inexpressibly fatuous individual who sits in the middle.” This is funny, but it is vulgar, and it is not given in good faith. It is the offspring of anger and spite mixed with a desire to be clever and antithetical. p. 25 I gather from Mr. Matthew Arnold’s essays on criticism that the endeavour of the critic should be to see the object criticized “as in itself it really is,” or as in another passage he says, “Real criticism obeys an instinct prompting it to know the best that is known and thought in the world.” “In order to do or to be this, criticism,” he says, in italics, “ought to be disinterested.” He points out how much English criticism is not disinterested. He says, “We have the Edinburgh Review, existing as an organ of the old Whigs, and for as much play of mind as may suit its being that; we have the Quarterly Review, existing as an organ of the Tories, and for as much play of mind as may suit its being that; we have the British Quarterly Review, existing as an p. 26organ of the political Dissenters, and for as much play of mind as may suit its being that; we have the Times existing as an organ of the common satisfied well-to-do Englishman, and for as much play of mind as may suit its being that. . . . Directly this play of mind wants to have more scope, and to forget the pressure of practical considerations a little, it is checked, it is made to feel the chain. We saw this the other day in the extinction so much to be regretted of the Home and Foreign Review; perhaps in no organ of criticism was there so much knowledge, so much play of mind; but these could not save it. It must needs be that men should act in sects and parties, that each of these sects and parties should have its organ, and should make this organ subserve the interest of its action; but it would be well too that there should be a criticism, not the minister of those interests, nor their enemy, but absolutely and entirely independent of them. No other criticism will ever attain any real authority, or make any real way towards its end,—the creating a current of true and fresh ideas.” p. 26 This, it must be remembered, was written in 1865. Would Mr. Matthew Arnold be happier now with the Fortnightly and the Nineteenth Century and others? There is, I think, a good deal of truth in the passage I have just quoted. I think he might have allowed that, among so many writers, each advocating his own view or the view of his party or sect, we ought to have some chance of forming a judgment. A question seems to get a fair chance of being
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