so much more convenient to acquiesce in assumptions than to face the responsibilities of knowledge. The golden bridge between our joyless populations and the new world where most of them would be instantly at home will not be supplied in our day. Double shakes will continue to be applauded; gin will continue to be drunk; and fortunately those for whom I plead will know nothing of what they miss. Sir G. Grove can afford to treat my complaint with indulgence; for he will get his 100,000/., and I shall never get mine.

119

POETS, CRITICS, AND CLASS-LISTS.

'COMPARISONS are odious,' is an aphorism commonly accepted-always, however, as reflection will show us, with reference to other people's comparisons, and never to our own. There are in reality few commoner signs of any sort of mental alertness than the love of comparison and classification for its own sake-the tendency to dwell on degrees of superiority and inferiority as such. We can trace its presence equally in the schoolboy's deep curiosity or still deeper conviction as to 'the best' and 'the next best' in the various departments of cricket, in the Swiss tourist's unfailing interest in realising which peak is higher and which lower than another, and in the national enthusiasm with which we regard a Newton or a Nelson. The affection is not easy to analyse ; but its main ingredient is, perhaps, just the primary instinct to take a side-the instinct of partisanship which comes out among the specta

tors of every sort of contest, and which, e.g., would make ninety-nine Londoners out of a hundred, even though innocent of the remotest connection with either of the contending Universities, feel ashamed of admitting complete indifference as to the result of the annual boat-race. And in its more refined forms, where the element of hero-worship more or less enters, the instinct of comparison is really so valuable a way of adding interest to our intellectual life, that to be destitute of it may be accounted a misfortune and a proof of torpor. It quickens passive perception into active participation. A personal and emotional colouring is given to the act of judgment, when one's own mind is recognised, not as a mere register, nor even as a passionless umpire, but as the sensitive and sympathetic stage on which one's heroes have actually to measure their strength and find their level-as the living and independent means through which the degrees of their excellence become distinct realities.

But like everything else which tends to a sense of one's own centrality, this habit of classification needs watching. In matters of daily intercourse we all recognise the odiousness of comparisons, when something that is moving our approbation is forced into disadvantageous contrast with something

else, absent or unknown to us, the suggestion of which chills our pleasure in proportion as it warms the self-importance of the person who introduces it. And further on we may have to notice that this sort of bad manners is not wholly lacking in literary criticism. But I want now more particularly to notice another danger, one affecting not the manner but the validity of the criticism; I mean the assumption that, because the justice of our classification is keenly felt, it is therefore demonstrable. We first attempt to give clearness and solidity to our position in our own minds by means of a formula, by entrenching our convictions behind some short and convenient canon or principle ; neglecting thereby the chance that their truth, even for us, may be a very composite thing, whose strength and weight is really disposed over many points. And then, as the fact of having our own order of merit is inseparable from the impulse to convince others of its justice, and as the normal mode of convincing others of anything is by argument, we are naturally led into trying to make argument cover the ground, just as we tried to make our formula cover it; which, in turn, may involve us in the struggle to prove or confirm by argumentative methods what really belongs in

large measure to the domain of instinct, and is as unamenable to reason as tastes and scents-much as though one should try to secure a sunbeam that has visited one's chamber by strengthening the floor and walls.

This danger belongs to verbal treatment of all imaginative work; but the field where it is most prominent is that of literary, and specially of poetical, criticism. In other arts, the need of a purely unreasoning faculty, of something in both producer and percipient which cannot be put into words—an 'eye for colour,' an 'ear for music'-is too obvious. to be for long lost sight of. Not, indeed, but that it often is lost sight of; but the very inadequacy of any attempts to convey in words what is the essence of the effect in these other directions acts as a sort of antidote, and would alone suffice to keep before us the radical truth. The arts present, in this connection, a natural ascending series. Music, in its abstraction and aloofness from visible and intellectual subject-matter, is naturally the one where reason soonest deserts the field; and, as a rule, the expository efforts so common in musical programmes, after telling us all that the composer had in his mind and meant to say, end by naïvely admitting that what concerns us is, after all, what