There are never, at any time and place, more than a few literary critics of genuine incision, taste, and instinct; and these qualities, rare enough in themselves, are further debilitated, in many cases, by excessive geniality or indigestion.  The ideal literary critic should be guarded as carefully as a delicate thermal instrument at the Weather Bureau; his meals, friendships, underwear, and bank account should all be supervised by experts and advisedly maintained at a temperate mean.  In the Almost Perfect State (so many phases of which have been deliciously delineated by Mr. Marquis) a critic seen to become over-exhilarated at the dining table or to address any author by his first name would promptly be haled from the room by a commissionaire lest his intellectual acuity become blunted by emotion.

The unfortunate habit of critics being also human beings has done a great deal to impair their value to the public.  For other human beings we all nourish a secret disrespect.  And therefore it is well that the world should be reminded now and then of the dignity and purity of the critic’s function.  The critic’s duty is not merely to tabulate literary material according to some convenient scale of proved niceties; but to discern the ratio existing in any given work between possibility and performance; between the standard the author might justly have been expected to achieve and the standard he actually attained.  There are hierarchies and lower archies.  A pint pot, full (it is no new observation), is just as full as a bathtub full.  And the first duty of the critic is to determine and make plain to the reader the frame of mind in which the author approached his task.

Just as a ray of sunshine across a room reveals, in air that seemed clear, innumerable motes of golden dancing dust and filament, so the bright beam of a great critic shows us the unsuspected floating atoms of temperament in the mind of a great writer.  The popular understanding of the word criticize is to find fault, to pettifog.  As usual, the popular mind is only partly right.  The true critic is the tender curator and warden of all that is worthy in letters.  His function is sacramental, like the sweeping of a hearth.  He keeps the hearth clean and nourishes the fire.  It is a holy fire, for its fuel is men’s hearts.

It seems to us probable that under present conditions the cause of literature is more likely to suffer from injudicious and excessive praise rather than from churlish and savage criticism.  It seems to us (and we say this with certain misgivings as to enthusiasms of our own) that there are many reviewers whose honest zeal for the discovering of masterpieces is so keen that they are likely to burst into superlatives half a dozen times a year and hail as a flaming genius some perfectly worthy creature, who might, if he were given a little stiff discipline, develop into a writer of best-readers rather than best-sellers.  Too resounding praise is often more damning than faint