swing of "production," until the end, no freedom to change his style or
matter, lest he should lose that paying following by the transition or
the pause.

Now before we can discuss how else we can deal with those who
constitute the current thought of the community, we must consider how
we are to distinguish what is worth sustaining from what is not.

This is the public aspect of Criticism. It is the mineralogy of
literature and art. At present Criticism, as a public function, is
discharged by private persons, usually anonymous and frequently
mysterious, and it is discharged with an astonishing ineffectiveness.
Nowhere in the whole English-speaking world is there anything one can
compare to a voice and a judgment--much less any discussion between
reputable voices. There are periodicals professing criticism, but most
of them have the effect of an omnibus in which disconnected
heterogeneous people are continually coming and going, while the
conductor asks first one of his fluctuating load and then another
haphazard for an opinion on this or that. The branch of literature that
has first to be put on a sound footing is critical literature. The
organization into efficiency of the criticism of contemporary work one
is forced to believe an almost necessary preliminary to the hopeful
treatment of the rest of the current of thought.

There is, of course, also the suggestion that an English Academy of
Letters might be of great service in discounting vulgar "successes" and
directing respect and attention to literary achievements. One may doubt
whether such an Academy as a Royal Charter would give the world would
be of any service at all in this connection. But Mr. Herbert Trench has
suggested recently that it might be possible to organize a large Guild