remplissage are the dummies of criticism-the recurrent, regulated billows in the ocean of talk. They have a reason for being, and the situation is simpler when we perceive it. It helps to explain the disproportion I just mentioned, as well, in many a case, as the quality of the particular discourse. It helps us to understand that the "organs of public opinion" must be no less copious than punctual, that publicity must maintain its high standard, that ladies and gentlemen may turn an honest penny by the free expenditure of ink It gives us a glimpse of the high figure presumably reached by all the honest pennies accumulated in the cause, and throws us quite into a glow over the march of civilisation and the way we have organised our conveniences. From this point of view it might indeed go far toward making us enthusiastic about our age. What is more calculated to inspire us with a just complacency than the sight of a new and flourishing industry, a fine economy of production? The great business of reviewing has, in its roaring routine, many of the signs of blooming health, many of the features which beguile one into rendering an involuntary homage to successful enterprise.

Yet it is not to be denied that certain captious persons are to be met who are not carried away by the spectacle, who look at it much askance, who see but dimly whither it tends, and who find no aid to vision even in the great light (about itself, its spirit and its purposes, among other things) that it might have been expected to diffuse. "Is there any such great light at all?" we may imagine the most restless of the sceptics to inquire, "and isn't the effect rather one of a certain kind of pretentious and unprofitable gloom?" The vulgarity, the crudity, the stupidity which this cherished combination of the offhand review and of our wonderful system of publicity have put into circulation on so vast a scale may be represented, in such a mood, as an unprecedented invention for darkening counsel. The bewildered spirit may ask itself, without speedy answer, What is the function in the life of man of such a reverberation of platitude and irrelevance ? Such a spirit will wonder how the life of man survives it, and above all, what is much more important, how literature resists it; whether indeed literature does resist it and is not speedily going down beneath it. The signs of

this catastrophe will not, in the case we suppose, be found too subtle to be pointed out-the failure of distinction, the failure of style, the failure of knowledge, the failure of thought. The case is, therefore, one for recognising with dismay that we are paying a tremendous price for the diffusion of penmanship and opportunity, that the multiplication of endowments for chatter may be as fatal as an infectious disease, that literature lives essentially, in the sacred depths of its being, upon example, upon perfection wrought, that, like other sensitive organisms, it is highly susceptible of demoralisation, and that nothing is better addressed than irresponsible pedagogy to making it lose faith in itself. To talk about it clumsily is to poison the air it breathes, and the consequence of that sort of taint is that it dwindles and dies. We may, of course, continue to talk about it long after it is dead, and there is every appearance that this is mainly the way in which our descendants will hear of it; not, perhaps, that they will much regret its departure, with our report to go by.

This, I am aware, is a dismal impression, and I do not pretend to state the case gaily. The most I can say is that there are times and places in which it strikes one as less desperate than at others. One of the places is Paris, and one of the times is some comfortable occasion of being there. The custom of rough and ready reviewing is, among the French, much less rooted than with us, and the dignity of criticism is, to my perception, in consequence much higher. The art is felt to be one of the most difficult, the most delicate, the most occasional; and the material on which it is exercised is subject to selection, to restriction. That is, whether or no the French are always right as to what they do notice, they strike me as infallible as to what they don't. They publish hundreds of books which are never noticed at all, and yet they are much neater bookmakers than we. It is recognised that such volumes have nothing to say to the critical sense, that they do not belong to literature, and that the possession of the critical sense is exactly what makes it impossible to read them and dreary to discuss them -places them, as a part of critical experience, out of the question. The critical sense, in France, ne se dérange pas, as the phrase is, for so little. No one would deny, on the other hand, that when it does.

set itself in motion, it goes further than with us. It handles the subject, in general, with finer finger-tips. The bluntness of ours, as tactile implements addressed to an exquisite process, is still sometimes surprising, even after frequent exhibition. We blunder in and out of the affair as if it were a railway station-the easiest and most public of the arts. It is in reality the most complicated and the most particular. The critical sense is so far from frequent that it is absolutely rare and that the possession of the cluster of qualities that minister to it is one of the highest distinctions. It is a gift inestimably precious and beautiful; therefore, so far from thinking that it passes overmuch from hand to hand, one knows that one has only to stand by the counter an hour to see that business is done with baser coin. We have too many small schoolmasters; yet not only do I not question in literature the high utility of criticism, but I should be tempted to say that the part it plays may be the supremely beneficent one when it proceeds from deep sources, from the efficient combination of experience and perception. In this light one sees the critic as the real helper of mankind, a torchbearing outrider, the interpreter par excellence. The more we have of such the better, though there will surely always be obstacles enough to our having many. When one thinks of the outfit required for fine work in this spirit, one is ready to pay almost any homage to the intelligence that has put it on; and when one considers the noble figure completely equipped-armed cap-à-pie in curiosity and sympathy-one falls in love with one's conception. It certainly represents the knight who has knelt through his long vigil and who has the piety of his office. For there is something sacrificial in his function, inasmuch as he offers himself as a general touchstone. To lend himself, to project himself and steep himself, to feel and feel till he understands, and to understand so well that he can say, to have perception at the pitch of passion and expression in the form of talent, to be infinitely curious and incorrigibly patient, with the intensely fixed idea of turning character and genius and history inside out these are ideas to give an active mind a high programme and to add the element of artistic beauty to the conception of success. Just in proportion as he is sentient and restless, just in proportion as he vibrates with intellectual experience, is the critic a valuVOL. IV.-No. 24.

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able instrument; for in literature, assuredly, criticism is the critic, just as art is the artist; it being assuredly the artist who invented art and the critic who invented criticism, and not the other way round.

And it is with the kinds of criticism exactly as it is with the kinds of art the best kind, the only kind worth speaking of, is the kind that the most living spirit gives us. There are a hundred labels and tickets, in all this matter, that have been pasted on from the outside and appear to exist for the convenience of passers-by; but the critic who lives in the house, ranging through its innumerable chambers, knows nothing about the bills on the front. He only knows that the more impressions he has the more he is able to record, and that the more he is saturated, poor fellow, the more he can give out. His life, at this rate, is heroic, for it is immensely vicarious. He has to understand for others and to interpret, and he is always under arms. He knows that the whole honour of the matter, for him, besides the success in his own eyes, depends upon his being indefatigably supple, and that is a formidable order. Let me not speak, however, as if his work were a conscious grind, for the sense of effort is easily lost in the enthusiasm of curiosity. Any vocation has its hours of intensity that is so closely connected with life. That of the critic, in literature, is connected doubly, for he deals with life at second-hand as well as at first; that is, he deals with the experience of others, which he resolves into his own, and not of those invented and selected others with whom the novelist makes comfortable terms, but with the uncompromising swarm of authors, the clamorous children of history. He has to make them as vivid and as free as the novelist makes his puppets, and yet he has, as the phrase is, to take them as they come. We must be easy with him if the picture, even when the aim has really been to penetrate, is sometimes confused, for there are baffling and there are thankless subjects; and we compensate him in the peculiar purity of our esteem, when the portrait is really, as it were, like the happy portraits of the other art, a translation into style.

HENRY JAMES.

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II.

ET us define Criticism as the form of skilled labour which is occupied in writing about other men's books, old or new. If Sainte-Beuve wrote on Dante, that is Criticism; and if a paragraphist in a newspaper compose a column of printed matter out of the prefaces of new books which he has not read, that is Criticism also. It is Criticism which discovers that Homer's works were compiled, in about five hundred years, by about fifty different authors. And it is Criticism which finds out that Mr. Smith or Mr. Brown steals his successful novels from Bishop Berkeley or Thomas Moore. The former is an example of the Higher Criticism, the latter of the lower species, and, really, both seem about equally valuable. It is not easy to find a common factor in Criticism, in the studies of which Aristotle and Longinus, Matthew Arnold and SainteBeuve, are masters, while unsuccessful lady novelists and uneducated pressmen form, perhaps, the majority of the school. All of them write about the works of other people, all distribute praise and blame; these are points common to all critics, though in reading, knowledge, taste, and temper there is every sort of diversity. All critics are contemplating works of literary art through the medium of their own temperaments, looking at them with their own eyes, estimating them by their own standards. Yet the writings of some critics are eternal possessions; always good to know and to live with, like the Poetics of Aristotle, or the Ars Poetica of Horace, or the Treatise of Longinus on the Sublime. The writings of other critics, daily or weekly, are often so ignorant, so prejudiced, so spiteful, so careless, that perhaps no printed matter is more entirely valueless and contemptible. It may be said that the topics with which the ordinary reviewer deals, the books on which he pronounces judgment, are not much better than the judgments he pronounces. This is very true, but it seems a pity that bad books should not be barren, but should beget bad reviews. That great George Dandin, the public, has willed it so.