re at any rate easier than fashioning some intelligent and intelligible
response to the perpetual "Why?" the _quare stans_ of criticism.

In the following pages, I shall no doubt be found, like other people, to
have come very far short of my own ideal, and my own precepts. I may
even say that I have knowingly and intentionally come short of them to
some extent. Biographical and anecdotic detail has, I believe, much
less to do with the real appreciation of the literary value of an author
than is generally thought. In rare instances, it throws a light, but the
examples in which we know practically nothing at all, as in that of
Shakespeare, or only a few leading facts as in that of Dante, are not
those in which criticism is least useful or least satisfactory. At the
same time biographical and anecdotic details please most people, and if
they are not allowed to shoulder out criticism altogether, there can be
no harm in them. For myself, I should like to have the whole works of
every author of merit, and I should care little to know anything
whatever about his life; but that is a mere private opinion and possibly
a private crotchet. Accordingly some space has been given in most of
these Essays to a sketch of the life of the subject. Nor has it seemed
advisable (except as a matter of necessary, but very occasional,
digression) to argue at length upon abstract and general questions such
as the definition of poetry, or the kinds and limits of the novel. Large
as is the body of criticism so-called which the last hundred years have
seen, it may be doubted whether there is even yet accumulated a
sufficient _corpus_ of really critical discussion of individuals. If I
have in these Essays contributed even a very little to such an
accumulation, I shall have done that which I purposed.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Only by dint of this constant comparison, can the critic save
himself from the besetting error which makes men believe that there is
some absolute progress in life and art, instead of, for the most part,
mere eddyings-round in the same circle. I am tempted to glance at this,
because of a passage which I read while this Essay was a-writing, a
passage signed by a person whom I name altogether for the sake of
honour, Mr. James Sully. "If we compare," says Mr. Sully, "Fielding for
example with Balzac, Thackeray, or one of the great Russian novelists,
we see at once what a simple toylike structure used to serve art for a
human world. A mind