RECENT PHASES OF LITERARY CRITICISM 131 



minds the appreciation of a work of the imagination 

 is a matter of feeling and intuition long hefore it is 

 a matter of intellectual cognizance. Not all minds 

 can give a reason for the faith that is in them, and it 

 is not important that they should ; the main mat- 

 ter is the faith. Every great work of art will he 

 found upon examination to have an ample ground of 

 critical principles to rest upon, though in the artist's 

 own mind not one of these principles may have been 

 consciously defined. 



Indeed, the artist who works from any theory is 

 foredoomed to at least partial failure. And art that 

 lends itself to any propaganda, or to any idea " out- 

 side its essential form, falls short of being a pure 

 art creation." 



The critical spirit, when it has hardened into fixed 

 standards, is always a bar to the enjoyment or under- 

 standing of a poet. One then has a poetical creed, 

 as he has a political or religious creed, and this creed 

 is likely to stand between him and the appreciation 

 of a new poetic type. Macaulay thought Leigh Hunt 

 was barred from appreciating his " Lays of Ancient 

 Rome " by his poetical creed, which may have been 

 the case. Jeffrey was no doubt barred from appre- 

 ciating Wordsworth by his poetical creed. It was 

 Byron's poetical creed that led him to rank Pope so 

 highly. A critic who holds to one of the conflicting 

 creeds about fiction, either that it should be realistic 

 or romantic, will not do justice to the other type. 

 If Tolstoi is his ideal, he will set little value on 

 Scott ; or if he exalts Hawthorne, he will depreciate 



