showed less of
the mastery of life, however, than of the mastery of a theme. It was a
curious by-world of literature, a little literature of death's-heads, and,
therefore, no more to be mentioned with the work of the greatest than the
stories of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Unfortunately, some disturbances in
Dublin at the first production of _The Playboy_ turned the play into a
battle-cry, and the artists, headed by Mr. Yeats, used Synge to belabour
the Philistinism of the mob. In the excitement of the fight they were soon
talking about Synge as though Dublin had rejected a Shakespeare. Mr. Yeats
even used the word "Homeric" about him--surely the most inappropriate word
it would be possible to imagine. Before long Mr. Yeats's enthusiasm had
spread to England, where people who ignored the real magic of Synge's
work, as it is to be found in _Riders to the Sea_, _In the Shadow of the
Glen_, and _The Well of the Saints_, went into ecstasies over the inferior
_Playboy_. Such a boom meant not the appreciation of Synge but a
glorification of his more negligible work. It was almost as if we were to
boom Swinburne on the score of his later political poetry. Criticism makes
for the destruction of such booms. I do not mean that the critic has not
the right to fling about superlatives like any other man. Criticism, in
one aspect, is the art of flinging about superlatives finely. But they
must be personal superlatives, not boom superlatives. Even when they are
showered on an author who is the just victim of a boom--and, on a
reasonable estimate, at least fifty per cent of the booms have some
justification--they are as unbeautiful as rotten apples unless they have
this personal kind of honesty.

It may be thought that an attitude of criticism like this may easily sink
into Pharisaism--a sort of "superior-person" aloofness from other people.
And no doubt the critic, like other people, needs to beat his breast and
pray, "God be merciful to me, a--critic." On the whole, however, the
critic is far less of a professional faultfinder than is sometimes
imagined. He is first of all a virtue-finder, a singer of praise. He is
not concerned with getting rid of the dross except in so far as it hides
the gold. In other words, the destructive side of criticism is purely a
subsidiary affair. None of the best critics have been men of destructive
minds. They are like gardeners whose business is more with the flowers
than with the weeds. If I may change