er his action to
everything else; so to treat this, as to permit its inherent excellences
to develop themselves, without interruption from the intrusion of his
personal peculiarities: most fortunate when he most entirely succeeds in
effacing himself, and in enabling a noble action to subsist as it did in
nature.

But the modern critic not only permits a false practice: he absolutely
prescribes false aims. "A true allegory of the state of one's own mind
in a representative history," the poet is told, "is perhaps the highest
thing that one can attempt in the way of poetry." And accordingly he
attempts it. An allegory of the state of one's own mind, the highest
problem of an art which imitates actions! No assuredly, it is not, it
never can be so: no great poetical work has ever been produced with such
an aim. _Faust_ itself, in which something of the kind is attempted,
wonderful passages as it contains, and in spite of the unsurpassed
beauty of the scenes which relate to Margaret, _Faust_ itself, judged as
a whole, and judged strictly as a poetical work, is defective: its
illustrious author, the greatest poet of modern times, the greatest
critic of all times, would have been the first to acknowledge it; he
only defended his work, indeed, by asserting it to be "something
incommensurable."

The confusion of the present times is great, the multitude of voices
counselling different things bewildering, the number of existing works
capable of attracting a young writer's attention and of becoming his
models, immense: what he wants is a hand to guide him through the
confusion, a voice to prescribe to him the aim which he should keep in
view, and to explain to him that the value of the literary works which
offer themselves to his attention is relative to their power of helping
him forward on his road towards this aim. Such a guide the English
writer at the present day will nowhere find. Failing this, all that can
be looked for, all indeed that can be desired, is, that his attention
should be fixed on excellent models; that he may reproduce, at any rate,
something of their excellence, by penetrating himself with their works
and by catching their spirit, if he cannot be taught to produce what is
excellent independently.

Foremost among these models for the English writer stands Shakespeare: a
name the greatest perhaps of all poetical names; a name never to be
mentioned without reverence. I will venture, however, to express a doubt