les. And that may be very true. Rules,
principles, and standards die and vanish every day. Perhaps they are all
dead and vanished by this time. These, if ever, are the brave, free days
of destroyed landmarks, while the ingenious minds are busy inventing the
forms of the new beacons which, it is consoling to think, will be set up
presently in the old places. But what is interesting to a writer is the
possession of an inward certitude that literary criticism will never
die, for man (so variously defined) is, before everything else, a
critical animal. And as long as distinguished minds are ready to treat
it in the spirit of high adventure literary criticism shall appeal to
us with all the charm and wisdom of a well-told tale of personal
experience.

For Englishmen especially, of all the races of the earth, a task, any
task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance.
But the critics as a rule exhibit but little of an adventurous spirit.
They take risks, of course--one can hardly live with out that. The daily
bread is served out to us (however sparingly) with a pinch of salt.
Otherwise one would get sick of the diet one prays for, and that would
be not only improper, but impious. From impiety of that or any other
kind--save us! An ideal of reserved manner, adhered to from a sense
of proprieties, from shyness, perhaps, or caution, or simply from
weariness, induces, I suspect, some writers of criticism to conceal the
adventurous side of their calling, and then the criticism becomes a mere
"notice," as it were, the relation of a journey where nothing but the
distances and the geology of a new country should be set down; the
glimpses of strange beasts, the dangers of flood and field, the
hairbreadth escapes, and the sufferings (oh, the sufferings, too! I have
no doubt of the sufferings) of the traveller being carefully kept out;
no shady spot, no fruitful plant being ever mentioned either; so that
the whole performance looks like a mere feat of agility on the part of
a trained pen running in a desert. A cruel spectacle--a most deplorable
adventure! "Life," in the words of an immortal thinker of, I should
say, bucolic origin, but whose perishable name is lost to the worship of
posterity--"life is not all beer and skittles." Neither is the writing
of novels. It isn't, really. Je vous donne ma parole d'honneur that
it--is--not. Not _all_. I am thus emphatic because some years ago, I
remember, the daughter of