s is the more importantly and
eternally true one.

XXIII.--THE CRITIC AS DESTROYER

It has been said often enough that all good criticism is praise. Pater
boldly called one of his volumes of critical essays _Appreciations_. There
are, of course, not a few brilliant instances of hostility in criticism.
The best-known of these in English is Macaulay's essay on Robert
Montgomery. In recent years we have witnessed the much more significant
assault by Tolstoy upon almost the whole army of the authors of the
civilized world from AEschylus down to Mallarme. _What is Art?_ was
unquestionably the most remarkable piece of sustained hostile criticism
that was ever written. At the same time, it was less a denunciation of
individual authors than an 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,"