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THESE five papers are reprinted from The English Review, and are introduced by another in which the author, considering certain objections to the critical attitude, suggests the temper of his own writing. The book is discursive enough, however, to carry the impression of having been welded together by an ingenious literary device, certain of the papers showing a wayward tendency to escape from the tie. But if the critical theory bears a passive, or an impassive interpretation, it is to be seen that Mr Hueffer seeks no rest himself in accepted ideas, nor does he make a creed for us. He will not consent to favour the convenient optimism which relies upon the pathetic assurance that all is well with the world. It may be there are more than this one critical ideal; but let this serve as guide to the author’s mind:
 
“On the one hand we have our friendships, on the other our quarrels; on the one side are our preferences and hopes, on the other our vision of things as they are. For nothing is more difficult, nothing is more terrible than to look things in the face . . . and yet, if we have consciences, we must seek to perceive order in this disorder, beauty in what shocks us, and premonitions of immortality in that which sweeps us into forgotten graves.”
 
There is little comfort in criticism as aloof from our concerns as The Winged Victory; our very divinity is threatened by this inquiring destroying angel who is ever ready to pass, like wild fire, through our rosegarden of illusion, and make of its place the old elemental wilderness. Yet in some such aloofness does Mr. Hueffer indicate the proper attitude of the critical spirit, in the belief that criticism, having abandoned all other reckoning, must at last be inhuman and inscrutable. He is busy, though he will not admit that he is, in the building of a Great Figure, a critical superman, who will embody those remote talents which we divine in ourselves, but do not care to trust. And perhaps criticism must ever be concerned thus with the making of the figure of a man, that greater man who is more excellent than we are, and more wholly given to the science of life for its own sake. If flesh will not do, we must have iron; if the sturdy bias of one-sided conviction is not luminous enough, we must empty out sensibility, and favour logic or arithmetic. So the argument seems to run, although to be sure Mr Hueffer merely goes to history and shows us Thomas Cromwell.
 
The enterprise was brave enough to have led to more permanent work than the paper on The Two-Shilling Novel, and that on English Literature of  To-day. These, for all their interest and candour, remain essentially in the category of journalism. We are made to feel that the mental deportment of the critic, had it been influential enough not to need separate statement, would have been evident in the greater shapeliness of the book as a work of art. Thus, when he is writing of the functions of art, we are aware of the mystery of fads, the problem of art in relation to the life of to-day; but are given only the mention of imagination, and the hint of a shift which has already failed to reconcile art to modern life. Mr Hueffer has something to say about the English writers who use an ancient theme in order to support a mass of romantic imagery of their own. It is an inspiring text for one who is not, on the other hand, given to the belief that deathless bloom may be settled, by a simple inversion of wit, upon Shepherd’s Bush; and yet the critic’s adroitness in undoing has to be shown, the futility of the whole adventure of art being set forth at the heels of the discussion, to sustain, at whatever sacrifice, the critical attitude.