In a sense still higher than would be
true even of the work done by Lamb and Ruskin, it deserves the praise
justly given by Carlyle to the masterpiece of Goethe; it is "the very
poetry of criticism".
We have now reviewed the whole circle traversed by criticism during
the present century, and are in a position to define its limits and
extent. We have seen that a change of method was at once the cause and
indication of a change in spirit and in aim. The narrow range of the
eighteenth century was enlarged on the one hand by the study of new
literatures, and on the other hand by that appeal to history, and that
idea of development which has so profoundly modified every field of
thought and knowledge. In that lay the change of method. And this, in
itself, was enough to suggest a wider tolerance, a greater readiness
to make allowance for differences of taste, whether as between nation
and nation or as between period and period, than had been possible for
men whose view was practically limited to Latin literature and to such
modern literatures as were professedly moulded upon the Latin.
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