ng with fresh
knowledge, is the valuable one; and thus knowledge, and ever fresh
knowledge, must be the critic's great concern for himself; and it is by
communicating fresh knowledge, and letting his own judgment pass along
with it,--but insensibly, and in the second place, not the first, as a
sort of companion and clue, not as an abstract lawgiver,--that he will
generally do most good to his readers.

Sometimes, no doubt, for the sake of establishing an author's place in
literature and his relation to a central standard,--and if this is not
done, how are we to get at our _best in the world_?--criticism may have to
deal with a subject-matter so familiar that fresh knowledge is out of the
question, and then it must be all judgment; an enunciation and detailed
application of principles. Here the great safeguard is never to let one's
self become abstract, always to retain an intimate and lively
consciousness of the truth of what one is saying, and, the moment this
fails us, to be sure that something is wrong. Still, under all
circumstances, this mere judgment and application of principles is, in
itself, not the most satisfactory work to the critic; like mathematics,
it is tautological, and cannot well give us, like fresh learning, the
sense of creative activity. To have this sense is, as I said at the
beginning, the great happiness and the great proof of being alive, and it
is not denied to criticism to have it; but then criticism must be sincere,
simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge. Then it may have,
in no contemptible measure, a joyful sense of creative activity; a sense
which a man of insight and conscience will prefer to what he might derive
from a poor, starved, fragmentary, inadequate creation. And at some epochs
no other creation is possible.

Still, in full measure, the sense of creative activity belongs only to
genuine creation; in literature we must never forget that. But what true
man of letters ever can forget it? It is no such common matter for a
gifted nature to come into possession of a current of true and living
ideas, and to produce amidst the inspiration of them, that we are likely
to underrate it. The epochs of Aeschylus and Shakespeare make us feel their
preeminence. In an epoch like those is, no doubt, the true life of
literature; there is the promised land, toward which criticism can only
beckon. That promised land it will not be ours to enter, and we shall die
in the wilderness; bu