method of losing
breadth and force of effect. One is ready to cry, "Do lapse for a
moment into dogmatism." Yet it ought to be added that Sidgwick's
subtlety is always restrained by practical good sense, as well as by
the desire to reconcile opposite views. His arguments, though they
often turn on minute distinctions, are not bits of fine-drawn
ingenuity, but have weight and substance in them.[52]

One book of his which has not yet (December 1902) been published, but
which I have had the privilege of reading in proof, displays his
constructive power in another light. It is a course of lectures on the
development of political institutions in Europe from early times down
to our own. Here, as he is dealing with concrete matter, the treatment
is more broad, and the line of exposition and argument more easy to
follow, than in the treatises already referred to. It is a masterly
piece of work, and reveals a wider range of historical knowledge and a
more complete mastery of historical method than had been shown in his
earlier books, or indeed than some of his friends had known him to
possess.

The tendency to analysis rather than to construction, the abstention
from the deliverance of doctrines easy to comprehend and repeat, which
belong to his writings on ethics and economics, do not impair the
worth of his literary criticisms. In this field his fine perception
and discriminative taste had full scope. He was an incessant reader,
especially of poetry and novels, with a retentive memory for poetry,
as well as a finely modulated and expressive voice in reciting it. His
literary judgments had less of a creative quality, if the expression
be permissible, than Matthew Arnold's, but are not otherwise inferior
to those of that brilliant though sometimes slightly prejudiced
critic. No one of his contemporaries has surpassed Sidgwick in
catholicity and reasonableness, in the power of delicate appreciation,
or in an exquisite precision of expression. His essay on Arthur Hugh
Clough, prefixed to the latest edition of Clough's collected poems, is
a good specimen of this side of his talent. Clough was one of his
favourites, and has indeed been called the pet poet of University men.
Sidgwick's literary essays, which appeared occasionally in magazines,
were few, but they well deserve to be collected and republished, for
this age of ours, though largely occupied in talking about literature,
has produced comparatively little criticism of the f