art.  We grow a monstrous and unhealthy plant of tolerance in our souls, and its branches drop colourless good words on the just and on the unjust—­on everybody, indeed, except Miss Marie Corelli, Mr. Hall Caine, and a few others whom we know to be second-rate because they have such big circulations.  This is really a disastrous state of affairs for literature and the other arts.  If criticism is, generally speaking, praise, it is, more definitely, praise of the right things.  Praise for the sake of praise is as great an evil as blame for the sake of blame.  Indiscriminate praise, in so far as it is the result of distrust of one’s own judgment or of laziness or of insincerity, is one of the deadly sins in criticism.  It is also one of the deadly dull sins.  Its effect is to make criticism ever more unreadable, and in the end even the publishers, who love silly sentences to quote about their bad books, will open their eyes to the futility of it.  They will realize that, when once criticism has become unreal and unreadable, people will no more be bothered with it than they will with drinking lukewarm water.  I mention the publisher in especial, because there is no doubt that it is with the idea of putting the publishers in a good, open-handed humour that so many papers and reviews have turned criticism into a kind of stagnant pond.  Publishers, fortunately, are coming more and more to see that this kind of criticism is of no use to them.  Reviews in such-and-such a paper, they will tell you, do not sell books.  And the papers to which they refer in such cases are always papers in which praise is disgustingly served out to everybody, like spoonfuls of treacle-and-brimstone to a mob of schoolchildren.

Criticism, then, is praise, but it is praise of literature.  There is all the difference in the world between that and the praise of what pretends to be literature.  True criticism is a search for beauty and truth and an announcement of them.  It does not care twopence whether the method of their revelation is new or old, academic or futuristic.  It only asks that the revelation shall be genuine.  It is concerned with form, because beauty and truth demand perfect expression.  But it is a mere heresy in aesthetics to say that perfect expression is the whole of art that matters.  It is the spirit that breaks through the form that is the main interest of criticism.  Form, we know, has a permanence of its own:  so much so that it has again and again been worshipped by the idolators of art as being in itself more enduring than the thing which it embodies.  Robert Burns, by his genius for perfect statement, can give immortality to the joys of being drunk with whiskey as the average hymn-writer cannot give immortality to the joys of being drunk with the love of God.  Style, then, does seem actually to be a form of life.  The critic may not ignore it any more than he may exaggerate its place in the arts.  As a matter of fact, he could not ignore it if he would, for style and spirit have a way of corresponding to one another like health and sunlight.