It is to combat the stylelessness of many contemporary writers that the destructive kind of criticism is just now most necessary.  For, dangerous as the heresy of style was forty or fifty years ago, the newer heresy of sylelessness is more dangerous still.  It has become the custom even of men who write well to be as ashamed of their style as a schoolboy is of being caught in an obvious piece of goodness.  They keep silent about it as though it were a kind of powdering or painting.  They do not realize that it is merely a form of ordinary truthfulness—­the truthfulness of the word about the thought.  They forget that one has no more right to misuse words than to beat one’s wife.  Someone has said that in the last analysis style is a moral quality.  It is a sincerity, a refusal to bow the knee to the superficial, a passion for justice in language.  Stylelessness, where it is not, like colour-blindness, an accident of nature, is for the most part merely an echo of the commercial man’s world of hustle.  It is like the rushing to and fro of motor-buses which save minutes with great loss of life.  It is like the swift making of furniture with unseasoned wood.  It is a kind of introduction of the quick-lunch system into literature.  One cannot altogether acquit Mr. Masefield of a hasty stylelessness in some of those long poems which the world has been raving about in the last year or two.  His line in The Everlasting Mercy:

  And yet men ask, “Are barmaids chaste?”

is a masterpiece of inexpertness.  And the couplet: 

  The Bosun turned:  “I’ll give you a thick ear! 
  Do it?  I didn’t.  Get to hell from here!”

is like a Sunday-school teacher’s lame attempt to repeat a blasphemous story.  Mr. Masefield, on the other hand, is, we always feel, wrestling with language.  If he writes in a hurry, it is not because he is indifferent, but because his soul is full of something that he is eager to express.  He does not gabble; he is, as it were, a man stammering out a vision.  So vastly greater are his virtues than his faults as a poet, indeed, that the latter would only be worth the briefest mention if it were not for the danger of their infecting other writers who envy him his method but do not possess his conscience.  One cannot contemplate with equanimity the prospect of a Masefield school of poetry with all Mr. Masefield’s ineptitudes and none of his genius.

Criticism, however, it is to be feared, is a fight for a lost cause if it essays to prevent the founding of schools upon the faults of good writers.  Criticism will never kill the copyist.  Nothing but the end of the world can do that.  Still, whatever the practical results of his work may be, it is the function of the critic to keep the standard of writing high—­to insist that the authors shall write well, even if his own sentences are like torn strips of newspaper for commonness.  He is the enemy of sloppiness in others—­especially of that airy sloppiness