now be laid at my front door by the furious faithful.  As for “The Finer Grain,” it leaves me as I was—­cold.  It is an uneven collection, and the stories probably belong to different periods.  The first, “The Velvet Glove,” strikes me as conventional and without conviction.  I should not call it subtle, but rather obvious.  I should call it finicking.  In the sentence-structure mannerism is pushed to excess.  All the other stories are better.  “Crafty Cornelia,” for instance, is an exceedingly brilliant exercise in the art of making stone-soup.  But then, I know I am in a minority among persons of taste.  Some of the very best literary criticism of recent years has been aroused by admiration for Henry James.  There is a man on the Times Literary Supplement who, whenever he writes about Henry James, makes me feel that I have mistaken my vocation and ought to have entered the Indian Civil Service, or been a cattle-drover.  However, I can’t help it.  And I give notice that I will not reply to scurrilous letters.

ENGLISH LITERARY CRITICISM

3 Nov. ’10

I learn that Mr. Elkin Mathews is about to publish a collected uniform edition of the works (poems and criticism) and correspondence of the late Lionel Johnson.  I presume that this edition will comprise his study of Thomas Hardy.  The enterprise proves that Lionel Johnson has admirers capable of an excellent piety; and it also argues a certain continuance of the demand for his books.  I was never deeply impressed by Lionel Johnson’s criticisms, and still less by his verse, but in the days of his activity I was young and difficult and hasty.  Perhaps my net was too coarse for his fineness.  But, anyhow, I would give much to have a large homogeneous body of English literary criticism to read at.  And I should be obliged to any one who would point out to me where such a body of first-rate criticism is to be found.  I have never been able to find it for myself.  When I think of Pierre Bayle, Sainte-Beuve, and Taine, and of the keen pleasure I derive from the immense pasture offered by their voluminous and consistently admirable works, I ask in vain where are the great English critics of English literature.  Beside these French critics, the best of our own seem either fragmentary or provincial—­yes, curiously provincial.  Except Hazlitt we have, I believe, no even approximately first-class writer who devoted his main activity to criticism.  And Hazlitt, though he is very readable, has neither the urbaneness, nor the science, nor the learning, nor the wide grasp of life and of history that characterizes the three above-named.  Briefly, he didn’t know enough.

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