayings of actual persons 
 reproduced in it, but the rules deduced from the observation 
 of the conditions of man's life are included in its records. 
 Similarly it presents to us not merely what individual men 
 found to interest them in particular countries in a particular 
 epoch, but also the general laws which have been gradually 
 formulated by long- continued observation of the processes of
 
 14 LITERATURE 
 
 nature. And so literature plays a very important part in the 
 life of man. It is the greatest of the secondary sources of 
 sensation, and it makes an immense contribution to the sum 
 total of facts — the joint result of the experience of the in- 
 dividual and of the race — which gives to each one of us this 
 subjective outlook upon the world at large. 
 
 In order to realize to how large an extent the subjective 
 existence of man is made up of the material of books, we 
 will pause a moment to consider what literature does for us. 
 Through literature we converse with the great dead, with 
 Plato, with Buddha, with Montaigne, with Addison ; we 
 walk the streets of Babylon, of Athens, of Rome, of 
 Alexandria ; we see great monuments, reared ages ago and 
 long since crumbled to the dust ; we recreate the life of distant 
 epochs, and thus by comparison gauge the progress achieved 
 by the men of to-day. Through literature we learn wisdom 
 from Aristotle, geometry from Euclid, law from Justinian, 
 morality from Christ and St Paul. Literature makes the 
 physical features, the inhabitants, the climate, the produce of 
 the antipodes as familiar as those of the neighbouring county. 
 More than this, the masters of creative literature have made 
 regions of their own which they have peopled with the 
 children of their genius. Homer has given us an Aegean of 
 sun-lit islands and purple seas, Dante a dark and mysterious 
 Inferno ; Milton a garden of Eden ; Shakespeare an Eliza- 
 bethan England, with landscapes more brightly hued, and 
 men and women more finely real, than the landscapes or the 
 people of the England of Elizabeth ; Moli^re a France more 
 natural and more vivid than the France of the Grand 
 Monarque. And so it is that Odysseus, Antigone, Beatrice, 
 Hamlet, Tartufe and the rest, these spiritual offspring of 
 great souls, live side by side with Moses, Alexander, Cgesar, 
 Joan of Arc, and Henry VIII. : for literature has made the 
 personalities of each almost as familiar to us as those of our 
 dearest or most intimate friends. 
 
 There is one point which must be noticed, before we 
 leave this consideration of the subjective outlook upon the
 
 LITERATURE 15 
 
 world to which literature contributes so largely. It is this : 
 the subjective outlook reacts upon the objective. The 
 knowledge of the world which we gain through our own 
 previous sensations, and through literature, increases our 
 capacity for understanding the objective world, and heightens 
 and intensifies the pleasure which we derive from the con- 
 templation of works of art or the face of nature. It is only 
 by, and through, the subjective aspect of the world that we 
 can rightly appreciate the objective. And that is why I 
 remarked in the preceding chapter, that one of the objects 
 for which we desire critical insight is that we may be able to 
 appreciate not only works of art, but also the external realities 
 of which these works are representations. It is this principle 
 which underlies the truth which Goethe states, when he says 
 that a traveller does not take anything out of Rome which he 
 has not first brought into it. 
 
 In conclusion, literature is the brain of humanity. Just as 
 in the individual the ^brain preserves a record of his previous 
 sensations, of his experience, and of his acquired knowledge, 
 and it is in the light of this record that he interprets every 
 fresh sensation and experience ; so the race at large has a 
 record of its past in literature, and it is in the light of this 
 record alone that its present conditions and circumstances 
 can be understood. The message of the senses is indistinct 
 and valueless to the individual without the co-operation of 
 the brain ; the life of the race would be degraded to a mere 
 animal existence without the accumulated stores of previous 
 experience which literature places at its disposal. 
 
 Chapter III 
 The Criticism of the Ancient World 
 
 We have seen how greatly it is due to literature that our 
 knowledge of men and things, other than those with which 
 we are brought into contact by the direct action of our
 
 i6 THE CRITICISM OF 
 
 senses, is so extensive. Indeed, so great is the part that 
 books play in our life, or, at least, in the formation of our 
 several personalities, that to master the contents of certain 
 books of admitted excellence has always been considered a 
 chief clement in a liberal education ; that is to say, it is a 
 recognized method of introducing the mind to the world at 
 large. But while all literature thus contributes to our sub- 
 jective outlook upon the world, we can recognize a broad 
 distinction in the manner in which books render us this 
 assistance. In the case of some books the value of the 
 contribution consists mainly, though not exclusively, in the 
 actual facts which they contain ; in the case of others, the 
 actual facts are of secondary importance and their chief 
 value consists in the manner in which these facts are brought 
 before our minds. No hard and fast line can be drawn be- 
 tween the two classes, but the difference may be broadly 
 indicated by saying that while the former gives us the facts 
 of life, the latter gives us " pictures " of life. 
 
 Let me illustrate the distinction by one or two examples. 
 Such works as Locke's " Essay on the Human Understand- 
 ing," and Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," must obviously be 
 placed under the head of books in which the facts are of 
 first importance. Equally, the novels of George Eliot, in 
 which she gives us a full and truthful picture of life in the 
 Midland Counties, must be included among those books 
 where the presentation of the facts is of more importance 
 than the facts themselves. And so, too, in the case of 
 " The Story of an African Farm," where we have a picture 
 of rural life in South Africa, or in " Diana of the Crnss- 
 ways." Only in this latter work the personality of the 
 central character is so commanding, that the book is not so 
 much a picture as a portrait — a portrait of a beautiful and 
 wayward woman who is exposed to temptation by circum- 
 stances and by the very abundance of her own gifts. Here, 
 then, we have two distinct elements, matter and manner ; 
 and it is upon the degree in which these elements are re- 
 spectively present in any given work, that the main division
 
 THE ANCIENT WORLD 17 
 
 of literature — the division which separates works of creative 
 literature from works of literature, simply so-called, is 
 based. 
 
 Now, it will be seen that this distin>ction is one which has 
 a very important bearing upon criticism, which, as I have 
 already said, is the science of forming and expressing correct 
 judgments upon the value and merit of works of literature. 
 And for this reason, that part of literature which is not 
 creative, employs, not entirely but mainly, the method of 
 science ; but creative literature employs — again not entirely 
 but mainly — the method of art. We are confronted, there- 
 fore, at the outset with the fact that there are two separate 
 and distinct values to be looked for in books, each of which 
 must be estimated by a separate and distinct test of merit. 
 In literature where the creative element is very slight, or is 
 altogether absent, and where, therefore, the method is the 
 method of science, the man of science, the philosopher, the 
 man who is master of the special subject treated, is the best 
 qualified critic ; but with creative literature the case is 
 different. Here, where special knowledge is subordinate, 
 where the facts are the broad facts of life known to all of 
 us, where treatment is all-important and the method of pre- 
 sentation is the method of art, the artist is the ideal critic. 
 
 But not only are there these two distinct qualities or 
 values to be found in the works which respectively belong to 
 one or other of these two main divisions of literature, but these 
 two qualities are mingled in varying proportions, and in 
 subtle conjunctions, in the several departments of the works of 
 which both of these main divisions are composed — in Science, 
 Philosophy, History, Biography, the Essay, Prose-Fiction, 
 and Poetry. Moreover, all creative literature, and all 
 literature that is not merely science — that is, all literature 
 in which the writer adds the work of his own mind to the 
 facts which he presents — contains a further quality or value 
 of which I have said nothing at present, but one which is 
 notwithstanding very real and very important. It is the 
 characteristic quality which Poetry shares with its sister
 
 i8 THE CRITICISM OF 
 
 Arts, the quality of giving pleasure — aesthetic pleasure ; 
 that is pleasure which arises neither from a consciousness of 
 right conduct, nor from an expectation of material profit, but 
 which consists in a sense of enjoyment that is purely self- 
 sufficing and disinterested. Here, then, are three distinct 
 and characteristic elements of excellence, the presence of 
 which can be discerned in varying degrees in works of 
 literature — matter, manner, and the capacity to please. And 
 as each and all are present in varying degrees and in different 
 combinations, both in different classes of books as well as 
 in different works of the same class, it is not surprising that 
 great minds should have approached books from different 
 points of view, should have proposed to measure their merit 
 by different tests, or that the verdict of the critics upon any 
 given work of literature should have been often confused 
 and uncertain. 
 
 Nevertheless it is due to these efforts, tentative and incon- 
 clusive though many of them were, that we can to-day 
 discern certain principles, the validity of which is definitely 
 established. Aiid in order to understand these principles 
 it is desirable, almost necessary, to know something of the 
 character of the several enquiries which have afforded the 
 most ample contributions to the evolution of criticism. 
 
 The first great writer who applied himself to the study of 
 literature, as literature, was Plato. As he was first in the 
 field, and as, too, questions of morality possessed a command- 
 ing interest for him, it is not surprising that the first and most 
 obvious quality of literature, namely its matter, should have 
 absorbed his attention, and made him comparatively blind to 
 those other qualities of manner and capacity to please, which 
 we now recognize as bein^ of almost equal importance. 
 Accordingly the sole test by which Plato proposed to 
 estimate the merit of a work of literature, — and indeed that 
 of works of art in general, — was the greater or less degree in 
 which the information which it conveyed corresponded to the 
 external realities of which it treated. Starting with the 
 principle of the interdependence of art and morals, he seems
 
 THE ANCIENT WORLD 19 
 
 to have regarded the works of both literature and the arts 
 merely as vehicles for the conveyance of the truths of 
 morality. This principle is so important in itself, and holds 
 so important a place in Plato's system of philosophy, that I 
 give a statement of it in his own words. IUM"^ 
 
 " Excellence of thought, and of harmony, and of form, andTZf'-i*^ 
 of rhythm, is connected with excellence of character, with "^^ 
 good nature, that is, not in the sense of the colourless charac- 
 ter which we euphemistically term ' good nature,' but in that 
 of the disposition which is really well and nobly equipped 
 from the point of view of character. . . . 
 
 " The qualities which are implied in this excellence of 
 character are conspicuously present in painting and all similiar 
 arts, in weaving and embroidery and architecture, and 
 indeed, in the productions of all the lesser arts, and further 
 in the constitution of bodies and of all organic growths. In 
 all of these, excellence or defectiveness of form can be dis- 
 cerned. And defectiveness of form and rhythm and harmony 
 are associated with deficiencies of thought and of character, 
 while the corresponding artistic excellencies are associated 
 with the corresponding moral excellencies of self-restraint and 
 goodness ; indeed, they are directly expressive of them. . . . 
 
 *' We must look for artists who are able out of the goodness 
 of their own natures to trace the nature of beauty and per- 
 fection, that so our young men, like persons who live in a 
 healthy place, may be perpetually influenced for good. 
 Every impression which they receive through eye or ear 
 will come from embodiments of beauty, and this atmosphere, 
 like the health-giving breeze which flows from bracing 
 regions, will imperceptibly lead them from their earliest 
 childhood into association and harmony with the Spirit of 
 Truth, and into love for that Spirit." ^ 
 
 Regarding literature and art from this point of view, Plato 
 used criticism as a means of ascertaining to what extent a 
 work of literature conveyed truthful and wholesome informa- 
 
 1 Republic ; p. 400-1 (St.): as translated in the author's 
 << Principles of Criticism."
 
 20 THE CRITICISM OF 
 
 tion upon the facts of life. In the application of this test of 
 "truth," he found that the Greek literature current in his 
 day — which included in particular the poetry of Homer and 
 Hesiod, the Lyrics of Pindar, and the masterpieces of the 
 Athenian dramatists — was deficient in morality. " Poets and 
 prose-writers," he says, *' are mistaken in dealing with human 
 life in the most important respects. They give us to under- 
 stand that many evil livers are happy and many righteous men 
 unhappy ; and that wrong-doing, if it be undetected, is profit- 
 able, while honest dealing is beneficial to one's neighbour, but 
 damaging to one's self." ^ In addition to this general charge 
 of immorality based upon the character of the subject matter 
 of Greek creative literature, he finds, by the application of 
 the same test, that its method is also deficient. It is in this 
 latter criticism that the limitations which his age imposed 
 i upon him are most apparent. For Plato, not perceiving that 
 literature is by the nature of things concerned exclusively 
 with the subjective outlook upon the world, counts as a defect 
 what is in fact its crowning virtue — that the poet, or writer 
 of creative literature, reproduces in his representations of the 
 real, not realities, but the mental aspects of these realities. 
 Consequently he is led into the absurdity of placing the writer 
 who describes a real object — that is reproduces the mental image 
 of that object by his word symbols — as lower in the scale of 
 truthful representation, than the artist who copies the object 
 in line and colour, and still lower than the artificer who makes 
 — to use his own example — the bed which is the material 
 reality upon which both the description and the painting are 
 alike based. In other words the distinction between the 
 truth of the senses and the truth of the idea — or the truth of 
 logic and the truth of art — has not yet been discerned even 
 by so acute a thinker as Plato. And so he condemns the 
 mental pictures which he found in creative literature as being 
 unreal, and therefore useless for purposes of instruction. 
 
 To this defect of unreality, due directly to the method 
 of creative literature, Plato adds another defect, also arising, 
 1 Ibid. p. 392
 
 THE ANCIENT WORLD 21 
 
 though less directly, out of its method. For the purpose of 
 making effective pictures of life, the poets — and he is thinking 
 especially of the Attic tragedians — are compelled to select 
 and reproduce bad actions and passionate characters, rather 
 than good actions and normal characters. For " the irascible 
 temperament admits of constant and varied reproduction, 
 while the wise and quiet temperament, which scarcely ever 
 varies, is neither easily reproduced nor, when reproduced, 
 readily comprehended.'* ^ And so an acquaintance with 
 creative literature will tend, he thinks, to foster the emotional 
 element of man's nature to the detriment of the intellectual. 
 " The part of the soul," he writes, " which is forcibly kept 
 down in the case of our own misfortunes, and which craves 
 to weep and bewail itself without stint and take its fill of 
 grief, being so constituted as to find satisfaction in these 
 emotions, is the very part which is filled and pleased by the 
 poets ; while that which is naturally the noblest part of us, 
 because it is not adequately disciplined by reason and habit, 
 releases its guard over this emotional part, representing to 
 itself that the sufferings which it contemplates are not part of 
 itself, and that there is no shame in its praising and pitying 
 the unseasonable grief of another who professes to be a good 
 man. On the contrary, the pleasure which it experiences it 
 considers to be so much gain, and it will not allow its con- 
 tempt for the poem as a whole to rob it of this pleasure. For 
 only a very few can realize that the character of our own 
 emotions must be affected by the manner in which we 
 participate in the emotions of others. Yet it is so, for if we 
 let our own sense of pity grow strong by feeding upon the 
 griefs of others, it is not easy to restrain it in the case of our 
 own sufferings." ^ 
 
 Now, in respect of this criticism of Plato, it may be said 
 at once that it combines a marvellous insight into the essential 
 conditions required for the production of great works of art 
 and literature, with a complete misunderstanding of the 
 nature and effects of artistic representation. Both the central 
 1 Ibid, p. 604. 2 Ibid. p. 606.
 
 12 THE CRITICISM OF 
 
 principle of the interdependence of art and morals, and the 
 proposal to make ** truth '* the central test of the merit of the 
 works of both the artist and the poet, are entirely in harmony 
 with the best modern thought. On the other hand the 
 difference between the method of science and the method of 
 art has become fully known by careful analysis of mental 
 processes, and both the essential truth of the pictures of life 
 presented by poets and novelists, as well as the significance 
 and value of the appeal to the emotions — " pathos " we call it 
 — have alike been recognized. This very criticism of Plato 
 affords a signal example of the importance of the increased 
 psychological knowledge which characterizes the modern 
 era ; since the want of such knowledge blinded him to ex- 
 cellences, made him exaggerate faults, and finally condemn 
 in this wholesale way those very masterpieces of Greek 
 literature which the whole civilized world has now learnt to 
 admire. 
 
 Aristotle, who was the next great thinker to apply himself 
 to the examination of the processes of artistic and literary 
 production, had the advantage of being able to avail himself 
 of the results of Plato's enquiries. Moreover, he was a 
 master of method ; and under the comprehensive scheme 
 which he elaborated for the treatment of all manifestations of 
 human activity and of nature, these artistic processes and the 
 creations which they produced formed a separate and distinct 
 department of enquiry. The work in which he conducted 
 this enquiry is the famous treatise on Fine Art, entitled 
 "concerning Poetry." It is brief, fragmentary, and incom- 
 plete, and the results which it embodied appear to have been 
 only partially understood by the ancient world ; nevertheless 
 it is the foundation upon which all modern criticism has been 
 based. It follows, therefore, that a knowledge of its chief 
 conclusions is a condition precedent to the comprehension of 
 those principles of criticism which, as I have already re- 
 marked, are now definitely accepted, and with which we 
 shall subsequently be concerned. 
 
 Aristotle, then, broadly characterized all art and creative
 
 THE ANCIENT WORLD 23 
 
 literature as processes of imitation or reproduction (^/jb/fxriffig). 
 He traced their origin, as manifestations of human activity, 
 to the same primitive impulse of imitation as that which 
 makes a child *' pick up " the language and the manners of 
 its parents ; and found their end, or purpose, to be that of 
 giving pleasure. Taking the tragedy as the most perfectly 
 developed form of poetry (the term in which he includes all 
 creative literature), he analysed the constituents of its subject 
 matter, and in so doing he distinguished those characteristic 
 elements which are to be found in a greater or less degree in 
 every work of creative literature, and upon the nature of which, 
 — both regarded separately and in their respective relationships 
 to each other and to the whole work of which they form 
 part — he was of opinion that the merit or value of the given 
 work depends. These elements are : Plot, or web of in- 
 cident ; Character, or the distinguishing qualities of the 
 persons introduced ; Diction, or the literary expression of the 
 thoughts or words of these characters ; Sentiment, or the 
 mental basis which governs their actions ; Stage-representa- 
 tion, and Musical Accompaniment. Now, in this analysis 
 two points must be noticed. First, that in approaching the 
 study of literature through an examination of this one form — 
 the tragedy — Aristotle has been led to include two elements 
 (the two last, i.e. Stage-representation and Musical Accom- 
 paniment) which are not properly elements of literary com- 
 position at all. And second, that this method of examining 
 a work of literature through its external aspects, suggests to 
 him the characteristic test by which he proposes to measure 
 the merit of any given work, namely by asking, '* Is this 
 work constructed in the best possible manner, having in view 
 both the form of literature to which it properly belongs, and 
 the general purpose of art, which is to give pleasure ? " 
 Aristotle also, continuing his analysis, discusses certain lesser 
 elements in literary composition, such as the construction of 
 the plot, its "development" and "solution," the arrange- 
 ment of the "episodes," using terms which are still used in 
 the sense in which he used them ; and he distinguishes and
 
 24 THE CRITICISM OF 
 
 contrasts the respective characteristics of tragedy, comedy, 
 and epic, as forms of poetry. 
 
 In this formal criticism Aristotle does little more than to 
 tell us not to write an epic as we should a tragedy, nor a 
 lyric as an epic. The infinitely wider acquaintance with 
 tlie external characteristics of the various forms of literature 
 which has followed the discovery of printing, has made such 
 information, and the rules by which it is conveyed, seem 
 superfluous and unmeaning. Nevertheless, we shall find that 
 a knowledge of these formal characteristics is still useful 
 in enabling us to detect the more essential elements of literary 
 excellence. And, as a matter of fact, modern criticism 
 commenced with an application of these formal rules to 
 contemporary literature, and it was the perception of their 
 inadcquateness, as thus applied by the seventeenth century 
 critics, which led to the great advances subsequently achieved, 
 which we shall have to trace in outline in the succeeding 
 chapter. 
 
 But Aristotle did much more than this. Incidentally he 
 corrected the misconception of the nature of the method 
 of creative literature which led Plato into such astonishing 
 errors. In so doing he has enunciated certain artistic 
 principles which are as permanently valid as Plato's principle 
 of the interdependence of art and morals. To Plato's charge 
 of unreality, he replies that the pictures of life given by 
 creative literature are not unreal in the sense of hneing in- 
 consistent with the facts of life ; but that their truth is of a 
 different order from the truth of science. Plato being 
 absorbed with that first aspect of literature in which it 
 appears as a source of information, made no distinction 
 between works of creative literature and literature in general. 
 Aristotle shows that the reality or truthfulness of these two 
 kinds of literature cannot be measured by the same test. 
 Taking history as typical of those works of literature in which 
 the actual facts are of first importance, and poetry as typical 
 of those works of literature in which the treatment of the facts 
 is more important than the facts themselves, he writes :— •
 
 THE ANCIENT WORLD 25 
 
 *' The business of the poet is to tell, not what has 
 happened, but what could happen, and what is possible, 
 either from its probability, or from its necessary connection 
 with what has gone before. The historian and the poet 
 do not differ in using or not using metre — for the writings 
 of Herodotus could be put into metre without being any 
 the less a history, whether in metre or not — but the difference 
 lies in this fact, that the one tells what has happened and 
 the other what could happen. And therefore poetry has 
 a wider truth and a higher aim than history ; for poetry 
 deals rather with the universal, history with the particular."^ 
 
 In these masterly sentences Aristotle has once for all 
 characterized the method of creative literature, and dis- 
 tinguished such literature from all other branches of letters. 
 
 With equal success he replies to Plato's second charge — 
 the charge that such creative literature, being compelled to 
 be sensational by the conditions of successful production, 
 fostered the emotional part of man's nature to the detriment 
 of the higher and intellectual. Taking the appeal of Tragedy 
 to the typical passions of "fear" and '*pity" as his text, 
 he replies to this objection of Plato by an argument based 
 upon a medical illustration. The appeal of poetry to tiie 
 passions instead of permanently fostering the emotional 
 element, purges man's nature by carrying off any excess of 
 this element. When emotion is artificially excited by 
 witnessing a tragedy performed on the stage, the moral 
 system of the spectator is relieved, just as a man's physical 
 system is relieved by a purging medicine. He writes : — 
 
 " Tragedy ... is an imitation of a serious and complete 
 action which has magnitude. The imitation is effected by 
 embellished language, each kind of embellishment varying 
 in the constituent parts. It is acted, not narrated ; and it 
 uses the agency of pity and fear to effect a purging of these 
 and the like emotions. ^ 
 
 Thus Aristotle justifies and explains the value and meaning 
 1 Poetici : p. 1451^. Translation as before.
 
 26 THE CRITICISM OF 
 
 of pathos. And indeed, if we reilect a moment we shall 
 probably be able to find something in our own every-day ex- 
 perience which is in accordance with the words of the 
 great Greek thinker. If we recall the feelings with which 
 we have left the theatre after witnessing a performance of a 
 tragedy, or even the less definite sensation with which we 
 have closed a powerful and well-written novel, we shall 
 probably remember that there was a distinct sense of relief 
 present in our minds. For a few hours we had forgotten 
 our own difficulties and troubles in the sympathy which was 
 aroused in us for the imagined characters of the dramatist 
 or the novelist. If we had given expression in words to 
 this feeling we should have said to ourselves, " Well, after 
 all, my troubles are not so bad as these." And this feeling 
 — based upon a comparison of the circumstances of our 
 own life with those of others — made us more reconciled to 
 our own lot in life, and perhaps, taught us to understand 
 better the meaning of human life as a whole. 
 
 The opinions of these two great thinkers embody what was 
 truest and most far reaching in the thought of the ancient world 
 on the subject of literature. There were subsequent writers, 
 both Greek and Roman, who dealt with the same subject ; 
 but their work has added nothing to the broad principles thus 
 laid down by Plato and Aristotle. Criticism in the restricted 
 sense of the study of the external characteristics of great 
 authors — such as style of composition, the use of simple or 
 florid language, dialect, and so on, with the authorship and 
 integrity of the actual texts of the several works respectively 
 attributed to them — was practised especially by the Greek 
 scholars of the great literary centre of Alexandria. And as 
 we have already noticed,^ literary criticism in this restricted 
 sense — in fact the only sense in which it was understood 
 by the ancient world — found its origin in the work done by 
 these scholars between the years 300 and 1 50 B.C. But even 
 the author of the famou;? treatise on " the Sublime " — 
 generally said to be Longinus, who lived in the third century 
 1 Ch. I. p. I.
 
 THE ANCIENT WORLD 27 
 
 A.D. — although he enlarges upon many of the lesser aspects 
 of successful literary composition, never gives us any ground 
 to believe that he had understood the deep significance of 
 those broad and far-reaching princi])les which constitute the 
 real merit of this criticism of Plato and Aristotle, and make it, 
 as I have said, embody and express all that is best in the critical 
 thought of the ancient world. The statement of these prin- 
 ciples is necessarily incomplete and indistinct; nevertheless it is 
 just here that the thought of the best era of the ancient world 
 unites with modern thought ; and it was by taking these in- 
 complete and indistinct exj^ressions as a basis that criticism 
 was able to advance again after so many centuries. 
 
 Among the authors who themselves contributed to form the 
 great literature of ancient Rome, there were, of course, some 
 who turned their thoughts to an examination of the forms and 
 methods of literature. But Cicero and Quintilian — to mention 
 the most important — do not advance beyond a re-statement of 
 the comments of Plato and Aristotle upon the more obvious 
 aspects of literary and artistic representation ; while the criti- 
 cism of Horace's ''Art of Poetry'' consists either of direct 
 transcripts from Aristotle, or of sensible common-places. 
 These latter are expressed with the neatness and facility which 
 we should naturally expect from so great a master of composi- 
 tion in verse ; but they neither possess — nor pretend to possess 
 — any value as original contributions to the subject of which 
 they treat. 
 
 Chapter IV 
 
 Modern Criticism 
 
 Before we begin to examine the advances respectively made 
 by certain modern critics, it will be useful to sum up the 
 results which the researches of Plato and Aristotle have so 
 far revealed. 
 
 From Plato we have got the principle of the inter-
 
 28 MODERN CRITICISM 
 
 dependence of art and morality. Not only must the great 
 artist or poet be a good man, but good art and bad art tend 
 respectively to make society moral or immoral. Also, the 
 equally important principle that "truth," in the sense of the 
 essential correspondence of the representation with the reality 
 on which it is based, is the highest merit of a work of art or 
 of a work of creative literature. 
 
 Our debt to Aristotle is still greater. To him we owe : — 
 
 The identification of poetry, or creative literature, with 
 Fine Art, and the tracing of the characteristic process of both 
 alike to the primitive instinct of imitation. 
 
 The detection of the essential characteristic of creative 
 literature, and the definition of it as the presentation of 
 universal, or typical, instead of particular or actual facts — 
 the same truth as that which wc now express subjectively, 
 when we say that idealization is the characteristic process of 
 the artist mind. 
 
 The distinction between creative literature and literature in 
 general, and the consequent necessity for measuring the 
 truth of the former by reference to the method of art, and 
 the truth of the latter by reference to the method of 
 science. 
 
 The justification of the use of pathos, or the exhibition of 
 imagined suffering ; and the explanation of its special purpose 
 and method. 
 
 In addition to this we have got an analysis of the con- 
 stituent elements of a typical form of creative literature, and 
 the use of these various elements of plot, character, etc., 
 expressed in a system of formal rules. In harmony with this 
 method we have symmetry, or structural perfection, proposed 
 as the measure of artistic excellence, — a test of the merit of 
 creative literature which is the counterpart of that proposed 
 by Plato. 
 
 Modern criticism began with an application of this last 
 formal, and, as we now call it, least valuable part of Aris- 
 totle's theory of art and literature. The ample growth of 
 creative literature in Europe which followed the Renaissance,
 
 MODERN CRITICISM 29 
 
 had been itself succeeded by an epoch of mingled reflec- 
 tion and creation. In this epoch — the xvii and xviii 
 centuries — the study both of nature and of literature was 
 recommenced with fresh ardour and more successful equip- 
 ments. It was then, when this new literature came to be 
 passed under review, that attention was again turned to the 
 subject of criticism. It was only natural that those writers 
 who began to measure the merit of the modern works should 
 have had recourse to Aristotle's rules ; for the '* Poetics " 
 — for all that it was written 2000 years ago — was the only 
 work which contained any approach to a definite system of 
 criticism. But it was also to be expected — as in fact proved 
 to be the case — that these canons, based upon a study of the 
 epics of Homer and the works of the Athenian dramatists, 
 would prove inadequate when applied to works which re- 
 flected in their changed forms the changed conditions of the 
 modern era. It was strange that this should have been over- 
 looked ; nevertheless it was the case, and during the seven- 
 teenth and part of the eighteenth century criticism consisted 
 mainly in a knowledge of the formal rules contained in the 
 Poetics, and the work of the critics consisted in the applica- 
 tion of these rules more or less rigorously to contemporary 
 literature. In France, especially, which was at this time 
 the centre of European thought and manners, a splendid 
 dramatic literature was produced which was absolutely 
 moulded upon classical models. '* Following, or thinking 
 they followed the ancients,'' Mr Saintsbury writes,^ 
 " French dramatists and dramatic critics adopted certain 
 fixed rules according to which a poet had to write just as a 
 whist-playcr has to play the game." The general effect of 
 this artificial system may be seen from the result which is 
 produced upon the great poets of the French *' Classical " 
 drama — Corneille and Racine. "This was the source," 
 says Demogeot, " of that severe unity to which Corneille 
 submits and of which Racine bears the yoke so lightly. 
 This was the source of that small number of characters, ever 
 1 In his "History of French Literature."
 
 30 MODERN CRITICISM 
 
 restrained to the indispensable requirements of the plot ; of 
 that rapid and uninterrupted progress of a sole and complete 
 action ; of those wide deserted porticoes where the persons 
 of the dialogue meet, vague regions, characterless and name- 
 less, the scene of an ideal action carefully purged of every 
 vulgar episode, in such wise that we might say that there is 
 not so much a unlty^ as a nullity, of time and place. This 
 immaterial and spiritual action, seems to exist by itself, like 
 thought, and to occupy neither time nor space." 
 
 Now this application of Aristotle's rules was both ignorant 
 and mistaken. It was ignorant, because these critics, taking 
 their knowledge of the Poetics for the most part second- 
 hand, frequently misinterpreted his meaning ; while the models 
 which they adopted were often not the Greek models at all, 
 but those pseudo-classical models of which the dramas of 
 Seneca were the recognized examples. It was mistaken, 
 because the conditions under which the Greek works were 
 composed were altogether different from the conditions of 
 the modern world. Yet it was possible in France, since the 
 French masters wrote deliberately with an eye upon those 
 very classical and pseudo-classical models upon which this 
 formal criticism was based. But in England the case was 
 different. The greatest of the English masters, the poets of 
 the Elizabethan and Stuart period, rebelled against the 
 servitude to pseudo-classical models : they drew their in- 
 spiration from the same sources as those which quickened 
 the national life. The opulence of ideas which followed the 
 recovery of the lost literatures of Greece and Rome, the 
 extension of scientific knowledge, and the discovery of the 
 new world of America and of the ocean highway to the East 
 — this, combined with the energy begotten of a period of 
 national expansion, was sufficient to provide them with a 
 creative impulse which refused to be confined within the 
 limits of any previously developed poetic forms. 
 
 Nevertheless, so strong was the influence of the accepted 
 critical creed during the period of French predominance, that 
 Addison, when he set himself to vindicate the greatness of
 
 MODERN CRITICISM 31 
 
 Milton's genius, was compelled to show that "Paradise Lost'* 
 conformed to the Aristotelian tests. It was this application 
 — this attempt to put the contents of a gallon into a pint- 
 measure — which showed him the insufficiency of any system 
 of critical rules based upon a study of the literature of a 
 single epoch, however splendid, and led him to discover a 
 new principle of poetical appeal, and consequently a new 
 test of merit by which the new forms — indeed, all forms — 
 of creative literature could be measured. In his criticism 
 of "Paradise Lost," Addison confines himself, mainly but not 
 entirely, to an application, and an explanation, of Aristotle's 
 canons. But in the " Essay on the Pleasures of the Imagina- 
 tion " he avails himself of the new knowledge of the processes 
 of thought embodied in the writings of Descartes, Hobbes 
 and Locke ; and it is with the assistance of this new 
 psychological knowledge, that he discusses and applies the 
 principle of the appeal of art to the imagination, which marks 
 the cardinal difference between ancient and modern criticism. 
 
 First, then, we will look for a moment at Addison's 
 criticism of " Paradise Lost," as being a typical example 
 of the method of this formal criticism, and afterwards we 
 will notice the character and significance of the new principle 
 of poetic appeal. 
 
 Addison gives us the plan of his criticism of " Paradise 
 Lost" in the last of the eighteen papers in the Spectator 
 which he devotes to the subject. Four papers are assigned 
 to the examination of the poem under the respective heads 
 of Fable (or Plot), Characters, Sentiments, and Language; 
 that is to the four constituent elements of Aristotle's analysis 
 of the Tragedy which are present in an Epic poem. Two 
 papers are given to the "Censures which the author may 
 incur under each of these heads ; " and the remaining 
 twelve are devoted to a consideration of each of the twelve 
 books of the poem in turn ; and in this consideration he 
 points out the " particular beauties " which belong to each 
 book, and tells " wherein these beauties consist." As the 
 result of this examination, he pronounces a general verdict
 
 32 MODERN CRITICISM 
 
 of approval ; but at the same time he indicates certain 
 deficiencies. Milton, he says, "excels in general under 
 each of these heads." On the other hand, he finds the 
 "plot" of "Paradise Lost" to be deficient in two re- 
 spects. First because " the Event is unhappy; " for Aristotle, 
 while he says that the plot of a tragedy should terminate 
 in a disaster, lays down the general rule that an epic 
 should end happily. And secondly, because it contains 
 too many "digressions." Similarly, he finds a defect in 
 Milton's " characters." This defect consists in the intro- 
 duction of "two actors of a shadowy and fictitious nature, 
 in the persons of Sin and Death." These allegorical 
 characters he holds are not suitable for an epic poem, 
 because "there is not that measure of probability annexed 
 to them, which is requisite in writings of this kind." In 
 advancing this criticism he makes a distinction between them 
 and the character of Satan ; for this latter was to all intents 
 and purposes a human character. Once more he complains 
 that Milton's " Sentiments" are marred by the " unnecessary 
 ostentation of learning " shown in his discussions on " Free- 
 will and Predestination, and his many glances upon History, 
 Astronomy, Geography and the like." 
 
 But these examples are sufficient to indicate the kind of 
 results obtained from the attempt to estimate the merit of a 
 work of creative literature by the application of these formal 
 rules. They have been cited as illustrations of the barren- 
 ness of this method, and not as specimens of Addison's 
 criticism. It is necessary, therefore, to add at once that 
 Addison himself compares the defects thus revealed to 
 " spots on the sun," and that he occupies twice as much 
 space in the more congenial task of indicating those beauties 
 in " Paradise Lost, which appear more exquisite than the 
 rest." In this appreciation he detects and emphasizes most 
 of the characteristic excellences of the great English Epic. 
 In particular he decides — and all subsequent critics have 
 agreed with him — that Milton's dominant quality is sub- 
 limity.
 
 MODERN CRITICISM 33 
 
 " Milton's chief Talent, and indeed his distinguishing 
 Excellence, lies in the Sublimity of his Thoughts. There 
 are others of the Moderns who rival him in every other 
 Part of Poetry ; but in the Greatness of his Sentiments he 
 triumphs over all the Poets, both modern and ancient, 
 Homer only excepted. It is impossible for the Imagina- 
 tion of man to distend itself with greater Ideas, than those 
 which he has laid together in his First, Second, and Sixth 
 Books." 1 
 
 But it is in the " Essay on the Pleasures of the Imagina- 
 tion " that Addison's great contribution to the science of 
 criticism is to be found. Let me try to state in a few 
 words what was the precise nature of the advance, which is 
 embodied in the proposal to measure the merit of works of 
 creative literature by the degree in which they severally 
 appeal to the imagination. 
 
 To do this, it is necessary to look back a little. Aristotle, 
 in showing that the test of truth could not be applied to 
 measure the value of poetry in the way in which Plato had 
 applied it, established the fact that works of creative litera- 
 ture, as being works of art, represented external realities in a 
 different manner from that in which non-creative or scientific 
 literature would represent them. Rightly considered he said 
 such representations were not less but more truthful ; because 
 under the method of art it was the most essential aspects of 
 realities that were reproduced. Addison, by applying the 
 new psychological knowledge of his age — in particular the 
 doctrine of association of ideas — to the study of literature, 
 notices that works of art, whether statue, painting, or creative 
 literature, by virtue of the reproduction of these essential 
 aspects of reality, work upon the mind of the spectator in a 
 different way than the corresponding raw material (so to 
 speak) of reality : that, in other words, by virtue of the im- 
 agination of the artist thus embodied in their sensible atributes 
 they call up images more rapidly and more vividly in the 
 mind with which they are so brought into contact. And 
 
 1 Spectator, No. 279. 
 C
 
 34 MODERN CRITICISM 
 
 from this observation he passes to the conclusion that the 
 characteristic merit of such works can be best measured by 
 the possession of this quality — the quality of appealing to 
 the imagination. 
 
 It is interesting to trace the steps by which Addison 
 arrived at this conclusion. But it is necessary to notice first 
 of all that he is well aware that ** the faculty of the imagina- 
 tion *' is nothing more than a convenient term for describing 
 one as|'.cct of the action of the mind as a whole. *' We divide 
 the soul," he says, "into several powers and faculties," but, 
 "there is no such division in the soul itself, since it is the 
 whole soul that remembers, understands, wills, or imagines." 
 
 In commencing his examination of the effects of this 
 faculty of the imagination, or fancy, he points out that it is 
 the sense of sight which provides the mind in the first in- 
 stance with the *' images " subsequently rej)roduced in 
 thought : and he describes briefly the mental process to 
 which these sense-impressions are submitted. 
 
 " It is this sense," he writes, " which furnishes the Im- 
 agination with its Ideas, so that by the Pleasures of the Im- 
 agination or Fancy (which I shall use promiscuously) I here 
 mean such as arise from visible Objects, either when we have 
 them actually in our View, or when we call up these Ideas 
 in our Minds by Paintings, Statues, Descriptions, or any the 
 like Occasion. We cannot indeed have a single Image in 
 the Fancy that did not make its first Entrance through the 
 Sight ; but we have the power of retaining, altering, and 
 compounding those Images which we have once received into 
 all the Varieties of Picture and Vision that are most agreeable 
 to the Imagination ; for by this Faculty a man in a Dungeon 
 is capable of entertaining himself with Scenes and Landscapes 
 more beautiful than any that can be found in the whole 
 Compass of Nature." ^ 
 
 He then divides these pleasures into two kinds — primary 
 and secondary. Of these the primary pleasures arise from 
 " objects before our eyes " ; the secondary, from ** the ideas 
 ^ Ibid. 411.
 
 MODERN CRITICISM 35 
 
 of visible objects, where the objects are not actually before 
 the eye, but are called up into our memories, or formed into 
 agreeable visions of things that are either absent or fictitious." 
 Moreover he finds that while the works of nature are more 
 effective in producing the first class, the works of art are 
 more effective in producing the second. It is the secondary 
 pleasures, therefore, with which art and literature are con- 
 cerned ; and these are caused not by real objects but by the 
 representations of these objects. But here again he dis- 
 tinguishes between the two kinds of representations produced 
 respectively by the "arts of the eye" and the "arts of the 
 ear." In the case of those of Architecture, Sculpture, and 
 Painting, there is a physical form perceptible by the sight: but 
 in the case of the representations of music and creative literature 
 the sole physical basis is the sound of the notes or words, or the 
 sight of the word-symbols which indicate articulate sounds. 
 
 In all cases alike he traces the secondary pleasures of the 
 imagination to "that action of the mind, which compares the 
 ideas arising from the original objects with the ideas we 
 receive from the statue, picture, description, or sound that 
 represents them." 
 
 In creative literature, where the ideas are " raised by 
 words," the part played by the imagination is twofold. 
 
 In the first place there is the working of the imagination 
 in the mind of the poet: — 
 
 "Because the Mind of Man requires something more perfect 
 in Matter than what it finds there, and can never meet with 
 any Sight in Nature which sufficiently answers its highest ideas 
 of Pleasantness ; or, in other words, because the Imagination 
 can fancy to itself Things more "Great, Strange, or Beautiful, 
 than the Eye ever saw, and is still sensible of some defect in 
 what it has seen ; on this account it is the part of a Poet to 
 humour the Imagination in its own Notions, by mending and 
 perfecting Nature where he describes a Reality ; and by adding 
 greater Beauties than are put together in Nature, where he 
 describes a Fiction. 
 
 He is not obliged to attend her in the slow Advances
 
 36 MODERN CRITICISM 
 
 which she makes from one Season to another, or to observe 
 her Conduct in the Successive Production of Plants and 
 Flowers. He may draw into his Description all the Beauties 
 of the Spring and Autumn, and make the whole year contribute 
 to render it the more agreeable. His Rose-trees, Woodbines, 
 and Jessamines may flower together, and his Beds be cover'd 
 at the same time with Lilies, Violets, and Amaranths. His 
 Soil is not restrained to any particular Sett of plants, but is 
 proper either for Oaks or Mirtles, and adapts itself to the 
 products of every Climate. Oranges may grow wild in it; 
 Myrr may be met with in every Hedge, and if he thinks it 
 proper to have a Grove of Spices, he can quickly command 
 Sun enough to raise it. If all this will not furnish out an 
 agreeable Scene, he can make several new Species of Flowers, 
 with richer Scents and higher Colours than any that grow in 
 the Gardens of Nature. His Consorts of Birds may be as full 
 and Harmonious, and his WooJs as thick and gloomy as he 
 pleases. He is at no more Expense in a long Vista, than a 
 short one, and can as easily throw his Cascades from a 
 precipice half a mile high, as from one of twenty yards. 
 He has his choice of the Winds, and can turn the Course of 
 his Rivers in all the Variety of Meanders, that are most 
 delightful to the Reader's Imagination. In a word, he has 
 the modelling of Nature in his own hands, and may give her 
 what Charms he pleases, provided he does not reform her too 
 much, and run into Absurdities, by endeavouring to excel." ^ 
 In the second, there is the characteristic power, possessed 
 by creative literature thus composed, to appeal to the imagina- 
 tion of the hearer or reader. "Words, when well chosen, 
 have so great a Force in them, that a Description often gives 
 us more lively Ideas than the Sight of Things themselves. 
 The Reader finds a scene drawn in stronger Colours, and 
 painted more to the life in his Imagination, by the help of 
 Words, than by an actual Survey of the Scene which they 
 describe. In this case the Poet seems to get the better of 
 Nature ; he takes, indeed, the Landskip after her, but gives it 
 1 Ibid. 418.
 
 MODERN CRITICISM 37 
 
 more vigorous Touches, heightens its Beauty, and so enlivens 
 the who'e Piece that the Images which flow from the Objects 
 themselves appear weak and faint in Comparison of those that 
 come from the Expressions. The Reason, probably, may be 
 because in the survey of any Object we have only so much of 
 it painted on the Imagination, as comes in at the Eye ; but 
 in its Description the Poet gives us as free a View of it as he 
 pleases, and discovers to us several parts, that either we did 
 not attend to, or that lay out of our Sight when we first 
 beheld it. As we look on any Object, our Idea of it is, 
 perhaps, made up of two or three simple Ideas ; but when 
 the Poet represents it, he may either give us a more complex 
 Idea of it, or only raise in us such Ideas as are most apt to 
 affect the Imagination." ^ 
 
 This element being of such importance, the merit of creative 
 literature can be estimated by reference to it. And so 
 Addison writes that "the talent of affecting the Imagination " 
 is the " very life and highest perfection " of poetry. Here, 
 then, we have a test of merit elastic enough to be applied to 
 all forms, and all developments, of creative literature, but 
 one which takes into account the element of *' pleasure," 
 — the last of the three characteristic qualities which belong 
 to it — as well as those of "matter" and "manner." It is 
 this application of psychology to the study of literature which 
 characterizes modern criticism, and all subsequent critics 
 have consciously or unconsciously availed themselves of 
 the principle of appeal thus formulated and interpreted by 
 Addison. 
 
 Mow Creative Literature appeals to ttie 
 Imagination 
 
 We have now, thanks to Addison's application of the 
 
 seventeenth century psychology to the study of literature 
 
 and art — the three essential tests of truth, symmetry, and 
 
 1 Ibid. 416.
 
 38 HOW CREATIVE LITERATURE 
 
 the appeal to the imagination, corresponding respectively 
 to the three dominant aspects of creative literature, matter, 
 manner, and ca])acity to produce pleasure. But before we 
 proceed to discuss the applications of these tests by con- 
 temporary writers, and the questions of criticism which 
 arise out of the varying degrees of prominence which are 
 severally assigned by individual minds to them, we must 
 glance at the work of two modern critics — the Laocoon of 
 Lessing, published in 1766, and the Lectures of Victor 
 Cousin, Du Vrat, du Beau et du Bteriy delivered in 18 1 8 
 and published in 1853. 
 
 Both of these writers recognize that the appeal of art is 
 chiefly addressed to the imagination, and only in a lesser 
 degree to the understanding, and the senses ; but their re- 
 spective examinations of the nature of this appeal proceed 
 from two opposite points of view. Lessing, concerning 
 himself with the objective point of view, tells us what 
 elements and aspects of reality the poet and the painter 
 must respectively strive to reproduce, if their several re- 
 presentations are to possess this power ; Cousin, on the other 
 hand, writing from a subjective point of view, traces the 
 process by which the raw material provided by the senses 
 is converted by the artist's (or poet's) mind into an idea or 
 form, which, when expressed in the medium appropriate to his 
 art, will appeal most powerfully to the imagination of the 
 spectator. More briefly, Lessing shows us how the artist 
 in representing a reality must modify the material attributes 
 of the original to suit the limitations of his art ; and Cousin, 
 how the " idea " or mental aspect of reality, the reproduction 
 of which is the special object of art, is formed in the artist's 
 mind. 
 
 The manner in which Lessing pursues his enquiry is 
 interesting both in itself, and because it is a further develop- 
 ment of the formal, or external, criticism of Aristotle in the 
 " Poetics." Commencing with a discussion of the date of 
 the famous piece of sculpture, the Laocoon ^ group (frcfm 
 
 ^ See Frontispiect.
 
 APPEALS TO THE IMAGINATION 39 
 
 which his treatise takes its title), he notices that there is a 
 remarkable similarity between it and Virgil's description of 
 the death of Laocoon and his two sons in the Second Aeneid. 
 He then argues that, apart from any historical evidence, the 
 date of the sculpture can be fixed by artistic considerations: 
 for if the poet copied the artist he would naturally omit 
 certain details unsuitable for his representation of the scene 
 in nvords ; while, similarly, if the artibt copied the poet he 
 would omit certain details in the poet's description which 
 are unsuitable for the sculptor's representation in stone. 
 Accordingly he considers and compares the details of the 
 two representations, and finally decides that the artist copied 
 the poet, because the differences in treatment which the 
 sculpture shows as compared with Virgil's description are 
 only those which the sculptor would be compelled to make 
 by the character of his medium. In particular he points out 
 that while Virgil tells us that Laocoon utters terrible cries, the 
 sculptor has invested his face with an expression of noble 
 calm. That, he says, is just what we should expect, since 
 it is impossible to express in marble the agonized suffering 
 which Virgil expresses by his words : — 
 
 Clamores simul horrendos ad sidera tollit: 
 Quales mugitus, fugit cum saucius aram 
 Taurus, et incertum excussit cervice securim.^ 
 
 The attempt to do this would have resulted in a grimace 
 that must have been either ridiculous or horrible — for 
 sculpture should express physical beauty in repose. On the 
 other hand, if Virgil had seen the sculptured group, and 
 founded his description upon the representation of the death 
 of Laocoon which it gives, he could never have omitted to 
 reproduce in his description the expression of sublime 
 endurance which Laocoon wears — for it is just as easy to 
 describe in words this sublime endurance as it was to express 
 the agonized outcry. 
 
 1 At the same time he raises terrible cries to heaven: cries like 
 the bellowings of a wounded bull that has shaken the ill-directed 
 axe from his neck, and fled from the altar of sacrifice.
 
 40 HOW CREATIVE LITERATURE 
 
 From this comparison Lessing enlarges upon a discussion 
 of the respective methods of painting, as representative of the 
 *' arts of the eye/* and poetry, as representative of the " arts 
 of the ear." And in the course of this discussion he analyses 
 very carefully the means for representing reality which are 
 respectively at the disposal of these two typical arts. 
 
 Poetry, he says, " employs articulate sounds in time " ; 
 that is, sounds which are uttered successively. Painting, 
 "forms and colours in space** \ that is, which co-exist side 
 by side. The aspect of reality which is most suitable for the 
 painter is " a visible and stationary action [or a group of 
 objects], the different parts of which are developed in juxta- 
 position in space" : that which is most suitable for the poet 
 is "a visible and progressive action, the different parts of 
 which happen one after another in sequence of time." The 
 painter, therefore, can only imitate actions indirectly ; that is, 
 by painting bodies so disposed as to suggest action. Similarly, 
 the poet can only imitate bodies indirectly ; that is, by telling 
 us of the actions or effects of such bodies, animate or in- 
 animate. And so the painter, when he represents an action, 
 must choose that single moment of the action, which best 
 suggests what has gone before and what is to come after : 
 and the poet, when he represents a body, must select that 
 single property of the body, which awakens the most vivid 
 picture of it in the mind. A simple instance will help to ex- 
 plain this closely reasoned argument. Let us take a common 
 object ; say a ship. The painter represents this object by 
 presenting on his canvas so much of its form and colour as 
 meets the eye of a spectator from a single point of view. 
 The poet, on the other hand, adds to the word-symbol which 
 recalls the idea of a ship to the mind, a single characteristic 
 epithet — the " swift ship." That is only a very simple 
 example, but if I add a remark of Mr Meredith (made in 
 "Diana of the Crossways ") I think it will serve to explain 
 Lessing's meaning. 
 
 " The art of the pen," Mr Meredith writes, " is to rouse 
 the inward vision, instead of labouring with a drop-scene
 
 APPEALS TO THE IMAGINATION 41 
 
 brush, as if it were to the eye ; because our flying minds can- 
 not contain a protracted description. That is why the poets, 
 who spring imagination with a word or a phrase, paint lasting 
 pictures. The Shakespearian, the Dantesque [pictures], 
 are in a line, two at most." But the great example is the 
 device which Homer uses to give us a sense of the beauty 
 of Helen. Instead of telling us the colour of her cheeks, or 
 the shape of her mouth, nose and eyes, — instead of enumerat- 
 ing in succession the several elements which together make up 
 her beauty of face and form — he tells us of the effect which 
 the sight of her produced upon the oldest and wisest of the 
 men of Troy. These elders — the men who would be least 
 likely to be affected by a woman's beauty — when they 
 saw her graceful presence, forgot the wrong which she 
 had done, and the suffering which she had brought upon her 
 country : — 
 
 Oi) vefiecris T/xDaj Kal ivKurj/xL5ai 'Axatoi)$ 
 
 ToigS' dfj.(pl yuvaiKl iroXiii' xP^'^ov dXyea Trdax^i-f' 
 
 AlvQs dOavaTTjai deys els Ciira idiKCu.^ 
 
 And what applies to human beauty, applies equally to the 
 beauty of nature ; and, therefore, descriptions of scenery are, 
 as such, unsuitable subjects for the poet. It is not that the 
 poet cannot describe such scenes. He can do this because 
 he uses a medium, words or language, which is capable of 
 recalling to the mind any and every conceivable idea. But 
 the writer of creative literature has a different aim from 
 that of the historian or the philosopher. He is an artist, 
 and must employ the method of art ; that is, he must com- 
 pose descriptions which appeal to the imagination and not 
 merely to the understanding. Lessing, although he does 
 not deliberately use the psychological principle of the appeal 
 to the imagination — because, as 1 have already remarked, he 
 approaches the productions of the respective arts from an 
 external, or formal, point of view — gives us an admirable 
 
 1 Iliad \\\. 156-8. No wonder that the Trojans and well-greaved 
 Achaeans endure evils so long a time for such a woman — she is 
 terribly like the deathless goddesses to look upon.
 
 42 HOW CREATIVE LITERATURE 
 
 statement of the application of the principle to the representa- 
 tions of creative literature. 
 
 "Since the symbols of speech," he writes, "are symbols 
 adopted by ourselves, it is perfectly possible for us by means 
 of them to indicate the consecutive appearance of the parts 
 of a body as completely as we can perceive those same parts 
 of a body in juxtaposition in nature. But this is an attri- 
 bute of speech and of its symbols in general, an attribute, too, 
 which does not minister specially to the purposes of poetry. 
 The poet's object is not merely to be intelligible, his repre- 
 sentations must be something more than clear and distinct 
 (M/V is sufficient for the prose writer). He desires to make 
 the ideas which he arouses in us so vivid that, as they flash 
 through our mind, we believe that we are experiencing the 
 true, objective impressions produced by the physical originals 
 of these ideas, and in this moment of our illusion we cease 
 to be conscious of the medium which he employs for this 
 purpose, that is, his words. It is this principle which forms 
 the basis of the explanation of the poetical picture." ^ 
 
 Cousin's researches form a direct contrast and an admirable 
 supplement to those of Lessing. While Lessing's analyses 
 were conducted upon Aristotelian lines, the broad con- 
 clusions of the French critic are admittedly based upon the 
 philosophy of Plato. His object, he tells us, is " to offer at 
 least an outline-sketch of a regular and complete theory of 
 beauty and art." For this purpose he considers in turn ; 
 ( I ) subjective beauty, or the faculties to which man owes 
 his consciousness of beauty; (2) objective beauty, or the 
 qualities which respectively m:ike an action, a thought, a 
 person or a material object, beautiful ; (3) the nature of art, 
 or the processes by which the beautiful in real existences is 
 reproduced; and (4) the means and therefore the aims, 
 which respectively belong to the several arts, or how the arts 
 are separated. On all of these aspects of beauty he writes 
 with precision and philosophic insight, but his most important 
 contribution to the science of criticism consists in his masterly 
 1 Laocoon, XVII., as translated in the author's Principles of Criticism.
 
 APPEALS TO THE IMAGINATION 43 
 
 exposition of the process of idealization — the process which, 
 as we have already seen, is identical with Addison's opera- 
 tion of the imagination in the mind of the poet, and is 
 now recognized as the characteristic process of the artist 
 mind. 
 
 <* We desire," he says, "to see and feel again the natural 
 beauty, physical and moral, which delights us in the world 
 of reality ; and we, therefore, endeavour to reproduce it not 
 such as it ivas, but such as our imagination represents it to us. 
 Thence arises a ivork original and proper to man, a ivorh of 
 art.^' 1 The artist neither creates in the sense in which we 
 speak of God as the creator, nor does he merely imitate. 
 He finds his materials in the world of reality, but he repro- 
 duces these materials in a changed form. This change of 
 form is the result of the process of idealization. " The true 
 artist," Cousin writes, " has a profound feeling and admira- 
 tion for nature ; but everything in nature is not equally ad- 
 mirable." What the artist reproduces is an " idea " of the 
 reality which is the subject of his representation ; an idea 
 formed in his mind by a double process of selection and omis- 
 sion. If he represents an action, or a person, or an object, it 
 matters not ; in all cases in forming this idea he omits defects 
 which were present in the original, and adds excellences which 
 that original did not possess. In a word he idealizes his sub- 
 ject. Idealization, then, is " the unconscious criticism of nature 
 by the human mind," 2 and it is an idealized reality, and not 
 reality itself, which the artist reproduces in the appropriate 
 medium of his art. In the words of Cousin, the end of art 
 is the expression of moral beauty by the assistance of physical 
 beauty. " The latter is for art only a symbol of the former. 
 In nature this symbol is often obscure ; art in rendering it 
 clear attains effects which nature does not always produce. 
 Nature has another means of pleasing us, for once again I 
 say she possesses in an incomparable degree that which causes 
 the greatest charm of the imagination and the eyes, life ; art 
 touches us in a higher degree, because, in making the ex- 
 
 1 Du Frai, etc. VIII. 2 Principles of Criticism.
 
 44 CREATIVE LITERATURE 
 
 pression of moral beauty its first aim, it appeals more directly 
 to the source of the deepest emotions. Art can be more 
 pathetic than nature, and pathos is the sign and the measure 
 of beauty of the highest class." ^ 
 
 And of all the arts, poetry, or creative literature, is that 
 in which the idealizing process can work most freely. In 
 the first place, its medium, language, is the most flexible of 
 all the mediums which the respective arts employ, and in 
 the second it is the actual medium of thought, and as such 
 enables the artist to communicate most directly with the 
 mind of the spectator. 
 
 " Speech," he writes, " is the instrument of poetry ; poetry 
 moulds it to its uses and idealizes it that so it may express 
 ideal beauty. It gives it the charm and majesty of metre, 
 it turns it into something that is neither voice nor music, 
 but which partakes of the nature of both, something at once 
 material and spiritual, something finished, clear, and precise, 
 like the sharpest contours and forms, something living and 
 animated like colour, something pathetic and infinite like 
 sound. A word in itself, above all a word chosen and 
 transfigured by poetry, is the most energetic and the most 
 universal of symbols. Equipped with this talisman of its 
 own creation, poetry reflects all the images of the world 
 of the senses, like sculpture and painting ; reflects feeling 
 like painting and music, rendering it in all its variations — 
 variations which music cannot reach, and that come in a 
 rapid succession which painting cannot follow, while it 
 remains as sharply turned and as full of repose as sculpture ; 
 nor is that all, it expresses what is inaccessible to all other 
 arts, I mean thought, thought which has no colour, thought 
 which allows no sound to escape, which is revealed in no 
 play of feature, thought in its loftiest flight, in its most 
 refined abstraction." ^ 
 
 1 Du rrai, etc. VIII. 
 
 2 Ibid. ix. Translation from Principles of Criticism
 
 CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM 45 
 
 Chapter VI 
 
 Contemporary Criticism 
 
 In spite of the fact that great thinkers have from time to time 
 applied themselves to the consideration of the processes of 
 literary composition, and of the relation of these processes 
 to the processes of artistic representation in general, it is 
 only to-day that any definite principles of judgment in 
 literature seem to have at length emerged from the nebulous 
 mass of thought which has thus gathered in the course of 
 centuries round the subject. I say " to-day," for nothing 
 is more astonishing to the student of literature than the 
 blindness which great — sometimes the greatest — men have 
 shown in contemplating the work of their fellows, and 
 especially that of contemporary authors. Putting on one 
 side for a moment the verdicts of what we may call the 
 " professional '' critics of the eighteenth and nineteenth 
 centuries — critics whose purpose was often frankly " des- 
 tructive '' — we are confronted by the record of a Voltaire 
 declaring that Hamlet was " a rude and barbarous piece — 
 such a work as one might suppose to be the fruit of the 
 imagination of a drunken savage " ; of a Goethe ex- 
 pressing the opinion that the Inferno of Dante was " abomin- 
 able, the Purgatorio dubious, and the Parad'iso tiresome " ; 
 of a Byron insensible to the charm of an entire choir of 
 English lyric singers, of a Matthew Arnold, acutely sensitive 
 to the beauty and power of the ancient and medigeval masters, 
 yet blind to the genius of the greatest of his great con- 
 temporaries — Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Rossetti, and 
 William Morris. While as for this professional criticism — 
 the criticism of which the great reviews which flourished 
 in the early part of the present century have been the chief 
 depositories — there is no more humiliating record of the 
 littleness of human nature than is afforded by the egregious 
 blunders and the envenomed sentences of its exponents. 
 The story is writ large in the pages of the literary journals,
 
 46 CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM 
 
 and both Wordsworth in his ** Essay Supplementary," ^ and 
 quite recently Mr Dowden in his essay on the Interpretation 
 of Literature,^ have collected and exhibited the most extra- 
 ordinary examples of the mingled perversity and obtuseness 
 which even great writers have displayed in the endeavour 
 to perform an impossible task. 
 
 But to-day the practice of attempting to estimate the 
 merit of works of literature — whether contemporary or 
 belonging to past ages — by the application of formal or 
 technical tests has become entirely discredited, if, indeed, it 
 is not practically extinct. Such tests, even if they were 
 perfectly understood by the critic who applies them, would 
 measure excellences or defects which are appreciable by only 
 a limited class, while they leave untouched those broad and 
 dominant qualities, which, appealing to all persons of ordinary 
 intelligence, can alone form the basis of that universal 
 recognition which is the sign and seal of the highest merit. 
 The practice of attempting verdicts upon new works of 
 literature is still maintained in the ordinary criticism of the 
 journals; but while there is much that is often both unbiassed 
 and enlightened in this criticism, it is well understood that 
 the writers of these reviews or notices do not claim to 
 give a binding verdict: that, indeed, the conditions under 
 which such criticisms are for the most part written preclude 
 their writers, however well qualified they may otherwise be, 
 from forming any but a superficial estimate. The criticism 
 embodied in the ordinary " reviews " of the journals we 
 may therefore put on one side as ineffective. Nevertheless 
 the study of literature has never been pursued so widely in 
 England, nor pursued with such happy results, as it is 
 to-day. But before we consider the motives and principles 
 of contemporary English criticism as thus understood, it 
 will be desirable to refer very briefly to some of the more 
 striking of the results embodied in the work of its most 
 distinguished exponents. 
 
 1 To the Preface of his edition of 1 8 15. 
 ^ Contemporary Hevieiv, 1 886.
 
 CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM 47 
 
 Wordsworth, In his protest against the assumptions of the 
 professional critics, has put his finger upon the inherent 
 weakness of any system of criticism which attempts to 
 measure new works of creative literature by rules based solely, 
 or mainly, upon a knowledge of previously existing models. 
 The external qualities which this formal and technical 
 criticism measures exist in complete independence of the 
 element of originality ; and it is to the fact that no allowance 
 has been made for this unknown quantity that the failure of 
 this criticism is chiefly due. Smarting under the mingled 
 injustice and indifference with which his own work had been 
 received, he writes : — 
 
 " If there be one conclusion more forcibly pressed upon 
 us than another by the review which has been given of the 
 fortunes and fate of poetical works, it is this: that every 
 author, as far as he is great and at the same time original^ has 
 had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed ; 
 so has it been, so will it continue to be. . . . The pre- 
 decessors of an original genius of a high order will have 
 smoothed the way for all that he has in common with them ; 
 and much he will have In common ; but, for what Is peculiarly 
 his own, he will be called upon to clear and often to shape 
 his own road ; he will be in the condition of Hannibal 
 among the Alps." ^ 
 
 He has also stated with perfect clearness the reason why 
 such formal tests as structure of plot, perfection of metre, 
 purity or elegance of diction, and others on which the pro- 
 fessional critic bases his verdict of approval or condemnation, 
 cannot In themselves afford the material for a binding verdict. 
 Mere technical or formal perfection can be attained In works 
 which are destitute of that quality which Is essential to secure 
 the permanent appreciation of mankind — the quality of giving 
 pleasure. On the other hand, works which are deficient 
 In such technical excellences may possess this quality in a 
 high degree. The foundation of this quality of giving pleasure 
 is, as we have seen, the power of appealing to the Imagination, 
 
 ^ Esioxj Supplementary,
 
 48 CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM 
 
 and it is precisely the greater freedom with which the poet 
 can avail himself of this appeal that constitutes the higher 
 value of the poetic presentation of the facts of life. But the 
 imagination to which the poet appeals is not that of the 
 critic, but that of the general reader — of the person possessed, 
 not of technical knowledge, but of ordinary everyday in- 
 telligence. Indeed, so far from technical qualities affording 
 an absolute basis for the measuring of poetic excellence, 
 these qualities may be developed to a degree that makes them 
 actually hinder the general appreciation or acceptance of the 
 work. " The poet writes,*' he says,^ *' under one restriction 
 only, namely, that of the necessity of giving immediate 
 pleasure to a human being possessed of that information which 
 may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a physician, 
 a mariner, an astronomer, or a natural philosopher, but as a 
 man. Except this one restriction, there is no object stand- 
 ing between the poet and the image of things ; between this 
 and the biographer and historian there are a thousand." 
 
 In other words, the power of giving pleasure by an appeal 
 to the imagination of the reader, is the essential quality which 
 a work of creative literature ought to possess (for it is only 
 by virtue of this quality that the general sense of mankind 
 can be satisfied), and this quality is one which lies outside the 
 reach of any technical test. 
 
 But it is in the critical writings of Matthew Arnold that we 
 find the highest example of contemporary English criticism. 
 In his two volumes of " Essays in Criticism " we have studies 
 of foreign and English authors, which exhibit more fully than 
 any similar writings the changed spirit of which I have 
 spoken. It is, of course, impossible within the limits at my 
 disposal to give any conception of the luminous treatment, the 
 lucid expression, or the wealth of illustration which char- 
 acterize these studies of individual authors; all that can be said 
 here is that the great object which Matthew Arnold the critic 
 has seemed to have placed before him, is to interpret — to 
 gather up all the facts which are of use as indicating the 
 ^ Observations, prefixed to the second edition oi Lyrical Ballads.
 
 CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM 49 
 
 special conditions of the author's personality, and the special 
 motives of his work, and then of tracing the connection 
 between these conditions and the excellences or defects 
 which characterize his work. In short, of providing the 
 reader with that preliminary basis of information which will 
 enable him to read the work of the author with both dis- 
 crimination and appreciation. 
 
 Indirectly, however, in the course of these studies of 
 particular authors he has enunciated certain principles of 
 general application. 
 
 ( 1 ) He has emphasized and defined the close connexion 
 between the author and the age in which he lives, by pointing 
 out that in every work of creative literature two distinct 
 factors can be discerned — the personality of the writer and 
 the mental atmosphere of the age. Gray is a case in point, 
 and in his essay on his poetry he takes him as an example of 
 a genius planted in an unfruitful soil, and therefore doomed 
 to comparative sterility. 
 
 " Gray," he writes, '* with the qualities of mind and soul 
 of a genuine poet, was isolated in his century. Maintaining 
 and fortifying them by lofty studies, he yet could not fully 
 educe and enjoy them ; the want of a genial atmosphere, the 
 failure of sympathy in his contemporaries, were too great. 
 Bora in the same year with Milton, Gray would have been 
 another man ; born in the same year with Burns, he would 
 have been another man. A man born in 1608 could profit 
 by the larger and more poetic scope of the English spirit in 
 the Elizabethan age; a man born in 1759 could profit by 
 that European renewing of men's minds of which the great 
 historical manifestation is the French Revolution." 1 
 
 (2) He has broadly characterized the philosophic aspect 
 of all poetic representations of reality by the luminous ex- 
 pression that Poetry is a " criticism of life." That is to 
 say, that the poet or novelist by creating ideal pictures of life, 
 provides an ideal standard with which the facts of real life 
 can be contrasted. And since such a comparison of the real 
 
 ^ Essays in Criticism^ \\. 
 D
 
 50 CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM 
 
 with the ideal helps us to understand the general purpose *and 
 conditions of human existence, he defines the special quality 
 of poetic thought as its " interpretative power." In par- 
 ticular, he has distinguished with precision the truth of poetry 
 from the truth of science, and he has told us why it is that 
 poetry by virtue of this power of interpretation becomes, as 
 Wordsworth has said, " the breath and finer spirit of all 
 knowledge." It is because it appeals to the ivhole man^ to 
 the emotions and feelings as well as to the reason. If we 
 understand this interpretative power, as thus defined, to be 
 the subjective aspect of the appeal to the imagination — or the 
 effect in the mind of the hearer or reader which the appeal 
 of poetry produces — we shall find in the following passage a 
 precise analysis of the effects of this appeal in the case of 
 that art — poetry — which possesses it in the highest degree. 
 
 " The grand power of poetry is its interpretative power ; by 
 which I mean, not a power of drawing out in black and 
 white an explanation of the mystery of the universe, but the 
 power of so dealing with things as to awaken in us a wonder- 
 fully full and intimate sense of them, and of our relations 
 with them. When this sense is awakened in us as to objects 
 without us, we feel ourselves to be in contact with the 
 essential nature of these objects, to be no longer bewildered 
 and oppressed by them, but to have their secret, and to be in 
 harmony with them ; and this feeling calms and satisfies us as 
 no other can. Poetry, indeed, interprets in another way 
 besides this ; but one of its two ways of interpreting, of ex- 
 ercising its highest power, is by awakening this sense in us. 
 I will not now enquire if this sense is illusive, whether it can 
 be proved not to be illusive, whether it does absolutely make 
 us possess the real nature of things ; all I say is, that poetry 
 can awaken it in us, and that to awaken it is one of the 
 highest powers of poetry. The interpretations of science do not 
 give us this intimate sense of objects as the interpretations of 
 poetry give it, they appeal to a limited faculty and not to the 
 whole man. It is not Linnaeus or Cavendish or Cuvier 
 who gives us the true sense of animals, or water, or plants.
 
 CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM 51 
 
 who seizes their secret for us, who makes us participate in 
 their life, it is Shakespeare, with his 
 
 ' daffodils 
 That come before the swallow dares, and take 
 The winds of March with beauty ; ' 
 
 it is Wordsworth, with his 
 
 ' Voice . . heard 
 
 In the spring-time from the cuckoo-bird, 
 Breaking the silence of the seas 
 Among the farthest Hebrides ; ' 
 
 it is Keats with his 
 
 * Moving waters at their priest-like task 
 Of cold ablution round Earth's human shores ; * 
 
 it is Chateaubriand, with his * cime indeterm'inee des forets ; ' 
 it is Senancour, with his mountain birch-tree ; * Cette ecorce 
 blanche^ I'tsse et crevassee ; cette tige agreste ; ces branches qui 
 s* tnclinent vers la terre ; la mohilite des feuilles, et tout cet 
 abandon, s'lmpliclte de la nature, attitude des deserts.^ " ^ 
 
 (3) Poetry of the highest cbss must exercise this power 
 of interpretation, this appeal to the imagination (or, as Arnold 
 himself calls it, to the "imaginative reason "), within a given 
 sphere ; and the accent of the masters of such poetry is the 
 " high seriousness of absolute sincerity." 
 
 " For supreme poetical success more is required than the 
 powerful application of ideas to life ; it must be an application 
 under the conditions fixed by the laws of poetic truth and 
 poetic beauty. These laws fix as an essential condition, in 
 the poet's treatment of such matters as are here in question, 
 high seriousness — the high seriousness which comes from 
 absolute sincerity." ^ And such poetry must be essentially 
 moral ; that is to say, it must be such as to satisfy the general 
 sense of mankind as embodied in the principles of morality. 
 
 " It is important, therefore, to hold fast to this : that 
 poetry is at bottom a criticism of life ; that the greatness of a 
 poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to 
 1 Ibid, I. a iiii, n.
 
 52 CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM 
 
 life — to the question : How to live. Morals are often treated 
 in a narrow and false fashion ; they are bound up with systems 
 of thought and belief which have had their day ; they are 
 fallen into the hands of pedants and professional dealers ; they 
 grow tiresome to some of us. We find attraction, at times, 
 even in a poetry of revolt against them ; in a poetry which 
 might take for its motto Omar Kheyam*s words : * Let us 
 make up in the tavern for the time which we have wasted 
 in the mosque.' Or we find attractions in a poetry in- 
 different to them ; in a poetry where the contents may be 
 what they will, but where the form is studied and exquisite. 
 We delude ourselves in either case ; and the best cure for 
 our delusion is to let our minds rest upon that great and in- 
 exhaustible word lifey until we learn to enter into its meaning. 
 A poetry of revolt against modern ideas is a poetry of revolt 
 against life ; a poetry of indifference towards moral ideas is a 
 poetry of indifference towards life.'* ^ 
 
 To Mr Ruskin in the field of the Fine Arts, and to 
 William Morris in the field of the Lesser Arts, we owe an 
 unhesitating application of the principle of the interdependence 
 of art and morality. The general character of Mr Ruskin's 
 criticism of works of architecture and painting is sufficiently 
 expressed in his own words. " In these books of mine,*' he 
 writes, " their distinctive character as Essays on Art is their 
 bringing everything to a root in human passion or human 
 hope." And nowhere else do we find a stronger assertion 
 of the inseparable connection of morality and poetic excellence 
 than in the following passage. 
 
 '* All right human song is, similarly, the finished expres- 
 sion, by art, of the joy or grief of noble persons for right 
 causes. And accurately in proportion to the rightness of the 
 cause, and purity of the emotion, is the possibility of the 
 fine art. . . . And with absolute precision, from highest 
 to lowest, the fineness of the possible art is an index of the 
 moral purity and majesty of the emotion it expresses. . . . 
 And that is so in all the arts ; so that with mathematical 
 1 Ibid. II.
 
 CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM 53 
 
 precision, subject to no error or exception, the art of a 
 nation, so far as it exists, is an exponent of its ethical 
 state." 1 
 
 Moreover Mr Ruskin (like Matthew Arnold) has 
 added increased precision to the principle of the appeal to 
 the imagination. The ideas which poetry and the arts can 
 powerfully stir in the mind by virtue of this appeal, must 
 be ideas which are in harmony with the best traditions of 
 the race. 
 
 " I do not say, therefore, that the art is greatest which 
 gives most pleasure, because perhaps there is some art whose 
 end is to teach and not to please. I do not say that the 
 art is greatest which teaches us most, because perhaps there 
 is some art whose end is to please and not to teach. I do 
 not say that the art is greatest which imitates best, because 
 perhaps there is some art whose end is to create and not to 
 imitate. But I say that the art is greatest which conveys to 
 the spectator, by any means whatsoever, the greatest number 
 of the greatest ideas ; and I call an idea great in proportion 
 as it is received by a higher faculty of the mind, and as it 
 more fully occupies, and in occupying, exercises and exalts, 
 the faculty by which it is received. If this, then, be the 
 definition of great art, that of a great artist naturally 
 follows. He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in 
 the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest 
 ideas." 2 
 
 On the other hand there are contemporary writers who 
 emphasize the important principle of the " freedom " of 
 art. 
 
 Their point of view is expressed in the phrase "Art 
 for art's sake : " and the principle which they apply is 
 excellently stated by Mr Swinburne — himself distinguished 
 beyond all living masters of song for the perfection of his 
 verse. 
 
 " No work of art has any worth or life in it that is not 
 
 1 Lectures on Art, III., §67. 
 
 " Modern Painters ^ I. Pt. I., Sect. I., ch. ii., §9.
 
 54 CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM 
 
 done on the absolute terms of art, that is not, before all 
 things and above all things, a work of positive excellence, 
 as judged by the laws of the special nrt to whose laws it is 
 amenable." And of poetry he writes: — 
 
 " The worth of a poem has properly nothing to do with 
 its moral meaning or design ; the praise (5f a Csesar as sung 
 by a Virgil, of a Stuart as sung by a Dryden, is preferable 
 to the most magnanimous invective against tyranny, which 
 love of country and of liberty could bring from a Bavius or 
 a Settle." 1 
 
 And again : — 
 
 " III all great poets, there must be an ardent harmony, a 
 heat of spiritual life, guiding without restraining the bodily 
 grace of motion, which shall give charm and power to their 
 least work ; sweetness that cannot be weak, and force that 
 will not be rough. There must be an instinct and resolution 
 of excellence which will allow no shortcoming or mal- 
 formation of thought or word, there must be also so natural 
 a sense of right as to make such a deformity or defect 
 impossible, and leave upon the work done no trace of any 
 effort to avoid or to achieve." ^ 
 
 This doctrine, although it can scarcely be maintained in 
 the extreme form in which it is here stated by Mr Swin- 
 burne, is valuable as emphasizing the independence of Art. 
 Although creative literature, and the arts in general, often 
 draw their inspiration from religion and patriotism, they must 
 not be identified with either the one or the other. And 
 again, although the test of truth requires that what the poet 
 writes should be in harmony with the general sense of 
 mankind, a poem or other work of creative literature must 
 not be condcmmed as inartistic, because the views which it 
 contains are repugnant to the individual critic, or contrary to 
 the received opinions of the majority of his fellow country- 
 men. It is very difficult, of course, to fix the line, so as to 
 distinguish between what is merely a divergence from a 
 temporary or local standard of sentiment or conduct, and 
 
 ^ Essays and Studies . 2 /^y^_
 
 CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM 55 
 
 what is really inconsistent with the principles of morality, 
 and can never, therefore, be in agreement with the general 
 sense of mankind. Owing to this natural difficulty, and a 
 failure to pay due respect to the independence of Art, charges 
 of *' obscurity " and " immorality " have been made almost 
 invariably against the works of great writers by their con- 
 temporaries. One or two examples will serve to illustrate 
 both the reality of the difficulty, and the nature of the 
 distinction between a divergence from conventional or national 
 sentiments, and a disagreement from the general sense of 
 mankind. Coleridge's *' Cristabel " appeared to the Edin- 
 burgh reviewer of that day to be *' a mixture of raving 
 and drivelling." Wordsworth's Ode on " Intimations of 
 Immortality " " . . . the most illegible and unintelligible 
 part " of the volume to which it belonged. Shelley was 
 advised to publish "a glossary of words" with his poems. 
 The writings of Southey and Wordsworth, now regarded 
 as our most spiritual poets, were originally regarded as 
 dangerous in their moral teaching, since the Lake School 
 found its inspiration in the writings of Rousseau, and was 
 tainted by his discontent at the organization of society. 
 Charles Kingsley's Teast was condemned by the Guardian. 
 *' It is the countenance the writer gives to the worst tendencies 
 of the day, and the manner in which he conceals loose 
 morality in a dress of high sounding and philosophic phrase- 
 ology which calls for plain and decided condemnation." 
 But these examples, which might be almost indefinitely 
 multiplied, will suffice to show that the student of creative 
 literature should hesitate before he pronounces an adverse 
 verdict on a new author on either of these grounds ; for not 
 only does the artistic merit of creative literature depend 
 upon the recognition of this freedom of art, but its moral 
 value, as one of the forces which make for progress, is also 
 involved. The idea is well expressed by Mrs Browning in 
 Aurora Leigh — a book which contains, as she tells us, her 
 '* highest convictions upon Life and Art." Of the poets, she 
 says that they are "the only truth-tellers now left to God : —
 
 56 CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM 
 
 "The only speakers of essential truth, 
 Opposed to relative, comparative. 
 And temporal truths : the only holders by 
 His sun-skirts, through conventional gray glooms, 
 The only teachers who instruct mankind 
 From just a shadow on a charnel-wall 
 To find man's veritable stature out 
 Erect, sublime, — the measure of a man." 
 
 To this appeal against the tyranny of convention, she adds 
 an equally impassioned appeal against the tyranny of the 
 professional critic. 
 
 " And whosoever writes good poetry, 
 Looks just to art. He does not write for you 
 Or me, — for London or for Edinburgh ; 
 He will not suffer the best critic known 
 To step into his sunshine of free thought 
 And self-absorbed conception and exact 
 An inch-long swerving of the holy lines. 
 If virtue done for popularity 
 Defiles like vice, can art, for praise or hire, 
 Still keep its splendor and remain pure art? 
 Eschew such serfdom. What the poet writes. 
 He writes ; mankind accepts it if it suits. 
 And that's success : if not, the poem's passed 
 From hand to hand, and yet from hand to hand, 
 Until the unborn snatch it, crying out 
 In pity on their fathers' being so dull. 
 And that's success too." 
 
 Nevertheless, important as this doctrine undoubtedly is, it 
 cannot be maintained in the extreme form in which Mr 
 Swinburne advances it, when he says, " No work of art has 
 any worth or life .... that is not .... a work of 
 positive excellence, as judged by the laws of the special art 
 to whose laws it is amenable." In the first place, obedience 
 to the laws of art is not alone sufficient to produce that sense 
 of delight in the ideal representation of nature and human 
 life which a work of art must produce, if it is to be accepted 
 by humanity. If we examine the actual conditions under 
 which this sense of delight is produced, we can find a psy- 
 chological basis for the opposite contention, that the supreme 
 test of merit is agreement with the general sense of mankind.
 
 CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM 57 
 
 The feeling of pleasure which arises from contact with a 
 work of art is not produced solely by the external stimulus 
 i.e., the picture or the poem, which appeals to the senses and 
 through them to the imagination, but it depends also upon the 
 effect caused by the re-action of the mind of the person so 
 affected. Now in this second factor — the mind of the 
 person as a whole — the social medium, or general body of 
 contemporary ideas, plays its part. Consequently, if the 
 artist wishes to please, he must present the materials which 
 form the subject of his work in a manner which will agree, 
 and not disagree, with the sentiments embodied in these con- 
 temporary ideas. Indeed, the argument may be carried 
 farther ; and it may be maintained that it is the adjustment 
 of the rules of the particular art to suit the requirements of 
 the human mind which constitutes the prime merit of the 
 artist. 
 
 Or, to approach the question from another side, in a 
 poem, or a picture, or a musical composition, there is one 
 aspect which appeals solely or mainly to persons who are 
 trained in the particular art, while there is another which 
 appeals to all and every one of ordinary intelligence. These 
 latter must by the nature of things be more numerous than 
 the former : and although it would be absurd to consult their 
 opinion in matters of purely technical importance, yet in the 
 question of the general effect of the particular work of art 
 they must be consulted ; since the poem or picture, as the 
 case may be, is not produced for poets and artists solely, but 
 for all the world. That the public in general do claim and 
 exercise the right of deciding on the worth of a work of 
 art, and do in fact pronounce the verdict of success or failure, 
 is a matter of common knowledge. Should not, therefore, 
 the faculty of taste or correct judgment which is the property 
 not of a particular class or profession, but generally of all in- 
 telligent persons, be the true test, and not the rules of the 
 specific art which are known only to the few ? It is quite 
 true that this "taste'' will vary from one age to another, 
 and will differ in different societies, just as the standard of
 
 58 CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM 
 
 morality varies ; but even allowing for these variations there 
 still remains a sufficient basis of agreement to constitute a 
 faculty of taste of permanent validity. If we accept the 
 existence of this faculty of taste, and maintain that " agree- 
 ment with the general sense of mankind," is the true test, then 
 the effect of a work of art on the world in general must be 
 considered, and its influence for good or bad becomes a 
 factor which cannot be overlooked. 
 
 Here we come upon the main drift of Mr Ruskin's 
 teaching ; " every principle of painting which I have stated," 
 he says in Modern Painters^ " is traced to some vital or 
 spiritual fact ; and in my works on architecture the preference 
 accorded finally to one school over another, is founded on a 
 comparison of their influences on the life of the workmen — 
 a question by all other writers on the subject of architecture 
 wholly forgotten or despised." According to Mr Ruskin, 
 then, the efl^ect of a work of art for good or bad is not only 
 a factor in its excellence, but a factor of supreme importance ; 
 and this conviction is the foundation upon which he, like 
 Plato, has based his whole theory of art. And so he decides 
 with reference to each branch of the arts. In painting, " no 
 vain or selfish person can possibly paint, in the noble sense of 
 the word. . . . Mere cleverness or special gift never made 
 an artist." In architecture, the Gothic style is adjudged to 
 be the best on the same grounds. "In one point of view, 
 Gothic is not only the best but the only rational architecture, 
 as being that which can fit itself most easily to all services, 
 vulgar or noble. Undefined in its slope of roof, height of 
 shaft, breadth of arch, or disposition of ground plan, it can 
 shrink into a turret, expand into a hall, coil into a staircase, 
 or spring into a spire, with undegraded grace, and unex- 
 hausted energy. . . ." And as we have seen, in his opinion 
 the greatest artist is the artist "who has embodied in the 
 sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas." 
 Moreover, he applies this principle no less rigorously to 
 individuals. In his lecture on the reaHstic school of paint- 
 ing, although he acknowledges Rossetti as " the chief intel-
 
 CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM 59 
 
 lectual force in the establishment of the modern Romantic 
 School in England," yet he decides that Holman Hunt is, 
 " beyond calculation greater, beyond comparison happier, 
 than Rossetti," because of his faith in the truths of the 
 Christian religion. " To Rossetti, the old and new Testa- 
 ments were only the greatest poems he knew ; and he painted 
 scenes in them, with no more actual belief in their relation 
 to the present life and business of men, than he gave also 
 to the 'Morte d' Arthur ' and the *Vita Nuova.' But to 
 Holman Hunt the story of the New Testament, when once 
 his mind entirely fastened on it, became what it was to an old 
 puritan or an old catholic of true blood, — not merely a 
 reality, not merely the greatest of realities, but the only 
 reality. So absolutely . . . that in all subjects which fall 
 short in the religious element his power also is shortened, and 
 he does those things worst which are easiest to other men."^ 
 And so we have a statement from Mr Ruskin of the 
 relations of morals and art which is precisely opposite to that 
 of Mr Swinburne "... the praise of a Caesar as sung by 
 a Virgil, of a Stuart as sung by a Dryden, is preferable to the 
 most magnanimous invective against tyranny which love of 
 country and of liberty " could inspire. Nevertheless it is 
 significant of the difficulty of the subject that neither of these 
 masters of criticism are perfectly consistent. When Mr 
 Ruskin writes of the faculty of the imagination, he declares, 
 in terms scarcely less definite than those of Mr Swinburne, 
 that this, the distinctive faculty of the artist being, is supreme, 
 and the subject matter of secondary importance. " There is 
 no reasoning in it ; it works not by Algebra nor by integral 
 Calculus ; it is a piercing, pholas-like, mind's tongue, that 
 works and tastes into the very rock-heart ; no matter what 
 be the subject submitted to it, substance or spirit. . . . 
 Every great conception of poet or painter is held and treated 
 by this faculty." ^ While Mr Swinburne, when he comes 
 to criticise a special poem, finds the blemish to consist in 
 certain social and moral views which offend him ; so he 
 
 ^ Lectures on Art II. p. 9. 2 J[^odern Painters.
 
 6o THE EXERCISE OF 
 
 writes of the " passing perversities of Christianized Socialism 
 or bastard Cassarism, which disfigure and diminish the pure 
 proportions and noble charm of Aurora Leigh. ^^ ^ 
 
 Both views embody a truth, but not the truth. Mr 
 Ruskin's test of conveying " the greatest number of the 
 greatest ideas " is appropriate, when applied to a work of 
 art in its external or objective aspect — the aspect in which 
 art as a whole is regarded as being " the interpretation or 
 expression of moral beauty by the assistance of physical 
 beauty " : ^ but it fails if it is applied to a work of art in its 
 internal or subjective aspect — the aspect in which a work of 
 art appears as the expression of the artist's mind, as a *' con- 
 ception converted into a creation." ^ Mr Swinburne's test 
 of " obedience to the rules of the specific art " is appropriate 
 only when applied to a work of art in its external aspect. In 
 forming his conception the artist should be guided by the 
 test of " great ideas " ; in executing his conception he must 
 be guided by the "rules of art." He, on the one hand, can 
 never be, by the nature of things, so independent of the mass 
 of mankind, as to make artistic excellence his sole object ; 
 on the other, moral worth, however distinctive, can never of 
 itself suffice to endow his work with the characteristic charm 
 of art. 
 
 Chapter VII 
 The Bxercise of Judgment in Literature 
 
 The preceding chapters have contained examples of the 
 points of view from which certain great thinkers, ancient 
 and modern, have looked at literature. These examples 
 show us, to some extent at least, what are the main qualities 
 which criticism teaches us to admire in works already ac- 
 cepted as part of the literary heritage of mankind, and to 
 look for in new works which have not yet won this accept- 
 ance. 
 
 ^ Study of Victor Hugo. "^ Cousin. • Idem.
 
 JUDGMENT IN LITERATURE 6i 
 
 Broadly speaking, the development of criticism, as shown 
 by a comparison of the writings of critics in different ages, 
 does not consist so much in the recognition of new qualities 
 as in the more complete comprehension, and the more exact 
 definition, of qualities recognized from the very first : and 
 consequently in the application of new and more appropriate 
 tests by which these essential qualities can be detected. As 
 we have already noticed, the three characteristic qualities of 
 literature as a whole are matter, manner, and the quality of 
 giving pleasure. By matter is meant the quality of contain- 
 ing " thought," or contributing to the subjective outlook 
 upon the world ; by manner, the quality of presenting this 
 " thought " by the method appropriate to the special form 
 of literature to which the given work belongs; while, if 
 a work of literature is to give pleasure, we know that it 
 must be possessed of the characteristic power of a work of 
 art, that is to say, it must " appeal to our imagination," or 
 produce in us that *' intimate sense of things " which makes 
 poetic truth more convincing — more easily assimilated by the 
 mind — than scientific truth. 
 
 Now all of these qualities were discerned from the first 
 moment when men began to regard literature (and the arts) 
 as a separate and distinct field for the exercise of the higher 
 faculties. Plato, for example, was conscious of the exist- 
 ence of all of these qualities, and he selected the conveying 
 of thought, and thought of the best kind, as the most essential 
 and commanding quality of literature as a whole. But the 
 test by which he proposed to measure the existence of this 
 quality was the degree in which the representations of 
 creative literature approached that naked description of reality 
 which is to be found in those forms of literature in which 
 an element of creation does not enter. In other words he 
 proposed to test the truth of a representation by a test which 
 is applicable only to an imhat'ton. Or, as Aristotle showed, 
 he did not distinguish between the aspects of reality which 
 the poet sought to represent and those which the historian 
 sought to represent — between the truth of feeling and the
 
 62 THE EXERCISE OF 
 
 truth of reason. Aristotle again, perceiving that works of 
 creative literature conveyed information to the mind in a 
 different way from that in which works of history or phil- 
 osophy did, thought that the best way of measuring this 
 characteristic quality was to observe the different forms in 
 which the poetic compositions of recognized merit were com- 
 posed. But we now take it for granted that a writer of 
 fiction, either in verse or prose, will adopt the appropriate 
 and necessary form of composition, and we look mainly, 
 though not entirely, at the effect which he has produced by 
 his composition as a whole ; and, if we find that his creation 
 possesses the essential quality of appealing to the imagina- 
 tion, we do not trouble ourselves to consider whether in 
 attaining this supreme purpose he has moulded his materials 
 into the precise form of any previously existing model. 
 
 If we call the canons which concern such lesser elements 
 as construction of plot, metre, language or diction, and the 
 rest "rules," and those which concern these essential 
 qualities "principles," and thus make a distinction between 
 " rules " and "principles," we can express the change 
 which has taken place in the spirit of criticism by saying 
 that criticism tends in an increasing degree to disregard 
 rules, and to concentrate its attention upon principles. For 
 whereas the application of these rules reveals excellences or 
 defects which vary in importance from one epoch to another, 
 the principles are concerned with qualities of universal im- 
 portance — that is to say with qualities which are connected 
 with some elementary characteristic of the mind of man. For 
 the appreciation of such qualities is not subject to change 
 under the shifting conditions of human life. The validity 
 of criticism, therefore, depends upon the capacity to distin- 
 guish between the permanent elements which are covered 
 by these principles, and the varying elements which are 
 covered by these rules. 
 
 The effect of this change is shown in the manner in which 
 the contemporary critic approaches the examination both of 
 works of established reputation and of those new works,
 
 JUDGMENT IN LITERATURE 63 
 
 the value of which is as yet undetermined. If he concerns 
 himself with the former he does not seek to estimate so 
 much as to interpret. He does not search for defects or 
 failures — or if he does, it is with a view of bringing the 
 contrasting merits into stronger relief — but he is rather busied 
 with the discovery and explanation of the qualities revealed 
 by the application of tests based upon a recognition of 
 these principles. He is concerned more with the reader 
 than the author ; for his chief aim is to make us understand 
 the special conditions of the author's social and material 
 environment, and of his personal endowment, and to show 
 how these determining conditions are reflected in the 
 character of his work. In this way, by putting us in 
 possession of information which enables us to understand 
 the author's motives and points of view, the critic enables 
 us to estimate for ourselves. In a word, criticism as applied 
 to works of this class, has become the interpretation of 
 literature. In approaching the examination of contemporary 
 works, the critic has a more difficult task. He can at 
 best only give a provisionary verdict ; but for the formation 
 of this verdict he relies upon tests which are intended to 
 measure the characteristic merits of matter, manner, and 
 the appeal to the imagination, — and puts on one side the 
 rules which deal with technical and less permanent qualities. 
 Of course, there is no question here of the necessity of 
 observing the recognized rules of grammar and prosody. 
 In general, the compositions in which such rules are 
 violated would not come under the category of literature, 
 and would not, therefore, demand the attention of the critic. 
 I say "in general," because it must be remembered that 
 these rules are themselves based upon the observed practice 
 of great writers ; and that the source from which they 
 derive their validity is literary usage. A certain latitude, 
 therefore, must be observed in applying them, for the 
 literary usage which made them, can also extend them ; 
 and moreover the spirit of the rule may be obeyed when 
 its letter is broken. With this exception, contemporary
 
 64 THE EXERCISE OF 
 
 criticism tends more and more to base its tentative judgments 
 of new works upon such principles, as are intended to reveal 
 the presence or absence of those qualities which past ex- 
 perience has taught us to recognize and admire in previous 
 efforts of human genius. And as we have to read con- 
 temporary literature as well as the masterpieces, a knowledge 
 of these principles is necessary to enable us to exercise for 
 ourselves a certain judgment in the selection and appreciation 
 of the books which are every day being offered for our 
 consideration. Such contemporary books have a value and 
 attractiveness of their own, which is independent of their 
 literary merit, strictly so-called. They are instinct with 
 the movement of the life around us ; they reflect and even 
 discuss questions, the solution of which has an immediate 
 interest for each and all of us ; they are vitalized, at any 
 rate for the moment, by the mere fact that they have come 
 straight from the brain of a neighbour. Moreover, unless 
 it be supposed that the fountain of English literature is being 
 suddenly dried up, it is among these contemporary works of 
 literature that we must look for the masterpieces of the 
 future. 
 
 Let us see if we can gather up what we have already 
 learnt about these principles into a statement sufficiently 
 clear to be of practical value in guiding us to form a judg- 
 ment upon books. 
 
 The first principle — first in order of historic evolution 
 and first in importance — is the principle of truth. The 
 characteristic quality, which this principle leads us to expect 
 and require in a work of literature, is the essential correspond- 
 ence between the body of information which the work conveys 
 to our minds and the external realities, or facts of life, of 
 which it treats. This is the principle of the highest validity, 
 for it serves to test the most important of all the qualities 
 by virtue of which a work of art or literature is felt to be 
 in agreement with the general sense of mankind, and, there- 
 fore, accepted as a permanent contribution to the intellectual 
 heritage of man. To contribute a new thought to the
 
 JUDGMENT IN LITERATURE 65 
 
 world is the highest merit of a work of literature in general, 
 and to contribute this thought in the delightful manner which 
 arises from the appeal to the imagination, is the highest 
 merit of a work of creative literature. Truth, then, is the 
 final test of merit in literature : for if we had to choose 
 between the sacrifice of matter or of manner, we should 
 prefer to lose the latter. For a work which has no corres- 
 pondence with the facts of life — or which violates any of 
 the universal and fundamental beliefs of mankind — is worth- 
 less, however great its purely artistic qualities may be. 
 
 But the truth which is required in literature is " essential " 
 truth. That is to say, the nature of the correspondence 
 between the matter of the book and the reality to which it 
 refers will vary in the different forms of literature. And in 
 order to ascertain the presence of this correspondence the 
 test of truth must be applied in the varying degrees appro- 
 priate to the several forms. The truth which we expect 
 from the philosopher, the historian, or the biographer, is the 
 actual fact, the " whole truth and nothing but the truth " 
 of a witness giving evidence in a court of law, an entire 
 statement of the necessary facts which is obscured neither 
 by a suppressio vert nor a suggest'to falsi. Perfect candour 
 in the presentation of the sources of information, perfect 
 accuracy in dates, figures, and in the sequence of events 
 or the marshalling of facts, absolute impartiality of opinion 
 where there is a conflict of evidence. From the essayist, 
 the descriptive writer, and the traveller, we require a less 
 rigorous reproduction of the facts which form the foundation 
 of his opinions, or of his pictures of men and places. For 
 here the personal element is more pronounced, and the 
 process of idealization converts his rendering of the facts 
 into representations rather than mere descriptions. That is 
 to say, he tells us not so much what he saw or learnt, 
 but the thoughts and feelings which the scenes of natural 
 objects, or his contact with other men, produced in his mind. 
 And it may well be that he can give us a more real, and 
 therefore more truthful picture of men and manners, and
 
 66 THE EXERCISE OF 
 
 even of natural scenery, by a free use of the idealistic method 
 of art ; by selecting certain features for prominent treatment, 
 by subordinating, or even omitting, details which he considers 
 likely to weaken the total effect which he desires to produce 
 in our minds. 
 
 Again, there is the truth which we require in creative 
 literature, whether fiction or poetry. This is the truth of 
 art, for the character and events of the poet and novelist 
 are typical, not actual. The scenes which the poet (or 
 novelist) describes, and the characters which he draws, have 
 no existing originals. The originals are the creations of 
 his mind, as well as the representations, and the proper truth 
 which belongs to fiction is the truth of idea ; that is to say, 
 the generalized experience of the individual author must 
 corresjiond to the generalized experience of the community 
 or of the race. To take exarnples, ** Middlemarch " is not 
 Nuneaton, nor is " Maggie Tulliver " Mary Ann Evans 
 in her girlhood ; but if we wanted to get an idea of what 
 life in a Midland town was like, or an idea of the sort of 
 girl tliat "George Eliot" must have been, where could 
 we get them better than by reading the novels in which the 
 accounts of Middlemarch and of Maggie Tulliver respectively 
 occur ? Here are examples of the generalized experience 
 of an individual producing the truth of idea. For no one 
 could fail to recognize the essential correspondence between 
 the descriptions and characters of " George Eliot," and 
 the generalized realities and facts, upon which they are 
 based. Even higher and more permanent is the essential 
 truth of those creations which are based upon a mingling 
 of personal experience and of that universal experience which 
 is embodied in the spiritual traditions of the race. If we 
 wish to " get an idea " of the supreme devotion which is 
 produced by the passion of love, we do not think of the 
 engagement and marriage of one of our acquaintances, but of 
 the story of " Romeo and Juliet " ; our idea of devotion to 
 a woman's ideal of duty is based upon the conduct of the 
 Antigone of Sophocles ; our idea of knightly duty upon the
 
 JUDGMENT IN LITERATURE 67 
 
 Arthur of the " Idylls of the King." The truth of idea 
 which is thus attained in the works of the great poetic 
 masters is in a certain sense superior to the truth of history 
 or biography, or of any mere transcript from reality. Its 
 superiority is due to the fact that the conceptions which 
 it embodies are based upon the generalized experience of 
 more than one age, and of more than one country ; that, 
 in fact, it epitomizes the experience of the race. And so, 
 as Aristotle says, "poetry has a wider truth and a higher 
 aim than history ; for poetry deals rather with the universal, 
 history with the particular." Or it becomes, as Wordsworth 
 says, *' the breath and finer spirit of knowledge." 
 
 This truth of idea which we require in a work of creative 
 literature, whether in prose or verse, is in its essence an agree- 
 ment between the opinions and feelings of the poet or novelist 
 and the general sense of mankind. And since the general 
 sense of mankind on matters of the highest importance is 
 embodied in the code of social laws, the observance of which 
 is called "morality," it follows that the connection between 
 the highest and best creative work and morality is by no 
 means an artificial connection. The morality of one country 
 or of one society differs in certain respects from that of 
 another ; the morality of the West is markedly different from 
 the morality of the East : but notwithstanding these differences 
 there are certain principles which — as principles — are uni- 
 versally accepted by all civilized societies. A novel or poem 
 which represents that an immoral man (in this sense) is 
 happier than a moral man, does not possess the truth of idea 
 which is the proper truth of creative literature; for the 
 experience which the author has embodied in his creation 
 does not correspond with the generalized experience of the 
 race as expressed in the laws of morality. Such works, 
 therefore, are condemned by an application of this principle 
 of truth. As morality is the aggregate experience of a given 
 society, or of society in general, the matter of books which 
 are in conflict with morality is ex hypothesi condemned by 
 this supreme test of truth.
 
 68 THE EXERCISE OF 
 
 Secondly, there is the principle of symmetry. It is the 
 adaptation of the external qualities of the given work to the 
 special purpose which it is intended to achieve. As applied 
 to the arts in general it enjoins and requires that the artist 
 should in each case both select such attributes of reality as 
 can be best reproduced by the means at the disposal of his 
 special art, and also confine himself to the employment of 
 these appropriate means in reproducing these aspects. From 
 this external point of view, symmetry is resolved into 
 *' composition," or the right selection and the right disposi- 
 tion of materials. As applied to literature, the principle has 
 a twofold significance. In the first place, it applies to 
 literature as a whole ; in the second, in addition to this 
 general application, it applies in a special sense to creative 
 literature where the method of artistic representation is 
 employed. In the first case, it requires that the external 
 qualities of literary compositions, i.e., length of composition 
 and /orm of composition (prose or verse, narrative, dialogue, 
 or union of narrative and dialogue), should be suitable to the 
 subject matter of which these compositions severally treat. 
 That is a comparatively simple and obvious requirement: 
 for, — to take two extreme instances — a historian, having a 
 great mass of facts to set out, would naturally choose the 
 narrative form, and write in easy prose unfettered by metre, 
 or by any structural limitation of length ; while the poet, 
 when he wishes to give expression to a single thought, just 
 as naturally selects a rigidly limited poetic form, such as the 
 sonnet, where he can endow a dozen lines with so much 
 beauty of literary workmanship that his single thought shines 
 like a jewel in an exquisite setting. In this sense, the 
 principle of symmetry applies to all literature, however 
 humble its purpose or form may be. Even a manual of 
 history or science requires to be written with a certain 
 regard for arrangement ; that is to say, the subject should be 
 presented as a whole, the facts must be marshalled in their 
 due order, what is essential must be brought into prominence, 
 what is merely accessory must be kept in due subordination.
 
 JUDGMENT IN LITERATURE 69 
 
 In the second sense the princljJe of symmetry applies to 
 creative literature only, since such literature alone employs the 
 method of art in its representations of reality. Here the 
 principle enjoins not merely that the given work should be 
 composed in a manner consistent with the external require- 
 ments of the form of poetic literature to which it belongs, but 
 that the limitations imposed upon the artist by the medium 
 in which his creations are expressed should be respected. 
 This medium is, briefly, word-symbols, written or spoken, 
 and capable of expressing the attribute of time by the sequence 
 in which they are presented to eye or ear. Thus under- 
 stood, the principle of symmetry requires that the artist in 
 words should select for representation certain definite aspects 
 of reality, and not all reality. If therefore a poetic composi- 
 tion is to possess the quality of symmetry, it must, first, be 
 limited as a whole to the presentation of these appropriate 
 aspects of the general mass of the reality — objective or sub- 
 jective — on which it is based, and, second, in the several 
 elements of dialogue, narrative, description, and soliloquy, the 
 medium of words must be used only to represent such aspects 
 in the respective objects, actions, states of mind, or scenes of 
 material reality to which these elements severally refer, as can 
 be appropriately reproduced by words regarded not as a means 
 of conveying thought, but as a means of presenting mental 
 pictures — that is of appealing to the imagination. The rules 
 which limit and control the artist in words in the use of his 
 medium have been sketched in outline by Aristotle in the 
 Poetics, and this outline has been filled in with detail by the 
 fuller researches of Lessing in his study of the respective 
 methods of the contrasting arts of the " eye " and " ear." As 
 I have already pointed out this principle is made by Aristotle 
 the chief measure of the merit of creative literature: and in 
 taking the tragedy as the most highly developed form of 
 such literature, he naturally insists upon the doctrine of the 
 supremacy of the plot. For in the stage play, and to a 
 scarcely less degree in the novel, it is in the construction of 
 the plot that the widest scope is given to the artist in words
 
 70 THE EXERCISE OF 
 
 for the manifestation of both excellence and deficiency of com- 
 position. And so he writes from this standpoint of symmetry, 
 that the plot is ** the central principle and soul, so to speak, 
 of tragedy; character is second in importance." And with 
 Aristotle the construction of the plot includes both the 
 selection of suitable materials, and the effective arrangement 
 of these materials by investing the central action with a dis- 
 tinctive prominence, and by keeping the "episodes" in due 
 subordination to this central action, while at the same time 
 they are directly ancillary to it. But whereas Aristotle deals 
 with the symmetry, or correct disposition, of the work as a 
 whole, Lessing tells us how to apply the principle to its 
 separate elements : not how to compose a plot, but how to 
 compose a description of a person, an object, an action, or 
 a scene. Some of the most striking results of Lessing's 
 inquiry have been already set out in Chapter V, and they 
 need not, therefore, be repeated here. They are summed up 
 in Mr Meredith's notable sentence, " The art of the pen is 
 to rouse the inward vision . . . because our flying minds 
 cannot contain a protracted description. The Shakespearian, 
 the Dantesque [pictures], are in a line, two at most." But 
 it will be useful to add the account of character drawing 
 which Sir Walter Besant gives in his " Art of Fiction." 
 It is written in a practical spirit and relates primarily to 
 prose fiction. 
 
 " As for the methods of conveying a clear understanding 
 of a character, they are many. The first and the easiest is 
 to make it clear by reason of some mannerism or personal 
 peculiarity, some trick of speech or of carriage. This is the 
 worst, as may generally be said of the easiest way. Another 
 easy method is to describe your character at length. This 
 also is a bad, because a tedious, method. If, however, you 
 read a page or two of any good writer, you will discover that 
 he first makes a character intelligible by a few words, and 
 then allows him to reveal himcclf in action and dialogue. 
 On the other hand, nothing is more inartistic than to be 
 constantly calling attention in a dialogue to a gesture or a
 
 JUDGMENT IN LITERATURE 71 
 
 look, to laughter or to tears. The situation generally re- 
 quires no such explanation : in some well-known scenes 
 which I could quote, there is not a single word to emphasize 
 or explain the attitude, manner, and look of the speakers, 
 yet they are as intelligible as if they were written down and 
 described. That is the highest art which carries the reader 
 along, and makes him see without being told, the changing 
 expressions, the gestures of the speakers, and hear the 
 varying tones of their voices. It is as if one should close 
 one's eyes at the theatre, and yet continue to see the actors 
 on the stage as well as hear their voices. The only writer 
 who can do this is he who makes his characters intelligible 
 from the very outset, causes them first to stand before the 
 reader in clear outline, and then with every additional line 
 brings out the figure, fills up the face, and makes his creatures 
 grow from the simple outline more and more to the perfect 
 and rounded figure." 
 
 Only such works, therefore, as are possessed of this quality 
 of symmetry — that is to say, in which the materials are so 
 disposed and arranged both in the mass and in detail as to 
 catch the "flying mind" — can appeal to the imagination. 
 And so the test of symmetry is indirectly a means by which 
 the presence of this dominant artistic quality can be dis- 
 covered and measured in a work of literature. 
 
 Thirdly there is the principle of idealization. This is a 
 principle which applies only to creative literature, that is to 
 say to such works of literature as are also works of art ; 
 which, therefore, must possess that characteristic quality of a 
 work of art which we call from a subjective point of view, 
 " to give pleasure," and from an objective point of view, 
 " beauty." As applied to creative literature this principle 
 enjoins and requires not merely that the mental aspect of 
 reality should be presented by the author, but that a selection 
 from this mental aspect of reality should first be made, and 
 that the selection so made should exclude such matter as 
 affects unpleasantly the aesthetic consciousness of the reader. 
 " Whatever feelings," Victor Cousin writes, *' art proposes
 
 72 THE EXERCISE OF 
 
 to excite in us, they ought always to be restrained and 
 governed by the feehng of" beauty. If it produces only pity 
 or terror beyond a certain limit, above all physical pity or 
 terror, it revolts, it ceases to charm ; it misses its proper 
 effect, for an effect which is foreign to it and vulgar. '* It 
 is only by reference to this principle that we can attach a 
 definite significance to the terms "realism" and "realistic'* 
 as applied to works of creative literature (and of art in 
 general). No work of creative literature can be "realistic" 
 in the sense that the author has reproduced reality and not 
 the mental aspect of reality : for if the author had attempted 
 to do this his composition would not be a work of creative 
 literature at all. If it is used as a term of reproach, the 
 word can only be properly applied to the work of an author 
 who has so far neglected to select his material — to idealize 
 in fact — that his work has lost the quality of giving pleasure. 
 As, however, this quality of giving pleasure obviously de- 
 pends upon the nature and character of the individual reader, 
 as much as on the nature and character of the book, the 
 term cannot be used with any precision unless we credit the 
 individual whom the given work fails to please with an 
 average degree of artistic and moral perception. And, 
 since the latter — moral perception — is the more commonly 
 developed, the term has come to bear a significance which is 
 almost equivalent to *' immoral," or repugnant to the general 
 sense of mankind. But in thus using the term it is necessary 
 not to forget that its original and wider significance is 
 different. In its wider significance it characterizes any work 
 of literature (or art) in which the author (or artist) has 
 reproduced any subject, or any aspect of a subject, which 
 lessens or removes that "beauty" by virtue of which a work 
 of art gives pleasure. 
 
 The most prominent application of the principle of idealiza- 
 tion is the doctrine of " poetic justice." According to this 
 doctrine the plot of a work of creative literature should, with 
 the sole exception of the tragedy, "end happily," and so 
 give expression to the deeply rooted sentiment of optimism,
 
 JUDGMENT IN LITERATURE 73 
 
 which results from the belief that the universe is governed 
 and controlled by an all-powerful and all-wise Being. In a 
 clear and splendid statement of the principle of idealization as 
 applied to creative literature, Bacon gives us the philosophic 
 basis upon which this doctrine — the propounding of successes 
 and issues of actions more just in retribution and more in 
 accordance with divine Providence — rests. 
 
 " Poetry ... is nothing else but Feigned History, which 
 may be styled as well in prose as in verse. The use of this 
 feigned history hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction 
 to the mind of men in those points wherein the nature of 
 things doth deny it ; the world being in proportion inferior 
 to the soul ; by reason whereof there is, agreeable to the spirit 
 of man, a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and 
 a more absolute variety, than can be found in the nature of 
 things. Therefore, because the acts and events of true 
 history have not that magnitude which satisfyeth the mind of 
 man, poetry feigneth acts and events greater and more 
 heroical. Because history propoundeth the successes and 
 issues of action not so agreeable to the merits of virtue and 
 vice, therefore poesy feigns them more just in retribution and 
 more according to revealed providence. Because true history 
 representeth actions and events more ordinary and less inter- 
 changed, therefore poesy endureth them with more rareness, 
 and more unexpected and alternative variations. So as it 
 appeareth that poesy serveth and conferrcth to magnanimity, 
 morality, and to delectation. And therefore it was ever 
 thought to have some participation of divineness, because it 
 doth raise and erect the mind by submitting the shows of 
 things to the desires of the mind, whereas reason doth buckle 
 and bow the mind into the nature of things. And we see 
 that by these insinuations and congruities with man's nature 
 and pleasure, joined also with the agreement and consort it 
 hath with music, it hath had access and estimation in rude 
 times and barbarous regions, where other learning stood 
 excluded. "1 
 
 ^ Advancement of Learning, Book II, iv. i-2.
 
 74 THE EXERCISE OF 
 
 It will be noticed that the tragedy is excepted from that 
 appHcation of the doctrine of poetic justice, which justifies, 
 and, in general, requires that the plot of a work of creative 
 literature should be so constructed as to finally convey a 
 sense of satisfaction to the mind. The reason is this. The 
 tragedy is a special form of creative literature which depends 
 for its effect mainly, though not entirely, upon pathos, or the 
 presentation of human suffering in an acute form. Here the 
 poetic representation is intended to work upon the passions 
 of "fear and pity,*' to use the terms of Aristotle's definition, 
 and the most powerful means by which this effect can be 
 achieved is to so construct the plot that it ends in a 
 ** disaster." For it is by the presentation of a final picture 
 of universal gloom, into which no ray of hope is allowed to 
 penetrate, that the dramatic artist produces that artificial ex- 
 citation of the emotions of the spectator, to which the special 
 and humanizing effect of tragedy is due. In other words, 
 whereas the termination of the plot in a disaster is essential 
 to tragedy, it is merely incidental to any other form of 
 creative literature : and it is only in such poems or novels 
 as are designedly tragic in motive that the final disaster is 
 necessary. In all others — that is in the general mass of 
 fictions in prose or verse — the natural optimism of healthy 
 humanity can be legitimately satisfied. Indeed, the effect of 
 artistic beauty which belongs to creative literature is in part 
 directly due to this characteristic application of the principle 
 of idealization.! 
 
 There is, however, a limit to idealization. The principle 
 is itself controlled by the operation of the test of truth, which 
 is the supreme and final test of merit in literature whether 
 creative or non-creative. But it is necessary in estimating the 
 effect of this limit upon creative literature, to remember that 
 1 Since writing the above it has been pointed out to me that 
 there was a further and non-artistic reason for the prominence of 
 the "disaster" in the plot of tragedy. The religious motive 
 of sacrifice is present in the Greek tragedy ; and where sacrifice or 
 atonement must be made for sin, even the innocent must be in- 
 volved in disaster.
 
 JUDGMENT IN LITERATURE 75 
 
 the truth of creative literature is the truth of idea, not the 
 truth of logic. Realistic treatment, — that is, realism in the 
 acquired sense of the presentation of subjects, or aspects of 
 subjects, repugnant to the moral sense — is sometimes defended 
 on the ground of its superior truth. Art, it is said, has 
 outgrown the stage of the fairy-tale : adult art should present 
 things as they really are. But this argument admits of a 
 very definite answer. The kind of truth which is here 
 required is not the kind of truth that a work of art can 
 yield. For this kind of truth — the truth of science — we 
 must go not to a novel, or a poem, but to a treatise on 
 politics or economics — to the blue-book or the criminal 
 reports. Nevertheless, there is a real and genuine sense in 
 which the principle of truth limits the application of the 
 principle of idealization. When the poet or novelist re- 
 presents his character as surrounded by the conditions of 
 real life, and, at the same time, as able to act ideally, his 
 presentation is deficient in truth. For the idea so presented 
 is essentially false. Similarly, if he represents his men and 
 women as acting as they would in real life, while the con- 
 ditions by which they are surrounded are plainly ideal, the 
 idea which he presents is one which has no correspondence 
 with reality. Such works have neither the truth of science 
 nor the truth of art. What is ideal is false because it is 
 made to look as though it were real, what is real is false 
 because it is offered to the reader in the form of the ideal. 
 In short, the whole picture of life is distorted. A work of 
 creative literature cannot be made to present the facts of life 
 in the sense in which these facts are presented in history, 
 biography, or in a scientific or philosophic treatise: if the 
 attempt is made, such a work ceases ipso facto to be 
 *' creative," and it loses forthwith the characteristic beauty 
 of a work of art. On the other hand the principle of truth 
 controls the application of the idealizing process in two 
 ways. It requires that the idealization shall be consistently 
 applied throughout — otherwise the work will convey a dis- 
 torted and therefore untruthful idea of the realities upon
 
 76 THE EXERCISE OF 
 
 which it is based ; and it requires that the idealization shall 
 be itself guided by that wide and yet exact knowledge of 
 men and things which is expressed by the term "philosophy." 
 If there is no such basis of wide and exact knowledge to 
 guide the artist in the formation of his mental originals, the 
 characters and scenes which he presents will bear no re- 
 semblance to the realities which these mental originals 
 are intended to interpret and explain. The effect of such 
 idealization, uncontrolled by the principle of truth, is to be 
 observed especially in prose-fiction. In the words of Mr 
 Meredith, the art of Fiction under this influence has become 
 *' a pasture of idiots, a method for idiotizing the entire 
 population." The ideal of character which it presents is a 
 "flattering familiar," which has become "the most dangerous 
 of delusions." It is only when the novelist has learnt to 
 control his idealizations by the principle of truth, to mould 
 his mental originals into the forms in which philosophy 
 teaches him to express the essential facts of life, that the art 
 "now neither blushless infant nor executive man," can attain 
 its full stature. And he exhibits with perfect felicity the 
 limit to idealization which is set by the principle of truth in 
 respect of that dominant form of creative literature of which 
 he is the greatest living master. 
 
 "We can then," he says, "be veraciously historical, 
 honestly transcriptive. Rose-pink and dirty drab will alike 
 have passed away. Philosophy is the foe of both, and 
 their silly cancelling contest, perpetually renewed in a shuffle 
 of extremes, as it always is where a phantom falseness reigns, 
 will no longer baffle the contemplation of natural flesh, 
 smother no longer the soul issuing out of our incessant strife. 
 Philosophy bids us see that we are not so pretty as rose- 
 pink, not so repulsive as dirty drab ; and that, instead of 
 everlastingly shifting those barren aspects, the sight of 
 ourselves is wholesome, bearable, fructifying, finally a 
 delight." ^ But the knowledge of the qualities which con- 
 tribute to excellence in literature, and of the principles which 
 
 ^ Diana of the Crossioays.
 
 JUDGMENT IN LITERATURE -J-] 
 
 alike require their presence and control the method of their 
 production, is not in itself sufficient to enable us to exercise 
 a correct judgment, to recognize merit and detect deficiency 
 in works of literature. In order to do this we require 
 something further : we must know how to apply these 
 principles to the works we read. Truth is the test which 
 reveals excellence of matter, symmetry is the test which 
 reveals excellence of manner, beauty is the test which reveals 
 the due exercise of the power of idealization. But how 
 can we apply these several tests to any given work ? There 
 is only one answer that can be given, and it has been given 
 more than once. The method by which these tests, and 
 the principles which support them, can be applied is com- 
 par'tson. Assume that we know not merely that we should 
 look for truth in any given work, but also the sort of truth 
 for which we should look — that is to say, the truth of logic, 
 if the work be non-creative, the truth of art, if it be creative, 
 — if, then, we would ascertain the extent to which the 
 work in question possesses this quality, we must compare it 
 with a work of recognized merit — a masterpiece, or a 
 *' classic " as we say — in the same department of literature. 
 Gradually by the study of the best work which has been 
 produced in the several departments of literature, our minds 
 will become so familiarized with the several and characteristic 
 excellences of each, that we shall almost instinctively welcome 
 their presence, and resent their absence. Literary taste, 
 Addison says, is the faculty " which discerns the beauties 
 of an author with pleasure and the imperfections with dislike. 
 If a man would know whether he is possessed of this faculty, 
 I would have him read over the celebrated works of 
 Antiquity which have stood the test of so many different 
 ages and countries." ^ And Arnold gives the same advice. 
 If we are to learn to detect the distinctive accent of poetry 
 of the highest class, the high seriousness of absolute sincerity, 
 we must fill our minds with the beauty and the music of the 
 masters — Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton. We must 
 
 1 Spectator^ No. 409.
 
 78 THE EXERCISE OF 
 
 keep in our minds " lines and expressions of the great masters, 
 and apply them as a touchstone to other poetry." A few such 
 lines, he adds, "if we have tact and can use them, are 
 enough even of themselves to keep clear and sound our 
 judgments about poetry, to save us from fallacious estimates 
 of it, to conduct us to a real estimate. '^ ^ 
 
 It is by the study of the masters that '* taste " is formed 
 in literature as in art. And by using our knowledge of the 
 work of the masters as a " touchstone " — or more correctly, 
 as Mr Dowden has pointed out, as a "tuning-fork" — we 
 can decide on the general character of any new and un- 
 recognized work. But if we wish to add precision to this 
 general estimate, we must proceed to apply our tests by a 
 more searching and exact comparison, or rather series of 
 comparisons. There are certain passages or scenes which 
 are admitted by common consent to be of transcendent 
 excellence in each branch of literature, and there are other 
 passages in recognized authors which each one discovers and 
 cherishes, because they appeal in a special degree to his own 
 mind. If we desire to estimate the merit of a new work 
 more exactly, we must select a given passage or scene (or 
 several passages or scenes) and compare it with one of 
 these standard passages ; taking care, of course, that it is one 
 in which the subject admits of identical treatment, and that, 
 therefore, it affords a fair basis of comparison. In plain words, 
 if we wish to know how X has succeeded, we compare 
 his work with the work of the same kind which A, B, and 
 C have done, and admittedly done well. To give definition 
 to this statement let me take one or two examples from prose 
 fiction. 
 
 At first sight, a farmer's walk to church with his family 
 would seem to be a very unpromising subject for artistic treat- 
 ment. But if we want to know how this or any similar scene 
 can be done, and well done, we have only to read the first half 
 of Chapter xviii in Adam Bede. " George Eliot " knew the 
 difficulty of investing so commonplace a subject with artistic 
 1 Essays in Criticism II. (The Study of Poetry),
 
 JUDGMENT IN LITERATURE 79 
 
 grace and philosophic sense, for she tells us as much in the 
 previous chapter : but she succeeded. And we are not 
 surprised to learn — as we do from her diary — that when she 
 read the MS. to George Henry Lewis he was " much 
 pleased." Here, then, is a "standard" passage. If we 
 come across a description of a like subject in a new work, 
 and wish to measure the success which the author has 
 attained, we have only to place the two passages side by 
 side, and read first one and then the other. Or, again, to 
 take an example of a different subject. Most novelists, 
 when they have brought their hero and heroine to the point 
 of a declaration of love, evade the inherent difficulty of 
 describing actions and speeches which are meaningless or 
 ridiculous when separated from the background of intense 
 emotion by which they are accompanied in real life. They 
 generally leave us, therefore, to ourselves, to imagine the 
 scene, or tell us that what took place concerns nobody but 
 the lovers themselves, and would have no interest for the reader. 
 Nevertheless, Mr Meredith in his " Ferdinand and Miranda " 
 chapter of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel not only tells us 
 every word that Richard and Lucy spoke when they met 
 " amid the breath and beauty of wild flowers," but he creates 
 in the mind of the reader such a sense of external beauty, and 
 such an atmosphere of vibrating emotion, that each simple 
 speech and act is welcome, significant, and beautiful. To 
 realize the full meaning of this supreme exhibition of Mr 
 Meredith's art, we should compare this chapter with the 
 corresponding scene in Romeo and Juliet. This comparison 
 will serve to bring out the essential agreement in the general 
 method of these great artists in words, and, at the same time, 
 those differences of treatment and thought which naturally 
 result from a difference of literary medium and of mental and 
 social environment. 
 
 In both play and novel there is the same love at first sight, 
 the same opposition from parents and kinsfolk making the 
 concentration of the lovers in themselves — the egoism a 
 deux — absolute and supreme. In both a brief realization of
 
 8o THE EXERCISE OF 
 
 happiness is followed by separation, and in both alike the 
 final catastrophe is complete and overwhelming, although it 
 arises in each case out of the merest malignity of fate. In 
 the play, Juliet's bearing is the bearing of a woman of the 
 Elizabethan age ; her words are direct and outspoken. In 
 the novel, Lucy Desborough's feelings are wrapped in the 
 reserve of a nineteenth century heroine, and her broken 
 speeches convey her meaning by allusion and half thought. 
 
 *' O, gentle Romeo, 
 If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully ; 
 Or if thou thinkest I am too quickly won, 
 I'll frovv^n and be perverse, and say thee nay, 
 So thou wilt woo ; but else, not for the world. 
 In truth, fair Montague, I am too fond ; 
 And therefore thou may'st think my 'haviour light: 
 But, trust me, gentleman, I'll prove more true 
 Than those who have more cunning to be strange." 
 
 Contrast this frank speech with the dialogue in which 
 Lucy admits her love for Richard, as he holds her hand 
 in his. 
 
 <' ' You will not go ? ' 
 
 " ' Pray let me,' she pleaded, her sweet brows suing in 
 wrinkles. 
 
 " * You will not go ? ' Mechanically he drew the white 
 hand nearer his thumping heart. 
 
 '' * I must,' she faltered, piteously. 
 
 " * You will not go ? ' 
 
 " ' Oh yes ! yes ! ' 
 
 *' * Tell me. Do you wish to go ? ' 
 
 " The question was subtle. A moment or two she did not 
 answer, and then foreswore herself, and said, ' Yes.' 
 
 " * Do you — do you wish to go ? ' He looked with 
 quivering eyelids under hers. 
 
 *' A fainter yes responded to his passionate repetition. 
 
 " ' You wish — wish to leave me ? ' His breath went with 
 the words. 
 
 *' ' Indeed I must.' . . ." 
 
 Then finally she returns.
 
 JUDGMENT IN LITERATURE 8i 
 
 " * I think it was rude of me to go without thanking you 
 again/ she said, and again proffered her hand. And so 
 she left him, and . . . The sweet heaven-bird shivered 
 out his song above him. The gracious glory of heaven fell 
 upon his soul. He touched her hand, not moving his eyes 
 from her nor speaking ; and she, with a soft word of fare- 
 well, passed across the stile and up the pathway, through the 
 dewy shades of the copse, and out of the arch of light, away 
 from his eyes." 
 
 These examples have been taken from prose-fiction, a 
 branch of literature which is probably most familiar. But 
 they will, I hope, serve to show how general tests and 
 principles can be applied by similar comparisons in all fields 
 of literature. 
 
 CHAPTER Vin 
 
 Forms of Literature — Classical and Romantic 
 Methods— Style 
 
 First in order both of artistic merit and literary evolution is 
 Poetry, or creative literature in metre. 
 
 The arrangement of words in combinations which possess 
 a more or less vivid musical expression can be traced to a 
 primitive impulse in man. The nature of this impulse in its 
 connection with poetry is well set out by Emerson. 
 
 " We are lovers of rhyme and return, period and musical 
 reflection. The babe is lulled to sleep by the nurse's song. 
 Sailors can work better for their yo-heave-o. Soldiers can 
 march better and fight better for the drum and trumpet. 
 Metre begins with pulse-beat, and the length of lines in 
 songs and poems is determined by the inhalation and ex- 
 halation of the lungs. If you hum or whistle the rhythm 
 of the common English metres, — of the decasyllabic quatrain, 
 or the octosyllabic with alternate sexsyllabic, or other rhythms, 
 you can easily believe these metres to be organic, derived 
 from the human pulse, and to be therefore not proper to 
 
 F
 
 82 FORMS OF LITERATURE— CLASSICAL 
 
 one nation, but to mankind. I think you will also find a 
 charm, heroic, plaintive, pathetic, in these cadences, and be 
 at once set on searching for the words that can rightly fill 
 these vacant beats. Young people like rhyme, drum-beat, 
 tune, things in pairs and alternatives ; and, in higher degrees, 
 we know the instant power of music upon our temperament 
 to change our mood and give us its own : and human passion, 
 seizing these constitutional tunes, aims to fill them with 
 appropriate words, or marry music to thought, believing, as 
 we believe of all marriage, that matches are made in heaven, 
 and that for every thought its proper melody or rhyme 
 exists, though the odds are immense against our finding it, 
 and only genius can rightly say the banns." ^ 
 
 The best division of the several forms of poetry (i.^. 
 poetry in verse) is that adopted by the Greeks. Under this 
 system of classification the following chief forms are dis- 
 tinguished — Epic or Narrative, Lyric, Elegiac and Dramatic. 
 
 The first of these. Epic, or Story-telling in verse (s'-jtoj, 
 word ; gcr^j, word-poetry), is the longest form of composition 
 in metre. In addition to the narrative in which the poet 
 speaks in his own person, telling the story to the reader — oi 
 to the audience to whom such works were originally recited, 
 or chanted with a musical accompaniment — it has a large 
 element of dialogue, in which the poet speaks through 
 the persons of his characters. As compared with a drama 
 an epic possesses two advantages. In the first place, the 
 period of the action is practically unlimited, and, besides the 
 fact that the main action can cover more time, it admits of a 
 greater number of episodes, or subsidiary stories, and of the ■ 
 treatment of these episodes at greater length ; and in the 
 second, a greater element of marvel can be introduced, since 
 the actors or events represented are not subjected to the 
 scrutiny of the sense of sight, as is the case when the scenes 
 and actors are before us on the stage. In other words, the 
 poet can use his imagination with greater freedom in an epic 
 than in a drama ; and, in point of fact, many of the subjects 
 
 ^ Poetry and Imagination,
 
 AND ROMANTIC METHODS— STYLE 83 
 
 of great epics are obviously supernormal, and many of the 
 characters and incidents are supernatural. On the other 
 hand, the composition of this form of poetry is characterized 
 by an essential difficulty which makes its successful execution 
 exceedingly rare. Its form is so great that it requires a vast 
 volume of thought, and thought of the highest kind, to 
 endow it with dignity, and a genuine and powerful source 
 of inspiration to endow it with life. Properly it should 
 sum up the thought of an epoch or give expression to the 
 aspirations of a people ; and that is why in the nature of 
 things the great epics can almost be counted upon the fingers 
 of two hands: — the Hindu epics, the Ramaydna and the 
 Mahabhdrata, the Iliad and Odyssey, the De Natura of 
 Lucretius, the Aeneid, the N'lehtlungen Lied, the Inferno, and 
 Paradise Lost. And of these, some are the work of more 
 than one mind and perhaps of more than one generation. 
 
 Lyric poetry, as the name implies [Xvpa, lyre; /xsXtj, song- 
 poetry) is poetry originally intended to be accompanied by 
 the lyre or by some other instrument of music. The term 
 has come to signify any outburst in song which is composed 
 under a strong impulse of emotion or inspiration. The last 
 stanza of Shelley's lyric To a Skylark illustrates the complete 
 fusion of personality and subject which characterizes such 
 poetry. 
 
 Higher still and higher 
 
 From the earth thou springest: 
 Like a cloud of fire, 
 
 The blue deep thou wingest. 
 
 And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest. 
 ******* 
 
 Teach me half the gladness 
 
 That thy brain must know ; 
 Such harmonious madness 
 From my lips would flow 
 The world should listen then as 1 am listening now. 
 
 Elegiac poetry (sas/oc, a mourning song) is composed 
 under deep feeling, but in a different mood. It is 
 reflective rather than impulsive, and as such it is marked
 
 84 FORMS OF LITERATURE— CLASSICAL 
 
 by a note of seriousness, often of melancholy. Gray's Elegy 
 ivrltten in a Country Churchyard is a familiar and exquisite 
 example. 
 
 The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, 
 
 And ail that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, 
 Await alike th* inevitable hour, 
 
 The paths of Glory lead but to the grave. 
 
 Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid 
 
 Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire ; 
 Hands, that the rod of Empire might have sway'd, 
 
 Or wak'd to ecstasy the living lyre : 
 But knowledge to their eyes her ample page. 
 
 Rich with the spoils of Time, did ne'er unroll; 
 While penury repress'd their noble rage. 
 
 And froze the genial current of the soul. 
 
 Dramatic poetry (dpa/ia, act, stage-play) is poetry com- 
 posed for the purpose of stage-representation, or written in the 
 form of poetry so composed. As every line is intended to be 
 spoken by one or other of the actors who take the parts 
 respectively assigned to the several characters, there is no 
 direct narrative and no direct reflection. I say no " direct " 
 narrative or reflection, because both these elements are to 
 some extent retained by various devices. In the Greek 
 drama, for example, the epic element of story telling was 
 retained in part by means of the ayyiXoc, or messenger — 
 a character into whose mouth long accounts of events outside 
 the immediate action of the play were put. And at the 
 same time the element of " reflection " was provided by the 
 chof us, whose function it was to express in their songs and 
 chants such feelings and reflections upon the events re- 
 presented on the stage, as the poet would have uttered 
 directly in a lyric or elegiac outburst of song. The Greek 
 drama as a literary composition, was, therefore, a union of 
 the epic and lyric forms of poetry. In the modern drama, 
 both the narrative and reflective element have been curtailed, 
 but the essential elements of plot and dialogue (or the plot 
 expressed in dialogue) have been correspondingly enlarged 
 and developed. Dramatic literature is divided by a broad
 
 AND ROMANTIC METHODS— STYLE 85 
 
 line of demarkation into Tragedy and Comedy. The 
 characteristic motive of tragedy is the exhibition of man 
 in unsuccessful conflict with circumstances. In the Attic 
 Tragedy the apparently undeserved disaster which thus over- 
 whelms the man of average morality is explained by the 
 doctrine of Nemesis, or inherited curse : that is to say the 
 man himself has not deserved the punishment, but he is 
 punished for the sins of his fathers. In this doctrine the 
 existence of evil is sought to be explained in a manner 
 identical with the declaration of the second Commandment, 
 and in harmony with the general purport of the Jewish and 
 Christian theology. In the Elizabethan drama this un- 
 deserved suffering is rather connected with contemporary 
 circumstances ; and in the novels of *' George Eliot," 
 which were written in respect of their philosophic basis 
 under the influence of the leaders of the positivist school 
 of thought, the same problem is presented in close connection 
 with the scientific principle of heredity, or the transmission 
 of physical and mental defects from parent to child. 
 
 In comedy the motive is furnished by the same conflict 
 viewed from an opposite point of view. In unexpected and 
 even in undeserved suffering, provided that it is not so acute 
 as to actively enlist our sympathy, there is an element of 
 satisfaction which arises from the contrast thus presented 
 between our own good fortune and the bad fortune of our 
 neighbours. If a man's hat is blown off by a high wind, 
 and we see him chasing it, or if a passenger arrives on the 
 platform breathless and excited, only to see the train steam 
 out of the station, we laugh : for these are such slight 
 disasters that our perception of the comic element is unre- 
 strained. But if the same person, instead of losing his hat, 
 were to be run over by an omnibus, the sight of his suffering 
 would at once command our sympathy, and instead of mirth 
 an instant sensation of pain and alarm would arise in our 
 minds: for this would be not comic but tragic. Further, 
 if the person to whom the unexpected disaster happens is 
 an evil character, or a character possessed of anti-social
 
 86 FORMS OF LITERATURE— CLASSICAL 
 
 qualities, a sense of satisfaction, or even of downright 
 pleasure, will arise in our minds, even if the disaster be one 
 that is really serious. But this disaster, if it is to be comic, 
 must not involve the sight of actual physical pain, for a 
 spectacle of human suffering in this extreme form will always 
 provoke a sense of horror, unless, indeed, the nature of the 
 spectator be exceedingly hardened, or the circumstances are 
 altogether abnormal. The central motive of comedy is, 
 therefore, to present an exhibition of the irony of circum- 
 stances, and the effect which it seeks to produce upon the 
 mind of the spectator is admittedly one of complete satis- 
 faction. It shows him that a great deal of the suffering 
 which he sees around him is deserved — for one of the 
 legitimate motives of comedy is to satirize, or exhibit the 
 ugliness of vice, the ludicrousness of pride based upon 
 conventional distinctions, and the unhappiness of excessive 
 self-regard — and by teaching him to view his own mis- 
 fortunes as part of the general life of the community, and 
 to himself look upon them from the point of view from 
 which he would look upon the same misfortunes in others, 
 reveals to him the fact that there is a " light side " to the 
 darkest events. 
 
 But the drama, that is the representation of a tragedy 
 or comedy in the theatre, includes two further elements 
 besides the literary element — the actual composition in words 
 — with which we are here concerned. These two elements 
 are the interpretation of the words by the intonation, acts, 
 and gestures of the actor, and the representation of the 
 scenery by the various resources, artistic and scientific, 
 which are placed at the disposal of the stage manager. The 
 drama is, therefore, a composite art, in which the author, 
 the actor and the stage manager all combine to produce 
 the total effect : and as the line of development of this art 
 has been rather in the direction of the perfecting of scenic 
 accessories, the importance of the literary element has 
 tended to decline in the modern drama. The greater con- 
 venience of prose as a literary medium, and the closer
 
 AND ROMANTIC METHODS— STYLE 87 
 
 resemblance of speeches in prose to the practice of real life, 
 has caused contemporary dramatic writers generally to 
 abandon the more rigid poetic forms in which the 
 dramatic masterpieces of the poet have been mainly, though 
 by no means exclusively, composed. Moreover, poetry 
 (strictly so-called) has tended to become reflective rather 
 than dramatic, and prose fiction has now become the great 
 literary vehicle for the presentation of idealized human 
 action. But while the poets' contribution to the drama has 
 declined, the drama itself, regarded as a composite art, has 
 advanced. It has advanced by virtue of an enlightened 
 realism which is manifested in the assimilation of its literary 
 medium to the language of every-day life, in an increased 
 " naturalness " in the actor — due to closer and more in- 
 telligent methods of study — and in a gradual approach to 
 complete *' illusion " in the mise en scene by virtue of a 
 higher regard for historic accuracy and a more complete 
 command of mechanical contrivances. 
 
 Creative Literature in Prose. — The dominant and 
 familiar form is the " novel.'* It is an imagined picture of 
 a man and woman in the spring-time of life, in which the 
 love interest is supreme ; and the traditionary plot leads the 
 hero and heroine to the point of union in spite of the malignity 
 of fortune, or the opposition of kinsfolk, in illustration of the 
 line ; — 
 
 " The course of true love never did run smooth." 
 
 In the ** romance " the motive of " adventure " is mingled 
 with that of love, and sometimes altogether takes its place. 
 Often, too, the atmosphere is frankly unreal, and supernormal 
 or supernatural incidents and characters are introduced. 
 Where a serious meaning is conveyed by fictions which are 
 otherwise purely imaginative in character and incident, we get 
 the allegory, and the satire. Of this class of fictions " Don 
 Quixote,'' " The Pilgrim's Progress," and " Gulliver's 
 Travels " are familiar examples. 
 
 In addition to these, there is a third class of novels which
 
 88 FORMS OF LITERATURE—CLASSICAL 
 
 possesses characteristics sufficiently well-marked to be dis- 
 tinguished. It is the novel of " local colour." In it the 
 author uses a thin thread of plot to connect what are practi- 
 cally a series of descriptions in which the natural scenery of 
 a given locality, or the salient features of a particular com- 
 munity, are faithfully drawn. Such novels have a value of 
 their own, although they stand to the higher fiction somewhat 
 in the relationship of the photograph to the painting. 
 
 The novel has undergone a remarkable development in the 
 nineteenth century. The general result of this development 
 is expressed by saying that fiction has become philosophic. 
 That is to say, writers of the higher fiction have learnt to 
 base both the development of their plot and the evolution of 
 each separate character, upon principles revealed by the 
 scientific study of the processes of the human mind and the 
 ascertained phenomena of racial and individual evolution. 
 In this way the writer of prose fiction unites the results of 
 the generalized experience of the race with those of his own 
 individual observation of the men and women of his own 
 generation. In thus approaching the study of society from 
 an internal, as well as an external, point of view, he is enabled 
 to present studies of life and analyses of character and motive 
 that are intelligible, and therefore interesting, to the men and 
 women of more than one generation and of more than one 
 country. 
 
 Fiction, as thus developed, has become a literary vehicle 
 of extreme importance. To some extent it has usurped the 
 function of the stage as the medium for the exhibition of 
 pictures of life by the display of imagined characters in action. 
 This aspect of fiction is well indicated by the picturesque 
 phrase which has been used to describe the novel — a " pocket 
 theatre." At the same time novels are so widely read that 
 it is impossible not to recognize in them one of the greatest — 
 perhaps the greatest — educational force in literature. Under 
 these circumstances it is not surprising that some of the 
 greatest minds of the century should have adopted this form 
 of literature as the vehicle of their thought. Count Tolstoy
 
 AND ROMANTIC METHODS— STYLE 89 
 
 in Russia, M. Emile Zola in France, and Mr George 
 Meredith in England, are instances which at once occur of 
 great thinkers, who have definitely contributed to the thought 
 of the century by means of this vehicle. 
 
 As a form of literature the novel unites the facts of history 
 and philosophy, and the reflections of the essay, with the 
 element of creation essential to all poetic literature, on a basis 
 of plot, or interwoven action ; and while it lacks the music 
 and the structural perfection of compositions in verse, it has 
 the increased precision of prose and complete freedom from 
 the rigid limitations incidental to such structural perfection. 
 
 History and Biography. — The characteristic merits 
 of these branches of literature have already been indicated in 
 the remarks which have been made on the principle of "truth." 
 The quality of first importance which such works must 
 possess, if they are to be of permanent value, is the im- 
 partiality which results from a natural or an acquired capacity 
 to weigh evidence, united with the power of distinguishing 
 what is essential from what is merely accidental in the mass 
 of material upon which the historian or the biographer 
 respectively bases his narrative. It is by virtue of this im- 
 partiality and the exercise of a judicious selection that the 
 essential facts can be disentangled. It then remains to 
 present the facts thus disentangled to the reader in the most 
 effective manner. For this purpose it is necessary to compose 
 descriptions of the several states of society, and of the several 
 localities which form the setting of the chief scenes and 
 incidents in the narrative. In the case of the latter — 
 descriptions of localities — it is generally recognized that the 
 writer should make himself acquainted with the localities in 
 question by personal study conducted upon the spot. And 
 when the events narrated belong to the past, a valuable 
 auxiliary is provided by the historical remains, the inscriptions 
 and the antiquities, which throw light upon them. It is to the 
 extended use of such elements that the greater vitality and 
 picturesqueness which marks the best work of contemporary 
 historians is chiefly due.
 
 90 FORMS OF LITERATURE— CLASSICAL 
 
 While the historian tells the story of the life of a people 
 — or of a single period in that life — the biographer treats of 
 a single individual. If, therefore, the necessary allowance 
 is made for the changes of treatment which naturally arise 
 out of this difference of subject, we may say that the same 
 qualities are required in biography as in history; except, 
 perhaps, that a note of personal sympathy is tolerated or 
 even welcomed in the biographer which would be out of 
 place in the historian. 
 
 The Essay is distinguished by the brevity of its external form, 
 and by the presence of the element of reflection. It treats 
 a subject from a single point of view, and permits the personal 
 characteristics of the writer to assume a greater prominence 
 than is permitted in the regular and complete treatment of 
 the same subject in a treatise or book. It stands to the 
 treatise in the relation of a sketch to a finished painting, and 
 it has the same kind of merit as a sketch from nature. Just 
 as the sketch is a record of direct and immediate impressions 
 received by the mind of the painter from the study of natural 
 objects made on the spot, so the essay should contain im- 
 pressions received by the mind of the writer when it has 
 been brought fresh to the consideration of any body of facts. 
 And since the process of selection is employed with more 
 than usual freedom in such writing, the essay is the most 
 artistic of all forms of non-creative literature. 
 
 Classical and Romantic. — In the composition of all 
 these works of literature, both creative and non-creative, we 
 can trace the effect of one or other of two opposite tendencies. 
 Of these the first is the tendency to follow the models pre- 
 sented by the works of the masters in each branch, and the 
 second is the conscious desire to break away from these 
 models in one or more particulars with the object of getting 
 nearer to the reality of contemporary life. The danger of 
 the classical method, — as the first is styled — is that of losing 
 vitality by an adherence to those forms and methods of the 
 past which are unsuited for the conditions — mental and 
 social — of the present; the danger of the second, the
 
 AND ROMANTIC METHODS— STYLE 91 
 
 Romantic method, is to sacrifice one or the other of these 
 quaHties in literature which have been shown to be of per- 
 manent value by the experience of past ages, by an endeavour 
 to secure effects, which, though they possess a distinct and 
 appreciable value for the contemporary readers, from their 
 close connection with the movement and thought of the 
 moment, may cease to possess an interest, or even to be in- 
 telligible, to future generations. Outside of these extremes 
 the pursuit of either method leads to obvious and character- 
 istic excellences, although these respective excellences will 
 naturally commend themselves to different classes of minds. 
 In the works of writers who are influenced by the traditions 
 of the classical method we expect to find a more perfect 
 literary execution, and the " grand air " which is acquired 
 by association with the great intellects and the great artists 
 of all time. But it is among the authors who follow the 
 romantic method that we look especially for the '* something 
 new," which is at once the cause and the effect of the progress 
 of the race, and by virtue of which literature becomes 
 essentially a part of the life of man. 
 
 Style. — Finally, a word must be said upon the quality, at 
 once so apparent and so elusive, which is called "style." 
 Just as we are repelled or attracted by the manner of a man 
 with whom we are brought into contact — especially when we 
 make his acquaintance for the first time — so are we repelled 
 or attracted by the style of the author whose work we read. 
 Moreover, as we form an estimate of the character of an in- 
 dividual from our observation of his manner, which is quite 
 distinct and separate from the more precise and definite 
 opinion which we form after we have obtained a more exact 
 knowledge of his actions and qualities of mind, so this feeling 
 for style is something separate and apart from any opinion 
 based upon a deliberate examination of the merit of his work. 
 What manner is to the individual, style is to the writer. 
 It is right, therefore, to say that " style is the man," in the 
 same sense, and with the same reservations, as we say 
 " manners makyth man." For style does not consist in any
 
 92 FORMS OF LITERATURE 
 
 quality shown in the construction of sentences, or in the 
 choice of words, or even in the use or neglect of character- 
 istic literary methods ; but it is something distinct and apart 
 from these which at the same time affects them each in turn. 
 It is that element of literary composition in which, without 
 any manifestation of treatment sufficiently distinct to con- 
 stitute either the observance or the breach of any literary 
 rule, the writer unconsciously expresses his own temperament, 
 training, or circumstances. It is the bearing which the 
 writer assumes in the presence of the reader.
 
 A List of the chief Authorities to whom reference has been 
 made in the preceding pages. 
 
 [Where not otherwise stated there is no difficulty in obtaining 
 translations of the foreign authors.] 
 
 GREEK. 
 
 Plato. The Republic. (Also Phadrus, Laivsy Symposium, Hippias 
 
 Major.) 
 Aristotle. The Poetics. (Also passages in the Ethics, Politics, 
 
 Metaphijsics, Posterior Anali^iics, and Physics^ 
 
 MODERN. 
 
 Bacon. Advancement of Learning. 
 
 Addison. The Spectator (especially papers on Paradise Lost and on 
 
 The Pleasures of the Imagination). 
 LessinG. Laoloon : or Concerning the Limits of Painting and Poetry. 
 Cousin, Victor. The True, the Beautiful, and the Good. [Z)« vrai du 
 
 beau et du bien. Not translated into English.] 
 WoKDswoRTii. Observations prefixed to the second edition of Lyrical 
 
 Ballads. Essay Supplementary to the Preface of his edition of 
 
 1815. 
 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Aurora Leigh. ["This book . . . 
 
 into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have 
 
 entered."] 
 Arnold, Matthew. Essays in Criticism (first and second series). 
 
 (See also Culture and Anarchy, Irish Essays, and his poems.) 
 RusKIN. Modern Painters. Lectures on Art. 
 Swinburne. Essays and Studies. 
 
 Meredith, George. Chapter I. of Diana of the Crossivays. 
 Besant, Sir Walter, ylrt of Fiction. 
 Emekson. E.ssay on Poetry and Imagination. (See also Essays on 
 
 77/,? Poet and The Comic.) 
 Dowden, Edward. Interpretation of Literature (Contemporary Revieiv, 
 
 1886). 
 Worsfold. Principles of Criticism : an Introduction to the study of 
 
 Literature.
 
 INDEX 
 
 The names of authors from whom quotations are made are 
 printed in Italics. 
 
 Where a subject is treated in several pages consecutively, only 
 the number of the first page is given. 
 
 Actor, the, 86. 
 
 Art, method of, 11, 22, 38, 43, 
 
 Addison, 30, 32, 34, 37, 43, 77. 
 
 69, 71. 
 
 ,, his criticism of '-Paradise 
 
 ,, work of, I, 5, 15, 21, 33, 
 
 Lost," 31. 
 
 35,43, 57, 60,71. 
 
 ,, „ "Essay on the Plea- 
 
 ,, and nature, 35, 41, 43, 50. 
 
 sures of the Imag- 
 
 ,, freedom of, 53, 55. 
 
 ination," 31, 33. 
 
 ,, for art's sake, 53. 
 
 ,, „ "Appeal to the Imag- 
 
 ,, taste in, 57. 
 
 ination, "31, 33, 37. 
 
 Arts, distinction between, 2, 5. 
 
 -(Esthetic pleasure, 18. 
 
 ,, (the Fine), classification of. 
 
 Age, the (in relation to author). 
 
 4. 
 
 49- 
 
 ,, of the "eye" and the "ear," 
 
 Alexandrian school, the, i, 26. 
 
 4,8. 
 
 Allegorical characters in Epic 
 
 ,, (Lesser or Mechanical), 2. 
 
 poetry, 32. 
 
 Athenian dramatists, 29, 85. 
 
 Architecture, 5, 35. 
 
 " Aurora Leigh," 55, 60. 
 
 Aristotle, 22,25, ^^j 3°? ^*j ^li 70' 
 
 
 ,, method of his criticism, 
 
 Bacon, 73. 
 
 22, 24, 33, 38. 
 
 Beauty, 19, 42, 44, 71, 77. {See 
 
 ,, his analysis of Tragedy, 
 
 also Art.) 
 
 23> 25. 
 
 ,, objective and subjective, 
 
 ,, contrasted with Plato, 
 
 42. 
 
 24. 
 
 ,, ideal, 43. 
 
 Arnold, Mattheii\\'^, 48, 77. 
 
 poetic, 35,44, 51, 73. 
 
 ,, ,, his contribution 
 
 ,, representation of ex- 
 
 to criticism, 49. 
 
 ternal beauty in 
 
 ,, ,, explains inter- 
 
 poetry, 41. 
 
 pretativepower 
 
 ,, representation of ex- 
 
 of poetry, 50. 
 
 ternal beauty in sculp- 
 
 ,, ,, calls poetry a 
 
 ture, 7. 
 
 "criticism of 
 
 Besant, Sir J^Falter, 70. 
 
 life," 51. 
 
 Biography, 17,65, 89. 
 
 Art, definition of, 5. 
 
 Browning, 45. 
 
 ,, and morals, 18, 21, 24, 27, 
 
 (Mrs), 55. 
 
 43. 51. 52. 55-58,67,72,75. 
 
 Byron, 45.
 
 96 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Character, 23, 31, 70. 
 Cicero, 27. 
 
 Classical drama, French, 29. 
 „ method, 90. 
 „ models, 30. 
 Coleridge, 55. 
 Comedy, 24, 85. 
 
 Comparison (means of applying 
 tests of literary excellence), 77. 
 Cousin, Victor, 9, 38, 42, 71. 
 Critic, definition of, i. 
 Criticism, definition of, i. 
 ,, ancient, 15, 26. 
 
 „ modern, 24, 27, 37. 
 
 „ contemporary, 45, 62. 
 
 „ Alexandrine, i, 26. 
 
 „ Roman, 27. 
 
 ,, evolution of, 18, 33, 
 
 61. (^See also Criti- 
 cism, passim.^ 
 „ formal, 24, 29, 38, 47. 
 
 „ comparison between 
 
 ancient and modern, 
 
 3i>33- 
 „ journalistic, failure of, 
 
 45. 55- 
 „ professional. 45, 56. 
 
 Dante, 45. 
 Demogeot, 29. 
 Dialogue, 84. 
 Diction, 23, 31. 
 Dowden, 46, 78. 
 
 Drama, 23, 29, 84 (a composite 
 art;, 86. 
 „ elements of, 86. 
 Dryden, 59. 
 
 "Eliot, George," 16, 66, 78, 85. 
 Elegiac (poetry), 83. 
 Elizabethan period, 30. 
 ,, drama, 85. 
 
 Emerson, 81. 
 
 Emotional element in manj2i,25. 
 Emotions, the, appeal by art to, 
 4^ ; of poetry to, 50, 
 
 Epic, 24, 31, 32, 82. 
 Essay, the, 90. 
 
 " Fear and Pity," 25, 74. 
 Fiction (prose), 70, 76, 87. (See , 
 Creative Literature.) 
 
 Genius, in poet, 47. 
 
 Goethe, 15, 45. 
 
 Gothic architecture, 6, 58. 
 
 Graj/, 49, 84. 
 
 Greek architects, 6 (note). 
 
 ,, drama, 84. 
 
 ,, literature, 20, 30. 
 
 ,, division of forms of poetry, 
 82. 
 
 Haydn, 9. 
 
 Heredity, principle of, 85. 
 Herodotus, 25. 
 History, 24, 65, 89. 
 Homer, 20, 29, 33. 
 
 ,, method of, 41. 
 Horace, 27. 
 Hunt, Hoiman, 59. 
 
 Ideas, etectrine of association of, 
 
 33- 
 Ideal element in literature, 11, 
 
 49. 66, 71,73. 
 Idealization, 8, 28, 35, 43, 65. 
 ,, principle of, 71. 
 
 ,, limit to principle 
 
 of, 74. 
 Imagination, the, 10, 31, 33, 37, 
 
 59- 
 
 „ the appeal to the, 
 
 38,41,47,51,53, 
 57,61,65,69,71. 
 
 „ the subjective as- 
 
 pectof theappeal 
 to the, 50. 
 
 „ the primary and 
 
 secondary plea- 
 sures of, 34.
 
 INDEX 
 
 97 
 
 Imagination, the talent to affect, 
 highest perfec- 
 tion of poetry, 
 
 Zl, 48. 
 
 Imitation, basis of Art, 23, 28, 
 
 61. 
 Immorality, charge of, 20. 55. 
 Interpretative power of poetry, 
 50. 
 , function of criti- 
 
 cism, 48. 
 „ function of art, 
 
 43, 60, 61. 
 
 Judgment in literature, 57, 60. 
 „ principles of, 45, 64. 
 
 Keats, 51. 
 Kheyam Omar, 52 
 Kingsley, Charles, 55. 
 
 Language. (5^*? Diction.) 
 Laocoon, the (Lessing's), 38. 
 
 ,, the (statue), 38. 
 Leising, 38, 69. 
 
 „ contrast between, and 
 Cousin, 42. 
 Literature, 10, 13, 15. 
 
 ,, creative and non- 
 
 creative, 17, 24, 28, 
 
 48, 77- 
 ,, creative, 47, 65, 69, 
 
 71,81,87. 
 ,, study of. (5.f<f Judg- 
 
 ment and Criti- 
 cism.) 
 ,, forms of, 81. 
 
 Longinus, 26. 
 Lyric (poetry), 83. 
 
 Matter and manner, 16, 61. 
 
 Meredith, George, 40, 70, 76, 79, 
 
 89- 
 Metre, 25, 47, 68, 81 
 Milton and Addison, 31 
 „ sublimity of, 32. 
 
 Morality. {See Art and Morals.) 
 ,, and convention, 54. 
 „ and creative work, 
 
 18, 67. 
 „ principles of, 2. 
 
 Morris, William, 45, 52. 
 
 Music, 4, 8, 82. 
 
 Musical accompaniment, 23. 
 
 Nature, study of, 29, 50. 
 „ and art, 35, 43. 
 Nemesis, 85. 
 
 Novel, the, 26, 69, 87. {See 
 Creative Literature and 
 Fiction.) 
 ,, development of, 88. 
 „ forms of, 87. 
 „ contrasted with play, 26,79. 
 
 Objective and subjective, 10, 15, 
 
 16, 20, 38, 42, 56, 60. 
 Obscurity, charge of, 55. 
 Optical corrections, 6 (note). 
 Originality in author, 47. 
 
 Painting, 7, 35, 40, 58. 
 
 ,, contrasted with poetry, 
 
 40. 
 ,, contrasted with litera- 
 ture, II. 
 "Paradise Lost," 31, 83. 
 Pathos, 22, 26, 28, 44, 74. 
 Personality, element of, 49. 
 Philosophy, in literature, 76, 
 
 85, 88. 
 Philosophic aspect of poetry, 
 
 49. 73- 
 Philosophic fiction, 88. 
 Plato, 18, 21, 27, 42, 61. 
 
 ,, and Aristotle, 24, 33, 61. 
 Plato's charges against poetry, 
 
 20, 24. 
 Plato, principles of, 19, 27. 
 Pleasure, quality of giving, in 
 
 works of art, 18, 23, 38, 47, 
 
 61, 72.
 
 98 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Pleasure, feeling of, 57. 
 
 Plot, 23, 28, 31, 47, 69, 84, 88. 
 
 Poet, the, 25, 40,48, 49. 52, 54. 
 
 Poetics (Aristotle), 22, 29, 38. 
 
 69. 
 Poetic justice, doctrine of, 72. 
 „ ,, Bacon's account 
 
 of, 73. 
 Poetry, 9. (See Creative Litera- 
 ture. ) 
 Poetry, freest of the arts, 44, 55. 
 „ a "criticism of life," 49 
 
 5'- 
 „ method of, 25, 40. 
 „ truth of, 25, 55, 67. 
 ,, interpretative power of, 
 50. 
 Psychology and literature, 22. 
 3i» 33' 37' 4^ 56. 
 
 QUINTIUAN, 27 
 
 Racine, 29. 
 
 Real, the. and the ideal, 43, 49. 
 
 Realism, 58, 72, 75. 
 
 Reality, objective and subjective. 
 
 10, 69. 
 Romantic method, the, 90. 
 Rossetti, 58. 
 Rousseau, 55. 
 Ruskin, 52, 58. 
 
 Sajntsbury, 29. 
 
 Science and literature 17, 22, 
 
 24,50, 61, 75. 
 Seneca, 30. 
 Sensation, literature as secondary 
 
 source of, 14. 
 Sentiment, 23, 31 
 Shakespeare, 5 i . 
 
 ,, Romeo and Juliet, 79. 
 Shelley, 55, 83. 
 Selection, 43. 
 Southey, 55. 
 Speech, instrument of poetry, 44. 
 
 Speech, symbols of, 42. 
 
 Stage representation, 23. 
 
 Style, 91. 
 
 Subjective. {See Objective and 
 
 Subjective.) 
 Sivinburne, 53, 56. 59. 
 Symmetry, principle of, 28, 37, 
 
 68, 70. 
 
 Taste in literature, 57, 77. 
 
 Test of merit in literature, 37, 
 
 77 (Plato), 18. 
 Test of merit in literature 
 
 (Aristotle), 23, 62. 
 Test of merit in literature 
 
 (Addisonj, 33, 37. 
 Test of merit in literature 
 
 (Ruskin), 60. 
 Test of merit in literature 
 
 (Swinburne), 60. 
 Tests of merit, application of, 78. 
 Thought, element in literature, 
 
 61, 64. 
 Tolstoi, Count, 88. 
 Tragedy, 72, 74, 85. 
 Tragedy, Aristotle's account of, 
 
 23, 69. 
 Tragedy, Aristotle s reply to 
 
 Plato, 25. 
 Tragedy, Attic, 20, 21, 74, 85. 
 Truth in art, 20, 22, 24, 28, 33, 
 
 43, 50, 51, 61,64,66, 74. 
 Truth in art, «' essential," 65. 
 
 ,, of idea, 66. 
 ,, principle of, 64. 
 ., of science, 24, 75. 
 ,, final test of merit in 
 literature, 64. 
 
 Unities (dramatic), 30. 
 
 VirgiL 39. 
 Voltaire, 45. 
 
 Words-worth, 46, 47, 55, 67. 
 
 Zola, Emile, 89.
 
 PRINTED BY 
 
 TURNBUI.L AND SPKARS, 
 
 EUINliURGH
 
 1 ^B^c.