Our reading is a search for the excellent, for the vital and
characteristic, which may assume as many and diverse forms in art and
literature as it does in life and nature. The savant, the scientist,
the moralist, the philosopher, may have pleasure in a work that gives
little or no pleasure to the literary artist. Criticism may be looked
upon as a search for these various values or various phases of truth,
which the critic expresses in terms of his own taste, knowledge,
insight, etc., for scientific values, philosophical values, literary
and poetic values, or moral and religious values, according to the
subject upon which the critical mind is directed. No two men look for
exactly the same values, nor have the same measure of appreciation of
them. Emerson and Lowell, for instance, make quite different demands
and form different estimates of the poets they read. Lowell lays the
emphasis upon the conventional literary values, Emerson more upon
spiritual and religious values. An Englishman will find values in
the poets of his own country that a Frenchman does not find, and a
Frenchman, values in his poets that an Englishman does not find. See
how Schérer and Taine handled Milton. Milton’s great epic has poetic
and literary value, often of a high order, but ad philosophy or
religion it is grotesque.