Yet let me not seem to underrate the value of what is called judicial criticism. Criticism as an act of judgment, as a disinterested endeavor to see the thing as it is in itself and as it stands related to other things, is justly jealous of our personal tastes and preferences. These tastes and preferences may blind us to the truth. Can we admire above them, or even against them? To cherish no writers but those of our own stripe or mental complexion is the way of the half cultured. Can we rise to a disinterested view? The danger of individualism in letters is caprice, bias, partial views; the danger of intellectualism is the cold, the colorless, the formal. The ideal critic will blend the two; he will be disinterested and yet sympathetic, individual and yet escape caprice and bias, warm with interest and yet cool with judgment; surrendering himself to his subject and yet not losing himself in it, upholding tradition and yet welcoming new talent, giving the personal equation free play without blurring the light of the impersonal intelligence. From the point of view of intellectualism, criticism seeks to eliminate the personal equation, that which is private and peculiar to us as individuals, and to base criticism upon something like universal principles. What we crave, what our minds literally feed upon, may blind us to the truly excellent. Our _wants_ are personal; what we should aim at is an excellence that is impersonal. When we rise to the sphere of the disinterested, we lose sight of our individual tastes and predilections. The question then is, not what we want, not what we have a taste for, but what we are capable of appreciating. Can we appreciate the best? Can we share the universal mind to the extent of delighting in the best that has been known and thought in the world? Emerson said he was always glad to meet people who saw the superiority of Shakespeare to all other poets. If we prefer Pope to Shakespeare, as we are apt to at a certain age, we may know by that that there is an excellence beyond our reach. It is certain that the mass of readers will not appreciate the best literature, but only the second or third best. A man’s æsthetic perceptions may be broadened and educated as well as his intellectual. An unread man feels little interest beyond his own neighborhood,--the personal doings of the men and women he sees and knows. Educate him a little, give him his county paper, and the sphere of his interests is widened; a little more, and he takes an interest in his State; more still, and he broadens out to his whole country; still more, and the whole world is within his sympathy and ken. So in the aesthetic sphere; he gets beyond his personal tastes and wants into the great world currents of literature and art. He can appreciate works written in other ages and lands, and that are quite foreign to his own temperament and outlook. This is to be disinterested. To emancipate the taste is as much as to emancipate