ea 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.

It is to combat the stylelessness of many contemporary writers that the
destructive kind of criticism is just now most necessary. For, dangerous
as the heresy of style was forty or fifty years ago, the newer heresy of
sylelessness is more dangerous still. It has become the custom even of men
who write well to be as ashamed of their style as a schoolboy is of being
caught in an obvious piece of goodness. They keep silent about it as
though it were a kind of powdering or painting. They do not realize that
it is merely a form of ordinary truthfulness--the truthfulness of the word
about the t