is necessarily a fool—­a sense that he feels that he has gone into the merits of a book, and that there is exactly as much and as little in it as he tells you.  He is very often right; that is the misery of it.  But this lack of urbanity, this unnecessary insolence, is a very grave fault in a writer—­fatal, indeed, to his permanence.  He turns a book or a person inside out, dissects it in a deft and masterly way; but one feels at the end as one might feel about an anatomist who has dissected every fibre of an animal’s body, classified every organ, traced every muscle and nerve, and bids you at the end take it on his authority that there is no such thing as the vital principle or the informing soul, because he has shown you everything that there is to see.  Yet the finest essence of all, the living and breathing spirit, has escaped him.

But what is a still worse fault in the writer of whom I speak is that he is the victim of a certain intellectual snobbishness.  By which I mean that when he has once conceived an admiration for a historical personage or a writer he becomes unable to criticise him; he can only justify and praise him, sling mud at his opponents, and, so to speak, clear a space round his hero by knocking over in opprobrious terms any one who may threaten his supremacy.  He condones and even praises any fault in his idol; and what would be in his eyes a damning fault in one whom he happened to dislike, becomes a salient virtue in the person whom he praises.  He condemns Swift for his coarseness and praises Johnson for his outspokenness.  He condemns Robert Browning for his obscurity and praises George Meredith for his rich complexity.  He would never see that the victory lies with the appreciator of any personality, because, if you happen to appreciate a figure whom he himself dislikes, you are proclaimed to be guilty of perversity and bad taste.  Thus I not only feel sore when he abuses a character whom I love, but I feel ashamed when he decries one whom I hate, for I am tempted to feel that I must have grossly misunderstood him; and even when he rapturously and unctuously belauds some figure that I admire, I feel my admiration to be smirched and tarnished.

The one quality which I think he always misses in a character is a high, pure, delicate sense of beauty, the subtlest fibre of poetry.  This my swashbuckler misnames sentimentality—­and thus I feel that he always tends to admire the wrong qualities, because he condones even what he calls sentimentality in one whom he chooses to admire.

It is this attitude of disdain and scorn, based upon the intellect rather than upon the soul, that I think is one of the most terrible and satanical things in life.  Such a quality may be valuable in scientific research, it may be successful in politics, because there are still among us many elementary people who really like to see a man belaboured; it may be successful in business, it may being a man wealth, position, and a certain kind of influence.  But it never inspires confidence or affection; and though such a man may be feared and respected on the stage of life, there is an invariable and general sense of relief when he quits it.