Every man who plays with literature at all must be ambitious to succeed in some form of art that may be called "creative," as distinct from critical--a distinction which, since Arnold taught us our lesson, we know does not exist. The reason for this ambition is plain enough. A novel or a play reaches a wider audience than a volume of essays, however admirable; it has a more obvious claim to originality, and it brings the author a greater degree of practical satisfaction. A few doubly or trebly gifted men, Dryden, Coleridge, Poe, Arnold, Pater, Henley, Stevenson, Henry James, could do first-rate work in more than one _genre_, including criticism. And a good case could be made out to prove that a man who knows how to handle words in many ways is on the whole the best qualified to comment on the art of handling words. However that may be, it is certain that in English literature a critic who is only a critic seldom wins a conspicuous position. Even Johnson was something more than a critic, and he was, with all due respect, somewhat less than a good one. And Hazlitt, who was a good one, wrote on many subjects besides books and art. Because so many little people went into the business of reviewing and presumed to sit in judgment on their betters, criticism early got a bad name in English literature, and not all the dignified work of Arnold and others has yet succeeded in restoring the reputation of the word or the art. Criticism came to mean censure, a connotation which persists in current speech. The degeneration had already taken place in Dryden's time, and he protested that "they wholly mistake the nature of criticism who think that its business is principally to find fault." Authors of imaginative works became resentful and felt that the critic was an enemy, a nasty and incompetent enemy, as indeed he often was. An interesting compilation could be made--and probably Saintsbury or somebody else has done it--of the retorts and counter-attacks made by writers of other things than criticism against the whole critical crew. Here are a few examples: Gentle Jane Austen in "Northanger Abbey" amusingly defends her heroine's habit of reading novels: I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom, so common with novel writers, of degrading, by their contemptuous censure, the very performances to the number of which they are themselves adding ... if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?... Let us leave it to the Reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. That sounds as if Miss Austen's pride in her craft had been wounded. I know of no record that anybody ever spoke ill of her while she was living.