THE PLACE AND POWER OF CRITICISM.

BY EDWARD R. RUSSELL.

A SPIRIT of egotism is not that in which a President of our Society should deliver his first address from this Chair. But I hope it may savour rather of humility than of conceit to offer to you some remarks on a subject in which, from my personal experiences and associations, I am deeply interested, and on which your kindness in raising me to this position has led me to meditate anew.

I propose to speak to you of the Place and Power of Criticism; and, although I shall not be unnecessarily apologetic, much of what I have to say will be intended to vindicate a branch of Literature and Philosophy which appears to me to be under valued, and insufficiently cultivated.

Of those who hear me announce this theme, some will say I am undertaking an unnecessary task. Others will think I am attempting a hopeless one. On the one hand I shall be assured that good Criticism of all sorts is justly esteemed. On the other I shall be warned that it is fruitless to endeavour to excite any enthusiasm on behalf of a species of literary effort which is always of secondary and commonly of no importance. In this incidental conflict of judgments I find my justification for endeavouring to make out my case.

And when I say my case, there is a special and particular significance in the personal pronoun. You have elected to the Presidency of this Society, filled in the past by so many distinguished men, one who, since his pen had any pith, has employed it uniformly in Criticism-one who confesses, and of whom it is well known among those who gave him their suffrages, that he has scarcely written a line or attempted a stroke of creative work-one who not only acknowledges this,

but advances it as the modest boast that best becomes him; but who believes none the less in the creative power of the critical craft and of critical appreciation. I feel entitled by the honour that has been conferred on me to assert the Place and Power of Criticism, and to admonish its depreciators that they are probably destitute alike of the critical faculty, and of any just apprehension of the work it has done.

But it is not my intention either exactly to define or to lay down rules for Criticism. This has always been found a mere waste of time and thought, and an opening of the sluices of vexatious controversy. I wish to exalt the function and the promise of intelligent Criticism on the merits, without attempting to say minutely what Criticism is, or definitely what type of Criticism is intelligent, or, at all, what are the merits upon which Intelligent Criticism. should pronounce. Criticism has no rightful place and ought to have no actual power of an arbitrary or autocratic character. Its virtue lies in the judicial energy of well-informed and rightly-balanced minds, and cannot be more closely described, although it is quite possible to debate hotly and idly wherein true Criticism consists, and how it should be brought into play.

As a matter of form it may be necessary at the outset to disown any intention to discuss Criticism in one or two other aspects which will occur to many minds. For a long time Criticism had a very narrowly limited meaning; and even now, both here and in Germany, a literary critic is commonly understood to be one of those microscopic students who, if they arrive at important conclusions, do so by means of the minutest observations. The Criticism for which I speak, however, is not the Criticism of a Scaliger or a Bentley, nor the Criticism which has lately founded theories upon the line

endings and other structural peculiarities of Shakspeare's verse. I use the word in a larger and higher sense, as denoting the faculty and occupation of the mind by which the merits of literature, art, affairs, and conduct are systematically judged, and by which the judgments so passed are presented in literary form to the world. To this faculty, and to the mind when so occupied, Criticism, in its narrower and drier sense, is only one of many ministrants. Occasionally the observations which it makes arrive at a degree of approximate certainty which exacts for them the acceptance of the higher critic. For instance, we can conceive a Shakspearian or classical critic so clearly establishing that a certain phrase could not have been used by its reputed author that the convictions of one who judged of authorship by style and thought might be overborne. But the thing written would remain, whoever wrote it; and cases must be very rare in which the minute corrections or apercus of verbal Criticism or profound scholarship can affect the complexion or the worth of those noble treasures of which true Criticism is the custodian and the expositor.

Another repudiation necessary to be made, in consequence of certain gratuitous and arbitrary definitions of Criticism enunciated by one of the finest living critics, is this:-While acknowledging most freely that Criticism is an endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world, I dispute the appropriateness of Mr. Matthew Arnold's qualification when he calls it a "disinterested" endeavour, and explains that in his judgment true Criticism is essentially the exercise of "curiosity as to ideas and all subjects, for their own sakes, apart from any practical interest they may serve." "Criticism," Mr. Arnold says, "obeys an instinct prompting it to try to know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespectively of practice, politics, and everything of the kind, and to value knowledge and

thought as they approach this best, without the intrusion of any other consideration whatever." I have no objection to abstract Criticism, or to Criticism on grounds of pure taste, and I fully recognise the danger of valuing productions of imagination by a didactic standard; but it seems to me that the moral, social, or intellectual utility which obviously attaches to many works, especially of literary art, must enter largely into any adequate critical estimate, and that there are not many really great works of any kind which would not rank all the higher for having their broader and collateral utilities thus brought into the reckoning.

Criticism, no doubt, should always be historic in spirit, whether employed upon ancient or modern work, and it is an offence both against taste and against truth to read into any work more meaning than is consistent with its time and the circumstances which surrounded its production. But it does not follow that the intention of the author is to be the measure of his work's significance. A recent newspaper writer has asked, with much pertinence, whether we are to regard as priggish or mistaken all art that tends to elevate the moral nature of man, and has found his best answer in the works of Shakspeare, of Homer, of Dante, and of Scott. "It is life itself," he says, "that meets us in their poems; life, with no feature omitted and none caricatured. They have no intention to teach and no fear of teaching, but show us the world in a strangely new, vivid, and impressive way. Consequences, in their art, must of necessity follow hard on actions, and hence the lesson of the lives they tell of comes home more swiftly and more surely than in the life of the world around us. But the lesson is never thrust forward, because it did not hold more than its proper place in the mind of the singer; because it did not hide slight incidental matters of sorrow and laughter from the vision of the seer." This is a beautiful and accurate discrimination. We discern in it