e 9
Rabelais 25
Dante 35
Shakespeare 55
El Greco 75
Milton 87
Charles Lamb 105
Dickens 119
Goethe 135
Matthew Arnold 153
Shelley 169
Keats 183
Nietzsche 197
Thomas Hardy 213
Walter Pater 227
Dostoievsky 241
Edgar Allen Poe 263
Walt Whitman 281
Conclusion 293

PREFACE

What I aim at in this book is little more than to give complete
reflection to those great figures in Literature which have so long
obsessed me. This poor reflection of them passes, as they pass,
image by image, eidolon by eidolon, in the flowing stream of my
own consciousness.

Most books of critical essays take upon themselves, in unpardonable
effrontery, to weigh and judge, from their own petty suburban
pedestal, the great Shadows they review. It is an insolence! How
should Professor This, or Doctor That, whose furthest experiences of
"dangerous living" have been squalid philanderings with their
neighbours' wives, bring an Ethical Synthesis to bear that shall put
Shakespeare and Hardy, Milton and Rabelais, into appropriate
niches?

Every critic has a right to his own Aesthetic Principles, to his own
Ethical Convictions; but when it comes to applying these, in
tiresome, pedantic agitation, to Edgar Allen Poe and Charles Lamb,
we must beg leave to cry off! What we want is not the formulating
of new Critical Standards, and the dragging in of the great masters
before our last miserable Theory of Art. What we want is an honest,
downright and quite _personal_ articulation, as to how these great
things in literature really hit us when they find us for the moment
natural and off our guard--when they find us as men and women,
and not as ethical gramaphones.

My own object in these sketches is not to convert the reader to
whatever "opinions" I may have formulated in the course of my
spiritual adventures; it is to divest myself of such "opinions," and in
pure, passionate humility to give myself up, absolutely and
completely, to the various visions and temperaments of these great
dead artists.

There is an absurd notion going about, among those half-educated
people who frequent Ethical Platforms, that Literary Criticism must
be "constructive." O that word "constructive"! How, in the name of
the mystery of genius, can criticism be anything else than an idolatry,
a worship, a metamorphosis, a