EECENT PHASES OF LITEEAEY CRITICISM 121 



even by Tolstoi. When rightly understood, it is 

 true. Art would live in the whole, and not in the 

 part called morals or religion, or even beauty. But 

 its exponents in our day have been, with few excep- 

 tions, of a feeble type, men of words and fancies like 

 Swinburne or Poe. In Tennyson we have as pure a 

 specimen of artistic genius as in Shakespeare, but 

 a far less potent one. His power comes when he 

 thrills and vibrates with some special thought or 

 cry of his time. With the great swarms of our 

 minor poets the complaint is, not that the type is 

 not pure, but that the inspiration is feeble. They 

 have more art than nature. It is the same with 

 the novelists. Since Hawthorne and Thackeray the 

 pure artistic gift has no longer been the endowment 

 of great or profound personalities. George Eliot, 

 Mrs. Ward, Tolstoi, all interested writers, all with 

 aims foreign to pure art, are the names of power in 

 our half of the century. Henry James is a much 

 finer artist, but he has nothing like their hold upon 

 the great common elements of human life. The 

 disinterested writer gives us a higher, more unselfish 

 pleasure than the type I am considering; we are 

 compelled to rise more completely out of ourselves 

 to meet him. I am only insisting that in our day 

 he has little penetration, and that the men of power 

 have been of the other class. 



I have placed Taine among the interested critics ; 

 he was interested in putting through certain ideas ; 

 he had a thesis to uphold ; he will not value all 

 truths equally, he will take what suits him. Like 



