criticism is more than a perfunctory examination of the merits and
defects of the work under consideration, it cannot endure beyond its own
brief day.

Several fruitless attempts have been made to reduce criticism to an
exact science, which, quite disregarding the factor of personal taste,
could refer all literature to a more or less fixed and arbitrary set of
critical principles. The champions of this objective criticism point to
the occasionally ludicrous divergence of the views expressed in
criticism of certain poets or novelists, and insist that there is no
occasion for such a bewildering difference of opinion. They seem to
forget that the criticism which we esteem most highly at all times is
the subjective criticism in which the personality of a competent and
sincere critic is manifest. Literature, like music, painting and the
other arts, has its own laws of technique--fundamental canons that must
be observed in the successful pursuit of the art; but at a certain point
difference of opinion is not only possible but profitable. The critics
who would unite in condemning a thirteen-line sonnet or a ten-act
tragedy could not be expected to agree on the relative merits of
Milton's and Wordsworth's sonnets. Unanimity of opinion is as impossible
and undesirable concerning the poetic achievement of Browning and
Whitman as it is concerning the music of Brahms and Wagner, or the
painting of Turner and Whistler. Great artists who have taken liberties
with traditions and precedents have done much to prevent the critics
from falling into a state of self-complacency over their scientific
methods and formulas.

The most helpful form of criticism is the interpretative variety, not
necessarily the laudatory "appreciation" that is so popular in our day,
but an honest effort to understand and elucidate the intention of the