its own sphere the Sublime does what
"natural magic" does in the poetical rendering of nature, and perhaps in
the same scarcely-to-be-analysed fashion. Whether this art can be taught
or not is a question which the author treats with modesty. Then, as now,
people were denying (and not unjustly) that this art can be taught by
rule. The author does not go so far as to say that Criticism, "unlike
Justice, does little evil, and little good; that is, _if_ to entertain
for a moment delicate and curious minds is to do little good." He does
not rate his business so low as that. He admits that the inspiration
comes from genius, from nature. But "an author can only learn from art
when he is to abandon himself to the direction of his genius." Nature
must "burst out with a kind of fine madness and divine inspiration." The
madness must be _fine_. How can art aid it to this end? By knowledge of,
by sympathy and emulation with, "the great poets and prose writers of
the past." By these we may be inspired, as the Pythoness by Apollo. From
the genius of the past "an effluence breathes upon us." The writer is
not to imitate, but to keep before him the perfection of what has been
done by the greatest poets. He is to look on them as beacons; he is to
keep them as exemplars or ideals. He is to place them as judges of his
work. "How would Homer, how would Demosthenes, have been affected by
what I have written?" This is practical counsel, and even the most
florid modern author, after polishing a paragraph, may tear it up when
he has asked himself, "What would Addison have said about this eloquence
of mine, or Sainte Beuve, or Mr. Matthew Arnold?" In this way what we
call inspiration, that is the performance of the heated mind, perhaps
working at its best, perhaps overstraining itself, and overstating its
idea, might really be regulated. But they are few who consider so
closely, fewer perhaps they who have the heart to cut out their own fine
or refined things. Again, our author suggests another criterion. We are,
as in Lamb's phrase, "to write for antiquity," with the souls of poets
dead and gone for our judges. But we are also to write for the future,
asking with what feelings posterity will read us--if it reads us at all.
This is a good discipline. We know by practice what will hit some
contemporary tastes; we know the measure of smartness, say, or the
delicate flippancy, or the sentence with "a dying fall." But one should
also know that these a