s who were not allowed
to be mediocre. The modern critic--I should say the modern critic of the
censorious kind, not the critic who looks on it as his duty to puff out
meaningless superlatives over every book that appears--will not allow any
author to be mediocre. The war against mediocrity is a necessary war, but
I cannot help thinking that mediocrity is more likely to yield to humour
than to contemptuous abuse. Apart from this, it is the reviewer's part to
maintain high standards for work that aims at being literature, rather
than to career about, like a destroying angel, among books that have no
such aim. Criticism, Anatole France has said, is the record of the soul's
adventures among masterpieces. Reviewing, alas! is for the most part the
record of the soul's adventures among books that are the reverse of
masterpieces. What, then, are his standards to be? Well, a man must judge
linen as linen, cotton as cotton, and shoddy as shoddy. It is ridiculous
to denounce any of them for not being silk. To do so is not to apply high
standards so much as to apply wrong standards. One has no right as a
reviewer to judge a book by any standard save that which the author aims
at reaching. As a private reader, one has the right to say of a novel by
Mr. Joseph Hocking, for instance: "This is not literature. This is not
realism. This does not interest me. This is awful." I do not say that
these sentences can be fairly used of any of Mr. Hocking's novels. I
merely take him as an example of a popular novelist who would be bound to
be condemned if judged by comparison with Flaubert or Meredith or even Mr.
Galsworthy. But the reviewer is not asked to state whether he finds Mr.
Hocking readable so much as to state the kind of readableness at which Mr.
Hocking aims and the measure of his success in achieving it. It is the
reviewer's business to discover the quality of a book rather than to keep
announcing that the quality does not appeal to him. Not that he need
conceal the fact that it has failed to appeal to him, but he should
remember that this is a comparatively irrelevant matter. He may make it as
clear as day--indeed, he ought to make it as clear as day, if it is his
opinion--that he regards the novels of Charles Garvice as shoddy, but he
ought also to make it clear whether they are the kind of shoddy that
serves its purpose.

Is this to lower literary standards? I do not think so, for, in cases of
this kind, one is not judging litera