In the first place, a critic must have the power to analyze. We have seen that analysis consists in breaking a subject into its components, in discovering of what it is made. This is the first great necessity in criticizing. You wish, for example, to make a criticism of a new rifle for your friends. It is not enough that you should with gusto enunciate, "It's just great!" "Oh, it's fine, fine and dandy!" "Golly but it's a good one!" Your friends are likely to ask "Why?" or to say, "The gentleman doth protest too much!" If, on the other hand, you remark that the rifle is admirable because of its sights, its general accuracy, its cartridge chamber, its comparative freedom from recoil, then you will be giving your friends definite and useful criticism, for you will have analyzed the virtue of the object into its components. Now this necessity for analysis exists in criticism of literature and art just as in criticism of rifles. Before you can properly estimate the value of a novel or a play you must divide the impression it makes into the various heads, such as emotional power, convincingness in the message of the book or play, truth to life, and whatever heading you may think necessary. Until you do this your impressions, your judgments will of necessity be vague and dim in their outlines, and though they may seem to be comprehensive, will be found actually to be insufficient to give your reader or listener a firm notion of the subject--he will have no nucleus of thought round which his total estimate will center. As soon, however, as you analyze, and make definite, so soon he will receive real enlightenment. In the following account of the work of James Russell Lowell at the Court of Saint James we find at once this careful breaking of the subject into parts which can be treated definitely. Had the writer merely uttered general impressions of the diplomacy of our ambassador we who read should have been comparatively unhelped.
To those who hold the semi-barbarous notion that one of the duties of a foreign minister is to convey a defiant attitude toward the people to whom he is accredited--that he should stick to his post, to use the popular phrase, "with his back up," and keep the world that he lives in constantly in mind that his countrymen are rough, untamable, and above all things quarrelsome, Mr. Lowell has not seemed a success. But to them we must observe, that they know so little of the subject of diplomacy that their opinion is of no sort of consequence. The aim of diplomacy is not to provoke war, but to keep the peace; it is not to beget irritation, or to keep it alive, but to produce and maintain a pacific temper; not to make disputes hard, but easy, to settle; not to magnify differences of interest or feeling, but to make them seem small; not to win by threats, but by persuasion; not to promote mutual ignorance, but mutual comprehension--to be, in short, the representative of a Christian nation, and not of a savage tribe.