ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 71 



in what respects the thinkers of the classic age differed from 

 themselves, and in what points humanity remained unaltered. 

 This comparison of a recovered civilisation with the civilisa- 

 tion of the sixteenth century, this shock of the Christian 

 with the Pagan mind, stimulated curiosity and encouraged 

 a keenly sceptical habit of investigation. Valla's exposure 

 of the false Decretals and the Donation of Constantine, and 

 his demonstration that the epistle of Abgarus was palpably 

 spurious, marked an epoch in the annals of destructive 

 criticism. Then came the movement of the Reformation in 

 Germany, and the movement of the New Philosophy in 

 Southern Italy, breaking down at one and the same time the 

 authority of ecclesiastical and of Aristotelian tradition, and 

 forcing men to regard documents, superstitiously accounted 

 sacred, in the light of common sense. 



Thus criticism, as we understand it, emerged ; and one of 

 the main benefits derived from the Revival of Learning is the 

 excitation of a sound instinct regarding its method. If we 

 owed nothing else to humanism, this alone should reconcile 

 us with the Renaissance; for science itself may be said to 

 have sprung into existence from habits of exact research 

 aroused by the scrupulous examination and comparison of 

 antique records. 



The chief danger of criticism in its present stage is not 

 that patient and exhaustive investigation should be spared, 

 but that the critic should be insufficiently upon his guard 

 against subjective fancies, paradoxes of opinion, and super- 

 subtleties of ingenuity. Science suffers less from this peril, 

 though, even in science, the plausible hypotheses of brilliant 

 thinkers may be mistaken for demonstrations. The history 

 of Darwinism after the publication of the ' Origin of Species,' 

 in 1859, furnishes a very interesting example of criticism 

 applied for a series of years to a theory which startled the 

 world, and won its way by slow degrees under the test of 

 strict and hostile examination. Literature and art are 

 peculiarly liable, owing to their subject-matter, to distortion 

 and misrepresentation at the hands of historians and critics. 

 It behoves us, therefore, to be specially upon our guard 



