nary common man is entitled to have his biography written too. It is to illustrate this view that I write the life of John Smith, a man neither good nor great, but just the usual, everyday homo like you and me and the rest of us." The truth of the matter is, however, that Stephen Leacock is not like the rest of us. As Christopher Morley justly complains in his book Modern Essays, "One of the unsolved riddles of social injustice is, why should Professor Leacock be so much more amusing than most people?" Persons who take themselves too seriously and life not seriously enough may consider Leacock too much the jester. Perhaps we may say of him what Hazlitt said of Lamb, that, fearing he may go beyond the comprehension of some needy, heartsore reader and make him uncomfortable, he prefers "to maintain a lower and friendlier level by indulging in nonsense."

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

There is an interesting treatment of Sir William Temple in

Taine's History of English Literature, Vol. I. Though perhaps too long to be classed as essays, these books have the style and manner of the short-story type: Travels with a Donkey, by Stevenson; The Path to Rome, by Belloc; South Sea Idylls, by Charles Warren Stoddard; De Profundis, by Oscar Wilde (or is this an apostrophe to "twilight in the heart"?).

CHAPTER VII

THE BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL ESSAY

We are forever deceiving ourselves with names and theories.-LAMB

BACKGROUND

Biography and criticism have come down through the ages with Aristotle's logic, bearing ever upon them the stamp of that first great critical and mental analyst, whose "dry and useless branches" of thought produced such futile wrath in the encyclopedic mind of the master aphorist, Bacon. In practically all countries except England biographical and critical literature has developed with literature in general, rising and falling in excellence with it. English biography and especially English literary criticism are characterized by a prolonged yet healthy backwardness, which was due to the rather obvious reason that authors and a single form of "curial" speech were lacking. Myth and legend so cast their glamour over the limited though rich literature of the Anglo-Saxon period that the authorship of most of it was practically unknown. The trilingual state of the language created difficulties, and these were further increased by the variations of Old English dialect which survived through the Conquest until Chaucer brought the vernacular into prominence. Thus it came

about that any attempt at writing critical treatises on literature could but die of sheer discouragement. Then, in the late seventeenth century, when modern English prose was at its early excellence, when the great writers of Elizabeth's day, of the Puritan Age, and of the Restoration period had left a body of literature which is England's proudest boast, when the Renaissance had revived general interest in writing as an art, came Joseph Addison to establish the school of classic, or formal, criticism. But as there are always hidden springs to feed rivers, so there were forerunners of Addison, some of them already known to us as essayists: Bacon, in The Advancement of Learning; the character writers, especially Butler; and the rhetoricians Sir Thomas Wilson, Sir John Cheke, and Roger Ascham, who, fashioning their prose with eyes squinted, one on Greece and the other on England, thus served to establish a chastened, correct pattern of writing. Ben Jonson's Timber contains some real book criticism; and we are amused to find this classic-minded gentleman, who disliked essays because of their desultoriness and incompleteness, writing essays which attack "all the essayists, even their master Montaigne" and yet at the same time bowing in adoration to his beloved ancients, who can be distinguished only in name from these "despised persons." Then came Dryden to furnish in his essays and prefaces a good serviceable prose style and to develop in his "Essay of Dramatic Poesy" the art of literary criticism, and Izaak Walton to give us in his Lives of Doctor Donne, George Herbert, and others model biographies in a quaintly attractive style.

It was the eighteenth-century writers, however, who brought literary criticism into its own. In A History of Criticism Saintsbury illustrates this fact by a pleasing figure. "Up to their time Criticism had been a mere Cinderella in the literary household. Aristotle had taken her up as he had taken up all Arts and Sciences. The Rhetoricians had found her a useful handmaid to Rhetoric. Roman dilettanti had dallied with her. The solid good sense and good feeling of Quintilian had decided that she must be 'no casual mistress but a wife' (perhaps on rather polygamic principles) to the student of oratory. Longinus had suddenly fixed her colours on his helmet, and had ridden in her honour the most astonishing little chevauchée in the annals of adventurous literature. The second greatest poet of the world had done her at once yeoman's service and stately courtesy. And yet she was, in the general literary view, not so much déclassée as not classed at all—not 'out,' not accorded the entrées." The eighteenth century is the "silver age," the "Augustan period," of English literature; above all, of English prose. In social life there were coffeehouses where elegant manners succeeded the old-time boorish conviviality, salons where literary lions—and bears—were given public worship, clubs where satiric dueling caused mental sparks to fly, innumerable periodicals scintillating with wit and humor; in political life there was comparative democracy achieved in the new cabinet form of government; in religious life there was a degree of toleration that must have seemed real freedom in those days. Truly was this an age in which to live and write!

DEFINITION

Matthew Arnold, who stands first among pure critics, says in his essay "On the Function of Criticism" that the purpose of criticism is "to see the object as in itself it really is," and that it is "the endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world." Obviously vision and judgment are essential to the critical essayist, whose function is "the expert interpretation, appreciation, and evaluation of literary productions." In his history Saintsbury defines literary criticism as "the reasoned exercise of Literary Taste the attempt, by examination of literature, to find out what it is that makes literature pleasant, and therefore good-the discovery, classification, and as far as possible tracing to their sources, of the qualities of poetry and prose, of style and meter, the classification of literary kinds, the examination and 'proving,' as arms are proved, of literary means and weapons, not neglecting the observation of literary fashions and the like."

The master critics have shown literary criticism to be of several kinds: judicial or deductive, evaluating the work; inductive, either examining the work and describing its contents or seeing in it an expression of environment, classifying it in relation to other works of the same kind and time; subjective or objective; synthetic or analytic. There are grounds for the contention that the critic is not, strictly speaking, a creative artist, but rather a contemplative one, since he works upon already existing literary material; yet, by ennobling and amplifying the work, he often does accom