or Mr. Zangwill or Mr. Barrie one may hear the most diverse opinions.
By the test of blackballing, only the unknown would survive. The
valuation is as erratic in many branches of science. The development of
criticism will diminish, but it certainly will not end, this sort of
thing, and since our concern is to stimulate rather than punish, we
must do just exactly what we should not do if we were electing men for
a club, we must include rather than exclude. I am told that Americans
remark in relation to University endowments, "we speculate in
research," and that will serve for only a slight exaggeration of this
third proposition. So long as we get most of the men of exceptional
mental gifts in the community under the best conditions for their work,
it scarcely matters if, for each one of them, we get four or five shams
or mere respectabilities upon our hands. Respectabilities and shams
have a fatal facility for living on the community anyhow, and there is
no more reason in not doing these things on their account than there
would be in burning a house down to get rid of cockroaches and rats.
The rat poison of sound criticism--to follow that analogy--is the
remedy here. And if the respectability lives, his work at any rate
dies.

But if the reward must be directly for the work, it must not have any
quantitative relation to the output of work. It is quality we want, not
quantity; we want absolutely to invert the abominable conditions of the
present time by which every exercise of restraint costs an author a
fine. It is my personal conviction that almost every well-known living
writer is or has been writing too much. "No book, no income" is
practically what the world says to an author, and the needy authors
make a pace the independent follow; there is no respect for fine
silences, if you cease you are forgotten. The literature of the past
hundred years is unparalleled in the world's history in this feature