literature, not to invent or denounce them; to discover principles, not
to establish them; to report, not to create.

It is so much easier to say that you like this or dislike that, than to
tell why one thing is, or where another thing comes from, that many
flourishing critics will have to go out of business altogether if the
scientific method comes in, for then the critic will have to know
something besides his own mind. He will have to know something of the
laws of that mind, and of its generic history.

The history of all literature shows that even with the youngest and
weakest author criticism is quite powerless against his will to do his
own work in his own way; and if this is the case in the green wood, how
much more in the dry! It has been thought by the sentimentalist that
criticism, if it cannot cure, can at least kill, and Keats was long
alleged in proof of its efficacy in this sort. But criticism neither
cured nor killed Keats, as we all now very well know. It wounded, it
cruelly hurt him, no doubt; and it is always in the power of the critic
to give pain to the author--the meanest critic to the greatest author
--for no one can help feeling a rudeness. But every literary movement has
been violently opposed at the start, and yet never stayed in the least,
or arrested, by criticism; every author has been condemned for his
virtues, but in no wise changed by it. In the beginning he reads the
critics; but presently perceiving that he alone makes or mars himself,
and that they have no instruction for him, he mostly leaves off reading
them, though he is always glad of their kindness or grieved by their
harshness when he chances upon it. This, I believe, is the general
experience, modified, of course, by exceptions.

Then, are we critics of no use in the world? I should not like to think