attitude of a critic towards a work of literary art. I may now proceed to the task of the critic. A superficial knowledge of the history of criticism is enough to see what is the great difference between the literary criticism of our days and that of the first centuries after the Renaissance. Up to the nineteenth century literary critics applied to artistic prose or poetry certain tests and praised or blamed the poet as he came up to these tests or failed to do so. Many critics thought it incumbent on them to tell the world what poet was "the best" and what poet the next best. 1)

It is now generally recognised that the critic's most important work is to act as an interpreter, a humble task and a proud one at the same time; for on the one hand it implies that his attitude towards the literary artist is that of an inferior to his superior; but on the other the man that is bold enough to interpret a great artist, say Shakespeare, to us, assumes that he is nearer to Shakespeare than most other mortals, assumes that he surpasses the run of mankind in depth of humanity and in artistic sensitiveness.

Let us try to realize what this function of interpreting a great writer really means. It means in the first place that the critic should be able to penetrate deeply into the heart and soul not of an ordinary fellow-mortal, but of the most profound thinkers and dreamers that the world has produced, thinkers and dreamers who were generally hardly conscious themselves of what they were aiming at, as the princess in Torquato Tasso says of the poet who seems "etwas zu suchen, das wir nicht kennen Und er vielleicht am Ende selbst nicht kennt." Let us also remember that in the case of writers of by-gone ages the writer has never come into personal contact with the poet, has never heard his voice, never met the look of his eyes and there is some truth in what George MacDonald says in The Princess and Curdie: "You need but take a person's hand, and you will know what good or evil beast is the truth of him." Besides, the critic can only be guided by what the poet has left behind him in writing, which is necessarily only a small part of all that he felt and thought. And then, even a poet cannot express with absolute clearness all that passes through his brains. "We all indulge," says a writer in one of the January numbers of the Literary Times, "in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying, even to some one opposite, what we think, then how little are we able to convey!" Further a great critic will feel instinctively that he can only really understand a little of that side of the poet's nature that is related to his own.

Nur wer euch ähnlich ist, versteht und fühlt,

Nur der allein soll richten und belohnen!

says Goethe's Tasso. Browning in the concluding lines of his Men and Women gives to each man two soul-sides, but Shakespeare's soul has as many sides as he finds readers. Besides Shakespeare, like ordinary mortals, was different from day to day and from year to year. Certain critics will have us believe that Shakespeare's personal emotions and thoughts are hardly reflected in his works. "The assumption", says Sir Sidney Lee in The Year's Work in English Studies 1922, "that Shakespeare reflects in his plays his personal experience and emotion at the time of writing is a critical fancy of the nineteenth century which takes an unconscionable time in dying." The reviewer in the Literary Times voices my opinion on the subject so perfectly that I can do no better than quote his words: "that he (i. e. Shakespeare)

1) See for instance: William Webbe. A Discourse of English Poetry. (Arber's Reprints, passim).

or any other poet ever produced a creative line which was not grounded in and suffused by 'personal experience and emotion at the time of writing' is, as any artist could assure Sir Sidney Lee, a psychological impossibility." But if Shakespeare changed from hour to hour, the critic is no less subject to this and consequently Shakespeare is something different to him at different times of his life. To the young man from twenty to forty, let us say, Shakespeare is almost exclusively the writer of tragedies; as we grow older the comedies appeal to us more and more. Such at least has been my personal experience. The critic then should be constantly conscious of the fact that what seems to him certainly true at one moment, may strike him quite differently even the next day. Hence all criticism that aims at interpreting what is most worth being interpreted is of necessity subjective and mistakes, very serious mistakes, are unavoidable. 1) Moulton holds up to ridicule a good many critics, mostly long dead and forgotten, who have blundered about Shakespeare. But the history of thought is the history of gigantic blunders. Does Moulton really think that any method of criticism can be found which would make mistakes of judgment impossible? If he means to suggest that the blunders were exceptionally stupid because they were made about Shakespeare, I do not see the point. The greater the writer, the more natural the mistakes are. Every one can enjoy Israels' paintings, but what about Vincent van Gogh? And yet the odds are that the latter's name will be mentioned with awe when Israels will be known to specialists only. Besides, it is not true that no one understood Shakespeare's greatness before our own enlightened days. Those among the critics whose genius entitled them to an opinion on Shakespeare did not go entirely wrong. I will not quote Dryden's well-known lines from his prologue to Aureng Zebe, but it is hard to resist the temptation of giving once more the passage from the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, written while Dryden still advocated the introduction of rhyme into English drama.

"(Shakespeare) was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of Nature were still present to him, and he drew them, not laboriously, but luckily; when he describes anything, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read Nature; he looked inward, and found her there. I cannot say he is everywhere alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great, when some great occasion is presented to him; no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not raise himself as high above the rest of poets, Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi.

The consideration of this made Mr. Hales of Eaton say, that there was no subject of which any poet ever wrote, but he would produce it much better treated of in Shakespeare; and however others are now generally preferred before him, yet the age wherein he lived, which had contemporaries with him Fletcher and Johnson, never equalled them to him in their esteem; and in the last King's court, when Ben's

1) Perhaps it would be 'a consummation devoutly to be wished', if all critics could agree with a remark made by the late James Huneker in his introduction to Shaw's Dramatic Opinions and Essays:- All criticism is personal, and neither academic or impressionist criticism should be taken too seriously.

reputation was at highest, Sir John Suckling, and with him the greater part of the courtiers set our Shakespeare far above him." 1)

The earnestness, the genuine emotion, the thoughtful compactness, and the wonderfully penetrative insight into Shakespeare's genius cannot escape any one who will take the trouble to read this quotation with the attention it deserves. And who is not moved by Ben Jonson's tribute to Shakespeare's genius and character in the Discoveries: "I lov'd the man 2), and doe honour his memory (on this side Idolatry) as much as any. He was (indeed) honest, and of an open, and free nature: had an excellent Phantsie; brave notions, and gentle expressions." ")

There is another quality which the critic should have to the highest degree and to which I have not yet referred, although probably many would have begun with it: I mean that of artistic sensibility. No doubt the power of penetrating deeply into the emotional life of the poet is closely related to artistic sensitiveness, but the one does not necessarily imply the other. Lytton Strachey need not necessarily be a competent literary critic. And in this domain, above all, subjectivity is unavoidable. Hence aesthetic criticism is only important, if the critic is himself an artist or almost an artist. If there is nothing of the artist in him, he will continually go wrong. To people who are afraid of everything that is or sounds vague, I may remark that there is far less difference among great critics than is generally supposed. The cause may be found in Carl Scharten's words: "De schoonheid, . . . . is niet een zwevend iets. De schoonheid is een zéér bepaald iets, onder duizend vormen. Allen, die het fijne verstand van litteratuur hebben, halen uit een zeker gedicht denzelfden schoonsten regel, en uit dien regel het woord of de klanken-combinatie, die er de schoonheid veroorzaken." ")

It need hardly be said that there is a large field of activity for the literary critic who does not feel drawn in the first place towards the artistic, psychological or philosophical aspects of literature. Biography, bibliography, textual criticism, literary history deserve all the devoted attention that is given to them in our days, but as far as literature is concerned they are important only in so far as they help us to come into closer contact with the soul of the poet; where they become ends in themselves and usurp the whole field, these studies can only lead us away from the living truth. To me then the great critic should rather help us to feel than to understand the truth and the beauty of what the great writers have left us. He can only do this by summoning to his aid the deepest powers of his own soul, the utmost of him his ratiocinative intellect alone will not carry him very far. If a critic has made me feel what I passed over before, or feel more deeply what I only half understood, he has done for me nearly all I want; in his method I am not deeply interested and one remark like Mr. Hopman's about Thomson's power of summoning before our eyes grand atmospheric phenomena is to me of more value than a minute scientific analysis of Thomson's poetic devices.

No doubt what I have said so far seems vague and unsatisfactory to many. People whose brains are different from mine want more clearly outlined methods, more definite results. Let them not be vexed at what must seem to them unscientific balderdash, let them remember that to others their Essays of John Dryden. Vol. 1. ed. Ker. pp. 79–80.

"Shakespeare

Dryden uses the same words in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy: was the Homer, or father of dramatic poets; Johnson was the Virgil, the pattern of elaborate writing; I admire him, but I love Shakespeare." Essays I. 82 f. 3) Ben Jonson, Discoveries. Bodley Head Quartos V p. 28.

Handelingen XXXIIe Nederl. Taal- en Letterkundig Congres te Antwerpen, 1912.

neatly constructed systems often seem to miss what is essential. No doubt there is much truth in Prof. Jan te Winkel's remark made at the Nederl. Taal- en Letterkundig Congres at Antwerp in 1912, that there are many things in literature that can be discussed objectively, but that to discuss the subjective element in art one has to be an artist. But if Prof. te Winkel means us to draw the conclusion from this that only that which can be treated objectively should be admitted to our universities or to our schools, I protest most emphatically, for this would mean that we allowed ourselves to be caught in a net of our own making. The nineteenth century has discovered a new and exacting goddess, called Science, who claims as her own the earth and the fulness thereof. If in her name we are told that we must banish from the study of literature all that makes literature a costly possession, we shall do well to ask ourselves the question if we had not better give up worshipping the goddess altogether.

Professor Moulton, however, is 1) one of her most devout believers. In his books one comes across the formidable words 'science' and 'scientific' on almost every page. And the strange thing is that even those who least believe in the efficacy of his methods can to a great extent agree with his general principles. In the Introduction to his Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist he says that literary criticism should follow other branches of thought in becoming inductive. "To begin with the observation of facts; to advance from this through the arrangement of observed facts; to use à priori ideas, instinctive notions of the fitness of things, insight into far probabilities, only as side-lights for suggesting convenient arrangements, the value of which is tested only by the actual convenience in arranging they afford; to be content with the sure results so obtained as 'theory' in the interval of waiting for still surer results based on a yet wider accumulation of facts; this is a regimen for healthy science so widely established in different tracts of thought as almost to rise to that universal acceptance which we call common sense." In the same Introduction Moulton then proceeds on the assumption that there are two kinds of criticism. Here, I believe, is a source of grave misunderstanding. Moulton indiscriminately speaks of à priori criticism, judicial criticism, subjective criticism. In his Modern Study of Literature he even says: "Subjective criticism is the literature of appreciation". Now it is obvious that all these terms are not interchangeable. Hence the bewilderment that takes hold of the reader of Moulton's essay who at one moment finds himself heartily agreeing with his ideas and the next hopelessly at variance with them. There are presumably few people that would advocate a return to the old à priori methods or to the criticism of praise and blame; the critic as a dictator in the world of letters is an "exploded superstition' and Moulton is not fair to the advocates of more or less subjective criticism when he identifies them with the older school. No doubt throwing all critics past and present who are not purely inductive in their methods on a heap, made it easier for Moulton to hold them up to ridicule. But criticism should not be judged by its worst output and Prof. Moulton ought in fairness to have taken those writers whose critical judgment has stood the test of time. Instead of doing this, he calls up the ghost of Rymer, exalts Pope to the rank of 'one of the best critics England ever had' and even seems to look upon Byron as a serious literary critic. And when some of the greatest are referred to, it is with relish that Moulton recalls their

1) While this article was printing, the news came of Prof. Moulton's death. Although this could hardly affect my opinion about his work, the respect one naturally feels for unselfish devotion to any cause, might have induced me to change the form of one or two statements in the rest of my article, if this had still been possible.

glaring mistakes. True, he does not forget to mention that the reading of Shakespeare made Johnson doubt, if the theory of the unities of time and place was tenable, but he fails to add that it was not by inductive methods that Johnson came to this conclusion. Johnson, like Dryden and great Ben before him could not for all their heavy learning help feeling something stir in the depth of them when they read Shakespeare's plays or saw them performed. It was by listening to the voice of the sub-conscious that they found or almost found the way to what seems to us the truth about Shakespeare. The grave mistakes were made by those critics whose personality lacked the depth which alone can lead us to the truth. In order to show up the folly of the older school of criticism, Moulton once more quotes the ridiculous list of poets laureate before Southey. But does Prof. Moulton think that these poetasters owed the honour to their literary merits? The story of the very first poet laureate tells another tale. But if Prof. Moulton knows this, then what does his list prove? Would it not have been better to state simply that literary criticism, subjective or objective, has outlived the habit of distributing praise and blame, and of laying down arbitrary laws for their betters?

Moulton's great merit is his insisting on the necessity of inductive methods. The reckless bias with which he does this no doubt has secured him a hearing which he might not otherwise have got. "The first and last word in literary theory is interpretation. The criticism of inductive interpretation is the basis on which all other criticism rests.") With this general statement nearly every one, I think, can agree. But when in the Introduction to Moulton's book on Shakespeare we read that 'inductive criticism is mainly occupied in distinguishing literary species', we realize how wide is the gulf between Moulton and those he has banished from the realms of science.

Now what is the fundamental difference between Moulton and what for convenience' sake I may call the subjective school of criticism? I believe we can find the answer by reading carefully the words I quoted above (page 204). Moulton insists on the accumulation of facts. Evidently he has asked himself, if in the domain of literature there are facts in the strictly scientific sense of the word, for on p. 39 of the Introduction to his Shakespeare-book he says: "Induction may be presumed to apply wherever there is a subject-matter reducible to the form of fact." Evidently the whole question turns on this. Moulton's book starts from the assumption that there are such facts; my introduction has, I hope, made it clear that to me facts, strictly so called, can be found in the field of literature concerning what is least essential; as to the rest the critic, though he should never forget that a careful and even minute study of the work under discussion is indispensable, is ultimately thrown on the resources of his own emotional and intellectual susceptibility. And that this applies not only to details but to fundamentals will be apparent, if we remember the absolutely different conception the greatest actors have had of the same parts.

In the same passage Moulton refers to the 'sure results' obtained by his methods. Again I do not believe that the purely inductive method will exclude blunders. When Goethe inadvertently started the slander about Ophelia's "reifer, süszer Sinnlichkeit" 2) and when Tieck followed suit, until at last Storffrich could write that "nichts Jungfräuliches war an ihr, als ihr unverehelichter Stand" "), or when a number of critics tried to make a The Modern Study of Literature, p. 494.

Wilhelm Meister, IV. 14.

Quoted by Loening: Die Hamlet-tragödie, p. 256.