Hours ago,Ernest,you asked me the use of Criticism.You might just as well have asked me the use of thought.It is Criticism,as Arnold points out,that creates the intellectual atmosphere of the age.It is Criticism,as I hope to point out myself some day,that makes the mind a fine instrument.We,in our educational system,have burdened the memory with a load of unconnected facts,and laboriously striven to impart our laboriously-acquired knowledge.
We teach people how to remember,we never teach them how to grow.
It has never occurred to us to try and develop in the mind a more subtle quality of apprehension and discernment.The Greeks did this,and when we come in contact with the Greek critical intellect,we cannot but be conscious that,while our subject-matter is in every respect larger and more varied than theirs,theirs is the only method by which this subject-matter can be interpreted.England has done one thing;it has invented and established Public Opinion,which is an attempt to organise the ignorance of the community,and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.But Wisdom has always been hidden from it.
Considered as an instrument of thought,the English mind is coarse and undeveloped.The only thing that can purify it is the growth of the critical instinct.
It is Criticism,again,that,by concentration,makes culture possible.It takes the cumbersome mass of creative work,and distils it into a finer essence.Who that desires to retain any sense of form could struggle through the monstrous multitudinous books that the world has produced,books in which thought stammers or ignorance brawls?The thread that is to guide us across the wearisome labyrinth is in the hands of Criticism.Nay more,where there is no record,and history is either lost,or was never written,Criticism can re-create the past for us from the very smallest fragment of language or art,just as surely as the man of science can from some tiny bone,or the mere impress of a foot upon a rock,re-create for us the winged dragon or Titan lizard that once made the earth shake beneath its tread,can call Behemoth out of his cave,and make Leviathan swim once more across the startled sea.Prehistoric history belongs to the philological and archaeological critic.It is to him that the origins of things are revealed.The self-conscious deposits of an age are nearly always misleading.Through philological criticism alone we know more of the centuries of which no actual record has been preserved,than we do of the centuries that have left us their scrolls.It can do for us what can be done neither by physics nor metaphysics.It can give us the exact science of mind in the process of becoming.It can do for us what History cannot do.It can tell us what man thought before he learned how to write.You have asked me about the influence of Criticism.I think I have answered that question already;but there is this also to be said.It is Criticism that makes us cosmopolitan.The Manchester school tried to make men realise the brotherhood of humanity,by pointing out the commercial advantages of peace.It sought to degrade the wonderful world into a common market-place for the buyer and the seller.It addressed itself to the lowest instincts,and it failed.War followed upon war,and the tradesman's creed did not prevent France and Germany from clashing together in blood-stained battle.There are others of our own day who seek to appeal to mere emotional sympathies,or to the shallow dogmas of some vague system of abstract ethics.
They have their Peace Societies,so dear to the sentimentalists,and their proposals for unarmed International Arbitration,so popular among those who have never read history.But mere emotional sympathy will not do.It is too variable,and too closely connected with the passions;and a board of arbitrators who,for the general welfare of the race,are to be deprived of the power of putting their decisions into execution,will not be of much avail.There is only one thing worse than Injustice,and that is Justice without her sword in her hand.When Right is not Might,it is Evil.
No:the emotions will not make us cosmopolitan,any more than the greed for gain could do so.It is only by the cultivation of the habit of intellectual criticism that we shall be able to rise superior to race-prejudices.Goethe -you will not misunderstand what I say -was a German of the Germans.He loved his country -no man more so.Its people were dear to him;and he led them.
