We may most conveniently begin by considering a range of representative doctrines chosen from the writings of famous critics with a view to illustrating chiefly their differences. Some, it is true, will hardly repay investigation. It is far too easy to write, with Carlyle “All real art is the disimprisonment of the soul of fact[85]” or “The infinite is made to blend itself with the finite; to stand visible, and, as it were, attainable there. Of this sort are all true works of art; in this (if we know a work of art from the daub of artifice) we discern eternity looking through time, the God-like rendered visible[86]”. All the difficulty begins when this has been written, and what has been said is of no assistance towards its elucidation. Nor is Pater, for all his praise of clarity and accuracy, of much better quality. “Truth! there can be no merit, no craft at all, without that. And, further, all beauty is in the long run only fineness of truth or what we call expression, the finer accommodation of speech to that vision within”[87]. It would perhaps be difficult, outside Croce,[88] to find a more unmistakable confusion between value and communicative efficacy. But the _Essay_ is a veritable museum of critical blunders. The extracts which follow are arranged approximately in order of obscurity. They rise from the most matter of fact to the most mystical uses of truth-notions in criticism. All might be taken as glosses upon the phrase ‘Truth to Nature’; they serve to show what different things may be meant by what is apparently simple language. We may begin with Aristotle. He makes three remarks which bear upon the matter. The first is in connection with the antithesis between Tragedy and History. “Poetry is a more philosophical and a more serious thing than History: for Poetry is chiefly conversant about general (universal) truth, History about particular. In what manner, for example, any person of a certain character would speak or act, probably or necessarily—this is universal; and this is the object of Poetry. But what Alcibiades did, or what happened to him—this is particular truth.” (_Poetics_, IX). His second remark is made in connection with the requisites of Tragic Character:— “The third requisite (in addition to goodness in a special sense, appropriateness, and consistency) of Character is that it have _verisimilitude_[89]”. (_Poetics_, XV). Aristotle’s third observation is in the same chapter:— “The poet when he imitates passionate or indolent men and such, should preserve the type and yet ennoble it[90]”. Wordsworth’s interpretation carries us a definite stage nearer to the mystical:—