ment that even so few as ten, let us say, had come together to make a fetish of intelligence. It is simply not the business of most of our critics to judge; they either write reviews to help the sale of a book, or they are above such things and spend their time proving that all contemporary things are bad (which is not a hard thing to do) except the few which belong to the old tradition, or, a few of them, that all ancient and modern things are bad with the exception of the work of John Snaffles and Lydia Hesterby, who are the only geniuses of our time. There are, of course, the critics whose function it is to help drive the world to or from Bolshevism, by the rough road of Arnold Bennett's humanism or the Freudian implications in D. H. Lawrence. They differ from the others only in this, that the others pretend to care about letters. Few of us really do care and it is hard to forgive Solomon Eagle, who does, for pretending that he does not. He has added another to the many books about books; there was no need for him to think of it as a sacred responsibility. You do not have to bring up a book and assure its place in society. But at least he might have admitted that he was happy to do it, and he should have put his best into it. As it is, he will have to publish another.
