“The more interested I became in literature,” he on one occasion explained to an interviewer, “the more convinced I grew of the narrowness of English criticism and of the importance to the English critic of getting away from the insular point of view. So I decided that the surest way of beginning to prepare myself for the work of the critic would be to make a study of three or four of the best writers among the older, and three or four among the younger school of each nation, and to judge from the point of view of the nation. For example, in studying French literature, I would try to judge from the point of view of a Frenchman. When this task was done I tried to estimate the literature under consideration from an absolute impersonal and impartial point of view. Of course, this study took a long time, but it furnished me material that has been invaluable to me in my work ever since.”
It was his constant endeavour to understand the underlying motive in any phase of modern literature; and he believed that “what is new in literature is not so likely to be unfit for critics, as critics are likely to be unfit for what is new in literature.” Concerning the art of Criticism he expressed his belief in an unfinished article: “When I speak of Criticism I have in mind not merely the more or less deft use of commentary or indication, but one of the several ways of literature and in itself a rare and fine art, the marriage of science that knows, and of spirit that discerns.”
“The basis of Criticism is imagination: its spiritual quality is sympathy: its intellectual distinction is balance.”
The occasion of his visit to Mr. Ernest Rhys was in connection with a scheme for the publication of two series of cheap re-issues of fine literature—a comparatively new venture five-and-twenty years ago—to be published by Messrs. Walter Scott: _The Camelot Classics_ to be edited by Ernest Rhys and to consist of selected prose writings, and _The Canterbury Poets_ to be edited by William Sharp;—Each volume to be prefaced by a specially written introduction. For the Prose Series William Sharp prepared De Quincey’s _Confessions of an Opium Eater_, and Mrs. Cunningham’s _Great English Painters_. For a third series—Biographies of _Great Writers_ edited by Eric S. Robertson and Frank T. Marzial, he wrote his monographs on Shelley in 1887, on Heine in 1888 and on Browning in 1890.