It is a part of the strange irony of life that the personalities which make themselves most strenuously felt among their own generation have a way of slipping out of history. A man who is much occupied in leaving his mark in life, in stemming or colouring the whirling stream that passes him, has little time to spend in piling monuments on the banks to be the envy and wonder of the fluid tides that come and go. The wild grief that we often encounter in books, sometimes in real life, that centres about the disappearance of some apparently unemphatic figure can be thus explained: his vitality did not lend itself to visible labour; it was content to modify the temporary and fluctuating. When such an attitude is artistically maintained: when a character most highly gifted, with a taste and delicacy of perception that overrides the captiousness of less instinctive critics, is seen to devote itself not to gathering straws, but to merely watching life, an atmosphere is created which is at once intensely attractive and baffling. When a patient silence is maintained upon questions which appear to the young and fervent to be essential to the progress of the race; when an impenetrable contempt for fanaticism and extravagance occasionally steals out in pungent sentences; when the outbursts of not unnatural emotions are drily repressed; when the overbalancing of enthusiasm is not forgiven, a deep and provoking wonder grows gradually up as to what standpoint such a critic has reached that such judgments should be possible; as to what platforms, what further heights are visible, that the plain should seem so low and despicable. Of all fascinations there is none like the fascination of contempt, and when this is seen, justified by a sure touch, a genuine grasp of ideas, a most piercing intellect, and seen moreover steadfast in a place of which the very atmosphere is that of generous and ardent spirits, the wonder becomes almost intolerable. There is a great and common misapprehension which accepts no criticism as valid except what proceeds from a basis of superior capacity. The ordinary man requires the critic to be a better man than the performer whom he dissects, to be able to beat his victim on his own ground. But this is a deep-seated error. The creative power often confers no clearness of vision on its possessor; the best critics are seldom originative men. The critic is, in fact, meant to clear the air about great work for ordinary people; to ascertain the best points of view, and to sting to death the crawling nerveless creatures who are just capable of obscuring by the closeness of their imitative powers the beauty of their great exemplar.