Critics have always been the bad boys of the literary family. ‘You know who the critics are?’ asked the novelist Disraeli. ‘The men who have failed in literature and art.’ Byron and Dr. Johnson were equally scathing about critics, accusing them of ignorance and idleness. It is, I suppose, inevitable that men who express candid opinions about other people’s writings should have to face tart and stinging retorts made in self-defence. But even when we turn to modern thinkers who have studied the value of literary criticism with detachment—that is, having no axe to grind—we find there is still a case to be made out against it. For instance, some declare that criticism is either polemic or advertisement. I think it is true that, as personalities, critics have seldom meant much to the general public. They are indeed a misunderstood and unpopular race. After all this, it is amusing and encouraging to find Oscar Wilde going to the opposite extreme, for in his characteristically outrageous essay, ‘The Critic as Artist,’ he defends the critic with the most vigorous and subtle of rapiers. The highest criticism, Wilde roundly declares, is more creative than creation.

We are getting down to less clever but more sound sense when we look at Matthew Arnold’s views on criticism. Arnold believed. in the critic as a Jiving force, but he demanded high qualifications. The business of criticism, he said, was simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world. and by making this known to create a current of true and fresh ideas—leaving alone all questions of practical consequence and applications. Let criticism be disinterested. Let it be sincere. simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge, and it might have in no contemptible measure a joyful sense of creative activity.