72 ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 



against the importation of our own thoughts and feelings into 

 the works we have to deal with, and to be mindful that our 

 subjectivity is a perpetual source of danger. 



It is something to have gained a clear conception of the 

 critical method. It is even more to have become aware of 

 its limitations. To this extent, then, through the perception 

 of what criticism ought to be, through the definition of its 

 province, and through the recognition of what is inevitably 

 imperfect in its instrument, the method tends to being in its 

 own way scientific. Each year adds to our systematic know- 

 ledge of arts and literatures ; and with each extension of that 

 knowledge the body of undisputed facts, the sum of accepted 

 opinions, are enlarged. It might almost be maintained that 

 we are slowly advancing towards a period at which criticism 

 will become deductive through the accumulation of principles 

 and their verification by the comparative method of study 

 applied to arts and letters. 



VIII 



At this point it is not unnatural to ask what are the rela- 

 tions between criticism and erudition. What is the real value 

 of laborious learning bibliographical, historical, philological, 

 etc. for the higher culture ? 



The critic, if he has a right conception of his task, will 

 regard no knowledge, however formal, no information, how- 

 ever slight and seemingly irrelevant, as unimportarit for his 

 purpose. 



It was from technical inquiries into the redaction of the 

 Gospels, the composition of the Pentateuch, the authorship 

 of the Psalms, the probable antiquity of the Book of Job, the 

 dramatic character of the Song of Solomon, the integrant 

 parts of Isaiah, the canon of S. Paul's epistles, the political 

 allusions in the Apocalypse, that sound views on the subject 

 of inspiration and the character in general of our sacred 

 writings gradually filtered into Biblical criticism. 



We had not learned to know Shakespeare before we 

 attempted to disentangle his part in Pericles and The Two 

 Noble Kinsmen ; before we tried to eliminate what does not 



