I doubt if there will ever be a critical method which all may apply. Every man will have his own method, as truly as he has his own manners. The French critic Schérer inclines to “the method which sets to work to comprehend rather than to class, to explain rather than to judge,” or which asks as the first step to possess itself of the author’s point of view. This is substantially Pope’s dictum that a work is to be read in the spirit in which it was written, and it accords with Heine’s saying that the critic is to ask, “What does the artist intend?” This is a part of, but does it sum up, the critical function? A man’s writing upon the works of another takes the form of description and analysis--like the report of a naturalist upon a new species, which Mr. Howells thinks is the main function of criticism; or it may aim chiefly at interpretation, which a recent essayist emphasizes as the latest and highest phase of criticism; or it may aim at a judicial estimate, an authoritative verdict from the rules and standards, which is the more classic and academic phase of criticism. Each phase is legitimate and leads to valuable results. Of any considerable artistic work we want a description and an analysis, we want an interpretation and an exposition, and we want an appraisement according to the standard of the best that has been thought and done in the world,--not a comparison with the externals of the accepted models, but with the originality, the spontaneity, the sanity, the inner necessity and consistency of them--the truth to nature and to the laws of the human mind. Is it liberating, vitalizing, cheering? Is it ethically sound? Does it favor large and manly ideals? Does it go along with evolution and progress? What, for instance, will criticism do with the work of such a man as Whitman, or Ibsen, or Tolstoi? It will describe it and analyze it, and name it as lyric, epic, dramatic, etc.; it will interpret it, or draw out and expound the ideas that lie back of it and out of which it sprang; it will seek to understand it and to get at the writer’s point of view; then it will judge it, try it by its own standards, and seek to estimate the value of these standards as they stand related to the best aims and achievements of the human mind. We demand of these men what we demand of Browning, Tennyson, Hugo, and every other poet and writer of high claims,--genuineness, sincerity, power, inspiration, and that they awaken in us fresh and vivid currents of ideas and emotions. We shall not quarrel with their methods, or materials, or their form, or formlessness, but they must go to the quick. All our pleasure and profit in great art--painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry--is at last one, a new experience of the beauty and significance of nature and life. We are made to feel these emotions afresh and as if for the first time.