m might be adopted in reply:

"The greatest fault of the writer who does me the honor to review me
is that he is not a critic."

For what are, in fact, the essential characteristics of a critic?

It is necessary that, without preconceived notions, prejudices of
"School," or partisanship for any class of artists, he should
appreciate, distinguish, and explain the most antagonistic tendencies
and the most dissimilar temperaments, recognizing and accepting the
most varied efforts of art.

Now the Critic who, after reading _Manon Lescaut_, _Paul and
Virginia_, _Don Quixote_, _Les Liaisons dangereuses_, _Werther_,
_Elective Affinities_ (_Wahlverwandschaften_), _Clarissa Harlowe_,
_Emile_, _Candide_, _Cinq-Mars_, _Rene_, _Les Trois Mousquetaires_,
_Mauprat_, _Le Pere Goriot_, _La Cousine Bette_, _Colomba_, _Le Rouge
et le Noir_, _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, _Notre-Dame de Paris_,
_Salammbo_, _Madame Bovary_, _Adolphe_, _M. de Camors_, _l'Assommoir_,
_Sapho_, etc., still can be so bold as to write "This or that is, or
is not, a novel," seems to me to be gifted with a perspicacity
strangely akin to incompetence. Such a critic commonly understands by
a novel a more or less improbable narrative of adventure, elaborated
after the fashion of a piece for the stage, in three acts, of which
the first contains the exposition, the second the action, and the
third the catastrophe or _denouement_.

And this method of construction is perfectly admissible, but on
condition that all others are accepted on equal terms.

Are there any rules for the making of a novel, which, if we neglect,
the tale must be called by another name? If _Don Quixote_ is a novel,
then is _Le Rouge et le Noir_ a novel? If _Monte Christo_ is a novel,
is _l'Assommoir_? Can any conclusive comparison be drawn between
Goethe's _Elective Affinities_, _The Three Mousqueteers_, by Dumas,
Flaubert's _Madame Bovary_, _M. de Camors_ by Octave Feuillet, and
_Germinal_, by Zola? Which of them all is The Novel? What are these
famous rules? Where did they originate? Who laid them down? And in
virtue of what principle, of whose authority, and of what reasoning?

And yet, as it would appear, these critics know in some positive and
indisputable way what constitutes a novel, and what distinguishes it
from other tales which are not novels. What this amounts to is that
without being producers themselves they are enrolled under a School,
and that, like the writers of novels, they rej