weed till his lineaments are hardly discernible. We have at least clear
sight of him now, and we are able to decide whether we will accept Mr
Eliot's description of him. Let us see.

We have no difficulty in agreeing that historical criticism of
literature is a kind apart. The historical critic approaches literature
as the manifestation of an evolutionary process in which all the phases
are of equal value. Essentially, he has no concern with the greater or
less literary excellence of the objects whose history he traces--their
existence is alone sufficient for him; a bad book is as important as a
good one, and much more important than a good one if it exercised, as
bad books have a way of doing, a real influence on the course of
literature. In practice, it is true, the historical critic generally
fails of this ideal of unimpassioned objectivity. He either begins by
making judgments of value for himself, or accepts those judgments which
have been endorsed by tradition. He fastens upon a number of outstanding
figures and more or less deliberately represents the process as from
culmination to culmination; but in spite of this arbitrary
foreshortening he is primarily concerned, in each one of the phases
which he distinguishes, with that which is common to every member of the
group of writers which it includes. The individuality, the quintessence,
of a writer lies completely outside his view.

We may accept the isolation of the historical critic then, at least in
theory, and conceive of him as a fragment of a social historian, as the
author of a chapter in the history of the human spirit. But can we
isolate the philosophic critic in the same way? And what exactly _is_ a
philosophic critic? Is he a critic with a philosophical scheme in which
art and literature have their places, a critic who therefore approaches
literature with a definite conception of it as one among many parallel