leaves. Both these tasks fall upon criticism. The younger generation
looks round a little apprehensively to see if there is a gardener whom
it can trust, and decides, perhaps a little prematurely, that there is
none.

There is reviewing but no criticism, says one icy voice that we have
learned to respect. There are pontiffs and potential pontiffs, but no
critics, says another disrespectful young man. Oh, for some more Scotch
Reviewers to settle the hash of our English bards, sighs a third. And
the _London Mercury_, after whetting our appetite by announcing that it
proposed to restore the standards of authoritative criticism, still
leaves us a little in the dark as to what these standards are. Mr T.S.
Eliot deals more kindly, if more frigidly, with us in the _Monthly
Chapbook_. There are, he says, three kinds of criticism--the historical,
the philosophic, and the purely literary.

'Every form of genuine criticism is directed towards creation. The
historical or philosophic critic of poetry is criticising poetry in
order to create a history or a philosophy; the poetic critic is
criticising poetry in order to create poetry.'

These separate and distinct kinds, he considers, are but rarely found
to-day, even in a fragmentary form; where they do exist, they are almost
invariably mingled in an inextricable confusion.

Whether we agree or not with the general condemnation of reviewing
implicit in this survey of the situation, or with the division of
criticism itself, we have every reason to be grateful to Mr Eliot for
disentangling the problem for us. The question of criticism has become
rather like Glaucus the sea-god, encrusted with shells and hung with