Mr. Eliot fails as a critic because he brings us neither light nor delight. But this does not mean that he will always fail. He has some of the qualities that go to the making of a critic. He has learning, and he enjoys intellectual exercise. His essay on “Tradition and the Individual Talent” shows that he is capable of ideas, though he is not yet capable of expressing them clearly and interestingly. Besides this, as one reads him, one is conscious of the presence of a serious talent, as yet largely inarticulate, and wasting itself on the splitting of hairs and metaphysical word-spinning. His failure at present is partly a failure of generosity. If a critic is lacking in generous responsiveness it is in vain for him to write about the poets. The critic has duties as a destroyer, but chiefly in the same sense as a gold-washer. His aim is the discovery of gold. Mr. Eliot is less of a discoverer in this kind than any critic of distinction who is now writing. Otherwise he could hardly have written the sort of attack he writes on Professor Gilbert Murray’s translation of Euripides, in which he overlooks the one supreme fact that calls for a critic’s explanation--the fact that Professor Murray alone among English translators has (whether imperfectly or not) brought Euripides to birth as an author for the modern world. Let Mr. Eliot for the next ten years take as his patron saint the woman in the New Testament who found the piece of silver, instead of Johannes Agricola in joyless meditation. He will find her not only better company, but a wiser counsellor. He may even find his sentences infected with her cheerful excitement, for want of which as yet they can break neither into a phrase nor into a smile. XIV MR. NORMAN DOUGLAS’S DISLIKES Mr. Norman Douglas has, in _Alone_, written a book of hatred tempered with archæology and laughter. Luckily, there is very little archæology and enough laughter to make the hatred enjoyable without being infectious. It is not that Mr. Douglas does not like some of his fellow-creatures. He likes heretics and jolly beggars. He liked Ouida. But, if Mr. Douglas likes you, the danger is that he will throw you at somebody else’s head. That is what he does with Ouida, whom he glorifies as “the last, almost the last, of lady authors.” He throws her at the head of the age in general--at “our anæmic and wooly generation,” at “our actual womanscribes” with “their monkey-tricks and cleverness,” at “our vegetarian world-reformers who are as incapable of enthusiasm as they are of contempt, because their blood temperature is invariably two degrees below normal,” and finally at an American novelist described as “this feline and gelatinous New Englander.” That gives a fair enough impression of Mr. Douglas’s attitude to the human race as seen at close quarters.