Is it not true that all first-class works have to be approached with a certain humility and free giving of one’s self? In a sense, “except ye become as little children” ye cannot enter the kingdom of the great books. I suppose that to get at the true inwardness of any imaginative work, we must read it as far as possible in its own spirit, and that if it does not engraft and increase its own spirit upon us, then it is feeble and may easily be brushed aside. Criticism which has for its object the discovery of new talent and, in Sainte-Beuve’s words, to “apportion to each kind of greatness its due influence and superiority,” is one thing; and criticism the object of which is to uphold and enforce the literary tradition, is quite another. Consciously or unconsciously, when the trained reader opens a new book he is under the influence of one or the other of these notions,--either he submits himself to it disinterestedly, intent only upon seizing and appreciating its characteristic quality, or he comes prepossessed with certain rules and standards upon which his taste has been formed. In other words, he comes to the new work simply as a man, a human being seeking edification, or he comes clothed in some professional authority, seeking judgment. Our best reading is a search for the excellent; but what is the excellent? Is there any final standard of excellence in literature? Each may be excellent after its kind, but kinds differ. There is one excellence of Milton and Arnold and the classic school, and another excellence of Shakespeare and Pope and Burns and Wordsworth and Whitman, or of the romantic and democratic school. The critic is to hold a work up to its own ideal or standard. Of the perfect works, of the works that aim at perfection, at absolute symmetry and proportion, appealing to us through the cunning of their form, scheme, structure, details, ornamentation, we make a different demand from the one we make of a primitive, unique, individual utterance or expression of personality like “Leaves of Grass,” in which the end is not form, but life; not perfection, but suggestion; not intellect, but character; not beauty, but power; not carving, or sculpture, or architecture, but the building of a man. It is no doubt a great loss to be compelled to read any work of literary art in a conscious critical mood, because the purely intellectual interest in such a work which criticism demands, is far less satisfying than our æsthetic interest. The mood in which we enjoy a poem is analogous to that in which it was conceived. We have here the reason why the professional reviewer is so apt to miss the characteristic quality of the new book, and why the readers of great publishing houses make so many mistakes. They call into play a conscious mental force that is inimical to the emotional mood in which the work had its rise; what was love in the poet becomes a pale intellectual reflection in the critic.