position; these formulas were applied to the work under
examination, and that was adjudged good or bad in the degree that it
conformed or failed to conform to the established rules. It was a
criticism of law-giving and of judgment. In the eighteenth century
criticism extended its scope by the admission of a new consideration,
passing beyond the mere form of the work and reckoning with its
power to give pleasure. Addison, in his critique of "Paradise Lost,"
still applies the formal tests of the Aristotelian canons, but he
discovers further that a work of art exists not only for the sake of its
form, but also for the expression of beautiful ideas. This power of
"affecting the imagination" he declares is the "very life and highest
perfection" of poetry. This is a long step in the right direction. With
the nineteenth century, criticism conceives its aims and procedure in
new and larger ways. A work of art is now seen to be an evolution;
and criticism adapts to its own uses the principles of historical study
and the methods of scientific investigation. Recognizing that art is
organic, that an art-form, as religious painting or Gothic architecture
or the novel, is born, develops, comes to maturity, lapses, and dies,
that an individual work is the product of "race, environment, and the
moment," that it is the expression also of the personality of the artist
himself, criticism no longer regards the single work as an isolated
phenomenon, but tries to see it in its relation to its total background.

Present-day criticism avails itself of this larger outlook upon art. But
the ends to be reached are understood differently by different critics.
With M. Brunetiere, to cite now a few representative names,
criticism is authoritative and dogmatic: he looks at the work
objectively, refusing to be the dupe of his pleasure, if he has any;
and approaching the work in the spirit of dispassionate impersonal
inquiry as an object of historical importance and scientific interest,
he decrees that it is good or bad. Matthew Arnold considers
literature a "criticism of life," and he values a work with reference to
the moral significance of its ideas. Ruskin's criticism is didactic; he
wishes to educate his public, and by force of his torrential eloquence
he succeeds in persuading his disciples into acceptance of his
teaching, though he may not always convince. Impressionistic
criticism, as with M. Anatole France or M. Jules Lemaitre, does not
even t