Walter is the most mournful and most
contemptible thing in association with the poorer sort of criticism
which has been encountered of late years.

It is no part of an honest critic's business to be personally offensive.
It is no part of his function to find a pleasure in giving pain. But
it is a part of his business, which is not to be escaped, to do his
fearless best to tell the truth, and the truth about Mr. Crockett and
the press is not to be told without giving deep offence, to him and it.
Fortunately, the press is a very wide corporation indeed, and if
there are venal people employed upon it, there are at least as many
scrupulously honourable; and if there are stupid people who can be
carried by a cry, there are men of all grades of brilliant ability,
ranging from genius to talent To put the matter in plain English will
offend neither honesty nor ability, and to give offence to venality or
incompetence is not an act of peculiar daring.

In plain English, then, it is not a matter of opinion as to whether Mr.
Crockett is worthy of the stilted encomium which has mopped and mowed
about him. It is not a matter of opinion as to whether Mr. Crockett has
or has not rivalled Sir Walter. It is a matter of absolute fact, about
which no two men who are even moderately competent to judge can dispute
for a second. The newspaper press, or a very considerable section of it,
has conspired to set Mr. Crockett upon an eminence so removed from his
fitness for it that he is made ridiculous by the mere fact of being
perched there. When Robert Louis Stevenson suffered from the hysteria
of praise, the natural feeling was to save an exquisite artist from the
excusable exaltations of enthusiasm. When the genuine art and real
fun and touching pathos of Mr. J. M. Barrie hurried his admirers into
uncritical ecstasy, one's only fear was lest the popular taste should
take an undeserved revenge in coldness and neglect. To say in the first
flush of affection and enjoyment that 'A Window in Thrums' is as good
as Sir Walter, or that 'The Master of Ballantrae' is better, is not to
exercise the faculty of a critic; but it is not monstrous or absurd. It
is the expression of a momentary happy ebullience, a natural ejaculation
of gratitude for a beautiful gift. It is only when the judgment comes
to be persisted in that we find any element of danger in it. It is only
when gravely and strenuously repeated, as in Stevenson's case, that it
is to be resente