Page:Studies of a Biographer 3.djvu/178

always does—he strikes one out in the heat of the moment. He has almost a trick—as I have hinted—of dividing all writers into two classes: philosophers are either 'seers' or 'gropers'; novelists are 'miscellaneous' or 'sentimental'; genius is symmetrical or irregular, and so forth. Such classifications will not always bear reflection: they only give emphasis to a particular aspect; but they show how his mind is always swarming with theories, and how he looks upon literature as a man primarily interested in the wider problems of the life and character which literature reflects. Critics, of course, might find fault with many of his dicta. He is sometimes commonplace because he tells us how things strike him, and not the less that they have struck every competent writer in much the same way. He writes of Shakespeare and Milton as if he had discovered them for the first time; he can at times utter a crude judgment, because he is too indifferent—if that be possible—to orthodox literary authority, and his literary criticism diverges into psychological or political speculations which are hardly relevant. That means that he is really most interested in the man behind the books. It is characteristic that he attacks the common statement about