Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/146

 now bellows at me in the tones of a bull of Bashan; but—criticism? I find—I find anything you like but criticism. Yet, surely, the Saturday Review is amongst the most notorious of the professedly critical journals of Great Britain. The Spectator, the Academy, the Athenæum, are different, very different—with a likeness. The likeness, I would submit, consists in the rigorous exclusion of considered literary criticism from their columns.

I am more concerned for the moment to mention and to deplore this state of things than to inquire into its causes. But certain of its causes invite no inquiry; they are obvious, they "spring at our eyes." Foreigners, to be sure, pretend that our trouble is radical and ineradicable; that the British mind is essentially and hopelessly uncritical; that directly we attempt to criticise we begin to compare. ("They can only communicate their opinion of Oranges by translating it in terms of Onions," says Varjine; and he adds, "The most critical Englishman I ever met was a clown in a circus at Marseilles.") That is a question I won't go into here. What is obvious and indisputable is this: that with the dissemination of ignorance through the length and breadth of our island, by means of the Board School, a mighty and terrible change has been wrought in the characters both of the majority of readers and of the majority of writers. The "gentleman and scholar" who still flourished when I was young, has sunken into unimportance both as a reader and as a writer. The bagman and the stockbroker's clerk [and their lady wives and daughters) 'ave usurped his plyce and his influence as readers; and the pressman has picked up his fallen pen,—the pressman, sir, or the presswoman! Well, what, by the operation of the law of cause and effect, what should we naturally expect?