The third definition of a standard is one which may without difficulty be applied to literature, but which is really a little more dangerous to deal with than the preceding. If the standard is to be an ensign or flag carried at the head of an army, we are confronted with an idea which is less durable than those which we have considered. For if the army marches with drums and trumpets, and all flags flying, it may not only march to defeat instead of victory, but it may alter its direction, and march back with no less pomp and noise than it marched forward. In these conditions, its ensigns, instead of representing a fixed purpose, may be the standards of irresolution and vacillation. We can find an exact literary parallel for this in European taste in the seventeenth century. The cleverness and fancy of writers, in prose and verse, and almost in every country, led them to adopt methods of writing which strained to the utmost the powers of language. Poetry, instead of being content to walk and run, turned somersaults on the trapeze. As long as this was done by very graceful and nimble intellectual athletes it gave great pleasure, and the world of letters seemed marching to victory under this ensign of imaginative acrobatism. But it speedily proved to have been a mistake; the graceful athletes gave place to grotesque contortionists, and the army of writers retreated in confusion, but slowly, doggedly, and under the same standards of taste. There was no other way back to health but to discard the existing ideals altogether; they were too obstinately fixed in men's minds to make it possible to modify them. If we are to form any opinion with regard to that question of the literary standard, which democratic habits of thought tend to make every day a more dangerous one, it is manifest that we must regard it from these three points of view, or from a combination of them. The taste of the public is a floating, a vague impression of an amateur body with regard to a matter which is more precisely and sharply defined by a consensus of experts. But the experts themselves are not united, and the precision of their views only tends to darken counsel and reduce opinion to chaos. Unhappily a piece of literature cannot be assayed mechanically like a piece of coinage. Under the strictest rules that ever were enacted and a régime the most academic conceivable, there will never be anything like unanimity regarding the excellence of a literary product. All we can hope to reach is a general agreement of the best-trained minds, recurrent for so many generations as to become practically durable.