But the greatest glory of Chateaubriand is that he is, if not the creator, the first brilliant exponent of what we have called above the Critical Imagination—the first great practitioner of imaginative criticism since Longinus himself. Lessing and Diderot had no doubt shown the way to this, but the first was not quite enthusiastic enough, and the second was enthusiastic to and over the verge of dithyramb. The Schlegels and Goethe had practised in it; but the two former were not great enough men of letters, and the most ambitious attempts of Goethe, such as that in _Wilhelm Meister_, are spoilt by deplorable longwindednesses and pedantries. Chateaubriand is one of the very first to take the new stream, _remis atque velis_, plying the oars of the intellect, and catching the wind of the spirit. His occasional delinquencies in the use of the phrase _mauvais goût_; his deference to the old opinion that the hero of tragedy must necessarily be what we called then in English “a high fellow”; other things of the same kind; do not matter in the very least. Every one of them could be set off against a corresponding expression of freedom from neo-classic prejudice; and there would remain a mighty balance of such utterances on the credit side.[211] [Sidenote: _Joubert—his reputation._] The critical position of Joubert, acclaimed soon after the posthumous publication of his work[212] by the greatest critical authorities, has sometimes been questioned in later days, but quite idly. Readers of these pages must have seen, if indeed they did not know it long before, that a large body of critical, as of other opinion, is merely negligible. It does not rest upon any solid knowledge or argument; it is in many cases not even the expression of a genuine personal preference, illusion, or impression of any kind. Sometimes the critic does not like the other critics who have expressed approval of the author; sometimes he does not like some individual utterance or group of utterances of the author’s own; more often he simply wishes “to be different”—to blame where his predecessors have praised, and to extol to the skies what they have disapproved or left unnoticed. In all such cases the verdict need not even be seriously fought before any court of cassation; it is self-quashed.