Our particular predilections in literature must, no doubt, be carefully watched. There is danger in personal absorption in an author,--danger to our intellectual freedom. One would not feel for a poet the absorbing and exclusive love that the lover feels for his mistress, because one would rather have the whole of literature for his domain. One would rather admire Rabelais with Sainte-Beuve, as a Homeric buffoon, than be a real “Pantagruelist devotee,” who finds a flavor even in “the dregs of Master François’s cask” that he prefers to all others. No doubt some of us, goaded on by the opposite vice in readers and critics, have been guilty of an intemperate enthusiasm toward Whitman and Browning. To make a cult of either of these authors, or of any other, is to shut one’s self up in a part when the whole is open to him. The opposite vice, that of violent personal antipathy, is equally to be avoided in criticism. Probably Sainte-Beuve was guilty of this vice in his attitude toward Balzac; Schérer in his criticism of Béranger, and Landor in his dislike of Dante. One might also cite Emerson’s distaste for Poe and Shelley, and Arnold’s antipathy to Victor Hugo’s poetry. Likes and dislikes in literature that are temperamental, that are like the attraction or repulsion of bodies in different electrical conditions, are hard to be avoided, but the trained reader may hope to overcome them. Taste is personal, but the intellect is, or should be, impersonal, and to be able to guide the former by the light of the latter is the signal triumph of criticism. VI “THOU SHALT NOT PREACH ” _After Reading Tolstoi on “What is Art?”_