Chapter LXIX: Section VI: The Future of Criticism

This trade of calumny was in vogue fifty years ago: in fifty more it will probably have altogether ceased. The French are beginning to comprehend the gravity of the Puritans; perhaps the English will end by comprehending the gayety of Voltaire: the first are laboring to appreciate Shakespeare; the second will doubtless attempt to appreciate Racine. Goethe, the master of all modern minds, knew well how to appreciate both.[380] The critic must add to his natural and national soul five or six artificial and acquired souls, and his flexible sympathy must introduce him to extinct or foreign sentiments. The best fruit of criticism is to detach ourselves from ourselves, to constrain us to make allowance for the surroundings in which we live, to teach us to distinguish objects themselves through the transient appearances, with which our character and our age never fail to clothe them. Each person regards them through glasses of diverse focus and hue, and no one can reach the truth save by taking into account the form and tint which his glasses give to the objects which he sees. Hitherto we have been wrangling and pommelling one another--this man declaring that things are green, another that they are yellow; others, again, that they are red; each accusing his neighbor of seeing wrong, and being disingenuous. Now, at last, we are learning moral optics; we are finding that the color is not in the objects, but in ourselves; we pardon our neighbors for seeing differently from us; we recognize that they may see red what to us appears blue, green what to us appears yellow; we can even define the kind of glasses which produces yellow; and the kind which produces green, divine their effects from their nature, predict to people the tint under which the object we are about to present to them will appear, construct beforehand the system of every mind, and perhaps one day free ourselves from every system. "As a poet," said Goethe, "I am a polytheist; as a naturalist, a pantheist; as a moral man, a deist; and in order to express my mind, I need all these forms." In fact, all these glasses are serviceable, for they all show us some new aspect of things. The important point is to have not one, but several, to employ each at the suitable moment: not to mind the particular color of these glasses, but to know that behind these million moving poetical tints, optics only prove transformations, governed by a law.