74 ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 



and whether Stella (the Lady Penelope Devereux) was a 

 married woman when Sidney wrote them. A special fami- 

 liarity with the Italian models then in vogue may help him 

 to form an opinion as to the imaginative nature of these 

 lyrics. With this end in view, he studies the types under 

 which that conventional style of utterance presented itself to 

 Elizabethan Englishmen, and carefully notes the differences 

 of tone and accent between Tasso and Bembo on the one 

 hand, and Sidney and Shakespeare on the other. 



After such preliminary labours, true critics will often best 

 display their quality of wisdom by abandoning the problem 

 as insoluble. They will be content to state its conditions 

 as fairly and as comprehensively as possible, leaving their 

 readers to draw conclusions, and modestly suggesting the 

 path on which they have themselves been led. Indeed, it 

 is just here that the critic has to protect himself most warily 

 against his own subjective ingenuity. To construct a plau- 

 sible scheme of explanation, to fence it round with psycho- 

 logical hypotheses, to emphasize the points of evidence which 

 give colour to the view adopted, to attenuate conflicting testi- 

 mony, is cheap and easy enough. This is what minds of the 

 second order in criticism, with whom erudition and the theory 

 weigh more than an imperious anxiety to prove the truth, 

 delight in doing. But the test of a good critic is suspension 

 of judgment in cases which are not convincingly proven. 



Take the more important instance of Shakespeare's sonnets. 

 We have all tried to wring the heart out of that mystery. 

 We have all felt the accent of acute passion alternating with 

 the accent of what looks like artificial compliment the 

 inequality of style, the inequality of emotion, the inequality 

 of artistic handling in those unparalleled outpourings of 

 a mighty poet's soul. We do not doubt their genuineness. 

 We trace the outlines of a story in them, which it is not 

 difficult to decipher, although the import may be painful. So 

 far we are agreed. But when it comes to deciding whether 

 Shakespeare intended a merely dramatic series of psycho- 

 logical lyrics, or whether he committed his own experience 

 from day to day to paper in the sonnets, or whether he wrote 



