ho gets
something like a good report from a critic is getting more than his
deserts. Yet authors, though a difficult, are not an impossible
generation. Few of them would allow that they are even unreasonable with
regard to criticism, and they would probably hail any improvement in its
theories and methods with gratitude.

As criticism cannot be an adequate report upon the qualities of a book,
even a book which has not been examined, why should it assume to do more
than talk about it and talk all the better for being merely tentative
and altogether unfinal? Nobody can really be authoritative concerning
anything, for there is no one whose wisdom will not be disputed by
others of the wise. The best way, then, might be for a reviewer to go
round collecting sentiment and opinion about the book he means to talk
of, and then to give as many qualifying varieties of impression as the
general unhandsomeness of human nature will allow him to give when they
differ from his own impression. On the terms of the old and still
accepted convention of criticism, Eugenio had himself done a vast deal
of reviewing, an amount of it, in fact, that he could not consider
without amaze, and in all this reviewing he had not once satisfied
himself with his work. Never once had he written a criticism which
seemed to him adequate, or more than an approximation to justice, even
when he had most carefully, almost prayerfully, examined the work he
reported upon. He was aware of writing from this mood or that, of
feeling hampered by editorial conditions, of becoming impatient or
jaded, and finally employing the hay-scales when he ought to have used
the delicate balances with which one weighs out life-giving elixirs or
deadly poisons. But he used to imagine that if he could have put himself
in the attitude of easy discussion or light comment, instead of the
judicial pose he felt obliged to take, he could have administered a far
finer and more generous measure of justice. In these moments he used to
wonder whether something stated and organized in the way of intelligent
talk about books might not be substituted for the conventional verdicts
and sentences of the courts of criticism.

In this notion he proceeded upon a principle evolved from his own
experience in fields far from the flinty and sterile ranges of
criticism. He had not only done much reviewing in those days, but he had
already written much in the kinds which he could not, in his modesty,
brin