The worst is that he is personal, perhaps because it is so easy and so natural to be personal, and so instantly attractive.  In this respect our criticism has not improved from the accession of numbers of ladies to its ranks, though we still hope so much from women in our politics when they shall come to vote.  They have come to write, and with the effect to increase the amount of little-digging, which rather superabounded in our literary criticism before.  They “know what they like”—­that pernicious maxim of those who do not know what they ought to like and they pass readily from censuring an author’s performance to censuring him.  They bring a stock of lively misapprehensions and prejudices to their work; they would rather have heard about than known about a book; and they take kindly to the public wish to be amused rather than edified.  But neither have they so much harm in them:  they, too, are more ignorant than malevolent.

VIII.

Our criticism is disabled by the unwillingness of the critic to learn from an author, and his readiness to mistrust him.  A writer passes his whole life in fitting himself for a certain kind of performance; the critic does not ask why, or whether the performance is good or bad, but if he does not like the kind, he instructs the writer to go off and do some other sort of thing—­usually the sort that has been done already, and done sufficiently.  If he could once understand that a man who has written the book he dislikes, probably knows infinitely more about its kind and his own fitness for doing it than any one else, the critic might learn something, and might help the reader to learn; but by putting himself in a false position, a position of superiority, he is of no use.  He is not to suppose that an author has committed an offence against him by writing the kind of book he does not like; he will be far more profitably employed on behalf of the reader in finding out whether they had better not both like it.  Let him conceive of an author as not in any wise on trial before him, but as a reflection of this or that aspect of life, and he will not be tempted to browbeat him or bully him.

The critic need not be impolite even to the youngest and weakest author.  A little courtesy, or a good deal, a constant perception of the fact that a book is not a misdemeanor, a decent self-respect that must forbid the civilized man the savage pleasure of wounding, are what I would ask for our criticism, as something which will add sensibly to its present lustre.

IX.

I would have my fellow-critics consider what they are really in the world for.  The critic must perceive, if he will question himself more carefully, that his office is mainly to ascertain facts and traits of literature, not to invent or denounce them; to discover principles, not to establish them; to report, not to create.