CRITICISM, the art of judging the qualities and values of an aesthetic object, whether in literature or the fine arts. It in volves the formation and expression of a judgment on the qual ities of anything, and Matthew Arnold defined it in this general sense as "a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world." It may be laid down as the definition of criticism in its pure sense, that it should consist in the application, in the most corn petent form, of the principles of literary composition. Those principles are the general aesthetics upon which taste is founded; they take the character of rules of writing. From the days of Aristotle the existence of such rules has not been doubted, but different orders of mind in various ages have given them diverse application, and upon this diversity the fluctuations of taste are founded. Over-legislation has been the bane of official criticism, and originality, especially in works of creative imagination, has been condemned because it did not conform to existing rules. Such instances of want of contemporary appreciation as the recep tion given to William Blake or Keats, or even Milton, are quoted to prove the futility of criticism. As a matter of fact they do nothing of the kind. They merely prove the immutable principles which underlie all judgment of artistic products to have been misunderstood or imperfectly obeyed during the life-time of those illustrious men. False critics have built domes of glass, as Vol taire put it, between the heavens and themselves, domes which genius has to shatter in pieces before it can make itself compre hended. In critical application formulas are often useful, but they should be held lightly ; when the formula becomes the tyrant where it should be the servant of thought, fatal error is immi nent. What is required above all else, by a critic is knowledge, tempered with good sense, and combined with breadth of sym pathy and an exquisite delicacy of taste.
To pass to an historical examination of the subject, we find that in antiquity Aristotle was regarded as the father, and almost as the founder, of literary criticism. Yet before his day, three Greek writers of eminence had examined, in more or less fullness, the principles of composition; these were Plato, Isocrates and Aristophanes. The comedy of The Frogs, by the latter, is the earliest specimen we possess of hostile literary criticism, being devoted to ridicule of the plays of Euripides. In the cases of Plato and Isocrates, criticism takes the form mainly of an exam ination of the rules of rhetoric. We reach, however, much firmer ground when we arrive at Aristotle, whose Poetics and Rhetoric are among the most valuable treatises which antiquity has handed down to us. Of what existed in the literature of his age, extremely rich in some branches, entirely empty in others, Aristotle speaks with extraordinary authority; but Mr. G. Saintsbury has justly remarked that as his criticism of poetry was injuriously affected by the non-existence of the novelist, so his criticism of prose was injuriously affected by the omnipresence of the orator. This continues true of all ancient criticism. A work by Aristotle on the problems raised by a study of Homer is lost, and there may have been others of a similar nature ; in the two famous trea tises which remain we have nothing less important than the f oun dation on which all subsequent European criticism has been raised. It does not appear that any of the numerous disciples of Aristotle understood his attitude to literature, nor do the later philosophical schools offer much of interest. The Neoplatonists, however, were occupied with analysis of the Beautiful, on which both Proclus and Plotinus expatiated ; still more purely literary were some of the treatises of Porphyry. There seems to be no doubt that Alex andria possessed, in the 3rd century, a vivid school of critic grammarians; the names of Zenodotus, of Crates and Aristar chus were eminent in this connection, but of their writings nothing substantial has survived. They were followed by the scholiasts, and they by the mere rhetoricians of the last Greek schools, such as Hermogenes and Aphthonius. In the 2nd century of our era, Dio Chrysostom, Aristides of Smyrna, and Maximus of Tyre were the main representatives of criticism, and they were succeeded by Philostratus and Libanius. The most modern of post-Christian Greek critics, however, is unquestionably Dio nysius of Halicarnassus, who leads up to Lucian and Cassius Longinus. The last-mentioned name calls for special notice; in "the lovely and magnificent personality of Longinus" we find the most intelligent judge of literature who wrote between Aris totle and the moderns. His book On the Sublime (HEpi i four), probably written about A.D. 26o, and first printed in 1554, is of extreme importance, while his intuitions and the splendour of his style combine to lift Longinus to the highest rank among the critics of the world.
In Roman literature criticism never took a very prominent position. In early days the rhetorical works of Cicero and the famous Art of Poetry of Horace exhaust the category. During the later Augustan period the only literary critic of importance was the elder Seneca. Passing over the valuable allusions to the art of writing in the poets, especially in Juvenal and Martial, we reach, in the silver age, Quintilian, the most accomplished of all the Roman critics. His Institutes of Oratory has been described as the fullest and most intelligent application of criticism to lit erature which the Latin world produced, and one which places the name of Quintilian not far below those of Aristotle and Longinus. He was followed by Aulus Gellius, by Macrobius (whose reputation was great in the middle ages), by Servius (the great commentator on Virgil), and after a long interval, by Martianus Capella. Latin criticism sank into mere pedantry about rhetoric and grammar. This continued throughout the dark ages, until the 13th century, when rhythmical treatises, of which the Labyrinthus of Eberhard (1212?) and the Ars rhythmics of John of Garlandia ( John Garland) are the most famous, came into fashion. These writings testified to a growing revival of a taste for poetry.
It is, however, in the masterly technical treatise De vulgari eloquio, generally attributed to Dante, first printed (in Italian) in 152q that modern poetical criticism takes its first seep. The example of this admirable book was not adequately followed; throughout the 14th and i 5th centuries, criticism is mainly indi rect and accidental. Boccaccio, indeed, is the only figure worthy of mention, between Dante and Erasmus. With the Renaissance came a blossoming of Humanist criticism in Italy, producing such excellent specimens as the Sylvae of Poliziano, the Poetics (1527) of Vida, and the Poetica of Trissino, the best of a whole crop of critical works produced, often by famous names, between 1 525 and 156o. These were followed by sounder scholars and acuter theorists: by Scaliger with his epoch-making Poeticus 0560; by L. Castelvetro, whose Poetica (1S70) started the modern cultiva tion of the unities and asserted the value of the epic ; by Tasso with his Discorsi (1587) ; and by Francesco Patrizzi in his Po etica (1586).
In France, the earliest and for a long time the most important specimen of literary criticism was the Defense et illustration de la langue f rancaise, published in 1549 by Joachim du Bellay. Ron sard, also, wrote frequently and ably on the art of poetry. The theories of the Pleiade were summed up in the Art poetique of Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, which belongs to 1574 (though not printed until 1605).
In England, the earliest literary critic of importance was Thomas Wilson, whose Art of Rhetoric was printed in 1553, and the earliest student of poetry, George Gascoigne, whose Instruc tion appeared in 1575. Gascoigne is the first writer who deals intelligently with the subject of English prosody. He was fol lowed by Thomas Drant, Harvey, Gosson, Lodge and Sidney, whose controversial pamphlets belong to the period between and 1580. Among Elizabethan "arts" or "defences" of English poetry are to be mentioned those of William Webbe (1586), George Puttenham (158q), Thomas Campion (1602), and Sam uel Daniel (1603). With the tractates of Ben Jonson, several of them lost, the criticism of the Renaissance may be said to close.
A new era began throughout Europe when Malherbe started, about 1600, a taste for the neo-classic or anti-romantic school of poetry, taking up the line which had been foreshadowed by Cas telvetro. Enfin Malherbe vint, and he was supported in his revolu tion by Regnier, Vaugelas, Balzac, and finally by Corneille him self, in his famous prefatory discourses. It was Boileau, however, who more than any other man stood out at the close of the 17th century as the law-giver of Parnassus. The rules of the neo classics were drawn together and arranged in a system by Rene Rapin, whose authoritative treatises mainly appeared between 1668 and 1674. It is in writings of this man, and of the Jesuits, Le Bossu and Bouhours, that the preposterous rigidity of the formal classic criticism is most plainly seen. The influence of these three critics was, however, very great throughout Europe, and we trace it in the writings of Dryden, Addison and Rymer. In the course of the 18th century, when the neo-classic creed was universally accepted, Pope, Blair, Kames, Harris, Goldsmith and Samuel Johnson were its most distinguished exponents in England, while Voltaire, Buffon (to whom we owe the phrase "the style is the man"), Marmontel, La Harpe and Suard were the types of academic opinion in France.
Modern, or more properly romantic, criticism came in when the neo-classic tradition became bankrupt throughout Europe at the very close of the 18th century. It had been heralded in Ger many by the writings of Lessing, and in France by those of Diderot. Of the reconstruction of critical opinion in the 19th century it is impossible to speak here with any fullness, it is contained in the record of the recent literature of each Euro pean language. It is noticeable, in England, that the predomi nant place in it was occupied, in violent contrast with Dis raeli's dictum, by those who had obviously not failed in imagi native composition, by Wordsworth, by Shelley, by Keats, by Landor, and pre-eminently by S. T. Coleridge, who was one of the most penetrative, original and imaginative critics who have ever lived. In France, the importance of Sainte-Beuve is not to be ignored or even qualified; of ter manifold changes of taste, he remains as much a master as he was a precursor. He was followed by Theophile Gautier, Saint-Marc, Girardin, Paul de Saint Victor, and a crowd of others, down to Taine and the school of individualistic critics, comparable with Matthew Arnold, Pater and their followers in England. Tolstoi's What is Art? was the most revolutionary and challenging book of criti cism to appear in the last quarter of the 19th century. Critical writing has become so abundant in recent years that it would be possible to fill a library with the works of living critics alone. Philosophers like Benedetto Croce, and poets like Mr. Bridges have helped to swell the stream. Some of the happiest contribu tions have been made in England by Mr. G. Saintsbury, Mr. A. C. Bradley, Sir Edmund Gosse and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.