lusiveness and the fastidiousness of intellectual
aristocracy, the fervour and rapture of aesthetic passion. To this, one
can answer little more than, "It may be so." Certainly the critic of
this kind will very rarely be able to indulge in the _engouement_ which
is the apparent delight of some of his class. He will deal very
cautiously in superlatives, and his commendations, when he gives them,
will sometimes have, to more gushing persons, the slightly ludicrous air
which attached to the modest boast of somebody that he was "the third
best authority in England on gray shirtings." On the other hand, the
critic of this kind will not be able to neglect the uninteresting with
the serene nonchalance of some of his fellows. He will sometimes have to
look back on days and months and years of laborious reading and say to
himself, "Were it not well for us, as others use, to take all this for
granted?" But to say this is to say no more than that the thorough-going
practice of any art and mystery involves a great deal of tedious,
thankless, and even positively fruitless work, brushes away a good many
illusions, and interferes a good deal with personal comfort. Cockaigne
is a delightful country, and the Cockaigne of criticism is as agreeable
as the other provinces. But none of these provinces has usually been
accounted a wise man's paradise.

It may be asked, "What is the end which you propose for this comparative
reading? A method must lead somewhere; whither does this method lead? or
does it lead only to statistics and classifications?" Certainly it does
not, or at least should not. It leads, like all method, to
generalisations which, though as I have said I do not believe that they
have attained or ever will attain the character of science, at least
throw no small light and interest on the study of literature as a whole,
and of its examples as particulars. It gives, I think (speaking as a
fool), a constantly greater power of distinguishing good work from bad
work, by giving constantly nearer approach (though perhaps it may never
wholly and finally attain) to the knowledge of the exact characteristics
which distinguish the two. And the way in which it does this is by a
constant process of weakening or strengthening, as the case may be, the
less or more correct generalisations with which the critic starts, or
which he forms in the early days of his reading. There has often been
brought against some great critics the charge that the