82 LITKKAEY VALUES 



seek to estimate the value of these standards as 

 they stand related to the best aims and achievements 

 of the human mind. 



We demand of these men what we demand of 

 Browning, Tennyson, Hugo, and every other poet 

 and writer of high claims, — genuineness, sincerity, 

 power, inspiration, and that they awaken in us fresh 

 and vivid currents of ideas and emotions. We shall 

 not quarrel with their methods, or materials, or their 

 form, or formlessness, but they must go to the quick. 

 All our pleasure and profit in great art — painting, 

 sculpture, architecture, poetry — is at last one, a new 

 experience of the beauty and significance of nature 

 and life. We are made to feel these emotions afresh 

 and as if for the first time. 



Here are the old eternal elements, — life, nature, 

 the soul, man and woman, all in danger of becoming 

 dull, commonplace, uninteresting to us. But the 

 man with the creative touch gives us a new and lively 

 sense of them, by presenting them to us in new com- 

 binations and under new lights. The only new thing 

 added is himself, — the quality or flavor of his own 

 genius. 



A complete criticism will not limit itself to de- 

 scription or to interpretation ; it will seek to esti- 

 mate, to bring out the relative or absolute value of 

 the thing. Mr. Howells in his trenchant little vol- 

 ume on " Criticism and Fiction," says the critic has 

 no more business to trample on a poem, a novel, or 

 an essay that does not please him, than the botanist 

 has to grind a plant under his heel because he does 



