It depends, of course, on whether one does or does not take a relative view of things. To those who hold that there is a definite standard of literary judgment the tastes of immature, and of uneducated persons, can be of little matter. You tell your form master that you consider Swinburne a greater poet than Matthew Arnold, and he will smile indulgently: “One does think like that at your age,” he will say, “but you’ll find in time that Matthew Arnold is more satisfying stuff.” And I suppose one does. At any rate, the majority of middle-aged persons of my acquaintance seem to find him so. But I can never see that this fact is a proof of Arnold’s superiority, any more than the fact that at forty one plays golf with greater comfort than Rugby football is a proof of the superiority of golf. In an estimate of Victorian poetry a critic considers himself to have proved his case when he has written: “Swinburne is the supreme poet of youth, but as the years pass his tempestuous flow of sound means less to us, and we increasingly appreciate the chastened, harmonious cadences of Matthew Arnold.” Actually, of course, he has done no more than state that Swinburne’s is the poetry of youth and Arnold’s of middle age. That each poet has certain qualities and certain limitations, and in his acceptance of Arnold’s superiority he has assumed that the tastes of a man of fifty are more significant, less impermanent, more surely built than those of a man of twenty-five. It is an assumption before whose authority most young writers, especially writers of fiction, have been in their time arraigned. “These stories,” the reviewer says, “are well enough written, the characters competently drawn, the situations skilfully prepared. But the book is concerned entirely with the problems of adolescence, problems, that is to say, that will in a few years’ time have ceased to concern the author. Its quality, therefore, is strictly temporal.” The author has been condemned, not on grounds of literary craftsmanship, not because he has failed to do well the thing he set out to do, but because he has employed unprofitable material, because the perplexities and enthusiasms of adolescence that formed the theme of his book are transient and must yield in time to the perplexities and enthusiasms of manhood. It is doubtless inevitable that literary criticism should accept the quality of permanence as its deciding standard, should consider the period of duration rather than the intensity of the fleeting mood; but on its own grounds even would not criticism do well to seek that quality in the skill and sincerity of the treatment, rather than in the matter of the material treated?