nature, that he can describe wonderfully some aspects of external nature, I know; but I doubt whether his art is fine enough or sympathetic enough to make enthusiastic anyone who differs from the moral attitude, as it may be called, of his stories.  This is the real test of a work of art—­has it sufficient imaginative vitality to capture the imagination of artistic readers who are not in sympathy with its point of view?  The Book of Job survives the test:  it is a book to the spell of which no imaginative man could be indifferent, whether Christian, Jew or atheist.  Similarly, Shelley is read and written about with enthusiasm by many who hold moral, religious, and political ideas directly contrary to his own.  Mr. Kipling’s Recessional, with its sombre imaginative glow, its recapturing of Old Testament prides and fears, commands the praise of thousands to whom much of the rest of his poetry is the abominable thing.  It is the reviewer’s task to discover imagination even in those who are the enemies of the ideas he cherishes.  In so far as he cannot do this, he fails in his business as a critic of the arts.

It may be said in answer to all this, however, that to appeal for tolerance in book-reviewers is not necessary.  The Press is already overcrowded with laudations of commonplace books.  Not a day passes but at least a dozen books are praised as having “not a dull moment,” being “readable from cover to cover,” and as reminding the reviewer of Stevenson, Meredith, Oscar Wilde, Paul de Kock, and Jane Austen.  That is not the kind of tolerance which one is eager to see.  That kind of review is scarcely different from a publisher’s advertisement.  Besides, it usually sins in being mere summary and comment, or even comment without summary.  It is a thoughtless scattering of acceptable words and is as unlike the review conceived as a portrait as is the hostile kind of commentatory review which I have been discussing.  It is generally the comment of a lazy brain, instead of being, like the other, the comment of a clever brain.  Praise is the vice of the commonplace reviewer, just as censoriousness is the vice of the more clever sort.  Not that one wishes either praise or censure to be stinted.  One is merely anxious not to see them misapplied.  It is a vice, not a virtue, of reviewing to be lukewarm either in the one or the other.  What one desires most of all in a reviewer, after a capacity to portray books, is the courage of his opinions, so that, whether he is face to face with an old reputation like Mr. Conrad’s or a new reputation like Mr. Mackenzie’s, he will boldly express his enthusiasms and his dissatisfactions without regard to the estimate of the author, which is, for the moment, “in the air.”  What seems to be wanted, then, in a book-reviewer is that, without being servile, he should be swift to praise, and that, without being censorious, he should have the courage to blame.  While tolerant of kinds in literature, he should be intolerant of pretentiousness.