INTOLERANCE OF LITERARY JUDGMENT. 21 gendered in apathy, spleen, or malice. There is no more healthy mental exercise than the study of a great work of art, if directed to the discovery of the elements of its glory, to cause its sublimity or its beauty to be felt more and more deeply, and not only felt, but understood, that the understanding may have cognizance of that which the heart has loved. It is to criticism thus conducted in the spirit of faith and hope that genius vouchsafes to make the most ample revelation of its glories. It is important, too, to shun the habit of dogmatic criticism. It is a singular but familiar fact that men are never more apt to be intolerant of difference of opinion than in what concerns the mingled powers of judgment and feeling denominated taste. I need suggest no other illustration than the striking contrariety of judgment on the merits of the most distinguished poets who have flourished in our own times, the discussion of which I shall not now anticipate by the expression of any opinion. To what is this owing? Partly, no doubt, to variety of character, intellectual and moral; to diversity of temperament and education; and whatsoever else makes one man in some respects a different being from his neighbour. Each reader, as well as each writer, has his peculiar bent of mind, his own way of thinking and feeling; so that the passionate strains of poetry will find an adaptation in the heart of one, while its thoughtful, meditative inspirations will come home to the heart of another. This consideration must not be lost sight of, because it goes far toward allaying this literary intolerance, which, like political or theological intolerance, is doubly disastrous, for it at the same time narrows a man's sympathies and heightens his pride. But the variety of mind or of general disposition will not wholly explain the variety of literary opinions. After making all due allowance in this respect, it is not to be questioned that there is right judgment and wrong judgment,—a sound taste and a sickly taste. There are opinions which we may hold with a most entire conviction of their truth, an absolute and imperious self-confidence, and a judicial assurance that the contradictory tenets are errors. There is a poetry, for instance, of which a man may both know and feel not only that it gives poetic gratification to himself, but that it cannot fail to produce a like effect on every well-constituted and well-educated mind. When an English critic, Rymer, some hundred and fifty years ago, disloyal in his folly, pronounced the tragical part of Othello to be plainly none other than a bloody farce, without salt or savor,—when Voltaire scoffed at the tragedy of Hamlet as a gross and barbarous piece, which would not be tolerated by the vilest rabble of France or Italy, likening it (I give you his own words) to the fruit of the imagination of a drunken savage,-when Steevens, an editor of Shakspeare, said that an act of Parliament would not be strong enough to compel the perusal of the sonnets and other minor poems of the bard,-when Dr. Johnson remarked that Paradise Lost might be read as a duty, but could not be as a pleasure, and pronounced a sweeping condemnation on Milton's incomparable Lycidas,-when, in our own day, a Scotch critic, Lord Jeffrey, declared of Wordsworth's majestic poem, The Excursion, that “it would never do,”—in each of these opinions I.know, as anybody may, with a confidence not short of demonstration, I know that there was gross and grievous falsehood. Now, if these opinions are defenceless on the score of variety of mind, and safely to be stigmatized as rash and QUALIFICATIONS OF A CRITIC. 25 23 irrational judgments, it follows that there must exist principles to guide to wise conclusions. And how is a theory of criticism to be formed? How, in a matter in which men are apt to think and feel so differently, to have such various fancies, prejudices, and prepossessions,-how are we to get at the truth? The process of criticism is a process of induction; and, happily, we have the pages of Spenser and Shakspeare and Milton to gather instruction from;-happily, I say, for no one is so bold or so stupid in paradox as to question the sufficiency of such authorities. But induction is something more than the gathering of examples, more than what is often thought to be all-sufficient, mere observation and experiment. The pages of the mighty poets cannot of themselves bestow the power to recognise and to feel what they contain. All their utterance may be unheeded; and it is only when the human spirit has studied its own nature that the sounds which before passed over it as idly and as noiselessly as a floating cloud make the spiritual music which is poetry. It is not enough to know the voice and the tones of poetry, but to discover the avenues of the human heart which lie open to them, and which send back the music echoed from its depths. These are the sources of that wisdom which enables us to distinguish the truth of poetic inspiration from that which is counterfeit and delusive. I know not where else to search for the elements of criticism than in the minstrelsy of the mighty dead, and the life which is the pulse of every living heart. It would not be inappropriate for me here to examine what is the union of qualifications essential to the character of an enlightened critic of poetry. There is needed a mind at once poetical and philosophical, with powers imaginative and analytical, and not merely the passive recipiency of a correct taste, but the quick sympathy of an active imagination, untrammelled by conventional or technical precepts; a natural sensibility; force and kindly affections; a vigorous and well-disciplined understanding; and a judicial composure dwelling above the clouded and fitful region of prejudice. Let me assure you that when I look forth to the magnificent theme which is before me, the vast compass of English poetry and its lofty soarings, no one is more painfully impressed than he who is addressing you with the thought of how much is demanded for the faithful execution of that which he has undertaken. I have already intimated an opinion that the noblest portion of a nation's literature is its poetry. I am well aware that this is a sentiment in which many minds will be reluctant to concur, and that not a few will utterly revolt at it. We live in an age whose favourite question is, What is the use? The inquiry is a rational one; and equally rational is the conclusion,- that what is useless is contemptible. But the notion of utility is very various, and we must be cautious that we are not condemning by a false standard. In the common business transactions of the world, men are very careful as to the weights and measures they are dealing with. The buyer of a yard of cloth, or a chest of tea, or a prescription of medicine, trusts to an accurate measurement as the means of giving him all that he is entitled to, and, in the last case, saving him from being drugged with more than his malady makes inevitable. Now, when you turn from the world of trade to the inner world of moral and intellectual operations, you will see men weighing and measuring UTILITARIAN CRITICISM. 25 out their judgments and their sentiments with all the confidence of logical deduction from their premises, not dreaming that often in those premises lies the fallacy of a false balance and a crooked rule. The mind, instead of being truly poised, is often perversely planted; and it has its makeweights in the shape of covert prejudices or prepossessions, and thence come distorted judgments and misdirected affections. Eminently is this the case in our estimate of utility, for the obvious reason that, men proposing to themselves different objects to be attained, a pursuit is applauded as useful, or despised as the reverse, just as it may happen to conduce to those ends respectively. Thus, things are judged by standards never meant for them, a process as senseless as if one sought to measure by a balance or to weigh by a foot-rule. The aim of one man may be wealth; of another, power, political or military; of another, notoriety or fame; of another, ease, eating and drinking and sleeping; of another, knowledge or literary cultivation; of another, the social amelioration of mankind; or, of another, the enlargement of his whole being by the improvement of every talent which God has given him, and the further-looking hope of the promised happiness of an hereafter. Each one, by a process of reasoning, equal, too, in logical accuracy, reaches a conclusion of his own. And thus the art of bookkeeping and the tables of interest are useful; and so is the art of cookery; and so is history, or politics, or the art of war; and so is poetry; and so is the Bible;-all useful, each in its own —I need not add how different—way. But the moment you begin to apply to any one the standard proper to another, then comes error, with confusion on confusion. Especially is this the case with regard to literature, and, |