Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/158

140 that criticism is not merely a statement of personal preferences but of justifications for such preferences presented with a view to persuasion. Of course even with this rider the definition still leaves autobiography the main element in criticism, and of such autobiographical appraisement Smith was a master. Whether he formulated the rule never to write of any authors whose work he did not enjoy I cannot say: he certainly acted upon it with the most delightful results. So keen in his gusto, so adequate and appetising his expression of it, that one may dare to say the next best thing to reading Montaigne, Bacon, Chaucer, and the Scottish Ballads, is to read what Alexander Smith has to say about them. His talk about books is always so human that it will delight people whom one would not think of calling literary. He discourses on The Canterbury Tales not as a man weighing and measuring a book, but as a wayfarer sitting in the inn-yard of the Tabard at Southwark, watching the crowd of pilgrims with the eye of an acute and good-natured observer, taking notes of their appearance, and drawing from it shrewd inferences as to habit and character. He has certain favourite volumes upon which he expatiates in the essay entitled "A Shelf in my Bookcase"; and the principle of selection is obvious enough. They are books full of a rich humanity; beneath their paragraphs or stanzas he can feel the beating heart. The literary vesture is simply a vesture which half reveals and half conceals the objects of his love—the man or woman who lives and breathes behind. He reveals in the old Scotch ballads and German hymns, for in them the concealing veil is thin, and the thoughts and loves and pains of simple souls in dead centuries are laid open and bare. He prefers Hawthorne's Twice-told Tales to his longer and more elaborate works, such as Transformation and The Scarlet Letter, because he finds more of the man in them, the solitary author who had no public to think of,