A flying spark from his anvil lights up the dullest intellect. It is a stimulus to the weary brain, after wading through essays as to what constitutes an ideal, to have the gentle scholar, across the blazing pine logs, on a winter’s night, say: “A genius conceives and expresses a great thought. The conception so expressed delights. It enters men’s souls; it compels their admiration. They applaud and are rejoiced that another masterpiece has been brought into existence to grace the world of art and letters. The genius alone is dissatisfied. Where others see perfection, he perceives something unexpressed; beyond the reach of his art. Try as best he may, he cannot attain that indefinable something. Deep in his inner consciousness he sees a type so grand and perfect that his beautiful production appears to him but a faint and marred copy of that original. That original is the ideal; and the ideal it is that appeals to the aesthetic and calls forth men’s admiration.” What a divining power has this student, in plummeting the vagaries of modern culture! “Every school of philosophy has its disciples, who repeat the sayings of their masters with implicit confidence, without ever stopping to question the principles from which those sayings arise or the results to which they lead.” These chattering disciples will affect to sneer at the Christian belief, while they lowly sit at the feet of one of their mud gods singing “thou art the infallible one.” They will not question their position simply because “these systems are accepted not so much for truth’s sake as because they are the intellectual fashions of the day.” Such men change their philosophy as quickly as a Parisian dressmaker his styles. It may yet be shown by some mighty Teuton that vagaries in philosophy and dress are closely allied, and that the synthetic philosophy of Herbert Spencer is responsible for the coming of crinoline. What a delightful thrust at that school of criticism that singles out an author or a book as the very acme of perfection, seeing wisdom in absurdities and truth in commonplace fiction, is given in these lines: “Paint a daub and call it a Turner, and forthwith these critics will trace in it strokes of genius.” With a twinkle in his eye he asks, “Think you they understand the real principles of art criticism?” You will be easily able to answer that question when you have mastered this pithy definition of true criticism, be it of literature or of art, “that it is all-embracing.” It has no antagonism to science so long as she travels in her rightful domain. When “science has her superstitions and her romancings as unreal and shadowy as those of the most ephemeral literature, then it is the duty of criticism to administer the medicine of truth and purge the wayward jade of her humors.”