92 LITEKAEY VALUES 



into a turbid one ; it is not deep, but pellucid, — a 

 tributary that improves the quality of the whole. 

 It gives us that refreshment and satisfaction that we 

 always get from the words of a man who speaks in 

 his own right and from ample grounds of personal 

 conviction. 



Positive judgments in literature or in art, or in 

 any matters of taste, are dangerous things. The 

 crying want always is for new, fresh power to break 

 up the old verdicts and opinions, and set all afloat 

 again. " We must learn under the master how to 

 destroy him." The great critic gives us courage to 

 reverse his judgments. Dr. Johnson said that Dry- 

 den was the writer who first taught us to determine 

 the merit of composition upon principle ; but criti- 

 cism has been just as much at variance with itself 

 since Dryden's time as it was before. It is an art, 

 and not a science, — one of the forms of literary art, 

 wherein, as in all other forms of art, the man, and 

 not the principle, is the chief factor. 



Ill 

 When one thinks of it, how diverse and contra- 

 dictory have been the judgments of even the best 

 critics ! Behold how Macaulay's verdicts differ from 

 Carlyle's, Carlyle's from Arnold's, Arnold's from 

 Frederic Harrison's or Morley's or Stephen's or 

 Swinburne's ; how Taine and Sainte-Beuve diverge 

 upon Balzac ; how Eenan and Arnold diverge upon 

 Hugo ; how Lowell and Emerson diverge upon Whit- 

 man ; and how wide apart are contemporary critics 



