of thinking, is pretentious and unprofitable, and that most of such
Extension Lecturing is fruitless and absurd. And I appeal to these two
facts in confirmation, to the thousands of people who every year listen
to such lectures and to the hundreds of thousands of copies of our
national classics sold by the booksellers, on the one hand, and on the
other to the absolute incapacity of our public to judge any new
literary thing or to protect itself in any way from violently and
vulgarly boomed rubbish of the tawdriest description. Without a real
and popular criticism of contemporary work as a preliminary and basis,
the criticism and circulation of the classics is quite manifestly vain.

By such expedients very much might be done for the literary atmosphere.
By endowing a critical review or so, by endowing a few chairs and
readerships in contemporary criticism, by organizing a Guild of
Literature and a system of exemplary honours for literature, by
stimulating the general discussion of contemporary work through
lectures and articles, criticism could, I believe, be made "worth
while" to an extent that is now scarcely imaginable, and there might be
created an atmosphere of attention, appreciation, and judgment that
would be in itself extraordinarily stimulating to all forms of literary
effort. Of course all this sort of thing may be done cheaply, stupidly,
dishonestly, and vulgarly, and one imagines the shy and exquisite type
of mind recoiling from the rude sanity of these suggestions. But,
indeed, they need not be done any other way than finely and well.
People whose conception of what is good in art and literature is
inseparable from rarity ought, I submit, to collect stamps. At an
earlier phase in this series of discussions there was broached a
project for an English Language Society, which would set itself to do
or get done a number of services necessary to the teaching and
extension of the language of our universal peoples. With such a Society