On the other hand,
the great majority of critical utterances must necessarily be ephemeral;
they may exert considerable contemporary influence, but are usually
forgotten long before the works that called them forth. Unless this
criticism is more than a perfunctory examination of the merits and
defects of the work under consideration, it cannot endure beyond its own
brief day.
Several fruitless attempts have been made to reduce criticism to an
exact science, which, quite disregarding the factor of personal taste,
could refer all literature to a more or less fixed and arbitrary set of
critical principles. The champions of this objective criticism point to
the occasionally ludicrous divergence of the views expressed in
criticism of certain poets or novelists, and insist that there is no
occasion for such a bewildering difference of opinion. They seem to
forget that the criticism which we esteem most highly at all times is
the subjective criticism in which the personality of a competent and
sincere critic is manifest. Literature, like music, painting and the
other arts, has its own laws of technique--fundamental canons that must
be observed in the successful pursuit of the art; but at a certain point
difference of opinion is not only possible but profitable.
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