nounced by critics whom they have made laugh till their sides ached, and
the reason is that, after leaving the theatre, the critics remember that
they do not like Mr, Shaw's moral ideas. In the same way, it seems to me,
a great deal of the praise that has been given to Mr. D.H. Lawrence as an
artist ought really to be given to him as a distributor of certain moral
ideas. That he has studied wonderfully one aspect of human nature, that he
can describe wonderfully some aspects of external nature, I know; but I
doubt whether his art is fine enough or sympathetic enough to make
enthusiastic anyone who differs from the moral attitude, as it may be
called, of his stories. This is the real test of a work of art--has it
sufficient imaginative vitality to capture the imagination of artistic
readers who are not in sympathy with its point of view? The _Book of Job_
survives the test: it is a book to the spell of which no imaginative man
could be indifferent, whether Christian, Jew or atheist. Similarly,
Shelley is read and written about with enthusiasm by many who hold moral,
religious, and political ideas directly contrary to his own. Mr. Kipling's
_Recessional_, with its sombre imaginative glow, its recapturing of Old
Testament prides and fears, commands the praise of thousands to whom much
of the rest of his poetry is the abominable thing. It is the reviewer's
task to discover imagination even in those who are the enemies of the
ideas he cherishes. In so far as he cannot do this, he fails in his
business as a critic of the arts.

It may be said in answer to all this, however, that to appeal for
tolerance in book-reviewers is not necessary. The Press is already
overcrowded with laudations of commonplace books. Not a day passes but at
least a dozen books are praised as having "not a dull moment," being
"readable from cover to cover," and as reminding the reviewer of
Stevenson, Meredith, Oscar Wilde, Paul de Kock, and Jane Austen. That is
not the kind of tolerance which one is eager to see. That kind of review
is scarcely different from a publisher's advertisement. Besides, it
usually sins in being mere summary and comment, or even comment without
summary. It is a thoughtless scattering of acceptable words and is as
unlike the review conceived as a portrait as is the hostile kind of
commentatory review which I have been discussing. It is generally the
comment of a lazy brain, instead of being, like the other, the comment of
a cleve