

ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 69 



idiosyncratic properties and further qualified by the conditions 

 of a certain race and century. In this way a quadruple 

 element of subjectivity enters into the final estimate, as will 

 appear from, the following diagram : 



A D 



Here A stands for the artist, b for his temperament, c for 

 what we will call his milieu. D stands for the critic, e for his 

 temperament, / for his milieu. Thus the relation between A 

 and D, the artist and the critic, involves a blending of b, c, e,f, 

 so uncertain in its combinations as to preclude scientific exacti- 

 tude in the estimate formed by the latter. Moral, political, 

 religious, aesthetic, sensuous sympathies and antipathies play 

 their inevitable part, preventing the intellect of the critic from 

 fully attaining to that quality of dry light which should be 

 the object of his earnest effort. For like reasons, no two 

 critics will ever be able to take precisely the same view of 

 any one object of art. 



Owing to this intrusion of subjectivity, one of the prime 

 difficulties of criticism is correct interpretation. How well- 

 nigh impossible it is to be quite sure that we have caught the 

 meaning, felt the tone of an ancient author ! The criticism 

 of the Bible, the criticism of Aristotle, and Plato, and Homer, 

 have suffered and are suffering from defective interpretation 

 to an extent of which the world is only tardily becoming 

 conscious. If we consider Calvin's interpretation of S. Paul 

 and Gladstone's views on Homer, what I mean by the blending 

 of quadruple subjectivity will be glaringly apparent. 



Criticism, in the modern sense of the word, began with 

 the humanistic movement of the early Renaissance. Those 

 first Italian scholars who collected Greek and Latin MSS. 

 approached the literature of antiquity with insufficient feeling 

 for its historical development. They regarded that vast mass 

 of documents, extending over about one thousand years, as 

 a totality, without perspective and without a just discrimina- 

 tion of successive periods. They assumed, for instance, that 

 the poem of ' Hero and Leander,' because it bore the name 



