at criticism, and that was a sure sign that the creative faculty had begun
to wither. His critical essays were not rich nor abundant in thought, they
were not the skirmishing of a man fighting for his ideas, they were not
preliminary to a great battle; they were at once vague and pedantic,
somewhat futile, _les ébats d'un esprit en peine_, and seemed to announce
a talent in progress of disintegration rather than of reconstruction.

'Sometimes the critic's phrases seemed wet with tears; sometimes,
abandoning his tone of commiseration, he would assume one of scientific
indifference. The phenomenon was the commonest. There were dozens of Hubert
Prices in London. The universities and the newspapers, working singly and
in collaboration, turned them out by the dozen. And the mission of these
men of intelligent culture seemed to be to _poser des lapins sur la jeune
presse_. Each one came in turn with his little volume of poems, his little
play, his little picture; all were men of "advanced ideas"; in other words,
they were all _dans le mouvement_. There was the rough Hubert Price, who
made mild consternation in the drawing-room, and there was the
sophisticated Hubert Price, who cajoled the drawing-room; there was the
sincere and the insincere, and the Price that suffered and the Price that
didn't. Each one brought a different _nuance_, a thousand infinitesimal
variations of the type, but, considered merely in its relation to art, the
species may be said to be divided into two distinct categories. In the
first category are those who rise almost at the first bound to a certain
level, who produce quickly, never reaching again the original standard,
dropping a little lower at each successive effort until their work becomes
indistinguishable from the ordinary artistic commercialism of the time. The
fate of those in the second category is more pathetic; they gradually
wither and die away like flowers planted in a thin soil. Among these men
many noble souls are to be found, men who have surrendered all things for
love of their art, and who seemed at starting to be the best equipped to