Now, says the writer, the critic must have a philosophy and, what is more, a philosophy of a certain sort. That the critic must have a philosophy we should, I suppose, all agree; for the critic is a historian, and a historian without a theory of realities, a system of values, _i.e._, a philosophy, has no basis for his judgments—he is merely a chronicler. (And a chronicler, let me say in passing, is precisely what I should call the writer’s “historical critic”—who “essentially has no concern with the greater or less literary excellence of the objects whose history he traces—their existence is alone sufficient for him.”) But what particular philosophy must the critic have? It must be, says the writer, “a humanistic philosophy. His inquiries must be modulated, and subject to an intimate, organic governance by an ideal of the good life.” Beware of confusing this ideal of good life with mere conventional morality. Art is autonomous and therefore independent of that. No; “an ideal of the good life, if it is to have the internal coherence and the organic force of a true ideal, _must inevitably_ be æsthetic. There is no other power than our æsthetic intuition by which we can imagine or conceive it; we can express it only in æsthetic terms.” And so we get back to Plato and the Platonic ideas and, generally, to “the Greeks for the principles of art and criticism.” “The secret” of the humanistic philosophy “lies in Aristotle.” But is not this attempt to distinguish between conventional morality and an ideal of the good life, æsthetically formed, rather specious? At any rate, the world at large, for a good many centuries, has applauded, or discountenanced, Greek criticism as essentially moralistic—as importing into the region of æsthetics the standards of ordinary, conventional morality. That is, surely, a commonplace about Aristotle. His ideal tragic hero is to be neither saint nor utter villain, but a character between these two extremes. Further, he must be illustrious, like Œdipus or Thyestes (Poetics, ed. Butcher, XIII. 3). Again, tragedy is an imitation of persons who are above the common level (XV. 8). It seems to me that the standards applied here are those of our ordinary, or conventional, morality, and I am only confused by the introduction of the mysterious “ideal of the good life.” It seems to me—that may be my stupidity—but it seemed so, also, to our forefathers, for it was this very moralism of Greek criticism that led men for so many centuries to demand “instruction” from art. And that is why it was such a feather in Dryden’s cap (Dryden, of whom our leader-writer has a poor opinion, as a critic without a philosophy) to have said the memorable and decisive thing: “delight is the chief if not the only end of poesy; instruction can be admitted but in the second place, for poesy only instructs as it delights.”