of great acuteness
and with strong and vehement preferences in literature. When I have
been forced by circumstances, as I sometimes have, to read one of his
books, I find myself at once in a condition of irritable opposition. He
writes sensibly, acutely, epigrammatically; but there is a vile
complacency about it all, an underlying assumption that every one who
does not agree with him in the smallest particular is necessarily a
fool--a sense that he feels that he has gone into the merits of a book,
and that there is exactly as much and as little in it as he tells you.
He is very often right; that is the misery of it. But this lack of
urbanity, this unnecessary insolence, is a very grave fault in a
writer--fatal, indeed, to his permanence. He turns a book or a person
inside out, dissects it in a deft and masterly way; but one feels at
the end as one might feel about an anatomist who has dissected every
fibre of an animal's body, classified every organ, traced every muscle
and nerve, and bids you at the end take it on his authority that there
is no such thing as the vital principle or the informing soul, because
he has shown you everything that there is to see. Yet the finest
essence of all, the living and breathing spirit, has escaped him.

But what is a still worse fault in the writer of whom I speak is that
he is the victim of a certain intellectual snobbishness. By which I
mean that when he has once conceived an admiration for a historical
personage or a writer he becomes unable to criticise him; he can only
justify and praise him, sling mud at his opponents, and, so to speak,
clear a space round his hero by knocking over in opprobrious terms any
one who may threaten his supremacy. He condones and even praises any
fault in his idol; and what would be in his eyes a damning fault in one
whom he happened to dislike, becomes a salient virtue in the person
whom he praises. He condemns Swift for his coarseness and praises
Johnson for his outspokenness. He condemns Robert Browning for his
obscurity and praises George Meredith for his rich complexity. He would
never see that the victory lies with the appreciator of any
personality, because, if you happen to appreciate a figure whom he
himself dislikes, you are proclaimed to be guilty of perversity and bad
taste. Thus I not only feel sore when he abuses a character whom I
love, but I feel ashamed when he decries one whom I hate, for I am
tempted to feel that I must have grossly