ago, and since then
I have found M. Brunetiere speaking about critical method as
distinguished from the science of criticism, and insisting on the
necessity of comparison, not less positively, and no doubt with far more
authority, than I have done myself. Yet I half think that M. Brunetiere,
like most of us, does not practise quite up to the level of his
preaching; and I should say that on mediaeval literature, on Romantic
literature, and on some other things, his own excellent censorship might
be further improved by a still more catholic sympathy, and a still more
constant habit of looking at everything and every writer in conjunction
with their analogues and their opposites in the same and other
literatures. This constant reference of comparison may indeed stand in
the way of those flowing deliverances of personal opinion, in more or
less agreeable language, which are perhaps, or rather certainly, what is
most popular in criticism; I do not think that they will ever stand in
the way of criticism proper. As I understand that long and difficult
art, its end, as far as the individual is concerned, is to provide the
mind with a sort of conspectus of literature, as a good atlas thoroughly
conned provides a man with a conspectus of the _orbis terrarum_. To the
man with a geographical head, the mention of a place at once suggests
its bearings to other places, its history, its products, all its
relations in short; to the man with a critical head, the mention of a
book or an author should call up a similar mental picture. The picture,
indeed, will never be as complete in the one instance as in the other,
because the intellect and the artistic faculty of man are far vaster
than this planet, far more diverse, far more intricately and
perplexingly arranged than all its abundant material dispositions and
products. The life of Methuselah and the mind of Shakespeare together
could hardly take the whole of critical knowledge to be their joint
province. But the area of survey may be constantly increased; the
particularity of knowledge constantly made more minute.

Another objection, more fantastic in appearance but rather attractive in
its way, is that the comparative critic becomes too much of a universal
lover, and too little of an enthusiast, that he has an irritating and
ungentlemanly habit of seeing blemishes in the greatest, a pottering and
peddling fancy for discovering beauties in the most insignificant; that
he lacks the exc