Good criticism is as important as anything that man can put on paper. Moreover, certain subjects must be treated by the critic with the utmost gravity. It would be owlishly humourless, uncritical, not to take Tolstoy seriously. Essays about the greater men of genius and the deeper problems of art must be substantial, solid, or they are inappropriate, out of key. But it is possible to be sane and erudite without being leaden, to approach a noble subject earnestly without striking an attitude of priestly austerity. Some of our sincerest contemporaries, both the academic and the rebellious, seem to me to worry about literature, as if it were an invalid that needed nursing or a dead man about whom the last word must be said before next Thursday afternoon. They do not get enough fun out of it. They forget that Pater, who was not a mad wag and not a dilettante, could sometimes see the gaiety of things and was willing to be inconclusive. Criticism is important. The best contemporaneous English criticism is not good enough. And even in France, where we have been taught to look for sound critics, Flaubert thought as late as 1869 that criticism was still in its infancy. He wrote to George Sand: "You speak of criticism in your last letter to me, telling me that it will soon disappear. I think, on the contrary, that it is, at most only dawning.... When will they (critics) be artists, only artists, but really artists? Where do you know a criticism? Who is there who is anxious about the work in itself, in an intense way?... The _unconscious_ poetic expression? Where it comes from? its composition, its style? The point of view of the author? Never. That criticism would require great imagination and great sympathy." To which George Sand replied with good sense: "The artist is too much occupied with his own work to forget himself in estimating that of others." Since then France has had a generation of critics, some of whom were artists. If Hennequin, who thought he was a scientific critic, was not an artist, if De Gourmont, who smiled wisely at the whole game, was not an artist, then the word means nothing. In England and America criticism has not made much progress since Pater died. I know that I am punctuating literature in the manner of the academic fogies. But one of the humours of this sport is that you sometimes do things which are fouls when your opponent is guilty of them.