The individuality, the quintessence,
of a writer lies completely outside his view.
We may accept the isolation of the historical critic then, at least in
theory, and conceive of him as a fragment of a social historian, as the
author of a chapter in the history of the human spirit. But can we
isolate the philosophic critic in the same way? And what exactly _is_ a
philosophic critic? Is he a critic with a philosophical scheme in which
art and literature have their places, a critic who therefore approaches
literature with a definite conception of it as one among many parallel
manifestations of the human spirit, and with a system of values derived
from his metaphysical scheme? Hegel and Croce are philosophical critics
in this sense, and Aristotle is not, as far as we can judge from the
Poetics, wherein he considers the literary work of Greece as an isolated
phenomenon, and examines it in and for itself. But for the moment, and
with the uneasy sense that we have not thoroughly laid the ghost of
philosophic criticism, we will assume that we have isolated him, and
pass to the consideration of the pure literary critic, if indeed we can
find him.
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