76 ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 



and yet remain incapable of feeling what is sublime in 

 Milton's conception and artistic in his execution. You may 

 be acquainted with the history of our language in all its stages, 

 and may be able to point out Spenser's archaeologisms, without 

 touching the points which make his epic valuable for culture. 

 You may discourse with the tongue of an angel upon the 

 dates of Shakespeare's plays, and at the same time show a 

 stolid incapacity for apprehending their true drift and nervous 

 grip on human life. In short, bibliography, linguistic studies, 

 questions of dates and sources, are only important as ancillary 

 to the real work of criticism, which is to interpret the work- 

 ings of the human spirit by its monuments in art and letters. 



In the second place, erudition, when not controlled by 

 vigorous sense, encourages what may be described as the 

 nidification of mares' nests a malady most incident to 

 ingenious but flighty theorists, who nourish the grotesque 

 fictions of their ignorance upon the milk of their ill- 

 assimilated learning. The misuse of erudition leads to such 

 fundamental misconceptions as that which vitiates Dr. Guest's 

 great work on English Rhythms. It renders the hypothesis 

 of Bacon's authorship of Shakespeare's plays attractive in 

 the eyes of incompetent students. It inflates blathery com- 

 pilations on esoteric Buddhism, Spiritualism, the history of 

 Secret Societies, the migrations of the ten Lost Tribes, Phallic 

 Worship, Apocalyptic Prophecy. For years it has infected 

 speculative writing on the evolution of religions, the inter- 

 pretation of mythology, the origin of language, ethnology, 

 phrenology, chiromancy, and all the bastard brood descended 

 from mediaeval astrology and magic. It taints the otherwise 

 sound work of many scholars of the German type, who have 

 not common sense or knowledge of life enough to save them 

 from fabricating preposterous solutions of perplexing problems, 

 and applying the resources of their knowledge to supporting 

 major premisses which are palpably absurd. 



Learning cannot come amiss to those who understand its 

 use. He who has most of it is best equipped for criticism. 

 But learning does not supply the critical faculty. To criticism 

 it is the necessary foundation and a serviceable handmaid. 



