the year. If one
attacks Mr. Galsworthy, again, it is usually because one admires his best
work so whole-heartedly that one is not willing to accept from him
anything but the best. One cannot, however, be content to see the author
of _The Man of Property_ dropping the platitudes and the false
fancifulness of _The Inn of Tranquillity_. It is the false pretences in
literature which criticism must seek to destroy. Recognizing Mr.
Galsworthy's genius for the realistic representation of men and women, it
must not be blinded by that genius to the essential second-rateness and
sentimentality of much of his presentation of ideas. He is a man of genius
in the black humility with which he confesses strength and weakness
through the figures of men and women. He achieves too much of a pulpit
complacency--therefore of condescendingness--therefore of falseness to the
deep intimacy of good literature--when he begins to moralize about time
and the universe. One finds the same complacency, the same
condescendingness, in a far higher degree in the essays of Mr. A.C.
Benson. Mr. Benson, I imagine, began writing with a considerable literary
gift, but his later work seems to me to have little in it but a good man's
pretentiousness. It has the air of going profoundly into the secrecies of
love and joy and truth, but it contains hardly a sentence that would waken
a ruffle on the surface of the shallowest spirit. It is not of the
literature that awakens, indeed, but of the literature that puts to sleep,
and that is always a danger unless it is properly labelled and
recognizable. Sleeping-draughts may be useful to help a sick man through a
bad night, but one does not recommend them as a cure for ordinary healthy
thirst. Nor will Mr. Benson escape just criticism on the score of his
manner of writing. He is an absolute master of the otiose word, the
superfluous sentence. He pours out pages as easily as a bird sings, but,
alas! it is a clockwork bird in this instance. He lacks the true innocent
absorption in his task which makes happy writing and happy reading.

It is not always the authors, on the other hand, whose pretences it is the
work of criticism to destroy. It is frequently the wild claims of the
partisans of an author that must be put to the test. This sort of
pretentiousness often happens during "booms," when some author is talked
of as though he were the only man who had ever written well. How many of
these booms have we had in recent ye