on any work of mine. How then their opinion of it can be matter of public knowledge, or on what ground the damning charge of "mutual admiration" can be sustained, it passes the modest range of my weak imagination to conceive. Nor can it figure to itself anything more pitiful and despicable than a society of authors, artists, or critics held together by a contract for the exchange of reciprocal flattery, except a society of the same kind whose bond of union should be a compact of detraction, a confederacy of malignities, an alliance for the defamation of men more honoured than its members. On the other hand, it may be reasonably assumed, or at least it may plausibly be alleged, that a writer whose interest or whose admiration is confined to the works of a single school or the effects of a particular style in art can claim no higher place or worthier office than that of herald or interpreter to a special community of workmen. If, however, my critical writing should be found liable to this charge, it will at least be admitted that the circle which confines my interest and limits my admiration is a tolerably wide one. I have not unfrequently found myself accused of lax and undiscriminating indulgence in too catholic and uncritical a taste, too wide and erratic a range of inconsistent sympathies, by men whose ways of work lay so far apart that they seemed to me as unable to estimate each other aright as I to withhold from the work of either the tribute of my thanks. It is impossible, I have been told, that any man of fair culture and intelligence can sincerely and equally admire at the same time the leaders or the followers of such opposite schools in art or letters. That must in effect be a somewhat clastic definition which should comprise in one term all the subjects of my study or my praise, a somewhat irregular process which should reduce them all to one denomination, a somewhat vague watchword which should marshal them all under one standard. I think upon the whole that having now gathered together these divers waifs of tentative criticism I may leave the babblers and backbiters who prate of "mutual admiration" and the cant of a coterie absorbed in its own self-esteem and fettered by its own passwords, to the ultimate proof or disproof of simple fact and plain evidence. If I am indeed one of those unfortunates who can see nothing good outside their own sect of partisans, it will not be denied that the sect to which I belong must be singularly comprehensive; nor will it be questioned that I am singularly fortunate in the variety and the eminence of my supposed allies. I would not be betrayed into any show of egotism or recrimination; but I thought it best not to let these reprints go forth together for the first time on their own account without a word of remark on their object and their scope. They are here atanged according to scale and subject, with the date appended when necessary; and have now but to show for themselves whether or not they can pretend to any more noticeable or more vital quality than that of sincere desire and studious effort to see the truth and speak it. 21 VICTOR HUGO: L'HOMME QUI RIT. ONCE Only in my life I have seen the likeness of Victor Hugo's genius. Crossing over when a boy from Ostend, I had the fortune to be caught in midchannel by a thunderstorm strong enough to delay the packet some three good hours over the due time. About midnight the thundercloud was right overhead, full of incessant sound and fire, lightening and darkening so rapidly that it seemed to have life, and a delight in its life. At the same hour the sky was clear to the west, and all along the sea-line there sprang and sank as to music a restless dance or chase of summer lightnings across the lower sky a race and riot of lights, beautiful and rapid as a course of shining Oceanides along the tremulous floor of the sea. Eastward at the same moment the space of clear sky was higher and wider, a splendid semicircle of too intense purity to be called blue; it was of no colour nameable by man; and midway in it between the storm and the sea hung the motionless full moon; Artemis watching with a serene splendour of scorn the B |