SOURCE: Farmer, Albert J. “The Method.” In Walter Pater as a Critic of English Literature, pp. 1-17. N.p.: Folcroft Library Editions, 1973.

[In the following excerpt, Farmer considers Pater's critical method in the context of earlier nineteenth-century criticism.]

I

The beginning of the nineteenth century marks the opening of a new chapter in the history of English criticism. The attempt to escape from the conventional restraint which had so long weighed upon literature is not less evident here than elsewhere. In prose writing, as in verse, the tenets and dogmas sacred to the writers of the preceding age lose their prestige. A new attitude is everywhere visible. Instead of clinging to outworn notions which had so long served, critics tend more and more to establish their judgments on more flexible, and more personal standards. The rigid objective methods of the past are cast aside, the subjective method asserts its sway. And of this «subjective method», Pater will be the most brilliant exponent and the most remarkable representative.

If we are to understand rightly Pater's position, it is therefore essential to recall briefly the attitude of his predecessors in the nineteenth century. For if he stands apart from them in the sense that he is the first critic boldly to assert the rights of the individual temperament in the appreciation of literature, it is nevertheless true that he but carries to a logical conclusion an evolution already begun, the stages of which are more or less clearly marked.

It is a far cry, no doubt, from the canons of the Augustan school to the attitude Pater represents. His conception of the critical function would have astounded Pope, laying down for his own time and for all time, a critical creed based on Aristotelian tradition. It would have puzzled Addison, judging Paradise Lost according to the tenets of Rapin and Le Bossu, and seriously applying to Chevy Chase the «classical» scale of values. It would have called forth the scorn of Johnson, the belated champion of the code which he no doubt considered, with the author of the Essay on Criticism, to be «Nature still, but Nature methodized», and in whose virtues he had never even a passing doubt. For critics such as these, bound down to dogma and considering literature as a field for the exercise of erudite rule, the intrusion of the purely personal element into criticism would have seemed, and did indeed seem, an unpardonable impertinence.

But Pater's standpoint would have been understood by Coleridge. True, Coleridge, like all his contemporaries, has not wholly shaken off the constraint of the past. He still retains a panoply of terms inherited from his predecessors; he still inclines to think of literature in terms of Fancy, Imagination, Sentiment and the like. And his constant intercourse with German thought and German writings tends to strengthen this predilection for abstract phraseology. But Coleridge is already on a new road. The astonishing chapters on Lyrical Ballads in the Biographia Literaria¹, the ever-illuminating exploration of Shakespearian drama in the Notes and Lectures, the casual remarks thrown out here and there on authors and books—the famous page on Sir Thomas Browne is a typical example—these owe nothing to traditional theory. The central idea around which the best of his criticism is built—that of the organic unity of the work of art, and its development from inner sources—breaks completely with the past. For Coleridge, the essential lies no longer in the conformity of the artist's creation to fixed principles, but in the intrinsic interest it offers, in its own particular appeal. And he already heralds Pater by his sympathy with the literature of all periods, by his readiness to admire one school of writers without denying his appreciation to another.

In Hazlitt Pater would have found an even warmer sympathizer. Not that Hazlitt, any more than Coleridge, is entirely free from the ideas of the eighteenth century; all his more ambitious critical efforts are encumbered with the abstractions dear to Johnson. But how small a part they really play in his judgments! When he «really lets himself go»—as he himself puts it, and the phrase casts a significant light upon his critical attitude—the antiquated formulæ lose all hold upon his mind; the subtle distinctions he has endeavoured to draw between Fancy and Imagination cease to interest him. He throws himself with enthusiasm, with zest, with gusto—his favourite word—into the appreciation of this or that work: he frankly tells us of his pleasure in this or that author. His prejudices, his instinctive dislikes, his inexplicable attacks of bad temper may shock or, at all events, indispose his readers; but here, beyond doubt, is personal criticism, drawing its very life from the reactions of a temperament in presence of the work of art—literature or painting—it is called upon to judge. Had Hazlitt set out methodically his theory of criticism, would it have differed greatly in its essence—the form and expression are another matter—from that of the author of Appreciations?

And if we turn to Lamb, the identity is even more apparent. In those pregnant notes which accompany his Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, in his critical essays—one calls to mind at once his defence of Restoration comedy, his apology for the more than «sugared» sonnets of Sidney—in the countless observations scattered through the Essays in which he evokes his favourite writers, the Elizabethans, the eccentric «worthies» of the seventeenth century, there is, from first to last, but that «personal element» to which Pater will give the main place. Lamb has no dogmatic bias. «I have no repugnances», he tells us, discoursing on Books and reading. «I can read anything which I call a book²». He is ready always to identify himself with another's thoughts, «to dream away his life in others' speculations³», as he puts it, so as to taste to the full the joy of reading. Small wonder, then, that Pater should have placed him so high, that he should have seen in him an ideal critic, and that he should have insisted on his method. «To feel strongly the charm of an old poet or moralist, the literary charm of Burton, for instance, or Quaries, or the Duchess of Newcastle; and then to interpret that charm, to convey it to others—… this is the way of his criticism⁴.» In thus defining the attitude of Lamb, Pater exactly defines his own.

The erratic De Quincey cannot be placed on the same level, so far as criticism is concerned, as his literary brothers in arms. There is about his work something too fragmentary, something too incomplete for him to figure among the great critics of his time. But, little as Pater would have liked the indiscriminate and invariable prolixity which characterizes all De Quincey's critical writings, he would not have altogether disclaimed relationship with him. Apart from De Quincey's ideas on prose style, in which, as we shall see, Pater found distinct premonitions of his own doctrine, there is in De Quincey something of that «relative spirit» Pater advocates. It can be found, mingled, it is true, with many other elements, in the Recollections of the Lake Poets: it is present whenever a digression leads De Quincey to study an individual work or writer—as, for example, in the essay on Rhetoric, the passage concerning Browne's Urn Burial⁵. Beneath the imitator of the German transcendentalists, we discover a critic striving to give a form to his impressions, his sensations. So that, from this point of view, he is worthy of a place among those writers who, from afar, prepare the way for the doctrine of purely subjective criticism.

Thus, to different degrees, all the romantic critics show preoccupations which distinguish them from the critics of the preceding period, and foreshadow the coming ideal. If the terminology of tradition still holds a certain fascination for most of them, the binding force of the «classical» system has gone. They have escaped from the prison of rule and formula. But, living in a period when lyricism everywhere dominates, fascinated by the problems raised by the new poetry—for all of them, except Lamb, the controversy concerning Lyrical Ballads furnishes, as it were, a critical centre—carried away, too, by their enthusiasm in the revelation of forgotten writers, none of these critics thinks for a moment of defining his creed. And perhaps they have no very clear idea as to the nature of that creed. Lamb is too diffident to lay down principles; Coleridge, Hazlitt and De Quincey, more or less under the sway of German thought, imagine that they are seekers after the absolute. They are not clearly aware that in criticism, as well as in verse, a new conception has made its appearance, and that they themselves are really its champions. But the fact remains that they are the founders, by example if not by precept, of criticism based on personal standards.

The same confusion of outlook is visible as the century advances. Carlyle brings into his literary appreciations abstractions, but they are no longer the abstractions of the eighteenth century. He does not realise that these symbols on which he founds his judgments are not fixed canons, exterior to his own personality, but the inner exigencies of his own nature. When he studies Shakespeare, or Johnson, or Burns, or Schiller, or Goethe, he is under the impression that he is applying to each of these writers a rigorous scale of values, literary or moral, but in any case absolute, and without appeal. In reality, he is expressing personal preferences, and his appreciation comes but from the harmony, or clash of his own temperament with that of his author. Macaulay, again, sets up standards which he believes to be objective; his wide reading, his encyclopædic learning, the calm superiority of his manner—that cocksureness with which a later generation has reproached him—all these traits keep up for him, and for others of his time, the illusion of impersonality. They mask the all-important factor, which is his personal taste. The famous essay on Dr. Johnson is particularly significant from this point of view; what is it, in its essence, but a violent diatribe against an author for whom he felt, above everything, a personal dislike? Macaulay, at bottom, belongs to the subjective school of criticism.

And, in spite of appearances, the same may be said of Arnold. Unlike his predecessors. Arnold has left us a definite exposition of his critical principles. In The Function of Criticism at the Present Time⁶, he begins by insisting on the importance of criticism. Is it a secondary form merely, demanding less talents or less gifts than other forms of literature? No, he replies, it requires all that «width», that knowledge, that sense of art necessary in a great poem or a great novel. It is creative, just as a great poem or a great novel is. And by the very fact that it is creative, it is the most useful guide in the onward march of literature; it is criticism, in other words, that prepares great periods of creative power⁷. How is its function to be understood? It must be first and foremost disinterested. It must keep aloof from the practical view of things; it must make no appeal to considerations outside its own sphere, neither to politics nor to narrow nationalism; it must stand ever in its own domain, that of literature. Open to all currents, especially foreign ones, it must bind itself down to no formula, to no particular schools⁸. It must be, in short, «a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world⁹.» And the business of the critic, from first to last, is therefore to study literature for its own merits, to discover and make known its intrinsic beauties, and, refusing to allow his judgment to be influenced by extraneous circumstances, to strive always «to see the object as in itself it really is¹⁰».

Here, evidently, is a conception of criticism which, in its main points at all events, would have rallied the approbation of Coleridge and his friends. Carlyle would not have endorsed it completely, perhaps; but Macaulay could have professed himself in general agreement. What, after all, are Arnold's main contentions? Firstly, that criticism is not inferior to other branches of art, that it is essentially creative. Creative—that is, it is the expression of an original talent, an original genius, deriving nothing from exterior rule or from artificial standards set up by tradition. In other words, the first element in criticism is not, as Pope or Johnson supposed, the knowledge of cut and dried precepts, but the critic himself, the ideas, the tastes, the preferences that he has acquired from his study and experience, and that go to make up his particular personality. True, a second proposition comes immediately as a sort of corrective; the object—the work of art in question, whatever it may be—must be seen «as it really is». And, no doubt, in Arnold's mind, an impersonal view is understood. But this «impersonal» view can never be really impersonal. From the moment he lays down the principle that the critic must consider literature in itself and for itself, it follows that the deciding factor is the critic's own taste, his personal reaction in presence of a writer or a work.

Arnold's own example bears this out. His eulogy of Wordsworth, his hostility to Keats—to take two convenient instances—are professedly based on the «impersonal view». But the reality is that they proceed, one and the other, from Arnold's own nature, from essentially subjective sources. And the whole of Arnold's criticism is on these lines. His tendencies his partialities, his likes and dislikes give us the key to his writings. His allegiance to Sainte-Beuve and to Renan is worthy of remark in this respect. For what, beneath their surface of urbane erudition, are the Lundis, if not personal appreciations? And what critic is more admittedly subjective than Renan? Whatever Arnold may affirm, he, too, is a subjective critic: and it is from its subjective qualities that his work derives its real interest.

Thus, from Coleridge onwards, the tendency is the same. Different in temperament, in taste, in thought and in ambition, all these critics are moving in the same direction; they are all moving more or less directly towards subjective criticism, even when as happens in many cases, they think they are moving towards something else. Pater represents the outcome of this development. He will take something from all of his predecessors from Coleridge, his catholicity of taste: from Hazlitt, that deliberate expression of pleasure as one of the main criteria of criticism; from Lamb, something of his quiet reserve: from De Quincey, the desire to theorize on form: whilst Arnold will give him the conception of criticism as a creation, as one of the highest forms of literature in itself, on the same plane as the works that inspire it. But over and above all, Pater will give utterance to that deep critical truth which lies, dimly apprehended, in all their work: that it is in the critic himself, and not in considerations outside him, that criticism finds its real, its only source.

II

That Pater had long meditated over his theory of criticism is evident from his essay on Coleridge (1865), the first of his published writings. In this study, which is confined to Coleridge's prose work, he represents the author of Biographia Literaria, perhaps not altogether justly, as the defender in criticism of a lost cause: that of the «absolute spirit» as opposed to the «relative spirit» of modern times.

Coleridge, he claims, is a prisoner of abstract phraseology; he «thinks to turn the tide of human thought by fixing the sense of such expressions as reason, understanding, idea¹¹». His criticism is an attempt to reduce literature to formulae, to «reclaim the world of art as a world of fixed laws¹²». How futile such an effort is! To the modern spirit, «nothing is, or can be rightly known, except relatively and under conditions¹³». The hard and rigid axioms of ancient philosophy take no account of the subtlety and complexity of life and art; they neglect the fine gradations, the ever-changing conditions which form the very texture of things. Now, adds Pater, «to the intellect, the critical spirit, just these subtleties … are more precious than anything else¹⁴». The essential, therefore, in criticism, is not to classify, to sub-divide, to seek to define in terms of the abstract, but to feel the world of colour, form and passion in life and in art. Who, asks Pater in a striking phrase, would change the colour or form of a rose-leaf for the colourless, formless, intangible ideal of beauty which Plato placed so high¹⁵?

It is this conception which Pater elaborates in the famous Preface¹⁶ to Studies in the history of the Renaissance, published eight years later. Here, the ideas thrown out in passing, as it were, in his first essay, find their complete expression. And Pater gives us what he considers as the complete gospel of the «æsthetic critic».

For the æsthetic critic, the main problem is the problem of beauty. And how is he to recognize beauty? Many philosophers, Pater writes, have set out to define it in abstract terms, but their definitions, often ingenious, have thrown little light on the essence of beauty; and, in any case, they afford us no help when we seek to enjoy art, and to discover the reasons for our pleasure. That is because beauty is relative, ever-changing. It can never be thought of in absolute terms; it presents itself to us in concrete forms, under particular conditions. And the aim of the æsthetic critic should be, therefore, to find, not some inadequate universal formula, but the formula which expresses beauty in this or that individual case, under these or those particular circumstances … We recognize here the point of view set forth in the essay on Coleridge: the relative as against the absolute method.

«To see the object as in itself it really is», continues Pater, quoting Arnold, «has been justly said to be the object of all true criticism whatever¹⁷». But what does Arnold's phrase really mean? Pater does not pause to discuss the question; he leaves aside the implied impersonality of view, and straightway offers his own interpretation: «the first step to seeing one's object as it really is, is to know one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it exactly¹⁸.» The objects with which the critic is called upon to deal—music, poetry, artistic forms in general—are «receptacles» of powers or forces; they have their particular qualities, their particular virtues. The critic will ask himself: What does this work of art—poem, painting or sculpture—mean to me? How does it affect me? What impressions, what sensations do I receive from it? The answers to these questions are the data on which his criticism will be based,—data essentially personal, individual, which each critic must ascertain for himself. There can be no question of appealing to an abstract or general code, no question of attempting to discover in what relation beauty stands to truth or to experience. One single consideration has here its place: the individual impression of the critic in presence of an individual artistic creation. «To see the object as in itself it really is», is thus to see the object through one's own temperament.

What, then, will be the measure of beauty? The «virtue» of the work of art lies in its power to produce «pleasurable sensations¹⁹». Those sensations will be various; they will vary with the nature of the work of art itself, they will vary too with the sensibility of the critic. But the first effort of the critic will be necessarily to disengage the special «virtue» of the work with which he is concerned; and, to do so, he must analyse his sensations, go back to their source, study the conditions under which they have been brought about, then, as far as may be possible, define them. The nature of his impressions, the degree of their intensity, will furnish a scale of values, if, indeed, the critic should desire to classify. But it is in the effort of realisation, of analysis and study of his sensations that the full measure of his criticism will really be given.

The first necessity for the æsthetic critic, therefore, is a temperament capable of being deeply, intensely moved by the spectacle of beauty in its multiple forms. He must have no preconceived notions, no particular preferences; he must pay allegiance to no particular doctrine, to no exclusive school. For him, all forms of beauty will be acceptable, all doctrines will have their interest, all schools will be equal²⁰. Nothing will concern him but the workings of his sensibility, and that he may be stirred to the full, he will be prepared to identify himself momentarily with all the thoughts, all the emotions a work of art strives to express. He will not set one form above another, exalt one genre to the detriment of another. Wherever he hears the appeal of beauty, even if it be strange or unaccustomed, there he will find a field for the exercise of his critical faculty, there he will find a «virtue» to be disengaged.

And, after all, there lies the real task of the æsthetic critic: to abstract for himself, then to convey to others the virtue of each particular artist or work. Take as a typical example, says Pater, the poetry of Wordsworth. Not all of his verse is perfect; much of what he has written bears the mark of mediocrity. But, our author goes on, «scattered up and down his work, sometimes fusing and transforming entire compositions, like the stanzas on Resolution and Independence, or the Ode on the Recollections of Childhood, sometimes, as if at random, depositing a fine crystal here or there, in a matter it does not wholly search through and transmute, we trace the action of his unique, incommunicable faculty, that strange, mystical sense of a life in natural things, and of man's life as a part of nature, drawing strength and colour and character from local influences, from the hills and streams, and from natural sights and sounds. Well, that is the virtue, the active principle in Wordsworth's poetry; and then the function of the critic of Wordsworth is to follow up that active principle, to disengage it, to mark the degree in which it penetrates his verse²¹».

The remainder of the Preface, which explains Pater's conception of the origins and evolution of the Renaissance in Italy and in France, does not concern us here. His critical creed is already set forth, he has already formulated the doctrine on which the whole of his criticism, in the sphere of art as in that of literature, will really rest. What is now important is to study the doctrine as it stands, to fill in certain of the gaps which Pater has left in his effort towards a concise exposition, to emphasize, in a word, the significance of his attitude, and the consequences which it implies.

III

The originality of Pater, we have already noted, lies in the fact that he gives, for the first time, a reasoned expression to an attitude already found in his predecessors, but which they had never clearly apprehended. It would, however, be unjust to limit Pater's theory there; and if we are to understand its real significance it is essential that we should endeavour to link it up with his general ideas on art and life.

This is not the place to set forth in detail the doctrine championed by Pater in the Conclusion to The Renaissance, and reaffirmed by him, with certain modifications, in Marius the Epicurean (1885). It suffices to state that his teaching has as its object the elevation of life through art. The moments of our existence, says Pater in substance, are too precious for us to lose them in idleness or in vain quests after abstractions. If we wish to realise all their possibilities, then we must seek to fill them with enthusiasms and with noble passions—and the finest enthusiasm, the highest passion, is the disinterested love of beauty. In literature, in painting, in music, in art in general, as well as in the higher aspects of life around us, we find ample field for this impassioned search for brilliant impressions, ardent sensations which it should be our aim to capture. And our task, therefore, is to seek beauty in all its forms, to identify ourselves with it—to relive, as it were, the magnificent creations of art, so that our own temperaments may be enriched by them, so that our own days pass by, a work of art in themselves. In the wealth and variety of our artistic experience, we shall find the measure of our existence²².

Such is the doctrine which lies at the base of the «æsthetic movement» in England, during the closing years of the nineteenth century. Such is the doctrine from which, in spite of many apparent variations, Pater never really moved. And its interest for us lies in its close relation to the theory of «æsthetic criticism» already summarized. That relation is at once evident. Here, once again, is the quest for beauty in the forefront of the theory; here, once more, is the insistence on personal impressions and sensations as the only means of realising the true appreciation of beauty. But what is new is the definition of the part to be played by the cult of beauty, by the love of art. For Pater, it is through the passion for beauty that life can be lifted on to a higher plane, that all its best possibilities can be most adequately developed. Of all the various forms of enthusiasm that give us a sense of a «quickened, multiplied consciousness», the most admirable, affirms our author, is «the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake²³».

Thus, the conception of «æsthetic criticism» takes on a new aspect. Pater demands for the exercise of the critical faculty—for what is the disinterested love of beauty but that?—the first place among the activities which contribute to the making of the perfect mind. It is in itself, he implies, the loftiest form of culture. Far from being confined to a mere rendering of spontaneous impressions, it is concerned with all that is vital in an intellect. Side by side with those impressions, shaping them, informing them, giving them at once scope and depth, there come all the subtlety of outlook, all the complexity of thought and judgment born from long intercourse with art and literature. The critic must enjoy art, in other words, as a humanist, as a scholar widely read, completely informed, drawing his pleasure not merely from the «object», but from his ability to reflect, to discriminate and to compare. He will exact from himself that «width» of knowledge demanded by professedly impersonal critics, like Arnold. If Pater praises and admires Sainte-Beuve, for example, it is precisely because the author of the Lundis appears to him to offer a striking example of a vast culture working in harmony with an artistic personality. To make us feel the most delicate shades of feeling and sentiment in the writers with whom he is concerned, to enable us to enjoy their particular qualities, Sainte-Beuve does not hesitate to range over the whole realm of art and experience, in search of pertinent comparisons and analogies.

And, together with this insistence on culture, comes the claim that criticism is a creative form of art. Arnold had already preceded Pater in this path, but his point of view is different. Criticism is creative, for him, because it is one of the main conditions governing the progress of art; great criticism prepares great literary periods. What is Pater's standpoint? Criticism is creative, because it necessitates all the qualities associated with great painting or great writing, and because, in its highest forms, it becomes independent of the theme with which it deals. Let us take Pater's own case. Is, for example, the famous page on the Mona Lisa, in The Renaissance,²⁴ a less original work than the picture itself? Obviously, replies the objector, since it follows a model. But, Pater would say, Leonardo himself, the «creator», follows a model. He gives a personal impression of an object—in this case, a woman's face, but if it were anything else the same would apply. And the critic, in his turn, gives a personal appreciation in which his culture, his temperament, his susceptibility to beauty, to combinations of lines and colours have no less importance than in the so-called «original» work of the artist. Suppose the Mona Lisa portrait were to disappear: the critic's page would still retain all its value, all its charm, for its qualities are its own, its effects are its own: it is, in other words, a creation, to be judged, if need be, upon its intrinsic merits.

Finally, this lofty idea of criticism carries with it a sense of deep responsibility. It is the fashion to depict the doctrine of «æsthetic criticism» as an exclusive invitation to consider literature from the standpoint of «art for art's sake», with the indifference to moral teaching with which that theory is often associated. Certainly Pater does not accept the standards of Ruskin, interpreting art in terms of morality, and founding his critical judgments on religious motives: nor the scale of values of Arnold, for whom poetry is above all «a criticism of life». But his attitude carries with it no deliberate turning away from morality. For Pater, art is first and foremost beauty, and it is as such that it should be considered. This, however, does not preclude his seeking to disengage, at the same time, the moral elevation of a precept or an example. Whether he is speaking of Shakespeare, of Sir Thomas Browne, of Lamb, of Wordsworth or of Rossetti, this preoccupation—as we shall see—is everywhere present. There is no essay, not even that on Style, which does not seek to convey some higher truth of mind or soul.

Too much stress cannot be laid on this aspect of his doctrine. It is not the joyous emotion, the gusto of a Hazlitt that he is striving for. Nor is it, to take more obvious examples of subjective criticism, the mere «impressionistic» enthusiasm of a Lemaître or a France. His aim is something wider, something graver. There must ever be in criticism, to his mind, an undercurrent of serious moral endeavour, a thoughtful humanity, an innate idealism. It must identify itself with the noblest efforts of the mind, with what is most admirable and disinterested in life. It so becomes the most moving of spiritual adventures, not only a means, but an end in itself.

Pater's theory, and the work that illustrates it should, then, be regarded in this light. An ideal is to be judged by the intention that lies behind it. We have tried to make clear, in the foregoing pages, the aim pursued by Pater. How far that aim is attained, to what extent his work corresponds to the precepts, explicit or implied, of «æsthetic criticism», as he understands it—these are the questions to which we shall seek an answer in our examination of the essays which make up the volume of Appreciations.

Notes

1. Biographia Literaria, ch. XIV, XVII-XX.

2. Essays of Elia, Nelson, p. 236.

3. Ibid., p. 236.

4. Appreciations, p. 114.

5. Works, Black, 1897, vol. X, pp. 105 sqq.

6. Cf. Essays in Criticism. Macmillan, 1900, vol. I, p. 1.

7. Ibid., pp. 4-18.

8. Ibid., pp. 18 sqq.

9. Ibid., p. 38.

10. Ibid., p. 1.

11. Appreciations, p. 69.

12. Ibid., p. 74.

13. Ibid., p. 65.

14. Ibid., p. 67.

15. Ibid., p. 67.

16. Studies in the Renaissance, pp. vii-xv.

17. Ibid., p. viii.

18. Ibid., p. viii.

19. Ibid., p. ix.

20. Ibid., p. x.

21. Ibid., p. xi.

22. Ibid., pp. 233-239. Cf. Marius the Epicurean, part II, ch. IX, New Cyrenaicism.

23. Studies in the Renaissance, p. 239.

24. Ibid., pp. 124-125.

Bibliography

The Works of Walter Pater

Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Macmillan, 1873.

Marius the Epicurean, 2 vols. Macmillan, 1885.

Appreciations, with an essay on Style. Macmillan, 1889.

Principal Works Quoted or Alluded to

Arnold (Matthew), Essays in Criticism, 2 vols (1865-1885). Macmillan, 1900.

Coleridge (S. T.): Biographia Literaria (1847). Bell, 1894.

De Quincey (Thomas), Works (Masson), vol. X. Literary theory and criticism. Black, 1897.

Lamb (Charles): Essays of Elia (1823-1833). Nelson, 1920.