mother always fondles the child that its aunts consider plain. Against
such obstinacy, what headway can the critics make? May we not advise
them to drop the old method of frontal attack altogether? Let them adopt
the methods of these new teachers of Eugenics, whom we have described as
insisting on quality. For the teachers of Eugenics, as I understand, do
not go about saying, "O parents, what inferior and degenerate children
you have! How goose-faced, rabbit-mouthed, lantern-jawed, pot-bellied,
spindle-shanked, and splay-footed they are! It was a most anti-social
action to produce these puny monstrosities, and when you found
yourselves falling in love, you ought to have run to opposite
antipodes." That, I believe, is no longer the method of the Eugenic
teacher. He now shows beforehand wherein the beauty and excellence of
human development may lie. He insists upon quality, he raises a
standard, he diffuses an unconscious fastidiousness of selection. He
does not prevent Tom and Sal from falling in love, but he makes Tom, and
especially Sal, less satisfied with the first that comes, less easily
bemused with the tenth-rate rubbish of a man or girl.

By similar methods, it seems to us, the critics might even now relieve
humanity from the oncoming host of spirits that threatens to overwhelm
us. They find it useless to tell creative writers how hideous and
mis-begotten their productions are--how deeply tainted with erotics,
neurotics, hysteria, consumption, or fatty degeneration. Either the
writers do not listen, or they reply, "Thank you, but neurotics and
degeneracy are in the fashion, and we like them." Let the critics change
their method by widely extending their action. Let them insist upon
quality, and show beforehand what quality means. Let them rise from the
position of reviewers, and apply to the general thought of the world
that critical power of which Matthew Arnold was thinking when he wrote:

"The best spiritual work of criticism is to keep man from
self-satisfaction which is retarding and vulgarising, to lead him
towards perfection by making his mind dwell upon what is
excellent in itself, and the absolute beauty and fitness of things."

Such criticism, if persisted in by all critics for a generation, would
act as so wholesome and tonic a course of Eugenic instruction, would so
strongly insist upon quality, and so widely diffuse an unconscious
fastidiousness of selection, that the locust cloud of phanto