many critics who brought from failure in imaginative composition
a cavilling, jealous and ignoble temper, who have mainly
exercised their function in indulging the evil passion of envy.
But, so far as they have done this, they have proved themselves
bad critics, and neither minute care, nor a basis of learning, nor
wide experience of literature, salutary as all these must be,
can avail to make that criticism valuable which is founded on
the desire to exaggerate fault-finding and to emphasize censure
unfairly. The examination of what has been produced by other
ages of human thought is much less liable to this dangerous error
than the attempt to estimate contemporary works of art and
literature. There are few indeed whom personal passion can
blind to the merits of a picture of the 15th or a poem of the
17th century. In the higher branches of historical criticism,
prejudice of this ignoble sort is hardly possible, and therefore,
in considering criticism in its ideal forms, it is best to leave out
of consideration that invidious and fugitive species which bears
the general name of “reviewing.” This pedestrian criticism,
indeed, is useful and even indispensable, but it is, by its very
nature, ephemeral, and it is liable to a multitude of drawbacks.
Even when the reviewer is, or desires to be, strictly just, it is
almost impossible for him to stand far enough back from the
object under review to see it in its proper perspective. He is
dazzled, or scandalized, by its novelty; he has formed a preconceived
notion of the degree to which its author should be
encouraged or depressed; he is himself, in all cases, an element
in the mental condition which he attempts to judge, and if
not positively a defendant is at least a juryman in the court over
which he ought to preside with remote impartiality.
It may be laid down as the definition of criticism in its pure sense, that it should consist in the application, in the most competent form, of the principles of literary composition. Those principles are the general aesthetics upon which taste is founded; they take the character of rules of writing. From the days of Aristotle the existence of such rules has not been doubted, but different orders of mind in various ages have given them diverse application, and upon this diversity the fluctuations of taste are founded. It is now generally admitted that in past ages critics have too often succumbed to the temptation to regulate taste rigidly, and to lay down rules that shall match every case with a formula. Over-legislation has been the bane of official criticism, and originality, especially in works of creative imagination, has been condemned because it did not conform to existing rules. Such instances of want of contemporary appreciation as the reception given to William Blake or Keats, or even Milton, are quoted to prove the futility of criticism. As a matter of fact they do nothing of the kind. They merely prove the immutable principles which underlie all judgment of artistic products to have been misunderstood or imperfectly obeyed during the life-times of those illustrious men. False critics have built domes of glass, as Voltaire put it, between the heavens and themselves, domes which genius has to shatter in pieces before it can make itself comprehended. In critical application formulas are often useful, but they should be held lightly; when the formula becomes the tyrant where it should be the servant of thought, fatal error is imminent. What is required above all else by a critic is knowledge, tempered with good sense, and combined with an exquisite delicacy of taste. He who possesses these qualities may go wrong in certain instances, but his error cannot become radical, and he is always open to correction. It is not his business crudely to pronounce a composition “good” or “bad”; he must be able to show why it is “good” and wherein it is “bad”; he must admire with independence and blame with careful candour. He must above all be assiduous to escape from pompous generalizations, which conceal lack of thought under a flow of words. The finest criticism should take every circumstance of the case into consideration, and hold it necessary, if possible, to know the author as well as the book. A large part of the reason why the criticism of productions of the past is so much more fruitful than mere contemporary reviewing, is that by remoteness from the scene of action the critic is able to make himself familiar with all the elements of age, place and medium which affected the writer at the moment of his composition. In short, knowledge and even taste are not sufficient for perfect criticism without the infusion of a still rarer quality, breadth of sympathy.
Criticism has been one of the latest branches of literature to reach maturity, but from very early times the instinct which induces mankind to review what it has produced led to the composition of imperfect but often extremely valuable bodies of opinion. What makes these early criticisms tantalizing is that the moral or political aspects of literature had not disengaged themselves from the purely intellectual or aesthetic.
To pass to an historical examination of the subject, we find that in antiquity Aristotle was regarded as the father and almost as the founder of literary criticism. Yet before his day, three Greek writers of eminence had examined, in more or less fulness, the principles of composition; these were Plato, Isocrates and Aristophanes. The comedy of The Frogs, by the latter, is the earliest specimen we possess of hostile literary criticism, being devoted to ridicule of the plays of Euripides. In the cases of Plato and Isocrates, criticism takes the form mainly of an examination of the rules of rhetoric. We reach, however, much firmer ground when we arrive at Aristotle, whose Poetics and Rhetoric are among the most valuable treatises which antiquity has handed down to us. Of what existed in the literature of his age, extremely rich in some branches, entirely empty in others, Aristotle speaks with extraordinary authority; but Mr G. Saintsbury has justly remarked that as his criticism of poetry was injuriously affected by the non-existence of the novelist, so his criticism of prose was injuriously affected by the omnipresence of the orator. This continues true of all ancient criticism. A work by Aristotle on the problems raised by a study of Homer is lost, and there may have been others of a similar nature; in the two famous treatises which remain we have nothing less important than the foundation on which all subsequent European criticism has been raised. It does not appear that any of the numerous disciples of Aristotle understood his attitude to literature, nor do the later philosophical schools offer much of interest. The Neoplatonists, however, were occupied with analysis of the Beautiful, on which both Proclus and Plotinus expatiated; still more purely literary were some of the treatises of Porphyry. There seems to be no doubt that Alexandria possessed, in the third century, a vivid school of critic-grammarians; the names of Zenodotus, of Crates and of Aristarchus were eminent in this connexion, but of their writings nothing substantial has survived. They were followed by the scholiasts, and they by the mere rhetoricians of the last Greek schools, such as Hermogenes and Aphthonius. In the 2nd century of our era, Dio Chrysostom, Aristides of Smyrna, and Maximus of Tyre were the main representatives of criticism, and they were succeeded by Philostratus and Libanius. The most modern of post-Christian Greek critics, however, is unquestionably Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who leads up to Lucian and Cassius Longinus. The last-mentioned name calls for special notice; in “the lovely and magnificent personality of Longinus” we find the most intelligent judge of literature who wrote between Aristotle and the moderns. His book On the Sublime (Περὶ ὕψους), probably written about A.D. 260, and first printed in 1554, is of extreme importance, while his intuitions and the splendour of his style combine to lift Longinus to the highest rank among the critics of the world.
In Roman literature criticism never took a very prominent position. In early days the rhetorical works of Cicero and the famous Art of Poetry of Horace exhaust the category. During the later Augustan period the only literary critic of importance was the elder Seneca. Passing over the valuable allusions to the art of writing in the poets, especially in Juvenal and Martial, we reach, in the Silver Age, Quintilian, the most accomplished of all the Roman critics. His Institutes of Oratory has been described as the fullest and most intelligent application of criticism to literature which the Latin world produced, and one which places the name of Quintilian not far below those of Aristotle and Longinus. He was followed by Aulus Gellius,
