This remark, if I remember rightly, was made in the course of a sparring match with the late Ferdinand Brunetiere over the principles and rules of literary criticism.  As was fitting for a man to whom we owe the memorable saying, “The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul amongst masterpieces,” M. Anatole France maintained that there were no rules and no principles.  And that may be very true.  Rules, principles and standards die and vanish every day.  Perhaps they are all dead and vanished by this time.  These, if ever, are the brave, free days of destroyed landmarks, while the ingenious minds are busy inventing the forms of the new beacons which, it is consoling to think, will be set up presently in the old places.  But what is interesting to a writer is the possession of an inward certitude that literary criticism will never die, for man (so variously defined) is, before everything else, a critical animal.  And, as long as distinguished minds are ready to treat it in the spirit of high adventure, literary criticism shall appeal to us with all the charm and wisdom of a well-told tale of personal experience.

For Englishmen especially, of all the races of the earth, a task, any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance.  But the critics as a rule exhibit but little of an adventurous spirit.  They take risks, of course—­one can hardly live without that.  The daily bread is served out to us (however sparingly) with a pinch of salt.  Otherwise one would get sick of the diet one prays for, and that would be not only improper, but impious.  From impiety of that or any other kind—­save us!  An ideal of reserved manner, adhered to from a sense of proprieties, from shyness, perhaps, or caution, or simply from weariness, induces, I suspect, some writers of criticism to conceal the adventurous side of their calling, and then the criticism becomes a mere “notice,” as it were the relation of a journey where nothing but the distances and the geology of a new country should be set down; the glimpses of strange beasts, the dangers of flood and field, the hair’s-breadth escapes, and the sufferings (oh, the sufferings too!  I have no doubt of the sufferings) of the traveller being carefully kept out; no shady spot, no fruitful plant being ever mentioned either; so that the whole performance looks like a mere feat of agility on the part of a trained pen running in a desert.  A cruel spectacle—­a most deplorable adventure.  “Life,” in the words of an immortal thinker of, I should say, bucolic origin, but whose perishable name is lost to the worship of posterity—­“life is not all beer and skittles.”  Neither is the writing of novels.  It isn’t really.  Je vous donne ma parole d’honneur that it—­is—­not.  Not all.  I am thus emphatic because some years ago, I remember, the daughter of a general. . .