should bring the requisite amount and kind of knowledge and the proper frame of mind and temper.

2. Criticism should be proportionate.

By this I mean that the language in which we speak of anything should be proportioned to the thing spoken of. If you speak of St. Paul’s Church, Beckenham, as vast, grand, magnificent, you have no language left wherewith to describe St. Paul’s, London. If you call Millais’ Huguenots sublime or divine, what becomes of the Madonná St. Sisto of Raphael? If you describe Longfellow’s poetry as the feeblest possible trash, the coarsest and most unparliamentary language could alone express your contempt of Martin Tupper.

“What’s the good of calling a woman a Wenus, Samivel?” asked the elder Weller. What indeed! The elder Weller probably perceived that the language would be out of all proportion to the object of Samivel’s affections. Of course, something may be allowed to a generous enthusiasm, and, with regard to this fault in criticism, it should perhaps be said that exaggerated p. 9praise is not so base in its beginning or so harmful in the end as exaggerated blame. From the use of the former Dr. Johnson defended himself with his usual vigour. Boswell presumed to find fault with him for saying that the death of Garrick had eclipsed the gaiety of nations. Johnson: “I could not have said more, nor less. It is the truth. His death did eclipse, it was like a storm.” Boswell: “But why nations? Did his gaiety extend further than his own nation?” Johnson: “Why, sir, some exaggeration must be allowed. Besides, ‘nations’ may be said—if we allow the Scotch to be a nation, and to have gaiety,—which they have not.”

p. 9

But there is more in this matter of proportion than at first meets the eye. How often do we converse with a man whose language we wonder at and cannot quite make out. It is somehow unsatisfactory. We do not quite like it, yet there is nothing particular to dislike. Suddenly we perceive that there is a want of perspective, or perhaps a want of what artists call value. His mountains are mole-hills, and his mole-hills are mountains. His colouring is so badly managed that the effect of distance, light, and shade are lost. Thus a man will so insist upon the use of difficult words by George Elliot that a person unacquainted with her writings would think that the whole merit or demerit of that author lay in her vocabulary. A man will so exalt the pathos of Dickens or Thackeray that he will throw their wit and humour into the background. Some person’s only remark on seeing Turner’s Modern 

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