Before the trial begins the critic-judge enunciates certain principles on which the verdict will be based and the verdict is based on those principles whether they find any application in the testimony or not. A favorite principle with the man on the bench is that all that is not obscure is not Art. It isn’t phrased as intelligibly as that, to be sure; a common way to put it is to lay down the rule that the popularity of a book (which means the extent to which it is understood and therefore appreciated) has nothing to do with the case, tra-la, has nothing to do with the case. Another principle is that sound can be greater than sense, which, in the lingo of the Highest Criticism, is the dictum that words and sentences can have a beauty apart from the meaning (if any) that they seek to convey. And there really is something in this idea; for example, what could be lovelier than the old line, “Eeny, meeny, miny-mo”? Shakespeare, a commercial fellow who wrote plays for a living, knew this when he let one of his characters sing: “When that I was and a little tiny boy, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, A foolish thing was but a toy, For the rain it raineth every day.” And a little earlier in _Twelfth Night_: “Like a mad lad, Pare thy nails, dad; Adieu, goodman devil.” Which is not only beautiful as sound, but without the least sense unless it hath the vulgarity to be looked for in the work of a mercenary playwright. 6 But the strangest thing about the proceedings in the Critical Court is their lack of contemporary interest. Rarely, indeed, is anything decided here until it has been decided everywhere else. For the great decisions are the decisions of life and not decisions on the past. A man has written twenty books and he is dead. He is ripe for consideration by the Critical Court. A man has written two novels and has eighteen more ahead of him. The Critical Court will leave him alone until he is past all helping. It seems never to occur to the critic-judge that a young man who has written two novels is more important than a dead man who has written twenty novels. For the young man who has written two novels has some novels yet to be written; he can be helped, strengthened, encouraged, advised, corrected, warned, counselled, rebuked, praised, blamed, presented with bills of particulars, and--heartened. If he has not genius nothing can put it in him, but if he has, many things can be done to help him exploit it. And a man who is dead cannot be affected by anything you say or do; the critic-judge has lost his chance of shaping that writer’s work and can no longer write a decree, only an epitaph.