own day but the charming and graceful
novelist, Anatole France?

All this, however, is no reply to Mr Benson's indictment of the
critics on the ground that they do not discover genius, but that the
public has to discover genius in spite of them. It is one of those
indictments which can only be believed on the assumption that the
critics are a race apart who think, as it were, _en masse_. Those who
repeat it seem to regard the critics as a disciplined army of
destruction instead of realising that they are a hopelessly straggling
company of more or less ordinary men and women of varying tastes, with
a sprinkling of men and women of genius among them. They tell us that
the critics attacked the Pre-Raphaelites, but they forget that Ruskin
was a critic and a prophet of the Pre-Raphaelites. They tell us that
the critics cold-shouldered Browning; but W. J. Fox wrote
enthusiastically of Browning almost from the first, and Pater praised
him in his early essays: it was a poet who, alas! was not a
critic--Tennyson--who said the severest things about him. Ibsen,
again, is constantly cited as an example of an artist who had to make
his way to public acceptance through mobs of shrieking critics. But
what do we find to be the case? In England three of the most
remarkable critics of their time, Mr Bernard Shaw, Mr Edmund Gosse,
and Mr William Archer, fought a desperate fight for Ibsen against
almost the entire British public. The critics who attacked Ibsen did
not represent the flower of British criticism, but the flower of the
British public. It will be found, I believe, to be an almost
invariable rule that whenever the critics have attacked men of genius,
they have had the public at their back cheering them on. There are
critics, indeed, who make themselves into the hired mouthpieces of the
public. They long to express not what they themselves think (for they
do not think), but what the public thinks (though it does not think).
Can Mr Benson point to any notable catch of genius ever made by
critics of this kind? I do not, of course, contend that even the most
intelligent reviewer in these days, (who is one of the most
hard-worked of journalists), is in a good position for discovering new
stars of genius. No man can appreciate a Shakespeare that is thrown at
his head, and books are thrown at the heads of reviewers nowadays in
numbers likely to stun or bewilder rather than to evoke the mood of
rapturous understanding. As for the revi