attack on the general tendencies of the literary art.  Tolstoy quarrelled with Shakespeare not so much for being Shakespeare as for failing to write like the authors of the Gospels.  Tolstoy would have made every book a Bible.  He raged against men of letters because with them literature was a means not to more abundant life but to more abundant luxury.  Like so many inexorable moralists, he was intolerant of all literature that did not serve as a sort of example of his own moral and social theories.  That is why he was not a great critic, though he was immeasurably greater than a great critic.  One would not turn to him for the perfect appreciation even of one of the authors he spared, like Hugo or Dickens.  The good critic must in some way begin by accepting literature as it is, just as the good lyric poet must begin by accepting life as it is.  He may be as full of revolutionary and reforming theories as he likes, but he must not allow any of these to come like a cloud between him and the sun, moon and stars of literature.  The man who disparages the beauty of flowers and birds and love and laughter and courage will never be counted among the lyric poets; and the man who questions the beauty of the inhabited world the imaginative writers have made—­a world as unreasonable in its loveliness as the world of nature—­is not in the way of becoming a critic of literature.

Another argument which tells in favour of the theory that the best criticism is praise is the fact that almost all the memorable examples of critical folly have been denunciations.  One remembers that Carlyle dismissed Herbert Spencer as a “never-ending ass.”  One remembers that Byron thought nothing of Keats—­“Jack Ketch,” as he called him.  One remembers that the critics damned Wagner’s operas as a new form of sin.  One remembers that Ruskin denounced one of Whistler’s nocturnes as a pot of paint flung in the face of the British public.  In the world of science we have a thousand similar examples of new genius being hailed by the critics as folly and charlatanry.  Only the other day a biographer of Lord Lister was reminding us how, at the British Association in 1869, Lister’s antiseptic treatment was attacked as a “return to the dark ages of surgery,” the “carbolic mania,” and “a professional criminality.”  The history of science, art, music and literature is strewn with the wrecks of such hostile criticisms.  It is an appalling spectacle for anyone interested in asserting the intelligence of the human race.  So appalling is it, indeed, that most of us nowadays labour under such a terror of accidentally condemning something good that we have not the courage to condemn anything at all.  We think of the way in which Browning was once taunted for his obscurity, and we cannot find it in our hearts to censure Mr. Doughty.  We recall the ignorant attacks on Manet and Monet, and we will not risk an onslaught on the follies of Picasso and the worse-than-Picassos of contemporary