triple wall of brass-or rather of neo-Byzantine coloured marble-pens him in on every side. He is there, not only to give the predatory spirit the lie, but to confront it with the creative spirit, to show the advantage of giving over taking. For whether he wish it or no, whether he choose to paint or to write about his own age or not, whether again he stand aloof from it or not (and to a certain extent, in order to get his perspective, he must), the aristocracy of art is the destined foe of the aristocracy of money with its thick, padded Tweedledum armour of bad taste.

XV

REVIEWING THE ART AND THE TRADE

MY DEAR X,

in

I was once talking over the subject of my last two or three letters with a friend of mine who, now and again, paints. I am a ludicrously bad conversationalist; arguing a case I can no more articulate my precise meaning than a statesman. Confront me with a generalization, as cheap, as flaccid, as vulnerable as you please, so it be confidently uttered, and the particles of my mind scurry like a disturbed ant-heap. My thought stammers, which is far worse than an impediment of speech. Partly, I suppose, because when one believes vehemently in something, one is liable to watch the thought of the opposition too intently, to anticipate and be confounded (in the eagerness to convert) by the objections. If I were arrested and put on my trial for hamstringing the President of Venezuela, I should be convicted from sheer intellectual palsy in defending myself. The heat of a ratiocinative crisis seems to shrivel my mentality. Anyway, there I was, dithering on about the recognition of artistic values. “Well,” said this friend with a terrible plumpness of assurance, "if you think I am going to submit my work to an academy of fogies!" Though my head was

pulsating like a paddle-box, not one word had I to say. Which is the authentic autobiographical genesis of my previous two letters. I had to get my own back somehow. And if it were not that this accursed paralysis and ineptitude rankle as they do, I hardly believe (a) that I should have written the letters at all, or (b) that I should have made up my mind to pursue the matter indirectly into the neighbourhood of criticism.

These poor hacks and sutlers of literature are called "reviewers" nowadays, because for such fry to style themselves critics would be to plunge themselves instantly into the Dunciad of their fellows' regard. Indeed for a reviewer to write about reviewing at all is surely to remind himself of the serpent who, in the seventeenthcentury printers' marks, is to be observed, in a paroxysm of despair, devouring his own tail. The last thing that the reviewer desires is to turn the inward eye upon the conditions of his trade. How he will dwindle in his own esteem! Coleridge, who compared the activities of reviewers to those of maggots, inferior to bookworms, living on the delicious brains of genius, is, he will declare, too tolerant of him. For nowadays, he battens, not on masterpieces, not on Grays, Godwins, Goldsmiths, and Golden Treasuries, but Garvices. Whether or not, alas, he have the courage of his career and regard criticism as an honourable pursuit demanding training, knowledge and judgment rather than, as the layman regards it, as a refuge from responsibility and hard work, he will watch the over-production of indifferent fiction rather with a covetous than a censorious eye. Where others, more fortunate than he is, dream of cakes and champagne, he will build stately pleasure-domes of comfort in terms of

inflated waste-paper baskets. The more rubbish for the public, says he, the more stout and kippers for me.

"The sundew in the boggy vale,

The nosing badger in the hills
Are not to me so rare a tale

As good books and receipted bills."

Yet it was not always thus. When I am feeling particularly humiliated I turn to the following epigram of Ben Jonson :

'May others feare flye and traduce thy name,

As guilty men do Magistrates: glad I,

That wish my poemes a legitimate fame,

Charge them, for a crown, to thy sole censure hye.

And, but a sprig of bayes given by thee,

Shall outlive garlands, stolne from the chast tree."

Now I am not so much concerned with the causes of the decay of criticism as with suggestions for its possible recovery. But, as the one is the complement of the other, I must, to some extent, interpret my complaint. What, in a word, is the matter with modern criticism? Well, the matter with criticism corresponds with what is the matter with the intelligence of the reading public and the vested interests that control that public. The function of the critic has, by almost insensible degrees, suffered a radical change. What in fact applies to journalism applies equally to criticism. I need not repeat the summaries of my previous letters on the subject. The decline of criticism is correlative with the decline of interest in the things of the mind. A new definition must be found

for the new attitude of the critic to his public, and of his public to him. Indifference and a craving for stimulants have spread like a frost over the mental consciousness of the public, and it is the business of the critic not to thwart that influence, but to expedite and encourage it. He is no longer in the position of a magistrate of letters, of a Platonic guardian or overseer appointed to protect the intellectual interests of the public, but rather of a middleman, whose office it is to recommend the goods that come to his hand, whatever their quality, to display their features satisfactorily, and to pass them smoothly on to their destination.

What indeed is disastrous to the reviewer is the general literary attitude towards him. What could be more shameful, more degrading to his artistic morals and selfrespect than the habit, forced upon him by penury, of shuffling in and out of newspaper offices, cap in hand, like a mendicant and begging for books as though they were crusts any wretched trifle of author's vanity the charity of editors will give him. And heaven knows that he has other difficulties enough-the advertising columns, the supremacy of topics of political and social interest dwindling his space; the over-production of books; the marketable value of popular authors; the custom of promiscuous praise; the tacit assumption that certain conditions are attached to a livelihood got by reviewing, one of them being that he must possess himself of a small apparatus of verbal shibboleth and recognizable phrase (as a workman must have certain tools), that and nothing else; economic dependence (no comparatively well-to-do writer would do reviewing nowadays)—all these militate against good and honest criticism. Poor