it is different. They stipulate with their publishers that the journals shall be supplied with copies of their new book. The burden of their cry is, "Review us! review us!" They prefer praise to condemnation, but, on the whole, perhaps they prefer even condemnation to silence. There is no crueller fate in the author's eyes than that of being carried down unnoticed to the great sea of Oblivion. "I would rather be damned outright," said a not obscure man of letters, "than be cold-shouldered by the critics." That may not be a universal feeling among authors and painters, musicians and actors, but there is a general desire on the part of "public men and "professionals" to elicit some sort of opinion from the press. The publicity must be advantageous, or it would not be sought after. There must be some benefit, or hope of benefit, in it, or singers and players, writers and limners, would not all be inviting, day after day, that very criticism which they profess to disparage, and which they mostly declare to be conceited and ignorant.

The plea for the existence of critics may not be equally forcible in all cases. There are some, for instance, who think that critics might, with no great loss, be dispensed with in matters of

art. Mr. Whistler is one of these. In his little brochure on "Art and Art Critics," he admits himself one of those irrationals who would extinguish the Art critic altogether. "That writers should destroy writings to the benefit of writing is," he says, "reasonable. Who but they shall insist upon the beauties of literature, and discard the demerits of their brother littérateurs? In their turn they will be destroyed by other writers, and the merry game goes on till truth prevails." But the painter's work, he contends, should be received in silence, as it was in the days to which the penmen still point as an era when art was at its apogee. "And here we come upon the oft-repeated apology of the critic for existing at all, and find how complete is his stultification. He brands himself as the necessary blister for the health of the painter, and writes that he may do good to his art. In the same ink he bemoans the decadence about him, and declares that the best work was done when he was not there to help it. No! let there be no critics; they are not a 'necessary evil,' but an evil quite unnecessary, though an evil certainly. Harm they do, and not good." Curiously enough, the artcritic whose attack on Mr. Whistler's "Studies" was the ultimate cause of this tract being written,

has views only one remove less exacting with regard to art-criticism than those of Mr. Whistler himself. In a letter on the subject, included in “Arrows of the Chace," Mr. Ruskin writes:-"We are overwhelmed with a tribe of critics who are fully imbued with every kind of knowledge which is useful to the picture-dealer, but with none that is important to the artist. . . . Whatever, under the present system of study, the connoisseur of the gallery may learn or know, there is one thing he does not know,-and that is Nature. Alas for Art while such judges sit enthroned on their apathy to the beautiful and their ignorance of the true, and, with a canopy of canvas between them and the sky, and a wall of tradition, which may not be broken through, concealing from them the horizon, hurl their darkened verdicts against the works of men whose night and noon have been wet with the dew of heaven,-dwelling on the deep sea, or wandering among the solitary places of the earth, until they have 'made the mountains, waves, and skies a part of them and of their souls.' A beautiful passage that, rich with the eloquent scorn which Mr. Ruskin has vials full of and to spare! Its meaning, simply put, is that no man should presume to pass judgment on another man's work, unless he possesses the special know

ledge and the feeling which have inspired and guided the worker himself. Mr. Whistler says that he should not presume to pass judgment at all.

It is not, however, for the behoof of those criticised altogether that criticisms are written. Their real aim is, or should be, to assist the public. If they are really criticisms-that is, the thoughtful and impartial work of experts—they not only enable the great multitude of busy men and women to avoid what is worthless or injurious, but they constitute a considerable factor in the formation of a correct and refined public taste. Modern Literature is too prolific for any of us to keep pace with its innumerable productions. Of fiction alone hundreds of works are brought out annually, some few noteworthy, several of mediocrity, but most of them not worth the waste of one's time in reading. But for the critics, who wade through all this tedious stuff, how would the public know which were the few works worth taking home and reading as an intellectual luxury? If the reviewers of this kind of literature are no more than sorters, classifying the heterogeneous heaps of fiction that come before them, they are still indispensable. "The truth is," says Hazlitt in his "Table-Talk," "that in the quantity of works that issue from the press, it is utterly impossible they should all

be read by all sorts of people. There must be tasters for the public, who must have a discretionary power vested in them, for which it is difficult to make them properly accountable. Authors, in proportion to their number, become, not formidable, but despicable. They would not be heard of or severed from the crowd without the critic's aid, and all complaints of ill-treatment are vain."

Take the Drama, again. Thousands of people. are not disposed to throw away their time and their money on a theatrical performance, unless they have learnt, from some one whose opinion is disinterested and can be trusted, that the expenditure would be justified by the results. An honest dramatic critic, then, is not only a faithful guide to his readers, but he indirectly helps to raise the tone of the stage. If there were no press censorship in matters theatrical, it is questionable to what the drama might not degenerate. By writing favourably of high-class pieces and artistic effort, the critic encourages the public to patronise the theatre; and when the manager finds that literary plays and fine acting fill his coffers, he gets the greatest of all stimulants to banish sensationalism, and indelicacy, and that witty vice which we have latterly taken to importing from our nottoo-moral Gallic neighbours.