must seek to destroy.  Recognizing Mr. Galsworthy’s genius for the realistic representation of men and women, it must not be blinded by that genius to the essential second-rateness and sentimentality of much of his presentation of ideas.  He is a man of genius in the black humility with which he confesses strength and weakness through the figures of men and women.  He achieves too much of a pulpit complacency—­therefore of condescendingness—­therefore of falseness to the deep intimacy of good literature—­when he begins to moralize about time and the universe.  One finds the same complacency, the same condescendingness, in a far higher degree in the essays of Mr. A.C.  Benson.  Mr. Benson, I imagine, began writing with a considerable literary gift, but his later work seems to me to have little in it but a good man’s pretentiousness.  It has the air of going profoundly into the secrecies of love and joy and truth, but it contains hardly a sentence that would waken a ruffle on the surface of the shallowest spirit.  It is not of the literature that awakens, indeed, but of the literature that puts to sleep, and that is always a danger unless it is properly labelled and recognizable.  Sleeping-draughts may be useful to help a sick man through a bad night, but one does not recommend them as a cure for ordinary healthy thirst.  Nor will Mr. Benson escape just criticism on the score of his manner of writing.  He is an absolute master of the otiose word, the superfluous sentence.  He pours out pages as easily as a bird sings, but, alas! it is a clockwork bird in this instance.  He lacks the true innocent absorption in his task which makes happy writing and happy reading.

It is not always the authors, on the other hand, whose pretences it is the work of criticism to destroy.  It is frequently the wild claims of the partisans of an author that must be put to the test.  This sort of pretentiousness often happens during “booms,” when some author is talked of as though he were the only man who had ever written well.  How many of these booms have we had in recent years—­booms of Wilde, of Synge, of Donne, of Dostoevsky!  On the whole, no doubt, they do more good than harm.  They create a vivid enthusiasm for literature that affects many people who might not otherwise know that to read a fine book is as exciting an experience as going to a horse-race.  Hundreds of people would not have the courage to sit down to read a book like The Brothers Karamazov unless they were compelled to do so as a matter of fashionable duty.  On the other hand, booms more than anything else make for false estimates.  It seems impossible with many people to praise Dostoevsky without saying that he is greater than Tolstoy or Turgenev.  Oscar Wilde enthusiasts, again, invite us to rejoice, not only over that pearl of triviality, The Importance of Being Earnest, but over a blaze of paste jewelry like Salome.  Similarly, Donne worshippers are not content to ask us to praise Donne’s