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 Mr. Brownell feels a civilized and, I believe, a profoundly sagacious apprehension:

So much for the main grounds on which Carlyle is decisively condemned. Now hear Mr. Brownell on Emerson:

Specifically, one of his greatest services both to us and to mankind. . . . is what might be called the rationalization of democracy through the ideal development of the individual. . . . Too fastidious to respond to the elementary appeal of philanthropy, he was yet bold enough and detached enough to recognize the injustice of privilege, and the claims of every human potentiality for development into power. . . . The very fact that he was no respecter of persons protected him from illusions as to classes, and the finality of feudalism was alone enough to lead his revolutionary and independent spirit to see it as an arrest of development and not an ideal. . . . If his emotional nature lacked warmth, what eminently it possessed was an exquisite refinement, and a constituent of his refinement was an instinctive antipathy to ideas of dominance, dictation, patronage, caste and material superiority whose

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 essential grossness repelled him and whose ultimate origin in contemptuousness—probably the one moral state except cravenness that chiefly he deemed contemptible—was plain enough to his penetration.

If Mr. Brownell had struck out no other bold phrase than "plebeian antagonism to democratic feeling," he would deserve to be remembered. If he had developed no other thesis than this, that an instinct for equality is "a constituent of refinement" and sensitiveness a mark of true democracy, he—would still be an important contributor to American—culture. To stigmatize as vulgarity what often masks as aristocratic superiority, and to name as the grace of a beautiful spirit what is often spoken of as the slatternly sentiment of the mob is, in a person of unquestionably distinguished refinement, to perform the service which the prince rendered to Cinderella and her proud stepsisters. To speak less "tropically," it is to begin that elevation of the level of one's private thinking upon which the level of public thought and the increase of charm in our society and in our letters ultimately depend.

One aspect of our subject remaining for consideration is suggested by Criticism and Standards: Mr. Brownell's keen interest in improving the theory and raising the standards of his own art. Various scholars in the universities write at length nowadays on the history and principles of criticism—for

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 scholars. But few are the practising critics who have thought so hard or written so much on the technic and art of criticism that is expert, helpful and stimulating to other practitioners. At exactly what time he dedicated himself to mastering its materials and methods I cannot say, but, as I conjecture, at a fairly early period; for no characteristic of his short row of masterpieces is more marked than their coherent, adequate, yet economical fulfilment of a preconceived design. He must have done these things, I say, for the abstract precepts of Criticism, produced in 1914, are illustrated with precision by his own practice since 1889.

The critic's business, according to this little manual, is to discern and characterize the abstract qualities of the personality which informs every important piece of literature, as every important work of plastic art. His equipment should include, in addition to extensive and intensive acquaintance with belles-lettres, a liberal knowledge of history, acquaintance with the fine arts, a tincture of philosophic training, and a personal "philosophy of life"—the last indispensable if one's work is to have outline and coherence. In his essay on Henry James, I cannot feel that Mr. Brownell has quite justly denied the novelist's possession of a philosophy of life; but in the essay on James he has stated succinctly what the indispensable elements of an artist's "philosophy" are:

It is simply to be profoundly impressed by certain truths. These truths need not be recondite, but they

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 must be deeply felt. They need be in no degree original. The writer's originality will have abundant scope in their expression.

Since the critic's aim is conviction, he must appeal to some accepted standard. He cannot rely upon impressionistic whim nor upon academic authority. He must appeal to the one standard which is generally accepted in a rationalistic age; he must appeal to reason. At this point, Mr. Brownell's precept is less persuasive and less easy to follow than his practice. As I have endeavored to show, in practice his standard is the ideal man of letters, as formulated by a critic of a certain stipulated culture. Reason is merely or mainly the instrument for instructively comparing the personality discoverable in a new work of art with this ideal. By formulating and diligently applying this ideal, by making it very exacting and yet on the whole, I think, very clear, very tangible, very practicable, and very persuasive, Mr. Brownell has shown himself a "creative" critic. It is one of his main contributions.

It may at this point be remarked that his ideal man of letters bears a strong resemblance to his ideal critic. The main features of both are alike, and most of these features are recognizable and definable by purely intellectual processes. The profile of neither his critic nor his man of letters looks to the eye of imagination like that of a lyric poet. If I were to apply to Mr. Brownell his own method, I should say that the characteristic merits and the characteristic defects of his criticism are both attrib-

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 utable to the extraordinary predominance of his intelligence.

"To produce vital and useful criticism," he declares in his "Lowell," where he perhaps treats the subject more effectively because less abstractly—"to produce vital and useful criticism it is necessary to think, think, think, and then, when tired of thinking, to think more." This is doubtless quite true; and it explains the unpopularity of criticism among us, and its rareness. It also explains such unpopularity as Mr. Brownell has enjoyed with the Party of Nature. People do not like to think. People will do almost anything, within the law, to avoid thinking—such things, for example, as making card-indexes and compiling bibliographies and genealogies. But what people really like to do is to feel, to dream, to thrill with delight, or to be diverted with change. Mr. Brownell, nevertheless, relentlessly insists upon thinking. He thinks before he begins to write; each essay opens with a thought, another follows in the succeeding sentence, and so on incessantly to the end. There are no places to rest:—no biographical passages, no merely historical paragraphs, no gossip, scanty anecdotes, no personal digressions, few illustrative extracts from the authors under discussion. No; except one great exhilaration of which I shall speak in a moment, nothing but the steady, remorseless, brilliant business of critical characterization. It is a strain, like reading Meredith and Henry James, which people will not readily

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 undergo unless they are preassured of an unusual reward.

With profound deference, I venture to doubt whether criticism is wisely restricted quite so exclusively to the field of pure knowledge and understanding. I doubt whether the art of criticism can, in the present state of our public, be most effectively practised within the strict limits of this field. His own resolution to admit no taste which he cannot "rationalize," to speak of no elation which he has not a rational "right" to feel, limits his power of communicating some of the undeniable effects which one receives from the immediate presence of unquestionably great personalities and great works of art. In his schedule of values he has, to be sure, made a place for sentiment, the throb of passion, the surge and beating of desire; but he appreciates ecstasy a shade languidly, and one cannot but associate his comparatively incidental treatment of poetry and something like indifference to the remarkable rhythmical qualities of his prose masters to the fact that there is little or nothing thoroughly "rational" to be said about what passion and poetry and rhythm do to "this quintessence of dust" which we are.

But I have said more than enough of the defects attributable to an extraordinarily predominant intelligence. In the main, I think the type of criticism produced by this intelligence is, at the present time, of especial and conspicuous service. In the present state of our letters, I agree with Mr. Brownell, in

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 spite of Pope, that "a little learning is a useful thing," and that a little intelligence is even to be encouraged. For a hundred critical "salesmen" who will cheerfully undertake to communicate the emotion of great works of art, there are one or two who will attempt, beyond the most threadbare platitudes, to utter anything in the similitude of a thought; there are only one or two in a hundred who will jeopardize the favor of their audience or sacrifice their own mental ease to seek a reason for being "bored to extinction" by Pendennis, or for bursting into peans of enthusiasm and rage over the latest bit of pornography suppressed by the censor. There is, after all, a certain very human craving which finds its satisfaction in knowing the causes and reasons of things, and no one has discovered a method of satisfying this craving without effort. A criticism which practises discrimination and high differentiation, and which therefore demands and rewards close attention, a criticism which avowedly emphasizes rather the discipline than the delights of culture, is, as the physicians say, "indicated," and this, beyond all our other practitioners of the art, Mr. Brownell provides.

And, though he gives us charily the first fine careless rapture of the emotional response to letters, he does constantly mingle the pleasant with the useful in the delectable form which intelligence takes in its moments of surplus power—in the form, I mean, of wit. The superiority of Mr. Brownell's intelligence has enabled him to enjoy more of these

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 moments of surplus power than zny other of our critics. His latest book, Standards, a work of strictly contemporaneous satirical inspiration, scintillates with wit from the first page to the last. It is the most continuous and silvery peal of "thoughtful laughter" that ever burst from our American Academy of Arts and Letters to float in hovering echoes over the unheeding heads of our New Barbarians. But wit and epigrammatic force are constant attendants upon Mr. Brownell's most serious analytic processes; they are incidents of his penetration, like the flash of a finely edged instrument. In the "Hawthorne," for example, this rare power of the intelligence is in continuously brilliant play. In this case, indeed, I suspect that it is a little excessively sharpened by a Knickerbocker's anti-New England malice—a malice, one admits, not without provocation in the slightly excessive awe which the old New England group felt toward themselves, and still more in the distinctively Frog-Pondian reverence with which certain wives of our Boston and Cambridge worthies habitually referred to "the awful majesty" of their own husbands. A realist, even an idealistic realist like Mr. Brownell, finds it difficult to swallow all that without a drop of irony in the glass.

Butje suis de ceux qui citent—why stand prating before the curtain, with Cyrano behind it?

Of Hawthorne, Mr. Brownell remarks: "He unquestionably dwelt apart, and partly, perhaps, for this reason his soul was generally believed to be like

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 a star." "A recluse in life, he overflows to the readers. He does not tell very much, but apparently he tells everything." "Instead of reading he reflected—'brooded' perhaps, in his pythian character. But he had very little to brood over. Hence the unsubstantial character of his fanciful progeny." Of Emerson: "Communication was manifestly the last concern of the lecturer. "When he left his church he took his pulpit with him." "He was not so much a delegate of the divine as a part of it." Concerning Poe's Tales this question: "Finally of what value after all is goose-flesh as a guide to correct estimates of art?" Of Lowell: "He had a 'genius' for being perfunctory and genuine at the same time." "He beamed and expanded in a confidence free from the fear of confutation or even contradiction." A consolatory thought in Criticism: "It seems unlikely that the unreal will ever regain the empire it once possessed. Its loss, at all events, is not ours, since it leaves us the universe." I have italicized: the wit in the original context depends upon the fact that this really stupendous consolation steals in like a mouse. Revival of animal worship, with denominational cleavage, noted in Standards: "Two distinct and interhostile sects of secular schismatics, one adoring the golden calf and the other incensing the under dog." A suggestion to the New Barbarians, who constitute the left wing of the Party of Nature: "In the realm of intelligence sincerity is but an elementary virtue. It is often the hardest thing to

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 forgive, as when, for example, it is vaunted as a superior substitute for intelligence itself."

In illustrating the vivacities of Mr. Brownell's manner, I have done what he never does: I have, as he would say, "caressed my predilections"; I have indulged myself in what he would stigmatize as "a Capuan dalliance with detail." But I return now to what I regard as the most distinguished feature of his ideal critic, namely, his method; and to the result of that method, namely, an impressive organic form in the critical essay. The method, as we have seen, begins with thinking, and the principal divisions of the work are as follows. First, the critic is to discover, by analysis or by intuition, in the subject before him, a theme. Toward this theme he is then sharply to define his own total feeling and attitude: thus this theme becomes his thesis. Next, he is to justify and correct his thesis by analysis of the constituting elements of his subject. This accomplished, he proceeds to the disposition of the various members of his discourse for the detailed examination of the "constituting elements." When the members have been rightly ordered and proportions duly kept, the essay appears to be produced from the theme as the fingers are produced from the wrist—with other implications of the image. As the successive members of the discourse are extended, like the gradually opening fingers of a hand, they first entirely disclose, and then, in a conclusive or "synthetic" grip, entirely enclose—what they hold. That which they hold, if the process has been

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 successful, is a personality. As personality is the soul of art, to state it—that is, to produce its characteristics in critical terms—is, as Mr. Brownell declares, "the crown of critical achievement."

It is something to have formulated such a method. That he has applied it with brilliant success to revealing, in turn, the characteristics of the French people, of French painting and sculpture, of the literature of England, and finally of the literature of America, assures to Mr. Brownell, I do not doubt, a secure and distinguished place in the history of our criticism. But if my own analysis has been of any avail, I have disclosed a personality which requires only to be known to them in order to make a wider and wider appeal to all those members of the younger generation who feel any concern in the "study of perfection." There are other living American apostles of culture who profess the power of initiation into that liberty of the spirit which results from knowing and following the law of our own higher natures; but there is no other, as it seems to me, of anything like his eminence, who can give to our somewhat fiercely realistic young people so much which they are now prepared to receive.

No apostle of culture, no one but a king of the South Sea Islands, could conceivably give to the left wing of the Party of Nature all that it desires. But Mr. Brownell has occupied himself for fifty years with that crucial problem which has vexed the best minds of the world since the eighteenth century and which is still before us as the central

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 critical problem of the twentieth: how to return to nature and to reason at the same time! He has found a solution, and the one solution yet proposed which has any prospect of satisfaction in it. The only way, he holds, to bring our nature and our reason together—and the only "fun" which can adequately console us for what Henry James called "the long humiliation of life"—is to set our reason contriving ever more and more difficult human tasks for our nature to perform. This is the solution of a genuine, an intelligent and a cultivated intellectual radicalism as distinguished from an ignorant, an unintelligent, and a false intellectual radicalism: and in this genuine sense Mr. Brownell is an intellectual radical.

Neither an iconoclast nor a reactionary, he has been steadfastly and consistently a man of intensely contemporary sympathies and interests; he has stood unflinchingly for reason as our supreme instrument; eminent in culture, he has valued the past as it could be used in the present; a convinced democrat, he has criticized the brutality of our individualism and has commended the study of French equality and the French social instinct as the means to refine our own society and to make it more delectable; no lover of negation, the main tendency of his work is Positive and affirmative; in every field of art he has turned from academic vacuity and romantic insubstantiality to welcome the modern passion for reality; as a critic of letters he has formulated and applied stapdards which are exacting but both in-

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 telligible and attainable; in his own writing he has striven with high seriousness to exemplify the virtues of an idealistic realism; he has declared that the highest service of criticism "is to secure that the true and the beautiful, and not the ugly and the false, may in wider and wider circles of appreciation be esteemed to be the good." If these are not the ideals of the younger generation, so much the worse for the younger generation. But I think they are—or that they will be as soon as the younger generation knows itself.

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The vision of life attained by men of letters is ordinarily attended by one of two major emotions: the emotion of love, which attends a vision of the beautiful; or the emotion of hate, which attends a vision of the ugly. Both of these emotions sharpen the eyesight.

The ancient proverb which declares that love is blind is only a half truth: love is only blind of one eye. The expression "blind hate" also contains only a half truth: hate has one powerful eye. When either of these passions is present, it insatiably sets about discovering new objects to feast upon. The lover collects and broods upon the graces of his beloved from the rising of the lark to the going down of the evening star. The husband who thoroughly loses his temper with his wife at the breakfast table busies himself all day long recollecting and amassing all the grievances that he has felt against her during the last ten years; and he returns at night in a sullen rage and with an almost superhuman insight into the deficiencies of his helpmate. So men of letters set out with gusto and find a relish in every wayside berry; or they set out on the

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 satirical foot with a bad taste in their mouths, and for a whole generation occupy themselves with malicious caricatures of their mistress, Life.

We midwesterners, for whom the centre is Chicago, have now for a good many years been falling ever more and more deeply in hate. There has been some rivalry at other centres, but I think it may be said that we now excel all the rest of the country in the special vision which attends this passion. Whatever can be seen under the intense glare of animosity, we are revealing to the critical inspection of our countrymen.

Authors in our locality feed on lion's marrow. We are partial to a fierce and sanguinary symbolism. There is a real propriety in the general acceptance of the slaughterhouse as the chief symbol of our spiritual activities. As a midwesterner to whom Chicago has decisively said "thumbs down," I often think, for example, with what veracity and power Carl Sandburg has represented literary criticism in the city under the figure of a hunky sweeping blood from the floor of the shambles at a dollar and a half a day.

It is consistent with our special literary vision and temper that we are making peculiarly our own a new type of novel. There are three main stages in the fictional treatment of the "sex interest." In the first stage we have the novel of courtship, which ends at the altar, with soft candlelight falling on the rosily tinted altarpiece, "Marriage." In the second stage, we have the novel of conjugal adventure,

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 which begins at the altar and widens over the various labyrinth of family life and relationships. In the third stage, we have the novel of conjugal disaster, which begins with divorce and widens over the field of individual and social disintegration. This we are making our own.

The third type of novel, it should be observed, is not a love-story at all. It is a hate-story. There is customarily an elaborate pretense that the hero is seeking a felicitous "self-realization" through union with some new and more perfect affinity—some young milliner, some shop girl with silken ankles, whose spirit is more exquisitely attuned to his than that of the fading middle-aged woman who has borne his children. But any one who reads our midwestern fiction thoughtfully sees clearly enough that this is all bosh. The young milliner and the shop girl are only transient mirrors of our hero's megalomania. The real and vital theme of our typical midwestern novels is: "How I fell in hate with my first wife, how I snubbed her, how I showed her up, how I shipped her." It is a grand theme. It is a rich and rather new vein for American writers; and already we have worked it so industriously that we have produced important results. We are beginning to be recognized as masters of disillusion. Midwestern is beginning at last to have a definite connotation in national letters.

I will illustrate the point by a contrast.

In reading recently a lot of minor English poets I was much struck by the fact that whenever one

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 of them lacked a heart-ravishing trochaic epithet for anything—for April or a hedgerow or a tuft of violets—he called it "English," and let it go at that. He said: "an English April," or "an English hedgerow" or "English violets"; and he could count on his readers for the rest. Though they might hate the British government and be cold to the British Empire, when he said "English" their hearts would thrill to an immemorial loveliness. They would feel beauty descending like dew upon all these familiar objects from the hearts of English men and women who have loved them for a thousand years.

So in America, whenever a writer wishes to bring home to his readers in a single heavily charged epithet the quintessence of materialism, flatness, monotony, crassness, violence, revolt, disgust, he almost instinctively nowadays calls it "midwestern," and lets it go at that. He says "midwestern materialism," "midwestern monotony," "midwestern crassness," "midwestern violence," "midwestern disgust;" and his reader feels disillusion descending upon the prairie lands and the prairie cities from the hearts of midwestern writers who have hated their environment with an increasing hatred for the last thirty years.

Carlyle praised Byron for having had at least the good sense not to be happy in this most miserable of worlds. On the same principle, we should praise our own eloquent apostles of disillusion: Mr. Garland, Mr. Herrick, Mr. Dreiser, Mr. Sinclair Lewis, Mr. Anderson, Mr. Hecht, Mr. Bodenheim,

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 Mr. Halderman-Julius and the rest. They have had the good sense not to be supinely happy in this most defective world; and they have raised a wail to rival that of Philoctetes. By that wail they have forced the Midwest into the centre of the national literary consciousness.

They have almost, I think, persuaded the country that it is going to be, as Dogberry would say, damned into everlasting redemption by men from these parts.

I for one do not agree with the critical sages who hold that we midwesterners are destroying literature. Whatever you may say of Chicago as a literary centre, you can't say of it, as you can say of one of our older literary capitals, that it is dead. Our midwestern literature is crude, hot, egotistical, hateful; but it ig quick, not dead; the pulse of life beats hard and fast in it. It is blind of one eye; by a kind of barbaric and brutal hate, it is blinded to most of the beauty and grace and promise now present in these midlands. But with its great illuminating passion of hate it has thrown a flood of new light upon the sort of man that the average American of our generation is. It has shown courage and talent in breaking through his superficial protective respectability and exhibiting the weltering chaos of his miscellaneous hungers and discontents. It has broken the long conspiracy of silence. This is a great service, which will be recognized by and by.

But this service of satire and iconoclasm, we midwesterners perform too exclusively in the spirit of

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 hatred and violence and journalistic sensationalism. Chicago tends to encourage "journalistic" sensationalism by recognizing and rewarding nothing else. Chicago authors—in this respect, to be sure, resembling Baltimore critics—feel obliged to yell in order to make themselves heard above the street cars and the newspapers. Now, a yell is often a necessary act. It is often an appropriate act. But a yell lacks one of the fine qualities of literature: it lacks charm. It seems to originate in fear or hatred, and it tends to provoke hatred and fear—unless it is promptly followed by notes of reassurance. Midwestern satire has not merely stripped the average man naked but has skinned him alive. He will remain a pitiful and abhorrent object till he gets a new skin. And the Chicago writers generally haven't the faintest notion where a new skin is to be had.

By those who profess knowledge of this recondite subject, I have been informed that the only way to get a woman to tell you anything of vivid interest about herself is to persuade her that you love her. Before you reach that point, she will give you gossip and scandal and even intellectual propositions of possibly some academic interest; but she will reveal none of the delightful things about her heart—none of the finer perfume and subtler fragrance of personality. I have often thought of this secret while vainly seeking year after year through the works of the midwestern novelists for anything that Henry James, for example, would recognize as the portrait of a lady. Presently I began to ask myself; "Has

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 none of our midwestern novelists ever made the acquaintance of a lady? Is the type extinct? Is its literary interest exhausted?" I abandoned that quest. Then I searched a long time for the portrait of a girl or of a woman who should reveal the delightful things about her heart—something of the finer fragrance of personality. I found plenty of women and girls who gossiped and intrigued and bored and tormented their lovers and forced their husbands to jump out of the window on the wedding night; but at the moment I can't recall a solitary midwestern heroine with charm enough to intoxicate a moderately critical schoolboy. That is a terrible indictment of a fictional movement which pretends to be realistic; for in the real world there are plenty of women and girls with charm enough to intoxicate even highly critical schoolboys.

If you follow this argument, you will not conclude that the women who are sitting for our novelist lack charm. You will conclude that they have not been persuaded to reveal their charm—which is a very different matter. The cynical, satirical, brutal, and barbaric mood of our midwestern "realism" excludes at present from midwestern fiction the possibility of meeting there a heroine to whom any particular person could think for an instant of losing his heart. And one fancies the midwestern women of these novels saying of their midwestern men: "They talk a lot of loving; but, Lord, what do they understand? They talk about falling in and out of love. Hitherto, they have only fallen

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 in and out of hate. Egotistical pigs—they have never loved anything but themselves. We will wait a bit before we cast our pearls."

I have fallen, like our Mr. Anderson and like our Mr. Hecht, into symbolism. What I have said about marriage may, of course, be taken as literally as one pleases. The new sport invented by our novelists, called Snubbing the First Wife, is as fashionable in fiction as Mah Jongg in society. But all this about falling in love and falling in hate is really symbolical. It represents the present relation of American literature to American life. I mean to insist that there is something profoundly feminine about the charm of a city or a province or a natural division of the country or a national culture. The essentially feminine element is this: that the city or the province or the national culture will never yield up its charm, will never impart its finer fragrance, except to true lovers—to those who come saying: "We do not fathom you; we love you." To philanderers and cavemen the city will remain a bedizened harlot and the country a buxom or bedraggled wench—with either of whom one may have adventures and fall in and out of hate and become tremendously learned in the psychology of aversion and the vocabulary of disgust. But the delightful things that sleep in the heart of the city, the fragrant things that sleep in the heart of the province, will wait—wait for true lovers.

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My quarrel with the Dreiser-Hecht school of monoptic novelists and with the Menckenian school of monoptic critics is not that they fail to see sharply but that they are stone blind of one eye, and that: they tend to transmit this monoptic peculiarity to all their literary posterity. I have professed my admiration for the intensity of their limited vision. They see very well the turmoil of instinctive and passional life which seethes beneath the surface of civilized and moralized life. Their disclosures of the subconventional welter have the value for us of all explorations of dark continents. I accept many: of their conclusions about the obscure territory which they have traversed. I think, for example, that they are probably right in representing the subconventional relationships of the mass of human beings as almost indescribably lustful and hateful.

It is only when they begin to reason about the value of the subconvenionalsubconventional [sic] life as compared with the civilized and moralized life that they appear to me to be afflicted with blindness. Having demonstrated, very ably demonstrated, that the subconventional life is lustful and hateful, they next proceed

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 to argue that it alone is "real." If there is a logical connection, I miss it. The argument affects me as fantastic: it is as if an arctic explorer, having proved that the cold of the polar regions is almost incredibly painful, should procced to argue that Prince Patrick Island is the only fit place to live, and that London, Paris, and New York are phantasmagorial. My faith is weak: I have never been able to think of New York, or even of Chicago, as a dream-city.

Yet the moment the monoptic naturalists begin to discuss the moral world, they take just that line: they insist that the moral world is so unreal as to be virtually non-existent—at the same time howling at the thorns which it thrusts into them. The assumption of practically all the insurgents against custom, convention, and morality is that every man who takes a customary, conventional, or moral attitude is a hypocrite, and that every man who doesn't abandon such attitudes is a coward and essentially a moral phantom.

The now popular but profoundly erroneous notion underlying their mental processes is this: that no man can express himself hotly and sincerely through any form of action or through any form of words which has ever been employed before. It is an extension of the attack on the verbal cliché to the entire fabric of approved and applauded values which we call civilization. A Hebrew singer smites his harp and sings: "Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord." That

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 is all right; probably he meant it. Some thousands of years later I write in my diary: "De profundis clamavi." That is a cliché. When I repeated that trite form, I meant nothing, I felt nothing. Jacob clove to Rachel. All right; probably he liked her. Jones cleaves to Mrs. Jones. All wrong; doubtless he hates her. Dumas created the three musketeers. All right; a bright idea. A Scotch writer describes the search for hidden treasure. All wrong; paste and scissors.

In some such fashion as this many a good man's reputation for being alive has been destroyed or seriously damaged. A very pretty case is that of R. L. Stevenson. I am one of the old fogies, past forty, who are not ashamed to acknowledge that they have preserved their "illusion" about Stevenson, in spite of everything that Henley and the surviving members of the Stevenson family and old Edinburgh gossips have done to smash his image. The illusion of my youth about Stevenson was this: that he was one of the most accomplished and versatile artists of the later nineteenth century—that he could play every instrument in the band, and most of them with a degree of skill beyond the reach of his detractors.

On Mr. Scribner's recent republication of his verse and his short stories in two comprehensive volumes, I tried him again where he is often said to be weakest, as a poet. I record here without shame that I can't get through the poems to-day without feeling once more some such emotional perturbation as

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 caused me many years ago, after standing for a few minutes before Saint-Gaudens' memorial on the wall of St. Giles in Edinburgh, to walk abruptly aside from my companions into a duskier aisle of the church. The lilt of the voice, the essence and sting, the authentic bite of the personality are there. The fiddling, dancing, preaching, flute-playing, play-acting, ever-various Stevensonian personality, the Scotch Presbyterian in his French velveteen jacket is there; and he is the man that we loved.

Now the grand business of monoptic naturalistic criticism is to prove that there never was any such personality as convulses my diaphragm. The creature whose memory, mixed with the music of the organ in St. Giles, leads me weeping up the Samoan mountain to the rock-hewn tomb under the southern skies never existed. The "real Stevenson," I am assured, was a wretched, pallid, rakehelly, tuberculous fellow, so shambling, disreputable, ill-kempt, and dirty that one would be rather ashamed to be seen on the street with him. Naturalistic criticism establishes that such was the "real" man. Next, naturalistic criticism searches for this tuberculous weevil in the prose and poetry of "R. L. S."; is obliged to report that, except for a rare blood spot or so, he is not there; regretfully—O, so regretfully—announces that Stevenson the writer was a "sham," a "poser." This naturalistic attack had begun even before his death, and the family made merry over it in Vailima: "To carry a brave front though your heart quaked was a pose; to live

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 up to your better nature was a pose; and Louis made us all laugh by saying earnestly, 'in short, everybody who tries to do right is a hypocrite'!"

To continue for a moment with our example: I do not contend that the picture of a pallid, rakehelly, tuberculous, shambling, disreputable Stevenson is false, so far as it goes. There is quite a bit of evidence and an abundance of gossip to the effect that there was such a Stevenson. What we old fogies contend is merely that this Stevenson was collected by a man with one eye. We contend also that there is nothing in the collection that seems more real or more valuable than what we discovered with an eye on the other side of our heads. The best-equipped heads have two eyes; but if some curious religious impulse urges the critic to pluck out one eye, we old fogies think it betrays a perverted judgment always to pluck out the right eye.

When only the left eye is preserved, criticism functions with the monotonous inevitability of predestination in some such fashion as this.

Hamlet exclaims in one place that man is a remarkable piece of work: "how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! . . . in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a God." But on another occasion Hamlet says: "I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things it were better my mother had not borne me. . . . What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven, we are arrant knaves all; believe

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 none of us. "The first speech is windy rhodomontade; in the second, we see the "real" Hamlet.

Tennyson wrote Idylls of the King, but in his off hours he smoked infinite tobacco and relieved his mind by relating Rabelaisian anecdote. The author of Idylls of the King was a Victorian hypocrite. The "real" Tennyson was a Rabelaisian.

Dr. Kennicott in Main Street says, "A fellow ought to go to church—keeps him in touch with the higher things!" but Dr. Kennicott slips down the street and spends the evening with Maud Dyer. The speaker was a hypocritical Puritan. The "real" man went down the street to Maud Dyer.

One of our sweethearts of the stage sings her love lyrics, touching every section of the audience with the caress of her eyes, and in a flight of wafted kisses vanishes behind the scenes, where she explodes in shrewish curses at the man who has dropped the curtain a quarter of a second too soon. On the stage, the actress: off the stage, the "real" woman.

Two young fellows entertain a starchy and correct elderly man before their fire. After some hours of serious talk, the elderly man withdraws. As the door closes behind him, one of the young chaps eases himself in the chair, stretches out his legs, yawns, and says: "Now, let's talk smut." The first part of the evening was passed in an uncomfortable illusion; the second part, amid the "realities of life."

The old-fashioned poets inspect their dreams and paint a woman as the object of every man's desire. But the naturalistic novelists see her and paint her

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 as she "really" is. They see her losing her temper, see her dowdy and with a smirched face, see her sick at the stomach, see her mean and cattish and sulky. A husband with a restless wife should say to her lover: "Here, take her and keep her for two years, and you will be as little enchanted with her as I am." The poets are professional liars. The novelists at last are giving us the "truth" about the great romantic humbug.

Such is the procedure of monoptic naturalistic criticism.

Now let us re-examine our last case—with two eyes, if we possess them. What is the real truth about falling in love? Is that object which commands the adoration of a young man's heart a mere brain-begotten fantasy of his own? By no means. What one falls in love with is, in most cases, "real" enough, what there is of it. But what one falls in love with is only a careful selection from the miscellaneous qualities possessed by the beloved person. The romantic passion of youth is monoptic. It is bred of occasional meetings, of prearranged contacts, of intercourse in agreeable settings, under favorable lights, with the two actors bringing to each other the best of their gayety, the choicest extracts of their talk, the distilled cup of their emotions, the flower of their personalities, all heightened a bit in value by the intoxication of young kisses and embraces, yet it is all substantial; that with which we fall in love is real enough.

Yet in so far as these romantic youths are love

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 worthy persons, they are artists scrupulously employing their available means to produce a preconceived effect, namely, to appear lovable. They are acting a part—one of the several parts which they act; and perhaps they are doing it very well indeed. Perhaps they are throwing themselves so earnestly into their part that they conceive themselves to be essentially and mainly lovers, when, as a matter of fact, they are essentially and mainly a real estate agent and a cook, an egotistical novelist and a pianist, a financier and a female athlete, or a professor and a semi-professional bridge player. Presently they neglect their make-up and forget their cues. They stop acting. They slip back into their main business. They lapse to the level of their natural instincts and emotions. And the moment they begin to be entirely natural, they begin to bore each other; they begin to fall in hate. They look at each other with monoptic naturalistic gaze; and they fall in hate with a careful selection of the hateful qualities possessed by—by all men and women.

I have known in the entire course of my life perhaps half a dozen men and women who were invariably charming, the very sight of whom rejoiced and refreshed any company in which they appeared. They have a natural genius for being charming, no doubt; but they have something more than that. They have a delight in practising the fine art of charm; they understand the technique of charm; they have drilled themselves in the expression of charm, till they are accomplished artists, as in

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 capable of a false note in personal relations as Paderewski is incapable of striking the wrong note at the piano. Do they never feel headache, melancholy, exasperation, fatigue, wrath? They are human: I am sure they do. But they are finished and highly conscientious performers in the art of life; and one never catches them out. Their "pose" seems effortless now. It seems to spring from a vital principle of their being. Whatever they do, whatever they say, gives delight, because the welter of their subconventional instincts and emotions finds no outlet except through beautiful forms.

When I think of these charming persons, I wish to write an essay in defense of "posing." It is very clear, in the light furnished by the psychoanalysts and the naturalistic novelists—it is very clear that whenever we have been decently agreeable to one another for an hour at a time we have been posing—we have been acting a part, and we are a little fatigued when it is over. There is work in it. There is real work done when a lady accepts with effusive joy an invitation to a dinner, which she tells her husband five minutes later that she would "rather die than attend."

Nature does so little for us. Nature does not even teach us how to walk or to speak or to eat in a fashion which is not repulsive to civilized society. Military training and the dancing master and the singing teacher and the mater familias have to stand over us with a stick for the first eighteen years of our lives to take the natural curvature out

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 of our spines, the shamble from our gaits, the squeak and snuffle from our voices, the cormorant from our table manners, before we are even physically fit subjects for any but the most indulgent scrutiny. No one who has ever been a parent but remembers how he longed for the time when his child would begin to "pose" as one who liked to have his face clean and his hair brushed. Eventually, one feels fairly sure that the child will like the part, and will keep his face clean and his hair brushed for the rest of his life, and will even add to these acquired graces daily manicure and shaving; but no analyst of human nature pretends that a well-groomed man is a sincere expression of the welter of instincts and emotions. He is the laborious triumph of art over nature.

All the world that is capable of ministering delight to any discriminating sense is a stage; and all the men and women, from pope to peasant, who do anything distinguished on this stage are merely actors. Why insult the bad actors by calling them hypocrites? A hypocrite is a man who has been cast for a part to which he is unsuited, and who consequently fails to identify himself with it. The sincere and successful actor is the one wise enough and fortunate enough to choose out of all the rôles open to him that which he likes the best, or those which he likes the best; and who then devotes himself with ardor to the perfection of his reles. All that he possesses of virtue and power and passion and personality—practically all of it, if he is a great

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 actor—he finds means and occasions for using and expressing through his art. What remains—the dross and débris of his days—he destroys, if he can, as valueless; or if he is negligent about his rubbish, he leaves it as a rich legacy to some monoptic naturalistic biographer to be dished up after his death as the "real" man.

As I draw towards the conclusion of this meditation, my mind reverts to its starting point; and I ask myself quite simply the question: "Why do lovers fall out of love?" And now the reason has become as clear as daylight: They fall out of love because they grow too lazy to act their part. Pleased with my progress in discovery, I proceed to another question. I ask myself quite simply why the Dreiser-. Hecht school of naturalistic or monoptic fiction and 'the Menckenian school of naturalistic or monoptic; criticism are at the present time enjoying such wide, popularity among our young people. And once more the reason is as clear as daylight: The monoptic or naturalistic vision and criticism of life are enjoying wide popularity because they are tremendously flattering to the performance of bad actors; they are tremendously flattering to the lazy men and women who are out of their part; they confer a sense of superiority upon that indolent and inferior portion of mankind which slips and slumps from the great stage which tests a man's art back into the subconventional, formless, unchanneled turmoil of instinct and passion.

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"Have we a style that is recognizably American?" If one accepts Buffon's identification of style with "the man himself," and if one then inquires whether an English street urchin can recognize an American at sight, the answer is, yes. The street urchin can recognize us, and by some power of the higher criticism not dependent, as I shall testify, on the cut of our jib, the sound of our klaxon, or any merely sartorial distinctions in which we may garb ourselves.

Some years ago, before the angularities and rotundities of our dispositions had much developed, one of my compatriots, since become an editorial luminary, and I, at the crowded hour in the Strand, were weaving our way through the fog and the London citizenry in what we thought was a complete national incognito. Enveloped in two-shilling cyclist's capes, with ten-shilling knickerbockers, and caps and stockings purchased in Edinburgh, and with an accent studied for a month in the Highlands and for a week in Oxford, we were just flattering ourselves that we walked with national characteristics invisible, nube cava amicti, when a newsboy darted

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 upon us from the rear, extending a pink sheet and crying in dolorous tones, "Terrible accident in the Stites!—Brooklyn Bridge falls—Thousands killed!" While we were sounding in our Scotch tweeds for the big red coppers, the youth explained, with an ingratiating grin, that he knew we were "good-natured Yankees," then pocketed our gratuity and ran on with his sporting extra. There is only one way to account for his penetration of our disguise: he recognized our style—incessu patuit dea, or as Virgil might have said, in American, "You could pipe the dame by the way she operated her stilts."

If an American can so easily be identified in an English crowd, it should seem to follow that an Englishman may by similar tests be identified in an American crowd. And as a matter of fact, on the "colorful" coast of California, where the sea washes up Mexican pottery, Hawaiian flowers and music, Japanese gods, jade, ivory, ginger, blue-and-tawny rugs from China, Russian tea, fire opals from South Africa, and some sun-loving Odysseus or other from every land, I have detected the English style in an Australian who was disguised by a good American tailor and an accent levelled by long colonial and American residence. Something more indelible than garb, vocabulary, or accent betrayed him: it was a latent quality of his entire gait and manner as he accosted our American Pierce-Arrow bus; it was some ineffaceable hint of the British Isles in his quiet scrutiny of his fellow passengers, and even

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 in his fugitive contact with our American ticket taker or conductor. Acclimated, naturalized, and settled for life in a grove of eucalyptus by the bay of Monterey, he still retained a distinction amid all 'the exotic color of the coast. Walking the streets of an Indiana village in wartime, he would have been brought to the attention of the vigilance committee as a suspicious alien.

But let us turn from "the man himself" to his self-presentment in literature. Since a foreign language puts an unmistakable mark on any style, our comparison must necessarily be confined to English and American writers. And we may fairly ask, to begin with, whether our transmarine relatives have themselves a literary style that is recognizably English. When William James met in our journals with an article, by an unknown hand, which particularly pleased him, it was, one regrets to reveal, almost customary with him to write in and inquire whether it was by an Englishman. He had a notion, it appears, that certain types of writing are definitely classifiable as not-American. He was probably right.

The following passage on public life, for example, has no contemporary American mark upon it. Possibly it might have been felt by Roosevelt in some rare interval of serenity. It could hardly have been written by any American later than John Adams. It is actually marked by its breadth and elevation and still more strongly by its balance and discrimination and by its logical and stylistic con-

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 catenation as belonging to the great age of English classicism, and, specifically, to Burke:

The following description of the perfected intellect is obviously not-American. No American conceives of a perfected intellect as the object or as "the result" of education. No American expresses such experienced delight in the things of the mind. It is un-American to attempt to see things steadily and to see them whole. It is not in the American mode to present in a single sentence a conspectus of an elaborate analytical process. These are the marks of a mind which has been effectively to school under Socrates—they are the marks of Newman:

But the intellect, which has been disciplined to the perfection of its powers, which knows and

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 thinks while it knows, which has learned to leaven the dense mass of facts and events with the elastic force of reason, such an intellect cannot be partial, cannot be exclusive, cannot be impetuous, cannot be at a loss, cannot but be patient, collected, and majestically calm, because it discerns the end in every eginning, the origin in every end, the law in every interruption, the limit in each delay; because it ever knows where it stands, and how its path lies from one point to another.

Let us have a case more nearly contemporary. Though it is American enough to attempt "plucking out" the heart of mysteries, it is not American to lay a long meditative siege to them, to sit brooding before a pictured woman's face till all experience seems to glimmer under her half-closed eyelids. It is not American to listen to the fall of one's phrases nor to imitate in the structure of a sentence the smooth gliding swell, the poising arch, abrupt break, and long creamy subsidence of a shattered wave. These are the marks of Englishmen infatuated with the music of their seventeenth century and with decadent Latin—modern euphuists, who weigh words like gold dust, and who are studious to preserve in the modern industrial world something of the "cadence, mysticity, and unction" of the Middle Ages. These are the marks of Pater:

If, in a voluntary archaism, the polite world of that day went back to a choicer generation, as it fancied, for the purpose of a fastidious self-correction, in matters of art, of literature, and even, as

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 we have seen, of religion, at least it improved, by a shade or two of more scrupulous finish, on the old pattern; and the new era, like the Neu-zeit of the German enthusiasts at the beginning of our own century, might perhaps be discerned, awaiting one just a single step onward—the perfected new manner, in the consummation of time, alike as regards the things of the imagination and the actual conduct of life.

These three specimens are, I think, all easily recognizable as by English writers. Without going back of 1776, one could readily extend the exhibit by adding, for instance, specimens of Johnson, Reynolds, Landor, Macaulay, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Ruskin, Stevenson, and Mr. Chesterton. All these writers show traits due to a common classical ancestry and to an unbroken English tradition. Though several of them have given their names to stylistic excesses—as the "Macaulayese" antithesis, the "Chestertonian" paradox—most of them are truly representative men, that is, men whose individual genius expresses with emphasis and splendor a spirit common to all classicists of George III's time, or to all Edinburgh reviewers, or to all neo-romantic Tories, or what not. Many of them have been widely influential in America. In the earlier numbers of "The North American Review" one can find specimens of "Macaulayese." A description of the Milan cathedral in a short story by Henry James in the 'sixties contains perfectly constructed "Ruskinian" sentences. Henry van Dyke has worn the "Stevensonian" velvet jacket in his day. And

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 every clever young journalist has tried now and then to write a "Chestertonian" column.

But now if we look around at home, what have we done in the last hundred and fifty years when we have tried to express ourselves? What styles have we invented which confess a representative American outlook as "Johnsonese" or "Macaulayese" confesses a representative British outlook? We can distinguish the styles of Franklin, John Adams, and Webster from one another but not, with any assurance, from that of some British contemporary. Franklin, for example, was for the greater part of his life a colonial Englishman, and though he struck out many phrases and maxims saturated in the color and spirit of the American provinces, and though he is a genuine source of our most vital native tendency, his homely idiomatic material style associates itself with the realistic bourgeois movement of early eighteenth century English prose, and does not steadily distinguish itself from the gait of Defoe. Most of the able statesmen and orators from John Adams to Webster represent, stylistically, an essentially undifferentiated American classicism, which did not fit with the closeness of a personal garment, nor with the distinction of a national garment, and which has, for better or for worse, disappeared. Among the older romanticists, Poe and Hawthorne, most musical of our prose writers, perfected, as a dominant trait of their styles, the cadence of the later English "Gothic" novels; but since their time no American prose writer has

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 had the ear to sustain their melody. So complete, indeed, is the present exclusion of musical elements from our prose, that whenever one of us discovers a stray cadence in his work, he joins the Poetry Society.

The research for a distinctive American style may fairly be said to begin with Emerson's first essay on "Nature," of which the gist is this: Discover, become, and express yourselves and nothing but yourselves. It was an injunction congenial to the spirits of a people who were then scrutinizing their own bosoms for new theories of government, religion, and social intercourse. Emerson himself and his more intelligent friends knew from experience of what immense assistance classical models are in this great business of self-discovery; but the main Emersonian impetus was toward a fresh exploratory contact with nature, and its not infrequent consequence was a self-reliant "blurting out" of whatever whim for the moment possessed the disciple. "Hundreds of writers," Emerson declares in a passage which called for revolt and indicated its direction, "hundreds of writers may be found in every long-civilized nation, who for a short time believe, and make others believe, that they see and utter truths, who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously on the language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature. But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things."

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 The first step—and some phenomena of the season suggest that we have not yet progressed beyond the first step—the first step in the search for an American style was a rather excited research for the rudiments—for words and images; logical concatenation, melody and harmony could wait. Emerson is not always Emersonian; sometimes he weaves, sometimes he flows. But he made himself a style, called Emersonian, of which the effect is like that of a man in moccasins dashing into a dense wood with sharp little ax, leaping from log to log, and calling out his discoveries to his followers, with sharp little cries. It is definitely American. Here are some specimens recognizable as not-English:

Whilst we use this grand cipher (Nature) to expedite the affairs of our pot and kettle, we feel that we have not yet put it to its use, neither are able. We are like travellers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs.

The bird is not in its ounces and inches, but in its relation to Nature; and the skin or skeleton you show me is no more a heron, than a heap of ashes or a bottle of gases into which his body has been reduced is Dante or Washington.

The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign—is it not? of new vigor, when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and feet. I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek art, or

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 Provençal ministrelsy. I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds.

Emerson and Thoreau worked in the same vineyard, sometimes in the same garden; and they so freely exchanged tools and horticultural ideas that one cannot always distinguish the original possessor. "I would not subtract anything from the praise that is due to philanthropy," said Thoreau, "but merely demand justice for all who by their lives and works are a blessing to mankind. . . . I want the flower and the fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse. His goodness must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of which he is unconscious." Those sentences might have been written by Emerson. But Thoreau has a nonchalant and phlegmatic swing—a better all-day gait than Emerson's. He goes nearer the ground, adheres more strictly to the homely material manner of Franklin; and he so regularly comes to his writing desk with the taste and stain of wild grapes on his lips and with spoils of his rustic truancy, that one can hardly find a complete paragraph of his that is not marked Thoreau's and "made in America:"

Yet, for my part, I was never unusually squeamish; I could sometimes eat a fried rat with a good relish, if it were necessary. I am glad to have

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 drunk water so long, for the same reason that I prefer the natural sky to an opium-eater's heaven.

We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a taste of that musty old cheese that we are.

I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls. Let me suggest a few comparisons that some one may convey an idea of my situation. I am no more lonely than the loon on the pond that laughs so loud. . . . I am no more Tonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horsefly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star or the south wind. . . or the first spider in a new house.

The piercing of "rotten diction," the fastening of words to our own "visible things"—this special pioneer quest of the American stylist, led by Emerson, followed by Thoreau, was pursued with immense and devouring gusto by Whitman and all his tribe.

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"Each singing what belongs to her, and to none else." The conviction which underlies the Emersonian theory is that everyone has a style. In a sense, of course, the theory is sound, since style, speaking broadly, is only a comprehensive term for the total effect conveyed through all the various means by which a man reveals that he is himself and not someone else. And Providence, with infinite ingenuity, has contrived in some way to distinguish every one of us, if only by our thumb prints. When without resort to these, a man "gives himself away" by everything that he is and says and does, we say that he has a personality, meaning a distinctive personality. When such a personality, happening to be a writer, marks his diction, his images, his speed, breathing intervals, and emphasis, his ideas, point of view, and temper as unmistakably belonging to him, we say that he has style, meaning a distinctive style. Whose "song" is this?

So I finally opened the conversation myself. I said:

"The mosquitoes are pretty bad, about here, madam."

"You bet!"

"What did I understand you to say, madam?"

Then she cheered up, and faced around and said:

"Danged if I didn't begin to think you fellers

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 was deef and dumb. I did b'gosh. Here I've sot, and sot, and sot, a-bustin' musketeers and wonderin' what was ailin' ye. Fust I thot you was deef and dumb, then I thot you was sick or crazy, or suthin', and then by and by I begin to reckon you was a passel of sickly fools that couldn't think of nothing to say."

Nothing so strikingly demonstrates the presence and the power of a distinctive style as its complete metamorphosis of any foreign substance which is cast into it. A play of Molière, for example, cast into the distinctive Anglo-Irish style of Synge and his friends becomes not a French play with Irish costume but an Irish play with an Irish soul. Mr. Untermeyer, a clever mimic, has recently demonstrated that many of our contemporary American poets possess distinguishable personal styles, by casting into them and transforming an ode of Horace, so that it reappears as recognizably the work of Mr. Sandburg or Mr. Frost—to mention two of his successful metamorphoses. We have therefore a variety of American styles; and that these are American you can judge by the shock that you feel in finding strains of Mr. Lindsay's "Congo" in the latest long poem of Mr. Masefield.

In similar fashion an ingenious person could doubtless translate, say "Pilgrim's Progress," into a half dozen of our rustic sectional idioms, that of Tennessee, or Maine, or Georgia; and, if he were sufficiently ingenious, the version would be stamped not merely with the obvious marks of dialectal difference but also with subtler distinctions in the

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 processes of thought and the shades of feeling. Since the gait and total effect of any work in these provincial idioms is readily distinguishable from that of the Anglo-Irish, Lancashire, or other provincial dramatists, we have manifestly several American styles which are more than personal styles.

Interest in these provincial styles has, beyond spelling and vocabulary, affected the character of what, for the moment, we may call "Standard American." Nothing perhaps in our literature is more remarkable than the immense abundance of our studies in "local color," the work of innumerable novelists and short-story writers. An impulse passes from them to the poets, making for a new intimacy of expression. If, eliminating prose writers who spell like Joel Chandler Harris and poets who spell like James Whitcomb Riley, we examine writers who employ standard American spelling, like Mr. Frost and Mr. Robinson, we find styles which have been formed in part by listening to the infrequent slow speech and harkening to the cautious, difficult, inexpressive soul of the New England farmer. "Something there is which does not love a wall:" that is the way the farmer would take hold of the thought; and that is about as far as he would get with it. Poets who listen to the calliope, the saxophone, and the Chicago Tribune betray still other subtleties of the national soul, into which I cannot now enter.

I should like to dwell on the fork in the stylistic

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 road, where one group of our native explorers branches off into the periphrastic Fifth Avenue style, which seems, at any rate, to fit them "like a glove," while the other group goes careening through Main Street on a "flivver," the entire stylistic baggage on the running board, naked to dust and derision. Both groups, singular to relate, are still animated by an inherited "Emersonian" desire to be themselves. Both are moving toward that consummation, without clear prevision of the end, with little acknowledged guidance, blazing the trail as they go, without any fear of trespass, rather with strengthening sense that nothing in all the wide forest is marked Verboten, and cheering one another from time to time with their marching song: "Get your effect, and with God be the rest." I should like, inter alia, to compare our aristocratic with our proletarian slang, and to inquire which is the more savory. But I will summarize our main tendency toward a universal American style, cutting across all dialectal differences, by remarking that John Adams or Chesterfield would probably have said: "Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re"; James Russell Lowell or Disraeli might have said, "The iron hand in the kid glove;" but Theodore Roosevelt said: "Speak softly and carry a big stick;" and in an American novel of the season I find: "The wallop in the velvet mitt." It sounds like "home."

For the recreation of the curious, I will add an exercise in the higher criticism, which consists in

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 detecting the American soul in each of the following specimens:

A white man cannot drink the water of Mono Lake, for it is nearly pure lye. It is said that the Indians in the vicinity drink it, though. It is not improbable, for they are among the purest liars I ever saw.

He saw that she had instantly understood his motive, though the family dignity which both considered so high a virtue would not permit her to tell him so. The persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies, and the fact that he and she understood each other without a word seemed to the young man to bring them nearer than any explanation would have one.

There floated from somewhere the scent of boiled corned-beef-and-cabbage and the clatter of dishes on the American plan. (Quoted from memory.)

The capitalist can tell you to a dollar the amount of his wealth. The trust magnate "estimates it." The rich malefactor hands you a cigar and denies that he has bought the P. D. & Q. The Caliph

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 merely smiles and talks about Hammerstein and the musical lasses.

The greatest and most wonderful thing in the world is a baby. Not so much for what he is, though that's astounding enough, but for his chemical and explosive possibilities. He's a marvelous little machine, an infant dynamo, and he has juice enough in his storage battery for a seventy-two-hour run, but the moment that is gone he goes out like a blown candle, muy pronto, unless he has connected up with his surroundings.

"I like this very much myself," he will explain. "It's great stuff. I wish I could use it. That part about the bobbed hair is a scream. But none of it would mean anything to the farmer in Iowa. Won't you show me something again that isn't quite so sophisticated?"

In those far-off times, in the city where I lived, all the hod-carriers were colored men—usually great, shiny fellows with immense knots of muscles in their legs and arms. The Irish had already become lawyers, city detectives, saloonkeepers, gang bosses, and Todsaufer for breweries. These colored men, in summer, liked to work with their chests bare. Swarming up the ladders in long files, each with his heavy hod on his shoulder, they made

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 an exotic, Egyptian, picture. One could fancy them descended in a direct line from the Nubians who carried the hod when Cheops built his pyramid.

It was flattering too—to have two personal slaves at once—the barber and the bootblack. He could have been completely happy if he could also have had the manicure girl. The barber snipped at his hair and asked his opinion of the Havre de Grace races, the baseball season, and Mayor Prout. The young negro bootblack hummed "The Camp Meeting Blues" and polished in rhythm to his tune, drawing the shiny shoe-rag so taut at each stroke that it snapped like a banjo string.

For the bumptious and silly sides of them will fatten his soup—the other side won't. So he goes on, until his world is one vast nauseous Pullman smoker full of Rotarians, Fraternians, Boomers, Realtors, and Baboons getting off one damn fool remark after another.

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We live in an age of fascinating literary movements. First the poets organized a movement, which became so comprehensive that there was no public left to view the procession, and the only distinction attainable in connection with it was not to participate. Then the new truth-telling novelists started a parade along Main Street, clad in their dismalest togs and attended by bands of mismated, rebellious wives, and joyless, unmated females of New England. (It is generally understood that every female residing in New England is a spinster.) And now a third movement, of the essayists, is forming and sweeping down upon us, a somewhat rollicking movement, preluded by the victorious blast of Professor Stephen Leacock's trumpet: "The appearance of Benchley's first book is an event in the history of literature not equaled since Milton produced his 'Paradise Lost.

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 Enter, then, Christopher Morley, with a scarlet plume in his cap, smoking his faithful pipe of briar and bearing aloft his plum pudding; Robert Cortes Holliday, swinging his walking stick like Taillefer at the Battle of Hastings; young Heywood Broun, tossing his witty quips to left and right, and bearing aloft Heywood Broun, Jr.; the before-heralded Robert Benchley, in cap and bells, presenting an excellent imitation of a Canadian professor of political economy; then, more sedately, Mr. Colby, with his hesitant smile, followed by the thirty other essayists, old and new, recently mustered by the scarlet-plumed master of the revels. The entire demonstration has a festive and holiday air. At the turn of the street one can fancy Mr. Morley leading in singing "God rest you, merry bourgeoisie, let nothing you dismay."

Suppose for the moment we fix our attention on these three "literary movements," and inquire, in the impressionistic manner, how they affect us. After one has read a yard or two of average American contemporary verse, ranging from "Rodin" Lindsay's "Johnny Appleseed" to Mr. Masters's "Domesday Book," one is left with a faint sense of strain in the appreciative organs, coupled with a furtive suspicion that verse as a vehicle of modern American life is pretty nearly obsolete. After one has read a shelf full of the new novelists, ranging from Ben Hecht's "Erik Dorn" to the "Three Soldiers" of John Dos Passos, or Anderson's "The Triumph of the Egg," one is left with a sombre sense that one

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 is wandering in a wilderness, obscure with blue and gray shadows, where moon calves leap in and out of bramble bushes a-searching for their eyes. But when one has spent a week-end with the new essayists, one comes away, not exactly filled and satisfied, not precisely inspired and uplifted, but feeling, as Pepys would say, "mighty pleasant." In the psychical circumstances created by the two previous movements, this "mighty pleasant" feeling becomes significant and demands consideration.

Why do the essayists leave us with this "mighty pleasant" feeling, so that we are disposed to say to a young woman seeking advice, "Flirt with a poet, engage yourself to a novelist, but marry an essayist"? Well, first of all, the true essayist since Montaigne's time has been a man of even, easy, adaptable temper. Brought to a stand by the opposing pressures of Catholic piety and Renaissance paganism, the French ancestor of all our essayists found an escape from the over-strenuous appeals of faith in a mild but universal skepticism, including in its serenely quizzical consideration his own experience. And so at every recoil from the violence of partisanship, from the fatigue of "strained attitudes," the modern spirit tends to slip into the form of Montaigne.

The essay lends itself better to a balanced representation of life than either free verse or the current realistic novel. For the ordinary life is not like a modern poem—it has more rhythm and reason and regularity. Life is not like a "realistic" novel

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 it has more bright spots, more sunlight and more apple blossoms, more spiritual variety. The ordinary life indeed is itself an essay, starting from nowhere in particular and arriving at no definite destination this side of death, but picking its way, like a litde river, now with "bright speed," and now with reluctance and fond lingerings, over all sorts of obstacles and through all sorts of channels, which would be merely humdrum but for the shifting moods and humors that play over a bottom of commonplace with the transient magic of shadow and light.

But what is the distinctive feature of this new mass-movement of the essayists? Of course, we must recognize that there were American essayists of a sort before the advent of young Heywood Broun and young Robert Benchley. There were, for examples, Dr. Crothers and Dr. van Dyke; Professor Santayana, Professor James, Professor Matthews and Professor Woodberry; W. D. Howells, Henry James, P. E. More, and Mark Twain; Miss Repplier, Mrs. Gerould and others. Several of these elders also did some rather decent things in their day. But the special character of the new movement is not given by writers of their complexion. The piquant figures in it are no longer clergymen, professors, novelists and literary ladies, carefully excogitating smooth discourses in the calm intervals between sermons, lectures, novels and babies.

The new men, who give a quicker tempo to the movement, are a light-footed generation for whom

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 the way was prepared by Eugene Field, "Mr. Dooley," B. L. Taylor, Don Marquis and the blandly omniscient Simeon Strunsky. They are, in short, for the most part busy newspaper men, secretly with child of Heaven knows what grand poems and plays and novels, yet producing their serio-comic column with daily or weekly regularity, the office boy at their elbows and the presses roaring for copy. "Literature," you say in your haste, "produced by men who are too busy to write, for men who are too busy to read?" No, not that; literature, rather, by men capable of taking joy in writing, like a sporting robin which built its nest and laid its bright blue eggs just above the coupling-pin between the engine and tender of a jolting little train that, twice a week, links a series of villages among the Green Mountains.

These young men, with obvious community of feeling, are striving to create a new literary public and to provide for that public a new literary fare, relatively free from political intoxicants. Journalists or near-journalists by training or temper or "environmental" necessity, they contemplate no longer the narrow circle reached by the old-fashioned review, but the wide circle composed of every man and woman who reads a newspaper. This is the true democratic reading public. Like the periodical essayists of Queen Anne's time, with their Scandal Clubs and Tatlers and Spectator Clubs, they undertake to meet their readers where they are, and they know that to do so their writing must sound like an

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 extension of familiar conversation. It must introduce no topic that can't be made current. It must be light enough to be digested with coffee and rolls. It must be pointed enough to wake up the man from New Jersey crossing the ferry in the cool, sleepy-eyed morning. It must be amusing enough to relax the tension of the tired business man and make him forget, when he goes up to bed, to mourn for his lost night cap.

The "colyumist" blazed out the way to the new public. And cannibalistic critics among the elder bigwigs like to dispose of the "colyumist" as Dr. Johnson in his loftier vein disposed of his friend Garrick: "Davy hath a pleasant wit, but he is a futile fellow." Now the "colyumist," taken singly and in detail, is not very formidable, to be sure. But let us first analyze our specimens, and then construct the species.

Christopher Morley chats me some forty chats, from which I recall that he went to Haverford, that he formed himself on R. L. S. and Joseph Conrad; that he likes lunching in odd places about town with fellow-craftsmen; that he likes Captain Bone and all tales of the sea, and that he loves the pungent odors and mellow tints of old shops and streets around the Post Office and Bowling Green. I thrust my thumb into the plum pudding of this professional amateur of the city, this Jim Hawkins of Broadway, so keen to make Manhattan a treasure island, and I fetch out a plum on the best way to clean an old pipe, or I fetch out this

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 note on the character of the late Francis Gummere: "It was characteristic of him that he usually smoked Robin Hood, that admirable five-cent cigar, because the name and the picture of an outlaw on the band reminded him of the fourteenth century ballads he knew by heart." The Dignity of Letters has never laid her heavy hand on Christopher Morley, but the gusto of letters waits for him at every corner. Youth, romance, the sweetness of life and the shade of R. L. Stevenson in velveteen jacket—these are the spirits that have put him under obligation and that whisper him among the blue and gray shadows of an unimaginative realism to be blithe and yet more blithe.

Mr. Holliday takes me for twenty-eight turns about town. We visit undertakers' shops, murder trials, lunchrooms and hotels; we talk with "traffic cops" and landladies and editors; we patter about Mr. Huneker and other famous men who have recently died; we step into a "colorful" place where we can see John Drew and Joseph Hergesheimer and Alexander Woollcott and young Burton Rascoe toying with the celery; we glance over the want ads in the morning paper; we study some photographs which illustrate the difference between the female form divine as conceived by Fragonard and as seen by Schopenhauer, and then we dip into the underworld and visit various doggeries where gentlemen can obtain a thimbleful of the needful at "80 cents a throw." Mr. Holliday has been around a good deal, has acquired a kind of Beau Brummelish

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 sophistication, and notices with less gusto than young Jim Hawkins—I mean Christopher Morley—the pristine bloom of things. In compensation, he notices other things that might have escaped my attention. What I recall most distinctly of our "nosing" about Washington and our calls on celebrities in New York is that President Harding wore a single ring but "no pin to his tie," and that Mr. Chesterton wore heavy woolen socks, "very much coming down about his ankles." So we confirm that brilliant aphorism: Life is a bundle of little things.

Young Heywood Broun is a Harvard man of about 30. He likes Stevenson, Hardy, H. G. Wells, Leonard Merrick and Mark Twain; and he holds that a girl should think twice before marrying any one who doesn't like them. He declares that some of his best friends have been Yale men, and, regretting the strained feelings between Yale and Harvard, he suggests that all might get happily together in crying, "To hell with Princeton!" He intends to meet Clayton Hamilton's standards for the dramatic critic, namely, to stand bareheaded in the nave of Amiens, to climb the Acropolis by moonlight, and to walk with whispers into the hushed presence of the Frari Madonna of Bellini before he attempts to review the performance of "Up in Mabel's Room." He likes the zoo and baseball, has a nice paper on "How to Be a Lion Tamer," and believes that "children who don't see Charlie Chaplin have, of course, been robbed of much of their childhood."

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 He has one two-year-old child who tells him that "Goliath loves you," and out of this wealth of parental experience he offers counsel to expectant motherhood. He has one touch of radicalism: in the rare intervals when he is not thinking of himself as the first parent, he informs his readers that Dr. Holt is a better guide to the upbringing of children than their grandmothers! He has courage: he doesn't hesitate to stuff all this into one container with dialogue, fables, and parodies, and call it a book.

Young Robert Benchley, as I have already intimated, is the most overt and unashamed humorist in our parade. I don't know why I should try to gild the refined gold of Professor Leacock's careful tribute, except to add that Gluyas Williams's illustrations are up to the text and are, in my opinion, altogether unequaled since Raphael produced his Sistine Madonna. If Hogarth could see how Mr. Williams has penetrated the soul of his author and doubled the force of his expression, he would blush to acknowledge his own crude sketches. Mr. Benchley's twenty-two masterpieces show a more constructive and impersonal imagination than we found in the scrapbook of Heywood Broun; and he discloses less of that studious, fostered and affectionate provincialism which distinguishes the true New Yorker. With feasting eye and wide-swooping wing he dives only for "nation-wide" interests, passes from letterwriting to amateur gardening and stoking one's own furnace, from bridge (the best thing since "Mrs.

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 Battle on Whist") to the higher salesmanship and New Year's resolutions, from Percy Mackaye's community drama to the sorrows of automobiling and tabloid versions of the American Magazine, Harper's and the Saturday Evening Post. And whenever he passes, one feels, if not better, yet more cheerful about things.

Frank Moore Colby has a professorial record in the background of his journalistic career; and he doesn't write with the abandon and gay incoherence of the "colyumist" who has never lost sleep by asking himself whether contributing to Vanity Fair is not infra dig. His title, however, The Margin of Hesitation, denotes him truly as one who has attained the right temper of the periodical essayist, the tolerant smiling skepticism of the literary newspaper man, who first writes out a blanket acceptance of the universe and then proceeds to question everything in it, not wholesale and with a shout like the editor of a radical weekly, but bit by bit, softly, like an epicure questioning the flavor of a glass of grapejuice. "The new thinker," says Mr. Colby thoughtfully, "is merely a man who does not know what other people have thought." Later he remarks in an excellent discourse on "The Pleasures of Anxiety:" "In middle-aged conversation there is always a certain coziness in political despair, and the thought of a large general disaster coming on has, at any rate, one bright side in the way it warms up elderly conversers." He, himself, reads for recreation the alarming radical journals which his

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 friends abhor, because, as he softly remarks: "Any man who is about half convinced that he and a few others are the sole remaining friends of civilization finds some dramatic zest in life." For a world that is always turning up with a painted face, dusty and overheated, Mr. Colby prescribes, like Mr. Dick: "Give it a bath—a bath of irony."

It may be true that the "colyumist" is a futile fellow, taken singly—as impotent as a single swallow to make a summer. But a mass-movement of them from their points of vantage on the great newspapers, a mass-movement of them against the doors of anxious publishers, merits attention. These wits and jesters and ironists of the press who buzz around the news and editorials are, or are becoming, a body of writers as sensible and useful as we possess. From the field of journalism they glean what little scent and nectar they can, and pass by quick flights into the adjacent field of literature. They bear the same relation to the "serious" editorial writer and the savage critic that bees bear to wasps and hornets. The raw stuff of life which in the one case goes chiefly to strengthen the sting is in the other case converted chiefly into wax and honey—"sources of sweetness and light." They are beginning to create a literary atmosphere with "organic filaments" of civility.

The present swarming of the diurnal and hebdomadal essayists is, therefore, agreeably ominous. They are not doing any "big constructive thinking." They refuse to accept responsibility for the universe.

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 These journalistic humanists are modest; they do not even attempt to reform the world. They are occupied rather in discovering how many likable things there are in the world as it is, and they seem satisfied if they make it no worse. Of all the sorts of their fellowmen they say, as Charles Lamb said of a certain not very prepossessing person: "How can we hate them? We know them." They recur to old things—old poetry, old customs, old streets—with an affectionate familiarity; and they touch vulgar things, the pompous and humdrum people, the annoying incidents, the tedious routine of daily life, with a humor which debrutalizes them and helps the man in a treadmill to see himself as a figure in a comedy. They are thus giving to New York City, for instance, a more genial and kindly air than it has had since the days of Diedrich Knickerbocker.

They refuse to have anything to do with notabilities, except in dressing-gown and slippers by the fire, in the disarming hours of the night, when a statesman will confidentially take back the lies he has been telling all day, and "Willy" Yeats, forgetting to chant about the silver apples of the moon, will gossip about his contemporaries with as spicy a malice as George Moore. They haunt that level, these humanists, where men are conscious of their common humanity; and they treat with equal respect all representatives who are great in their kind: Mr. Wells, Mr. Bryan, Charlie Chaplin, M. Viviani, Babe Ruth, Einstein, Pavlowa, Lloyd George, Jack Dempsey and Caruso. It is their habit to walk all

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 the way around wooden horses and to look all gift horses in the mouth. They are cultivating in themselves and in a pretty thick stratum of the great democratic reading public a Missourian temper of inquiry about some of the Big Constructive Thinking, a lenity and amused tolerance toward even the painful virtues of their neighbors, and a quiet self-possession (recall Mr. Holliday's observation that the President had "no pin to his tie")—a quiet self-possession and an ability to relish one's "daily bread" amid all the pomps and splendors and indignities of the human lot.

They tend to make the stranger at home in the world, and the lonely and insignificant man in town or country, who talks with no one morning, noon or night, feel yet, as he opens his paper, that he is not the only one of his kind, but that he is neighboured on all sides by his kindred and that in farmhouse and town mansion and White House there are millions of other strangers, essentially as lonely and insignificant as he. This is, perhaps, as near to a homelike feeling as a man can expect to come in this world.

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As a leader in the famous revolt of the Younger Generation, Mr. Sinclair Lewis is distinguished from many of his coevals by the velocity of his intelligence and the justice of his antipathies. Not quite incidentally, he is conspiring with the spirit of the times to become the most interesting and important novelist in America. Not, as is commonly supposed, a man of one book, he has marked his passage through the stage of brilliant promise by a succession of substantial accomplishments. Yet he is still so young and so brimming with energy, talents, and invention that he impresses one as a man from whom much is to be expected. With all his other gifts, he has that faculty for being opportune which the envious ascribe to luck but which the knowing perceive is a hard-earned acquisition and a part of the open-eyed efficiency of genius. Mr. Lewis is opportune, because he industriously studies himself and his age, like a good humanist, till he understands the needs and aspirations and powers of both. The times in America since the war of the German Invasions have clamored for adequate

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 representation in fiction; with vision of arresting centrality and sharpness, Mr. Lewis is giving it. The publication of Babbitt set a thousand reviewers to discussing whether it equalled the novel, Main Street, which fluttered their dovecotes in 1920. It is my purpose rather to invite somewhat more serious attention to the quality of his work as a whole, and his significance on the contemporary scene.

When Mark Twain, Henry James, and W. D. Howells died, the wide domain of American realism gaped for a masculine heir. There followed an interval in which no one would read an American who could get a British novel. The field swarmed with claimants who could not be taken seriously, who were just "outside" literature. There was an occasional offering by an old hand, but the "movement" halted for lack of adequate leadership. Poetry was said to be "looking up"—to Mr. Masters and to Miss Lowell, who from different directions had given it fresh impetus. But in prose fiction there seemed to be, say, ten years ago, no one "significant" to swear by or to swear at but Mr. Dreiser, a "barbarian" who had never learned to write English. In their desperation, the critical instigators of our "movement" urged us for a time to look up to Mr. Dreiser. Later they shifted their attention to a more scrupulous artist, Mr. Hergesheimer, who was veering uncertainly between realism and an exotic type of the historical-romantic, and to Mr. Cabell, who had achieved a succès de scandale in the erotic-fantastic. From the "lunatic fringe" of experimentation there

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 was an ominous buzzing of "Freudians." Whatever was most unwholesome in the fiction of Russia, France, Germany, and the younger England was cried up by our criticasters and seized upon for imitation. As a fairly direct consequence of the critical encouragement given to bad English and mad psychology, we are now asked to admire such erotic rubbish as Mr. Waldo Frank's Rahab, in which a female finds amid the "sickly dissolutions" of the underworld, as Mr. Lewis Mumford tenderly phrases it, "like a rainbow glimmering over a pool of stagnant water, a justification and a light." As I trust even Mr. Mencken would say,—"Bosh!" But in the fall of 1920 arrived, to deliver the beleaguered citadel of our hope and sanity, Mr. Sinclair Lewis with Main Street.

Now Main Street, a criticism of contemporary life with special reference to its interest and beauty, is important to us socially because, more thoroughly than any novel since Uncle Tom's Cabin, it has shaken our complacency with regard to the average quality of our civilization. But it and the other work of Mr. Lewis which I shall discuss, are equally important to our literature as a return to the main matter and the manner of our national narrative.

If we had applied ourselves more diligently to the search for a deliverer, we might have observed that Mr. Lewis was coming, far back in 1914, when he published Our Mr. Wrenn—as the seductive title suggests, a merrily bubbling story with a "happy ending," somewhat in the vein of H. G. Wells's

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