ch the subject has, or which he
chooses to represent that it has, produced on him. This last is in a
better case than the others; but still he, as it seems to me, misses
the full and proper office of the critic, though he may have an
agreeable and even useful function of his own.

For the full and proper office of the critic (again as it seems to me)
can never be discharged except by those who remember that "critic" means
"judge." Expressions of personal liking, though they can hardly be kept
out of criticism, are not by themselves judgment. The famous "J'aime
mieux Alfred de Musset," though it came from a man of extraordinary
mental power and no small specially critical ability, is not criticism.
Mere _obiter dicta_ of any kind, though they may be most agreeable and
even most legitimate sets-off to critical conversation, are not
criticism. The most admirable discourses from the merely literary point
of view on taste, Shakespeare, and the musical glasses, with some
parenthetic reference to the matter in hand, are not criticism. There
must be at least some attempt to take in and render the whole virtue of
the subjects considered, some effort to compare them with their likes in
other as well as the same languages, some endeavour to class and value
them. And as a condition preliminary to this process, there must, I
think, be a not inconsiderable study of widely differing periods, forms,
manners, of literature itself. The test question, as I should put it, of
the value of criticism is "What idea of the original would this critic
give to a tolerably instructed person who did not know that original?"
And again, "How far has this critic seen steadily and seen whole, the
subject which he has set himself to consider? How far has he referred
the main peculiarities of that subject to their proximate causes and
effects? How far has he attempted to place, and succeeded in placing,
the subject in the general history of literature, in the particular
history of its own language, in the collection of authors of its own
department?" How far, in short, has he applied what I may perhaps be
excused for calling the comparative method in literature to the
particular instance? I have read very famous and in their way very
accomplished examples of literature ostensibly critical, in which few if
any of these questions seem to have been even considered by the critic.
He may have said many pretty things; he may have shown what a clever
fellow he i