popularity the sole standard by which a writer may be paid. The
novelist, for example, gets an income extraordinarily made up of sums
of from sixpence to two shillings per person sufficiently interested to
buy his or her books. The result is entirely independent of real
literary merit. The sixpences and shillings are, of course, greatly
coveted, and success in getting them on anything like a magnificent
scale makes a writer, good or bad, vehemently hated and abused, but the
hatred and abuse--unaccompanied as they are by any proposals for
amelioration--are hardly less silly than the system. And for our
present purpose it really does not matter if the fortunate persons who
interest the great public are or are not overpaid. Our concern is with
the underpaid, and with all this affair of mammoth editions and booming
only as it affects that aspect. We are concerned with the exceptional
man's necessities and not with his luxuries. The fly of envy in the
True Artist's ointment may, I think, very well stop there until
magnanimity becomes something more of a cult in the literary and
artistic worlds than it is at the present time.

This, perhaps, is something of a digression from our second general
proposition, that we must pay directly for the work itself. But it
leads to a third proposition. The whole history of literature and
science abundantly shows that no critical judgment is more than an
approximation to the truth. Criticism should be equal to the exposure
of the imitator and the pure sham, of course, it should be able to
analyze and expose these types, but above that level is the disputed
case. At the present time in England only a very few writers or
investigators hold high positions by anything approaching the unanimous
verdict of the intelligent public--of that section of the public that
counts. In the department of fiction, for example, there is a very
audible little minority against Mr. Kipling, and about Mr. George Moore