le moments, but they are few; Matthew Arnold, with study and
discipline, might perhaps have been a great critic, only his passion for
literature was not strong enough to make him give up
school-inspecting--and there you are! Moreover, Matthew Arnold could never
have written of women as Sainte-Beuve did. There were a lot of vastly
interesting things that Matthew Arnold did not understand and did not
want to understand. He, too, was provincial (I regret to say)--you can
feel it throughout his letters, though his letters make very good quiet
reading. Churton Collins was a scholar of an extreme type; unfortunately
he possessed no real feeling for literature, and thus his judgment, when
it had to stand alone, cut a figure prodigiously absurd. And among living
practitioners? Well, I have no hesitation in de-classing the whole
professorial squad--Bradley, Herford, Dowden, Walter Raleigh, Elton,
Saintsbury. The first business of any writer, and especially of any
critical writer, is not to be mandarinic and tedious, and these lecturers
have not yet learnt that first business. The best of them is George
Saintsbury, but his style is such that even in Carmelite Street the
sub-editors would try to correct it. Imagine the reception of such a style
in Paris! Still, Professor Saintsbury does occasionally stray out of the
university quadrangles, and puts on the semblance of a male human being as
distinguished from an asexual pedagogue. Professor Walter Raleigh is
improving. Professor Elton has never fallen to the depths of sterile and
pretentious banality which are the natural and customary level of the
remaining three.... You think I am letting my pen run away with me? Not at
all. That is nothing to what I could say if I tried. Mr. J.W. Mackail
might have been one of our major critics, but there again--he, too,
prefers the security of a Government office, like Mr. Austin Dobson, who,
by the way, is very good in a very limited sphere. Perhaps Austin Dobson
is as good as we have. Compare his low flight with the terrific sweeping
range of a Sainte-Beuve or a Taine. I wish that some greatly gifted youth
now aged about seventeen would make up his mind to be a literary critic
and nothing else.

MRS. ELINOR GLYN

_10 Nov. '10_

After all, the world does move. I never thought to be able to congratulate
the Circulating Libraries on their attitude towards a work of art; and
here in common fairness I, who have so often animadverted upon