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 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
id