ical profundity of most modern critical writing
of the higher kind. Critics are not content nowadays with taking up a
poem, novel, essay, or history, and looking at it by itself as an
individual and isolated work of art. They must look into the personal
life of the writer; they must discover and estimate all the influences
by which he was surrounded; and among these they give a very important
place to the condition of the society in which he lived, the political
and religious forces which were at work while he was studying,
thinking, writing. Briefly, they regard him not as an isolated
individual force, but as a manifestation, a result of many forces, as
doing his work less by personal volition than as the unconscious agent
or representative of the times in which he lived. Consequently a
critical edition or appreciation of a great writer has come to be not a
purely literary task, but an attempt to unfold the mental and moral
condition of a people and a period. Compare, for example, Addison's
criticism of the "Paradise Lost," to which in a great measure the
general appreciation of that poem is due, with David Masson's "Life of
Milton." The former can all be included in a thin duodecimo volume, and
has been so printed; the latter, still unfinished, fills several
ponderous octavo volumes. Addison concerns himself with the poem
itself; Masson writes an elaborate history of Puritanism and of the
English people during the development and completion of that religious,
social, and political revolution which produced the Commonwealth in Old
England and the Puritan emigration to America, with the formation of
the religious commonwealths of New England. True, Addison did not
undertake to do what Masson undertook, and allowance must be made for
the avowed difference between the methods of the two writers. But still
that very difference is the significant exponent of the critical spirit
of the times in which they lived. The very fact that the Victorian
critic has undertaken his tremendous task, which Addison or any man of
his time would not have thought of, is significant of the change in
critical manner to which we have referred.

That the new theory of the proper scope of criticism is well founded,
cannot be entirely denied. Literature to a certain degree is a
characteristic product of the age and of the people for which, if not
by which, it is produced. And if Mr. Van Laun had confined himself to
the affirmative part of his propo