The
average critic today is an old young man who has not failed in
literature or art, possibly because he has not tried to
accomplish anything in either. By the time he has acquired some
skill in criticism he has generally ceased to be a critic,
through no fault of his own, but through sheer weariness of
spirit. When a man is very young he can dance upon everyone who
has not written a masterpiece with a light heart, but after
this period of joyous savagery there follows fatigue and a
certain pity. The critic loses sight of his first magnificent
standards, and becomes grateful for even the smallest merit in
the books he is compelled to read. Like a mother giving a
powder to her child, he is at pains to disguise his timid
censure with a teaspoonful of jam. As the years pass by he
becomes afraid of these books that continue to appear in
unreasonable profusion, and that have long ago destroyed his
faith in literature, his love of reading, his sense of humour,
and the colouring matter of his hair. He realises, with a
dreadful sense of the infinite, that when he is dead and buried
this torrent of books will overwhelm the individualities of his
successors, bound like himself to a lifelong examination of the
insignificant.
Timidity is certainly the note of modern criticism, which is rarely
roused to indignation save when confronted by the infrequent outrage
of some intellectual anarchist. If the critics of the more important
journals were not so enthusiastic as their provincial confreres,
they were at least gentle with "The Improbable Marquis.
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