free its hinder parts from the mire.[1] Hence the progress of literary art under the patronage of courts, as previously under that of seigneurs, moved in a groove of individual thought and feeling to which the influence of classical imitation only confined it more strictly. Hence, too, the language of criticism which expressed or analysed this literary progress was altogether conceived from the individual standpoint, and can with difficulty be employed by the socialising spirit of the present day. To take one example of the influence of these individual associations, we may refer to the unfinished essay of Montesquieu on Taste. In his famous Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu, after starting, indeed, with abstract principles not much superior to the usual imitations of Plato and Aristotle, had struck into the true path of social and physical causation; yet, when he afterwards came to discuss the theory of Taste, there rose before his mind the figure of an individual, dependent indeed for his conceptions of the beautiful on his senses and liable to have such conceptions altered by the sharpening or blunting of his senses, the increase or diminution of their number, but still an individual with whose statical nature questions of æsthetic development as depending on social life or physical environment have little to do. So hard was it even for such an intellect as that of Montesquieu to rise above ideas of individuality which the art and criticism of classical antiquity and modern civilization had combined to create.
§ 20. Anticipating evidences to be adduced elsewhere, we may here lay down the principle that in the movement of civilisation—a movement by no means regular, but often spasmodic, back and forward, forward and back, though on the whole forward—personal character comes
- ↑ Shakspere: his Mind and Art, p. 320.
