Newnham graduates, confirmed womanthropes for the rest of their
lives. Nor is it necessary. To know the vintage and quality of a
wine one need not drink the whole cask. It must be perfectly easy
in half an hour to say whether a book is worth anything or worth
nothing. Ten minutes are really sufficient, if one has the
instinct for form. Who wants to wade through a dull volume? One
tastes it, and that is quite enough--more than enough, I should
imagine. I am aware that there are many honest workers in painting
as well as in literature who object to criticism entirely. They
are quite right. Their work stands in no intellectual relation to
their age. It brings us no new element of pleasure. It suggests
no fresh departure of thought, or passion, or beauty. It should
not be spoken of. It should be left to the oblivion that it
deserves.

ERNEST. But, my dear fellow--excuse me for interrupting you--you
seem to me to be allowing your passion for criticism to lead you a
great deal too far. For, after all, even you must admit that it is
much more difficult to do a thing than to talk about it.

GILBERT. More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it? Not
at all. That is a gross popular error. It is very much more
difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of
actual life that is of course obvious. Anybody can make history.
Only a great man can write it. There is no mode of action, no form
of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is
only by language that we rise above them, or above each other--by
language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought.
Action, indeed, is always easy, and when presented to us in its
most aggravated, because most continuous form, which I take to be