love affair! The pathetic mistake
these people make is to fancy that the great artists only lived and
wrote in order to buttress up such poor wretches as these are upon
the particular little, thin, cardboard platform which is at present their
moral security and refuge.

No one has a right to be a critic whose mind cannot, with Protean
receptivity, take first one form and then another, as the great Spells,
one by one, are thrown and withdrawn.

Who wants to know what Professor So-and-so's view of Life may be?
We want to use Professor So-and-so as a Mirror, as a Medium, as a
Go-Between, as a Sensitive Plate, so that we may once more get the
thrill of contact with this or that dead Spirit. He must keep his
temperament, our Critic; his peculiar angle of receptivity, his
capacity for personal reaction. But it is the reaction of his own
natural nerves that we require, not the pallid, second-hand reaction
of his tedious, formulated opinions. Why cannot he see that, as a
natural man, physiologically, nervously, temperamentally,
pathologically _different_ from other men, he is an interesting
spectacle, as he comes under the influence first of one great artist
and then another, while as a silly, little, preaching school-master, he
is only a blot upon the world-mirror!

It is thus that I, moi qui vous parle, claim my humble and modest
role. If, in my reaction from Rabelais, for instance, I find myself
responding to his huge laughter at "love" and other things, and a
moment later, in my reaction from Thomas Hardy, feeling as if
"love" and the rest were the only important matters in the Universe;
this psychological variability, itself of interest as a curious human
phenomenon, has made it possible to get the "reflections," each
absolute in its way, of the two great artists as they advance and
recede.

If I had tried to dilute and prune and "correct" the one, so as to make
it "fit in" with the other, in some stiff, ethical theory of my own,
where would be the interest for the reader? Besides, who am I to
"improve" upon Rabelais?

It is because so many of us are so limited in our capacity for
"variable reaction" that there are so few good critics. But we are all,
I think, more multiple-souled than we care to admit. It is our foolish
pride of consistency, our absurd desire to be "constructive," that
makes us so dull. A critic need not necessarily approach the world
from the "pluralistic" angle; but there must be something of su