Systematic Fudgments.

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bility, the judgment of envy and jealousy. Finally, there is the systematic judgment, and this judgment is the most worthless of all. The sharp scrutiny of envy and jealousy may bring real faults to light. The judgments of incompatibility and ignorance are instructive, whether they reveal necessary clefts of separation between the experiences of different sorts of people, or reveal simply the narrowness and bounded view of those who judge. But the systematic judgment is altogether unprofitable. Its author has not really his eye upon the professed object of his criticism at all, but upon something else which he wants to prove by means of that object. He neither really tells us, therefore, anything about the object, nor anything about his own ignorance of the object. He never fairly looks at it, he is looking at something else. Perhaps if he looked at it straight and full, looked at it simply, he might be able to pass a good judgment on it. As it is, all he tells us is that he is no genuine critic, but a man with a system, an advocate.

Here is the fault of Professor Hermann Grimm, and of his Berlin lectures on Goethe. The professor is a man with a system; the lectures are a piece of advocacy. Professor Grimm is not looking straight at 'the greatest poet of all times and of all peoples;' he is ooking at the necessities, as to literary glory, of the new German empire.-Mixed Essays.

THE JOURNEYMAN-WORK OF LITERATURE. EDUCATED Opinion exists here as in France; but in France the Academy serves as a sort of centre and rallying-point to it, and gives it a force which it has not got here. Why is all the journeyman-work of literature, as I may call it, so much worse done here than it is in France? I do not wish to hurt any one's feelings; but surely this is so. Think of the difference between our books of reference and those of the French, between our biographical dictionaries (to take a striking instance) and theirs; think of the difference between the translations of the classics turned out for Mr. Bohn's library and those turned out for M. Nisard's collection! As a general rule, hardly any one amongst us, who knows French and German well, would use an English book of reference when he could get a French or German one; or would look at an English prose translation of an ancient author when he could get a French or German one. It is not that there do not exist in England, as in France, a num ber of people perfectly well able to discern what is good, in these things, from what is bad, and preferring what is good; but they are isolated, they form no powerful body of opinion, they are not strong enough to set a standard up to which even the journeyman-work of literatur must be brought, if it is to be vendible. Ignorance and charlatanism in work of this kind are always trying to

The Journeyman-work of Literature. 15

pass off their wares as excellent, and to cry down criticism as the voice of an insignificant, over-fastidious minority; they easily persuade the multitude that this is so when the minority is scattered about as it is here; not so easily when it is banded together as in the French Academy.-Essays in Criticism.

THE NOTE OF PROVINCIALITY.

In a production which we have all been reading lately, a production stamped throughout with a literary quality very rare in this country,-urbanity; in this production, the work of a man never to be named by any son of Oxford without sympathy, a man who alone in Oxford of his generation, alone of many generations, conveyed to us in his genius that same charm, that same ineffable sentiment, which this exquisite place itself conveys, I mean Dr. Newman, an expression is frequently used which is more common in theological than in literary language, but which seems to me fitted to be of general service; the note of so and so, the note of catholicity, the note of antiquity, the note of sanctity, and so on. Adopting this expressive word, I say that in the bulk of the intellectual work of a nation which has no centre, no intellectual thetropolis like an Academy, like M. Sainte-Beuve's sovereign organ of opinion,' like M. Renan's 'recogised authority in matters of tone and taste,'—there is observable a note of provinciality. Now, to get rid of pro

vinciality is a certain stage of culture; a stage the positive result of which we must not make of too much importance, but which is, nevertheless, indispensable; for it brings us on to the platform where alone the best and highest intellectual work can be fairly said to begin. Work done after men have reached this platform is classical; and that is the only work which, in the long run, can stand. All the scoria in the work of men of great genius who have not lived on this platform, are due to their not having lived on it. Genius raises them to it by moments, and the portions of their work which are immortal are done at these moments; but more of it would have been immortal if they had not reached this platform at moments only, if they had had the culture which makes men live there.-Essays in Criticism.

AN ENGLISH ACADEMY.

NATIONS have their own modes of acting, and these modes are not easily changed; they are even consecrated, when great things have been done in them. When a literature has produced Shakspeare and Milton, when it has even produced Swift and Burke, it cannot well abandon its traditions; it can hardly begin, at this late time of day, with an institution like the French Academy. I think academies with a limited, special, scientific scope, in the various lines of intellectual work,-academies like that of Berlin, for instance, we with time may, and pro

An English Academy.

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bably shall, establish. And no doubt they will do good; no doubt the presence of such influential centres of correct information will tend to raise the standard amongst us for what I have called the journeyman-work of literature, and to free us from the scandal of such biographical dictionaries as Chalmers's, or such translations as a recent one of Spinoza, or perhaps, such philological freaks as Mr. Forster's about the one primeval language. But an academy quite like the French Academy, a sovereign organ of the highest literary opinion, a recognised authority in matters of intellectual tone and taste, we shall hardly have, and perhaps we ought not to wish to have it. But then every one amongst us with any turn for literature will do well to remember to what shortcomings and excesses, which such an academy tends to correct, we are liable; and the more liable, of course, for not having it.-Essays in Criticism.

THE SAME.

BECAUSE I have freely pointed out the dangers and inconveniences to which our literature is exposed in the absence of any centre of taste and authority like the French Academy, it is constantly said that I want to introduce. here in England an institution like the French Academy. I have, indeed, expressly declared that I wanted no such thing. But let me notice how it is just our worship of machinery, and of external doing, which leads to this

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