CONTENTS

“Set in all lights by many minds To close the interests of all.”

p. 27But, as I said, there is a good deal in what the writer says. The Daily News says the Government is all wrong, and the Daily Telegraph says it is all right; and if any paper ventured to be moderate it would go to the wall in a week. I think what he says is true, but there is no occasion to be so angry about it. We really are very thankful for such men as Carlyle, Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold, and I can’t help thinking they have had their proper share of praise, and have had their share of influence upon their age. The air of neglected superiority, which they assume, detracts not a little from the pleasure with which one always reads them.

p. 27

Perhaps some of my conservative friends will regret the good old times in which criticism was really criticism, when a book had to run the gauntlet of a few well established critics of the club, or a play was applauded or damned by a select few in the front row of the pit. I agree to lament a past which can never return, but, on the whole, I think we are the gainers. Also, I very much incline to think that the standard of criticism is higher now than in the very palmy days when Addison wrote; or when the Edinburgh or Quarterly were first started. I incline to agree with Leslie Stephen in his Hours in a Library, that, if most of the critical articles of even Jeffrey and Mackintosh were submitted to a modern editor, he would reject them as inadequate; but I think that perhaps they excel our modern efforts in a certain reserve and dignity, and in a more matured thoughtfulness.

If criticism is an art, such as I have described it, and is subject to certain rules and conditions; if good criticism is appreciative, proportionate, appropriate, strong, natural, and bonâ fide, and bad criticism is the p. 28reverse of all this, why, you will ask, cannot the art be taught by some School or Academy; and if criticism is so important a matter as you say, surely the State might see to it? I must own I am against it. Mr. Matthew Arnold, who is much in favour of founding an academy, which is not only to judge of original works but of the criticisms of others upon them, states the matter very fairly. He says, “So far as routine and authority tend to embarrass energy and inventive genius, academies may be said to be obstructive to energy and inventive genius; and, to this extent, to the human spirit’s general advance. But then this evil is so much compensated by the propagation on a large scale of the mental aptitudes 

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