It is said that, if we adopt this view, we are denying the existence of any standards in criticism. This is not so. One may believe in the conscience while admitting that moral standards fluctuate. Similarly, one may believe in the literary conscience while admitting that literary standards fluctuate. There is an eternal difference between good and evil, but what seems good to one generation may seem evil to another, and it is possible to recognise the goodness of a man, such as an Old Testament polygamist or a Scottish Sabbatarian, whose moral standards are in conflict with ours. We can hold to our own moral standards while realising that they are not the only conceivable moral standards. There is, no doubt, a perfect moral standard somewhere, but only a perfect spirit could perceive it. The rest of us can but do our best, and we cannot even do that. Milton was right when he made “all-judging Jove” the one supreme critic of literature. Meanwhile, the standards of sublunar critics are but guesses. The critic who claims that they are more is simply a dogmatist who climbs into a pulpit when he should be going on a pilgrimage. Brunetière accused Anatole France of having no standards, and it is possible that Anatole France does not subscribe to any Thirty-nine Articles of criticism. But if to have a conscience is to have standards, and if taste is conscience in the æsthetic world, who can deny that Anatole France has very fine literary standards indeed? It is obvious that he all the time measures an author by the excellence of all the authors he has loved, just as most of us get our standards of character from the love and veneration we have felt for good men. This love of excellence is indisputably the first of all the requisites of a critic--love of excellence and acquaintance with excellence. The critic’s first standard is his enthusiasm for the great writers. “By ‘poetry,’ in these pages,” says Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in one of his books of criticism, “I mean what has been written by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and some others.” It is an admirable definition. It puts us in touch with the writer’s standards at once. It suggests, too, the reflection that all the good critics have been men who agreed in the main with posterity in regard to literature. They have accepted the tradition. Even the revolutionary critics, such as Coleridge, have accepted the tradition for the most part, while advancing on it. It is scarcely possible for a man so whimsical or irreverent of the tradition as Samuel Butler to be a good critic. Nor is the man who cannot enter into the tradition that puts Homer and Dante and Shakespeare among the greatest of the poets capable of criticising the free verse of our own day. There is clearly, however, a danger in traditionalism. To criticise not in the spirit but in the letter of the tradition is to become a formalist, a pedant, and it is probable that the French injured their literature in the seventeenth century by their too