154 Mr. Edward F. Benson [May. 



other people have made, particularly if you cannot. But there are, 

 of course, instances where an eminent novelist, having exhausted the 

 reservoir of his imao-ination, begins to take to criticism rather as a 

 tiger takes to man-eating on the approach of old age. He usually 

 begins by eating himself, that is to say, he writes immense auto- 

 biographical critiques. Or, if his zeal leads him to maul other 

 people, he seems still to be uncertain what he is eating : sometimes 

 he takes a mouthful of his victim, sometimes he merely bites 

 himself. He produces on his reader — I have lately been such a 

 one — the effect of being in a beleaguered city surrounded by the 

 enemy and a dense fog, out of which sound a confused and bewilder- 

 ing clatter of arms, from this quarter and that, without a direct 

 assault being ever delivered. Or he seems to resemble the boy at 

 Mrs. Leo Hunter's garden party, who proceeded to entangle himself 

 with the legs of a chair, crawl under it, wriggle round it, do anything 

 but sit on it. 



Another reason why the creative artist seldom develops into a 

 critical artist, is that, quite unjustifiably, he often feels contempt for 

 the sister art, on which his own is so largely founded, through resent- 

 uient against its practitioners, who perhaps have told him many 

 things he did not want to know. Wordsworth, for instance, con- 

 founds the art of criticism with its artists, of whom he takes the 

 gloomiest view when he tells us that " the writers in these periodicals, 

 while they prosecute their inglorious employment, cannot be supposed 

 to be in "^a state of mind very favourable for being affected by the 

 fine influence of a thing so pure as genuine poetry." Tennyson, on 

 the other hand, is frankly personal when in one of his terse and 

 naked moments, of which he was so gloriously unashamed, announced 

 that "critics are the lice upon the locks of literature." Shelley 

 expressed himself in the preface to " Queen Mab " with equal free- 

 dom : while Gautier's remarks in the preface to " Mademoiselle 

 Marpin " blister the page. But all tliese seem to confound the critic 

 who has annoyed them with the art he practises, and it would l)e as 

 reasonal)le to gird at poetry, because Mr. Pye wrote some extremely 

 bad verses. 



A noble curiosity, the passion to learn some new thing, to find 

 and to embrace the beauty that lurks there, to pursue it instinctively, 

 like a well-trained hound on a hot scent, and by the music of his 

 baying to lead the hunt after him — there is the true function of the 

 critic. He will often have to condemn, but only as the hound rejects 

 the false scent that may lead others astray, and through briar and 

 thicket, and the muddy stream of error he pursues his way, devoting 

 to the urgency of his work all that he has of perception and of 

 leadership. And though he does not create in the sense that a 

 musician, a sculptor, a painter creates, fashioning new forms out of 

 the eternally old materials, yet often his interpretation, his musing 

 on the beauty that others have made, becomes in itself, as one of the 



