he adds, that the first does most harm to art, and the last to himself.  If we must be dilettanti:  if it is impossible for us, under the circumstances amidst which we live, to think clearly, to feel nobly, and to delineate firmly:  if we cannot attain to the mastery of the great artists—­let us, at least, have so much respect for our art as to prefer it to ourselves.  Let us not bewilder our successors:  let us transmit to them the practice of poetry, with its boundaries and wholesome regulative laws, under which excellent works may again, perhaps, at some future time, be produced, not yet fallen into oblivion through our neglect, not yet condemned and cancelled by the influence of their eternal enemy, caprice.

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM AT THE PRESENT TIME[21]

Many objections have been made to a proposition which, in some remarks of mine[22] on translating Homer, I ventured to put forth; a proposition about criticism, and its importance at the present day.  I said:  “Of the literature of France and Germany, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort; the endeavor, in all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object as in itself it really is.”  I added, that owing to the operation in English literature of certain causes, “almost the last thing for which one would come to English literature is just that very thing which now Europe most desires,—­criticism”; and that the power and value of English literature was thereby impaired.  More than one rejoinder declared that the importance I here assigned to criticism was excessive, and asserted the inherent superiority of the creative effort of the human spirit over its critical effort.  And the other day, having been led by a Mr. Shairp’s[23] excellent notice of Wordsworth[24] to turn again to his biography, I found, in the words of this great man, whom I, for one, must always listen to with the profoundest respect, a sentence passed on the critic’s business, which seems to justify every possible disparagement of it.  Wordsworth says in one of his letters[25]:—­

“The writers in these publications” (the Reviews), “while they prosecute their inglorious employment, cannot be supposed to be in a state of mind very favorable for being affected by the finer influences of a thing so pure as genuine poetry.”

And a trustworthy reporter of his conversation quotes a more elaborate judgment to the same effect:—­

“Wordsworth holds the critical power very low, infinitely lower than the inventive; and he said to-day that if the quantity of time consumed in writing critiques on the works of others were given to original composition, of whatever kind it might be, it would be much better employed; it would make a man find out sooner his own level, and it would do infinitely less mischief.  A false or malicious criticism may do much injury to the minds of others, a stupid invention, either in prose or verse, is quite harmless.”