Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/261

Rh explain a book, no doubt, is often tantamount to judging it; for if the book be demonstrated to be full of corruption, that is the most effective way of declaring it a corrupt book. Nevertheless, the object of the "interpretative" or "appreciative" critic is primarily expository, and he prefers that the reader himself should pass ultimate judgment, in the light of the exposition which has been made. He puts the needful facts before the jury, and then rests his case. Sainte-Beuve is a master of this sort of criticism, as Jeffrey is of the magisterial. The "impressionistic" critic, finally, does not concern himself overmuch with the canons. He leaves "universal considerations" and "the common sense of most" to his rivals. Textual criticism bores him. The examination of principles strikes him as too "scientific," the massing of biographical and historical details seems to him the work of the historian rather than the critic. He deals frankly in his own "impressions," his personal preferences, the adventures of his soul in the presence of masterpieces. He translates the sensations and emotions which he has experienced in his contact with books into symbols borrowed from all the other arts and from the inexhaustible stores of natural beauty. His rivals may call him a man of caprice rather than a man of taste, but they cannot really confute him, for such are the infinitely varied modes of physical and psychological reaction to the presence of the beautiful, that nobody knows exactly how the other man feels. We must take his word for it, and the words of impressionistic criticism have often been uttered with an exquisite delicacy and freshness and radiance that make all other types of literary criticism seem for the moment mere cold and formal pedantries.

THE UNION AND MERGING OF TYPES OF CRITICISM

So much for the theoretical distinction between the three tendencies. But no one can read many pages of the masters of modern criticism without becoming aware that all three tendencies frequently reveal themselves in the same man, and even in the same essay. Some of the famous "impressionists," like Lamb, Stevenson, Lemaître, and Anatole France, know a great deal more about the "canons" than they wish at the moment to confess. They play so skillfully with the