literature that awakens, indeed, but of the literature that puts to sleep, and that is always a danger unless it is properly labelled and recognizable. Sleeping-draughts may be useful to help a sick man through a bad night, but one does not recommend them as a cure for ordinary healthy thirst. Nor will Mr. Benson escape just criticism on the score of his manner of writing. He is an absolute master of the otiose word, the superfluous sentence. He pours out pages as easily as a bird sings, but, alas! it is a clockwork bird in this instance. He lacks the true innocent absorption in his task which makes happy writing and happy reading. It is not always the authors, on the other hand, whose pretences it is the work of criticism to destroy. It is frequently the wild claims of the partisans of an author that must be put to the test. This sort of pretentiousness often happens during "booms," when some author is talked of as though he were the only man who had ever written well. How many of these booms have we had in recent years--booms of Wilde, of Synge, of Donne, of Dostoevsky! On the whole, no doubt, they do more good than harm. They create a vivid enthusiasm for literature that affects many people who might not otherwise know that to read a fine book is as exciting an experience as going to a horse-race. Hundreds of people would not have the courage to sit down to read a book like _The Brothers Karamazov_ unless they were compelled to do so as a matter of fashionable duty. On the other hand, booms more than anything else make for false estimates. It seems impossible with many people to praise Dostoevsky without saying that he is greater than Tolstoy or Turgenev. Oscar Wilde enthusiasts, again, invite us to rejoice, not only over that pearl of triviality, _The Importance of Being Earnest_, but over a blaze of paste jewelry like _Salomé_. Similarly, Donne worshippers are not content to ask us to praise Donne's gifts of fancy, analysis and idiosyncratic music. They insist that we shall also admit that he knew the human heart better than Shakespeare. It may be all we like sheep have gone astray in this kind of literary riot. And so long as the exaggeration of a good writer's genius is an honest personal affair, one resents it no more than one resents the large nose or the bandy legs of a friend. It is when men begin to exaggerate in herds--to repeat like a lesson learned the enthusiasm of others--that the boom becomes offensive. It is as if men who had not large noses were to begin to pretend that they had, or as if men whose legs were not bandy were to pretend that they were, for fashion's sake. Insincerity is the one entirely hideous artistic sin--whether in the creation or in the appreciation of art. The man who enjoys reading _The Family Herald_, and admits it, is nearer a true artistic sense than the man who is bored by Henry James and denies it: though, perhaps, hypocrisy is a kind of homage paid to art as well as to virtue.