more perfect fruit.  There is also a sense that if the lusus naturae, the writer of genius, were to appear, there ought to be a person or an organisation capable of recognising him, however unexpected his scent or the shape of his leaves.  Both these tasks fall upon criticism.  The younger generation looks round a little apprehensively to see if there is a gardener whom it can trust, and decides, perhaps a little prematurely, that there is none.

There is reviewing but no criticism, says one icy voice that we have learned to respect.  There are pontiffs and potential pontiffs, but no critics, says another disrespectful young man.  Oh, for some more Scotch Reviewers to settle the hash of our English bards, sighs a third.  And the London Mercury, after whetting our appetite by announcing that it proposed to restore the standards of authoritative criticism, still leaves us a little in the dark as to what these standards are.  Mr T.S.  Eliot deals more kindly, if more frigidly, with us in the Monthly Chapbook.  There are, he says, three kinds of criticism—­the historical, the philosophic, and the purely literary.

’Every form of genuine criticism is directed towards creation.  The historical or philosophic critic of poetry is criticising poetry in order to create a history or a philosophy; the poetic critic is criticising poetry in order to create poetry.’

These separate and distinct kinds, he considers, are but rarely found to-day, even in a fragmentary form; where they do exist, they are almost invariably mingled in an inextricable confusion.

Whether we agree or not with the general condemnation of reviewing implicit in this survey of the situation, or with the division of criticism itself, we have every reason to be grateful to Mr Eliot for disentangling the problem for us.  The question of criticism has become rather like Glaucus the sea-god, encrusted with shells and hung with weed till his lineaments are hardly discernible.  We have at least clear sight of him now, and we are able to decide whether we will accept Mr Eliot’s description of him.  Let us see.

We have no difficulty in agreeing that historical criticism of literature is a kind apart.  The historical critic approaches literature as the manifestation of an evolutionary process in which all the phases are of equal value.  Essentially, he has no concern with the greater or less literary excellence of the objects whose history he traces—­their existence is alone sufficient for him; a bad book is as important as a good one, and much more important than a good one if it exercised, as bad books have a way of doing, a real influence on the course of literature.  In practice, it is true, the historical critic generally fails of this ideal of unimpassioned objectivity.  He either begins by making judgments of value for himself, or accepts those judgments which have been endorsed by tradition.  He fastens upon a number of outstanding figures and more or less deliberately represents the process as from culmination to culmination; but in spite of this arbitrary foreshortening he is primarily concerned, in each one of the phases which he distinguishes, with that which is common to every member of the group of writers which it includes.  The individuality, the quintessence, of a writer lies completely outside his view.