or
not seeing, nor anybody's seeing or not seeing. The point is the
imperative 'at once.' Literature is getting to be the filling of
orders--time-limited orders. Criticism is out of a car window. Book
reviews are telegraphed across the sea (Tennyson's memoirs). The ----
(Daily) ---- (a spectacle for Homer!) begins a magazine to 'review in
three weeks every book of permanent value that is published'--one of the
gravest and most significant blows at literature--one of the gravest and
most significant signs of the condition of letters to-day--that could be
conceived! Three weeks, man! As if a 'book of permanent value' had ever
been recognised, as yet, in three years, or reviewed in thirty years (in
any proper sense), or mastered in three hundred years--with all the
hurrying of this hurrying world! We have no book-reviewers. Why should
we? Criticism begins where a man's soul leaves off. It comes from
brilliantly-defective minds,--so far as one can see,--from men of
attractively imperfect sympathies. Nordau, working himself into a mighty
wrath because mystery is left out of his soul, gathering adjectives
about his loins, stalks this little fluttered modern world, puts his
huge, fumbling, hippopotamus hoof upon the _Blessed Damozel_, goes
crashing through the press. He is greeted with a shudder of delight.
Even Matthew Arnold, a man who had a way of seeing things almost,
sometimes, criticises Emerson for lack of unity, because the unity was
on so large a scale that Arnold's imagination could not see it; and now
the chirrup from afar, rising from the east and the west, 'Why doesn't
George Meredith?' etc. People want him to put guide-posts in his books,
apparently, or before his sentences: 'TO ----' or 'TEN MILES TO THE
NEAREST VERB'--the inevitable fate of any writer, man or woman, who
dares to ask, in this present day, that his reader shall stop to think.
If a man cannot read as he runs, he does not read a book at all. The
result is, he ought to run; that is natural enough; and the faster he
runs, in most books, the better."

At this point The Mysterious Person reached out his long arm from his
easy-chair to some papers that were lying near. I knew too well what it
meant. He began to read. (He is always breaking over into manuscript
when he talks.)

"We are forgetting to see. Looking is a lost art. With our poor,
wistful, straining eyes, we hurry along the days that slowly, out of the
rest of heaven, move their stillness a