ing hordes. They swarm about us; they
bite us at every turn. They sit in our chairs, and hover round our
tables. They speak to us on mountain tops, and if we descend into the
Tube, they are there. They absorb the solid world, making it of no
account beside the spirit world in which we dwell, so that we neither
see nor hear nor handle the realities of outward life, but perceive them
only, if at all, through filmy veils and apparitions, the haunting
offspring of another's mind. And remember, we are now speaking of the
spirits in novels alone. Besides novels, there are the breeding grounds
of the drama, the essay, the lyric, and every other kind of spiritual
and imaginative book. In every corner the spirits lurk, ready to spring
upon us unaware. We are ghost-ridden. The witches tear us. Our life is
no longer our own. It has become a nebula of alien dreams. O wretched
men that we are! Who shall deliver us from the body of these shades?

To what can we look? Prudence may save us in the end, for if the spirits
utterly devour us, they will find they cannot live themselves. In the
end, Nature may adjust their birthrate. But at what cost, after how
cruel a struggle for existence! Might not teachers of eugenics do
something drastic, and at once? Critics are the teachers of spiritual
eugenics. Could not a few timely words from them hold the productive
powers of certain brains in check? It is easily said, but the result is
very doubtful. Mr. Walkley, in an unintentionally despairing article in
the _Times_, once maintained that the critics were powerless to stem the
increasing flood that pours in upon us, like that hideous stream of
babies that Mr. Wells once saw pouring down some gutter or rain-pipe.
Mr. Walkley said no real and industrious artist ever stops to listen to
criticism. He said the artist simply cannot help it; the creature is
bound to go on creating, whatever people say. Mr. Walkley went further,
and told us the critic himself is an artist; that he also cannot help
it, but is bound to create. So we go on from bad to worse, the creative
artist not only producing shadows on his own account, but the shades of
shadows through the critics. Our state is becoming a bewildered horror;
and yet we cannot deny that Mr. Walkley was right, though we may regard
his pessimism as exaggerated. There are one or two cases on record in
which criticism, or the fear of it, has really checked the production of
peculiarly sensitive and fastidi