criticism, certain qualifications are, or should be, indispensable; and though it may be but a thricetold tale to enumerate them, they ought to find a place in any book about critics. It is not necessary that the critic should be able to execute the work upon which he passes judgment. The talent of judging, as the elder Disraeli says, may exist separately from the power of execution. A man may be competent to criticise a picture who never mixed a colour or handled a brush in his life: that is, he may be able, from his own knowledge of nature, to see what has been aimed at by the artist, and how nearly the aim has been realised. Or a critic may be capable of criticising an actor, who, if put upon the stage himself, could not utter half a dozen lines with the faintest approach to dramatic effect. If the work of criticism were confined to those only who could produce great works themselves, half, and more than half, of its utility would instantly vanish, since the producers of great works are very, very few, and there would be scarcely any one qualified to point out the beauties, or balance them with the faults, of works of exceptional power. The critic, however, should be a man of taste, with fine natural discrimination, and an instinctive perception of intellectual power,

beauty of workmanship, worthiness of aim, and earnestness of purpose. So far it may be said of him as of the poet, nascitur non fit.

“Both must alike from heaven derive their light,
These born to judge, as well as those to write."

Apart from this natural gift of taste, the critic has it in his power to acquire other scarcely less indispensable qualifications. He should be a man of information,-not only a student of books, but a reader of men, acquainted with the springs of human actions, familiar with the developments of human passion. He should be absolutely free from prejudice. He should be guided by a conscientious anxiety to find out what the man whose work he criticises had in view, the object of his book or picture, the extent to which that object was worth attainment, and the extent to which it has been attained. He should be free from physical ailments, and the infirmities of temper to which they give rise. The best of

critics may have a liver which will make him almost the worst. Isaac Disraeli has written an interesting paper on the influence of bad temper in criticism, as exemplified in the case of the notorious Dennis. An attack of biliousness, or a

L

fit of what our forefathers used to call the spleen, is capable of completely warping a man's judgment, and rendering his criticism false and unfair.

66

Everything looks yellow to the jaundiced eye." Health-the sound mind in the sound bodyis therefore one of the essentials of calm, dispassionate, unbiassed criticism. The true critic, again, should be keenly alive to the importance of his work and the largeness of the influence he wields. He should remember that his censure may have far-reaching consequences. He should be just, but where the faults and shortcomings he condemns violate no principles of propriety, he should temper his justice with mercy. One of the great needs the crying, loud-voiced, urgent needs of criticism, is more charity. There is too great a readiness to fasten upon the weak points of a work, to magnify its failings, to tear the whole fabric into a thousand shreds because of an imperfection in the warp here, or a knot in the web there. True charity need not condone impudent imposture, or extenuate insidious vice. It need not spare ignorance, or tolerate folly, or justify the trickery of slovenly work. But it can temper with self-restraint the severity of judgments which may, but for its benign influence,

inflict unnecessary pain. The object of the true. critic should not be to inflict pain. Smartness and pungency-cutting phrases and pointed jests

-are not the ends for which he is set in the judgment-seat. He should never forget, whatever temptations there may be to the contrary, that his chief business is to guide public taste, to point out what is worthy of admiration, to discover and encourage unknown merit. And to this end his principles should be too deeply rooted to be affected by the passing whims of literary caprice or artistic fashion, without his being too obstinately prejudiced to deny the merits of an original work, simply because it departs from the recognised and conventional groove. Above all, he should be in harmony with Nature, for it is only the critic whose soul is strung in sympathetic unison with Nature who is capable of rising to the height of the great argument of the masterpieces of genius. Without that sympathy he cannot decipher the spiritual workings in Hamlet's puzzled mind, or realise the terrible pathos of the Titanic overthrow of poor, mad Lear. Without it, he cannot detect in the great artists of the stage

A voice below the voice,

And a height beyond the height."

Without it, the wizard spell of the romancer is shorn for him of half its wondrous charm, and the characters of fiction are but the lifeless puppets of a grosser clay. If he be not in harmony with Nature he can never feel as the poet feels, never rise to the meaning of the painter's sublimest aims. He cannot enter into the magical mystery of a Turner's sunsets, or feel the devotional rapture of a Titian's celestial themes. And even in the commonplace circumstances of life, its struggles, its faults, its fatuous follies, and its teeming, sordid, selfish sins, as recorded with the caricaturist's pencil or the humourist's pen, the critic needs to be familiar with the workings of the human heart in all its varying moods, before he can enter into the point of the jest, or catch the spirit and philosophy of the laughter. One touch of Nature makes the critic kin with those great authors and artists who have gone to Nature herself for their inspiration. Without that touch he can never fathom the fulness of their meaning, and his words are but as the sounding brass and tinkling cymbal.