literal respect for the Greeks. The critic must have respect for the life of his own times as well as for the writings of the dead. He cannot safely yield to the belief that great literature is a temple that has already been built. If he does not know that creation is still going on, he is little more than a guide to the ruins of classical architecture. The critic must be governed by his sense of life, both in men and in books. The sense of the past alone is not enough. Even as he reads Æschylus or Shakespeare, it is his sense of life, not his sense of the past, that is the more important. Hence the best critics have been men in whom the sense of life, which is the imaginative artist’s sense, has been strong. They have been, for the most part, men who have also attempted with some success other forms of literature--poets, novelists, essayists, such as Coleridge, Sainte-Beuve, Lamb, Matthew Arnold and Anatole France. The old sneer that the critics are men who have failed in literature might almost be reversed, so far as the good critics are concerned. The good critics are men who have succeeded in literature. A good critic tells us as interesting things about his subject as Gilbert White tells us about a bird. It is essentially the same kind of illuminated observation that enables Gilbert White to write well about a blackcap and Anatole France to write well about Pierre Loti. “With an exquisitely delicate skin,” we are told of Loti, “he feels nothing deeply. While all the pleasures and sorrows of the world leap around him like dancing girls before a Rajah, his soul remains empty and depressed, indolent and unoccupied. Nothing has entered it. This is an excellent disposition for the writing of pages which perturb the reader.” To deny the possession of critical standards to a writer whose work is full of imaginative criticism such as this is to speak of standards as though they were a sort of plumbline existing entirely outside the imagination of the critic. It is to fail to see that, as Anatole France says, “every book has as many different aspects as it has readers and a poem like a landscape, is transformed in all the eyes that see it, in all the souls that conceive it.” It is the object of the critic to enable us to share this magical transformation with him, not to issue immutable decrees. Anatole France, it may be, exaggerates the personal element in criticism at the expense of the traditional. He compares himself to a man who goes about “placing rustic benches in the sacred woods and near the fountains of the Muses.” “It demands neither system nor learning,” he declares, “and only requires a pleasant astonishment before the beauty of things. Let the village dominie, the land surveyor, measure the road and set up the milestones!” This is extravagant and fanciful, but it shows us at least the bright side of the moon of criticism. The other side of the moon is useful, but it is not the side that gives us light. THE END