ourselves to be. Man has been described as a animal with aspirations
reaching up to Heaven and instincts rooted--elsewhere. Is literature
to flatter him, or reveal him to himself?

Of living writers it is not safe, I suppose, to speak except,
perhaps, of those who have been with us so long that we have come to
forget they are not of the past. Has justice ever been done to
Ouida's undoubted genius by our shallow school of criticism, always
very clever in discovering faults as obvious as pimples on a fine
face? Her guardsmen "toy" with their food. Her horses win the Derby
three years running. Her wicked women throw guinea peaches from the
windows of the Star and Garter into the Thames at Richmond. The
distance being about three hundred and fifty yards, it is a good
throw. Well, well, books are not made worth reading by the absence
of absurdities. Ouida possesses strength, tenderness, truth,
passion; and these be qualities in a writer capable of carrying many
more faults than Ouida is burdened with. But that is the method of
our little criticism. It views an artist as Gulliver saw the
Brobdingnag ladies. It is too small to see them in their entirety:
a mole or a wart absorbs all its vision.

Why was not George Gissing more widely read? If faithfulness to life
were the key to literary success, Gissing's sales would have been
counted by the million instead of by the hundred.

Have Mark Twain's literary qualities, apart altogether from his
humour, been recognised in literary circles as they ought to have
been? "Huck Finn" would be a great work were there not a laugh in it
from cover to cover. Among the Indians and some other savage tribes
the fact that a member of the community has lost one of his senses