What, then, do we mean by a great critic? We mean a great mind that finds complete self-expression in and through the works of other men. Arnold found more complete self-expression through literary criticism than through any other channel: hence he is greatest here; his theological and religious criticism shows him to less advantage. Sainte-Beuve tried poetry and fiction, but did not find a complete outlet for his talent till he tried criticism. Not a profound or original mind, but a wonderfully flexible, tolerant, sympathetic, engaging one; a climbing plant, one might say, that needed some support to display itself to the best advantage. We say of the French mind generally that it is more truly a critical mind than the English; it finds in criticism a better field for the display of its special gifts--taste, clearness, brevity, flexibility, judgment--than does the more original and profoundly emotional English. French criticism is rarely profound, but it is always light, apt, graceful, delicate, lucid, felicitous,--clear sense and good taste marvelously blended. Criticism in its scientific aspects or as a purely intellectual effort--a search for the exact truth, a sifting of evidence, weighing and comparing data, disentangling testimony, separating the false from the true, as with the lawyer, the doctor, the man of science, the critic of old texts and documents--is one thing. Criticism of literature and art, involving questions of taste, style, poetic and artistic values, is quite another, and demands quite other powers. In the former case it is mainly judicial, dispassionate, impersonal; in the latter case the sympathies and special predilections are more involved. We seek more or less to interpret the imaginative writer, to draw out and emphasize his special quality and stimulus, to fuse him and restate him in other terms; and in doing this we give ourselves more freely. We cannot fully interpret what we do not love, and love has eyes the judgment knows not of. What a man was born to say, what he speaks out of his most radical selfhood,--that the same fate and power in you can alone fully estimate and interpret. VI