We must give the terms good taste, right reason a broader scope; that is all. The principles of good taste when applied to art are not fixed and absolute, like those of mathematics or the exact sciences. They are vital and elastic. They imply a certain fitness and consistency. Shakespeare shocked the classic taste of the French critics. He violated the unities and mixed prose and poetry. But what was good taste in Shakespeare--that is, in keeping with his spirit and aim--might be bad taste in Racine. What is permissible to an elemental poet like Whitman would jar in a refined poet like Longfellow. But bad taste in Whitman, that is, things not in keeping with the ideal he has before him, jar the same as in any other poet. He has many lines and passages and whole poems that set the teeth of many readers on edge, that are yet in perfect keeping with his plan and spirit. They go with the poet of the Cosmos, but not with the poet of the drawing-room or library. My taste is not shocked, but my courage is challenged. In Whitman’s case the appeal is not so directly and exclusively to our æsthetic perceptions as it is in most other poets; he is elemental where they are cultured and artificial; at the same time he can no more escape æsthetic principles than they can. Because a flower, a gem, a well-kept lawn, etc., are beautiful, we are not compelled to deny beauty to rocks, trees, and mountains. If Whitman does not, in his total effects, attain to something like this kind of beauty, he is not a poet. IV I have said that Sainte-Beuve was more truly a democratic critic than is M. Brunetière. He is more tolerant of individualism in letters. He called himself a naturalist of minds. His main interest in each work was in what was most individual and characteristic in it. He was inclusive rather than exclusive, less given to positive judgments, but more to sympathetic interpretation. He united the method of Darwin to the sensibility of the artist. Critics like Arnold and Brunetière uphold the classic and academic traditions. They are aristocratic because they are the spokesmen of an exclusive culture. They derive from Catholicism more than from Protestantism; they uphold authority rather than encourage individuality in life and letters. In criticism they aim at that intellectual disinterestedness which is indeed admirable, and which has given the world such noble results, but which seems unsuited to the genius of our time. Ours is a democratic century, a Protestant century. Individualism has been the dominant note in literature. The men of power, for the most part, have not been the disinterested, but the interested men, the men of conviction and of more or less partial views, who have not so much aimed to see the thing as it is in itself as they have aimed to make others see it as they saw it. In other words, they have been preachers, doctrinaires, men bent upon the dissemination of particular ideas.