Lamb would have been a first-class critic if he hadn’t given the chief part of his life to clerkship.  Lamb at any rate is not provincial.  His perceptions are never at fault.  Every sentence of Lamb proves his taste and his powerful intelligence.  Coleridge—­well, Coleridge has his comprehensible moments, but they are few; Matthew Arnold, with study and discipline, might perhaps have been a great critic, only his passion for literature was not strong enough to make him give up school-inspecting—­and there you are!  Moreover, Matthew Arnold could never have written of women as Sainte-Beuve did.  There were a lot of vastly interesting things that Matthew Arnold did not understand and did not want to understand.  He, too, was provincial (I regret to say)—­you can feel it throughout his letters, though his letters make very good quiet reading.  Churton Collins was a scholar of an extreme type; unfortunately he possessed no real feeling for literature, and thus his judgment, when it had to stand alone, cut a figure prodigiously absurd.  And among living practitioners?  Well, I have no hesitation in de-classing the whole professorial squad—­Bradley, Herford, Dowden, Walter Raleigh, Elton, Saintsbury.  The first business of any writer, and especially of any critical writer, is not to be mandarinic and tedious, and these lecturers have not yet learnt that first business.  The best of them is George Saintsbury, but his style is such that even in Carmelite Street the sub-editors would try to correct it.  Imagine the reception of such a style in Paris!  Still, Professor Saintsbury does occasionally stray out of the university quadrangles, and puts on the semblance of a male human being as distinguished from an asexual pedagogue.  Professor Walter Raleigh is improving.  Professor Elton has never fallen to the depths of sterile and pretentious banality which are the natural and customary level of the remaining three....  You think I am letting my pen run away with me?  Not at all.  That is nothing to what I could say if I tried.  Mr. J.W.  Mackail might have been one of our major critics, but there again—­he, too, prefers the security of a Government office, like Mr. Austin Dobson, who, by the way, is very good in a very limited sphere.  Perhaps Austin Dobson is as good as we have.  Compare his low flight with the terrific sweeping range of a Sainte-Beuve or a Taine.  I wish that some greatly gifted youth now aged about seventeen would make up his mind to be a literary critic and nothing else.

MRS. ELINOR GLYN

10 Nov. ’10

After all, the world does move.  I never thought to be able to congratulate the Circulating Libraries on their attitude towards a work of art; and here in common fairness I, who have so often animadverted upon their cowardice, am obliged to laud their courage.  The instant cause of this is Mrs. Elinor Glyn’s new novel, “His Hour” (Duckworth, 6s.) Everybody who cares for literature knows, or should