He must either appeal to some
absolute standard--the rules drawn from the "classical writers", in
a sense wider or narrower, as the case may be; or he must decide
everything by his own impression of the moment, eked out by the "appeal
to Moliere's maid". The latter is the negation of all criticism. The
former, spite of itself, is the historical method, but the historical
method applied in an utterly arbitrary and irrational way. The former
was the method of Johnson; the latter, of the _Edinburgh_ and the
_Quarterly_. Each in turn, as we have seen, had ludicrously broken
down.
In the light of recent inventions, it might have been expected that
some attempt would be made to limit the task of the critic to a mere
record of his individual impressions. This, in fact, would only have
been to avow, and to give the theory of what the _Edinburgh_ and the
_Quarterly_ had already reduced to practice. But the truth is that the
men of that day were not strong in such fine-spun speculations. It was
a refinement from which even Lamb, who loved a paradox as well as any
man, would have shrunk with playful indignation.
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