Here are the old eternal elements,--life, nature, the soul, man and woman, all in danger of becoming dull, commonplace, uninteresting to us. But the man with the creative touch gives us a new and lively sense of them, by presenting them to us in new combinations and under new lights. The only new thing added is himself,--the quality or flavor of his own genius. A complete criticism will not limit itself to description or to interpretation; it will seek to estimate, to bring out the relative or absolute value of the thing. Mr. Howells in his trenchant little volume on “Criticism and Fiction,” says the critic has no more business to trample on a poem, a novel, or an essay that does not please him, than the botanist has to grind a plant under his heel because he does not find it pretty. His business “is to classify and analyze the fruits of the human mind as the naturalist classifies the objects of his study, rather than to praise or blame them.” To classify and analyze the fruits of the human mind is certainly one of the functions of criticism, and only one. The analogy Mr. Howells employs is misleading. We do not sit in judgment on natural specimens and products except as they stand related to human wants and utilities. We compare climates, seasons, soils, landscapes, with reference to racial and individual needs and well-being. If you bring me trees from the woods or stone from the quarry to build my house with, I am bound to sit in judgment upon them. And when my house is built, my neighbors will sit in judgment upon it. Of all artificial things, of all man’s works, we are bound to ask, are they well done? are they what they should be? are they the best of their kind? Shall we not ask these questions of the poem also, of the novel, the essay, the history? Art has relations to life, and the critic is bound to consider what these relations are in any given work,--how true, how important; he is examining a human product, not a natural specimen, and is as competent to reject as to accept; he must compare, weigh, appraise, to the best of his ability.