naturally forgot' on this occasion. If that be so, then the imputation of a low motive to Manning for using the word after Newman's death falls to the ground. And if Newman himself similarly used the term 'friend' or 'friendship,' then still more utterly does Mr. Purcell fail in his indictment, unless he join, as he must, the name of Newman to that of Manning in his count of dissimulation.

So early as the year 1837 we have Newman thanking Manning for a very kind letter' from Lavington, and saying: It was quite unnecessary though, as far as it expressed your friendly feelings to Pusey and myself. A year later we have Newman and Manning signing their letters to each other 'ever yours affectionately;' and we leave it to Mr. Purcell, who says they were never intimate, either early or late in life,' to attribute to each correspondent the fell design that lurks beneath those words. How intimate they were in 1843 is shown by a letter, dated from Littlemore, in which 'ever yours affectionately John H. Newman' tells Manning of his misgivings as an Anglican, adding: And believe me, the circumstance of such men as yourself being contented to remain is the strongest argument in favour of my own remaining.' When Newman's secession was announced to Manning in terms of similar confidence two years later, Manning wrote: I accept your letter as a pledge of affection. Only believe always that I love you.' When Manning became a Catholic, he went at once to spend a day or two with Newman at Birmingham. In 1857, Newman dedicated to Manning the 'Sermons preached on Various Occasions' as some sort of memorial of the Friendship there has been between us for nearly thirty years.' When Manning was consecrated Archbishop of Westminster in 1865, Newman was one of the first' whom he invited, and Newman, accepting the otherwise tiresome invitation to a ceremony, replied, ‘I come as your Friend. When, again, a little later, the two men discussed their variances' of view, Manning still wrote, at the end of them, the assurance that the friendship of so many years, though of late unhappily clouded, is still dear to me.'

...

Yet he was to be decried for using a similar expression after all those variances' of view had faded away, after he had kissed his brother Cardinal on his elevation, and when he stood in spirit by his open grave. Moreover I have shown that this charge levelled against the one Cardinal equally reaches the other. If one took the name of 'friend' in vain, so did they both take it. In life they were together in that-at any rate in that-and in that they shall rest together. Friend-it is their own word, and their word shall endure for ever.

WALL

CRITICISM AS THEFT

SOME years ago as a Trade.'

I contributed an article to this Review on 'Criticism This brief sequel to it I call 'Criticism as Theft.'

It is a somewhat grave charge to make against even a subsection of our nineteenth-century Literature that it contravenes the spirit of the eighth law in the Jewish Decalogue; and, if made, it must be justified by evidence. I bring no 'railing accusation,' however, against the noble army of modern critics, who, day by day, week by week, and month by month, write to satisfy a modern demand. The true critic fulfils a singularly great function in the world of Letters, and he is quite as needful-alike to his contemporaries and successors as is the original author, be he poet, novelist, philosopher, man of science, or divine. The severe censorship of the Press is absolutely necessary to prevent our Literature from becoming a rabbitwarren of commonplace, or a Sahara of mediocrity and irrelevancy. I raise no objection to it, however scathing it may be, if it is based on knowledge, and is discriminative, just, and wise.

What we owe to our best contemporary reviewers I have already indicated, and I shall try to state it more appreciatively later on. No one who has an eye for excellence can be blind to the merit of their work; but what our age seems unfortunately to demand is the continuous turning out of a set of articles that are neither original, nor distinctive, nor genial, nor learned, nor instructive, nor up to date,' but which merely satisfy the morbid and pampered appetite of the hour, which for the most part craves for novelty. The comment which follows should therefore perhaps be directed against the spirit of the age we live in, rather than against the work of any individual writer belonging to it. The Age demands the article, and our modern Press supplies it; but it does not follow, because the Age desires what its railway-bookstalls chiefly supply, that the latter is the best thing for it. Demand always regulates supply, but the supply quickens the demand. The two things are closely kindred; and are related as cause and consequence. The one invariably feeds the other. If our highest wisdom lies in following the verdict of the many, and of the hour-if it is to be found in accepting a policy decided by the mere 'count of heads,' raising (as some have done) the 'masses' above the 'classes,' as our superiors in insight, so long as

that insight coincides with their own-it doubtless follows that we should receive the literary judgment of the uneducated with the same deference with which we accept their votes at the polling-booth. If our age demands what an enlightened judgment condemns, it may possibly have to be submitted to, for the time being; but the demand would certainly be lessened were the critics of the day open-eyed enough to see it, and courageous enough to resist it.

There can be little doubt that far too much is written nowadays, by 'all sorts and conditions of men.' The list of new books advertised week after week by the publishing houses of Great Britain, the Continent, and America is stupendous, and almost baffling. There never was anything like it heretofore. It may be one result of our extended methods of modern education, and the evils which it has created will probably cure themselves before long. Meanwhile, our English Literature as it is mirrored in the long advertisement lists issued by our publishing firms-is undergoing an extraordinary change. For the few dozen Books of the Season' which used to interest our grandfathers, we have now not only hundreds, but thousands. One who is tolerably well in touch with this continuous stream of tendency -the evolution of new books-is constantly met by the question, 'Oh, have you seen so and so?' or, 'You should read so and so. It's the best book of the year.' They are works-perhaps belonging to his own department-of which he has never heard, and which, perhaps, he will never see. The printing-presses of the last decade of this nineteenth century are producing books, at such a rate and of such dimensions, that no one can possibly keep pace with the many-sided output,' can even remember the names of the books and their authors, far less be familiar with their contents; and librarians, or members of library committees '-Town libraries or University ones, it is all the same-have to confess, with dismay, that it has become an extraordinarily difficult thing to winnow the wheat from the chaff.

It is true that this vast increase in the number of new books published week by week is a partial justification of the multitudinous criticism which overtakes them; especially since there is so great an increase of trivial, pretentious, and useless books. At the same time, the majority of these criticisms are worse than the books they criticise, and do no good to their readers or their authors, or to the public.

Time out of mind it has been found that books of original merit, and of permanent value to the world, have been ignored in their day, but have become to after-ages objects of supreme interest. While they exercised no influence in their own time-and were pecuniarily worthless to their author-they have occasionally fetched large sums at the auction-sales of the future. On the other hand, the Book of the Hour '-which most persons read, and of which

nearly every one speaks-is often buried, at no distant date, amongst the débris from which it knows no resurrection. Of these two extremes, the latter will probably be found to be most characteristic of the close of the nineteenth century. In every department of effort we are suffering from the vast amount of trivial production-in other words, from swarms of ephemera, and froin the avidity with which the public welcomes the most sensational and even the most ghastly tale of the hour.

In addition to this, the state into which our contemporary literature has been brought by the multiplication of its daily, weekly, and monthly magazines, is so bewildering that no one can adequately follow it throughout. I remember the day when the bare notion of starting a weekly paper to be called Tit-Bits was thought to be the ne plus ultra of literary degradation. Nevertheless, the paper issued under that title is currently believed to have yielded a fortune to its owner. Some years ago I asked at an English railway-station bookstall for this extraordinary product of the time, when the boy who sells for Smith ran up to the carriage door and said, 'No, sir, sold out, sir; but here's Ally Sloper, sir. It's far better; I sells a lot more o' them, sir.' The literary pabulum supplied to the travelling public at our railway-bookstalls is a sad disclosure of the taste of the day. It goes without saying' that it is a sheer waste of money to buy, and a greater waste of time to read, the 'shilling shockers' which are the ordinary stock-in-trade at many a railway station. The melancholy thing is that so many new periodicals are started by publishers merely to please the public, and to make profit by descending to its level, instead of endeavouring to educate the multitude, by inviting it to ascend a few steps above the platform on which it stands. It is the easiest thing in the world to write down to the taste, and the sympathy, of the half-educated proletariate; but such writing is-let the word be taken literallyde-gradation. There are at the present moment scores of papers, journals, magazines, reviews-whatever they may be called-produced simply to please the public,' but not to inform, or to teach, to educate, or to elevate; and this, it must be owned, is one of the least valuable results of the activity of the modern printing-press.

In the same connection it may be worth mentioning-and all honour to American enterprise and originality for attempting it-that a good many years ago the Alton and Chicago Railway Company issued as a supplement to their monthly time-tables-the poems of Robert Browning, beginning with Sordello. I remember how much the poet was struck with the copy I once showed him. Had the experiment been tried in England it is doubtful if the ordinary railway traveller would have read any one of the poems from the beginning to the end.

It may at first sight seem surprising that any one should object

to the work of those clever censors of the press who vigorously, if unmercifully, put down the many-sided ignorance, the manifold pretence, the arrogance and egoism of all who imagine that they are born to be writers of books.' When one realises the fact already alluded to, viz. the scores of volumes issued week by week from our British and American printing-presses-books which had never any right or title to exist—it is quite unnecessary to raise the question as to what will be the verdict of the twentieth century upon them. It is a real kindness to posterity for the literary reviewer to kill many of these books, whether he makes use of a tomahawk or not; and it would be far better for the world if the majority of the volumes which annually appear never saw the light. One effect of the diffusion of the 'higher education' of men and women has been that we have now hundreds and thousands of writers where we only had dozens before this 'higher education' began. We have a modern literary swarmery, as we have a modern social proletariate. One result inevitably is that the quality of the work deteriorates, while its quantity increases; and we have numerous dashing writers of 'books for the many '-like the dexterous scribes of political leaderettes-instead of the well-informed, the calm, the strong, the incisive, and thoroughgoing writers of the past. When the history of English Periodical Criticism' has to be written-and it well deserves to be written-there is reason to believe that the present age will not be that of its chief glory.

The truth is that the function of the modern critic is a singularly ill-defined one. Who is to define it? is a question not easily answered, but it may surely be taken for granted that a thorough knowledge of the subject written about is essential to any adequate criticism. Nevertheless it is a quite notorious fact that when asked to review a book sent to him for the purpose-and presumably sent because the recipient is considered an authority, or a quasiauthority (if not an expert) on the subject-some reviewers have contented themselves with cutting open the table of contents and the preface, and-without reading the book itself-proceeding to review it. At the sale of a large Library of Books, which had been sent for review to an 'expert,' who, for many years, wrote long and most dexterous literary notices for a daily newspaper of celebrity and impor

A well-known writer and reader of books for a publishing firm lately ventured on the statement that he thought there were probably one thousand clever young women in our country who were quite well able to turn out the ordinary and most readable English novel of the period; but, as to these books being 'Literature,' that was a very different question. A publisher recently told me that he received so many offers of volumes of verse, and of novels, from beginners-mostly, young girls-that he would require to keep a special 'reader' if they had all to be examined with care. It was only possible to glance at most of them. In the same connection I may quote a sentence which Tennyson once wrote, 'I receive a stanza of verse sent to me for every five minutes of my life, but very seldom a volume of good wholesome prose.'