There is no need, however, for criticism to lash out indiscriminately at all hurried writing. There are a multitude of books turned out every year which make no claim to be literature--the "thrillers," for example, of Mr. Phillips Oppenheim and of that capable firm of feuilletonists, Coralie Stanton and Heath Hosken. I do not think literature stands to gain anything, even though all the critics in Europe were suddenly to assail this kind of writing. It is a frankly commercial affair, and we have no more right to demand style from those who live by it than from the authors of the weather reports in the newspapers. Often, one notices, when the golden youth, fresh from college and the reading of Shelley and Anatole France, commences literary critic, he begins damning the sensational novelists as though it were their business to write like Jane Austen. This is a mere waste of literary standards, which need only be applied to what pretends to be literature. That is why one is often impelled to attack really excellent writers, like Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch or Mr. Galsworthy, as one would never dream of attacking, say, Mr. William Le Queux. To attack Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch is, indeed, a form of appreciation, for the only just criticism that can be levelled against him is that his later work does not seem to be written with that singleness of imagination and that deliberate rightness of phrase which made _Noughts and Crosses_ and _The Ship of Stars_ books to be kept beyond the end of the year. If one attacks Mr. Galsworthy, again, it is usually because one admires his best work so whole-heartedly that one is not willing to accept from him anything but the best. One cannot, however, be content to see the author of _The Man of Property_ dropping the platitudes and the false fancifulness of _The Inn of Tranquillity_. It is the false pretences in literature which criticism must seek to destroy. Recognizing Mr. Galsworthy's genius for the realistic representation of men and women, it must not be blinded by that genius to the essential second-rateness and sentimentality of much of his presentation of ideas. He is a man of genius in the black humility with which he confesses strength and weakness through the figures of men and women. He achieves too much of a pulpit complacency--therefore of condescendingness--therefore of falseness to the deep intimacy of good literature--when he begins to moralize about time and the universe. One finds the same complacency, the same condescendingness, in a far higher degree in the essays of Mr. A.C. Benson. Mr. Benson, I imagine, began writing with a considerable literary gift, but his later work seems to me to have little in it but a good man's pretentiousness. It has the air of going profoundly into the secrecies of love and joy and truth, but it contains hardly a sentence that would waken a ruffle on the surface of the shallowest spirit. It is not of the