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 settles firmly down at the point of view to which his circumstances have driven him. In that case, there is a fair likelihood that in his leisure hours he will become a tedious utilitarian critic of his own upbringing. He will complain of the liberal education which unsettles youth and fills it with insatiable hungers by attempting to develop a general human personality instead of a sharp vocational instrument. He will turn around upon his Alma Mater and condemn her harshly for not having cut away, at an earlier age, all the young unprofitable shoots of his general human curiosity. He may declare that the fault of his education was its failure to make him an even keener, harder, sharper vocational instrument than he is.

"What good," he will say, "have history and literature and philosophy ever done to me? You teachers pumped me full of culture. You filled me up with stuff about the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and the Reformation and the Puritan Revolution. You wasted my youth in talk about the real and the ideal and the good and the beautiful. You lured me into listening to symphonies and looking at pictures and vibrating to the pity and terror of tragic drama. You peopled the greenwood of my imagination with poetic figures of knights and ladies on great adventures and romantic quests. And then I married a fairly good cook and you sent me into the world to serve as a chemist in a dye works or to write advertising for toothpowder and laundry soap. My education was not

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 practical. It didn't prepare me for life. It was no good. I have no use for it."

To this complaint, it should be remarked in passing, there is a retort which all "liberal" educators should learn to make. It runs something like this: "You say that your education is 'no good.' We reply, O solid businesslike character, that your life is 'no good.' Your life is not good because you built it too small to hold the best of your possessions. The trouble with you is that you wasted the wealth that we gave you; you let it rust and mildew in cellar and attic. You lacked ingenuity to use your capital. You have not learned how to employ your culture in your life. You have made no outlets for your education. Don't blame us if you can't draw Niagara through a brass faucet into the kitchen sink. As occasion serves, we shall continue to 'pump' culture into you. Perhaps bye and bye you will burst. We rather hope that you will. Then possibly something more exhilarating than a solid businesslike character can be made of the ruins and fragments of you. Perhaps a personality can be made of the pieces. At any rate there will be no great loss if you burst. On the whole, go ahead and burst. You really aren't worth saving."

But now let us assume the more enlivening of the possibilities: let us assume that a miracle happens. As Brown looks dismally out from the barred small window of his character upon his life, and sees that it is finished, suddenly his past breaks away from him, as Sicily broke away from Italy,

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 and a gulf yawns between. There is evidence that this thing does happen. His past is no longer his; it has become a part of human history. It has become a dramatic spectacle; sitting in the box of his character he regards it as it were across footlights, with spectatorial detachment. He can re-examine it now without shame or vanity or repentance. It interests him no longer as conduct waiting for the Judgment Day but as food for intellectual and aesthetic curiosity. He now finds a use for his culture in understanding, not judging, the whole of the human spectacle. He wheels a speculative eye upon his coevals—those dreary "substantial characters" who now for so many years have been giving one another, as Thoreau complained, the same old bite of the same musty old cheese that they are. They, too, have become dramatic spectacles, each one with its own individual savour! And his wife and the four children? The moment that he stops worrying about that abstract line which is the shortest distance between two points, he perceives at last the full colour and fragrance and taste of his relation to them.

What does all this mean? It means that at forty, when a man seems hermetically enclosed in his character, an angel may just possibly unbar the door, and, leaving his possessive, aggressive body sleeping there, let his spirit out for the recognition and appreciation of a new life. So long as he wished to possess and direct the world, the world erected barriers against him, and progressively shut him in.

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 As soon as he exacts nothing of it, it gives him all—all its qualities for his discrimination and delectation. There is no way to return to his youth by retracing the caterpillar progress of the senses or by the renovation of cells that have become clogged with the hard deposit of years. But all those old interests which he had thought dead are now reborn with wings. He can return to his past, he can flit into his future, with the swift flight of a butterfly. While he seems to sleep in the barred prison-house of his character, and his old sweetheart weeps over the baldheaded, roundwaisted man of property gently snoring there, he perchance has discovered that she can't be met at the old trysting place any more, and has pushed on up the highroad to the detour of pure poetic contemplation where all her fair qualities, her joy and blitheness and beauty, are recollected in tranquillity. Out of the death of the possessive passion, a rebirth of the mind and imagination!

If this miracle has happened, he feels, at forty, the possibility not merely of a new life but of a new kind of life opening before him. He sees the necessity of revising the "theory of education." At forty, instead of killing off the nerves, one should be occupied in reviving the spirits. Instead of closing old doors, one should be cutting new windows. Instead of sitting down and going to sleep at his own point of view, he should hunt for new ones, if he has to go to China or Alaska or Tierra del Fuego to find them. What a man of forty

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 needs to do is to re-examine his metaphors. Let us try our hammer on this "solid character."

We spend our lives in a quarry of words. We immure ourselves behind a wall of images. We talk of characters; immediately the mallet and chisel are in our hands. We are sculptors, and our subjects are unhewn blocks of marble, and the form we seek is imposed from without. The chips fly. Chips of what? Is the imposition of marble qualities upon flesh and blood responsible for that grim and weary and hopeless look of the Old Man of the Mountain, which establishes itself at middle age upon faces once mobile and rosy? Has this entire theory of human sculpture a bearing upon the prevalence of ennui, rigor mortis, premature death, and petrification at forty? Is there a gleam of hope in a change of images?

"He built his house on a rock." Is that the best place for a house? Not if one cares for gardening. At forty, one is justified at least in enquiring whether what looked like a white rock was only a ribbon of foam. There is current an alternative set of images, which takes us out of the stone-quarry and the graveyard and away from the tedious refrain, Requiescat in pace.

Our lives are a bright-flowing mist of days and nights. Our blood is a swift-winding river. Our flesh is a changing flower. There is a season of buds and a season of fruit and a season of wine and perfume. And after the vintage, there are memories and dreams.

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 Is there no kinetic and flowing character—no form imposable upon wind and water: such form as the cloud takes in the West, such color; such shapes as life transiently rests in, rising from seed to blossom?

Come, let us make a new set of maxims, not for youths in their twenties with houses to build and children to educate, but for men of forty and upwards who are growing tired of one another and yet are not quite ready to die:

Unfold, leaf by leaf.

Become more and more intimate with life.

Ask no cold question of any joyous thing.

Go to all living things gently, listening for the wonder of the breath and the heartbeat.

Ask all successful and happy creatures for a clue.

Study all lovely things, with docility seeking their principle of beauty.

Consider whether it is better to change and be living than to be unchanged and dead.

Eschew pedantry and make much of fine art: it possesses a secret of eternal life.

Be your residence urban or rural, there is no provincialism so narrow as that developed by the inveterate maintenance of your own point of view.

Push on into untrodden forests, up unexplored valleys, seeking new springs of refreshment, crying at the foot of every mountain ridge, "Let us see what is on the other side."

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A few of our great thinkers have gone out, out—out beyond good and evil. When it comes to definitions and specific cases, the rest of us may differ sharply. But with reference to the abstract principle we are still within shouting distance of one another. We have preserved our 'illusions.' We have not yet learned to look upon words as merely patterns made in a child's game of letters. We believe that there are important values represented by such symbols as 'good taste' and 'decency.' We may quarrel about standards of decency; but we agree—I hope that I do not generalize from insuffcient data—we agree that persons who have 'lost all sense of decency' are undesirable, unfragrant, and perhaps imbecile and unsafe to be abroad in the community.

Our common sense accordingly takes measures to provide against destruction of the sense of decency by perverts who subsist on the propagation of vice, or who, as mere amateurs of depravity, find their delight in corrupting the minds of the young. Our common sense does not attempt to legislate with reference to highly disputable points of taste, but

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 only with reference to the elements of common decency. For this reason our regulations are not devised by æsthetic experts or professors of ethics or Galahads, but by fairly worldly all-around men, equally competent with respect to railroads, boxing, and tariffs. These representatives whom we have elected to care for our public welfare have declared by law that a certain class of literature is unprintable. In this class fall, according to various Federal and State enactments, every book and picture which is 'obscene,' 'lewd,' 'lascivious,' 'filthy,' 'indecent,' or 'disgusting.'

Under authority of these acts, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and similar agencies have confiscated, destroyed, and excluded from the mails a great mass of 'demoralizing' matter concerning which our common sense is not in doubt—matter which comes to respectable noses only when some brief newspaper paragraph reminds us that there are monsters among us engaged in the business intimated with shuddering horror in Henry James's 'Turn of the Screw.'

But these moral agencies have also obtained in recent years the temporary suppression of several novels, which 'everyone' has read, written by English and American authors whose other works are 'in every library.' In the circumstances, common sense naturally raises the question whether there has not been a failure of justice. I doubt whether any man versed in letters can read the records of a celebrated literary trial without coming

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 to the conclusion that judges and lawyers are, so far as their professional training is concerned, unequipped for the task undertaken and really as much at sea as they have frequently shown themselves when they have employed their grave wisdoms in settling the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. Their self-confidence in such affairs is supported by their certified expertness in handling evidence—of a sort. They think that they understand the law. They have explained it to the jury in just about this fashion and in nearly these words:

'The question before you, gentlemen, is very simple.' (That is their first error: the question before the gentlemen is one of abysmal complexities. But let us not interrupt the Court.) 'The question is not to say how this book affects you, or persons of your seasoned experience and virtue. The question is whether this book tends to deprave the minds of those open to such influences, and into whose hands a publication of this character might come. It is within the law if it would suggest impure and libidinous thoughts in the young and inexperienced. A book to be obscene, need not be obscene throughout the whole of the contents; but if the book is obscene in part, it is an obscene book.'

A schoolboy far below Macaulay's conception of the type can perceive at a glance that any jury which honestly obeyed these instructions could bar from the mails the Bible, Shakespeare, or even an unabridged English Dictionary, which, as there is testimony to prove, is quite capable of suggesting

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 impure and libidinous thoughts in minds 'open to such influences.' In the celebrated, but now remote, case of Madame Bovary, the prosecution, indeed, like a prurient schoolboy, selected from that grim and repellent history of illicit relations all the passages descriptive of sensual passion, wove them into a suggestive little narrative of its own, and thus presented its case to the jury. The defense, on the other hand, argued with a good deal of piquancy and cogency that Flaubert had dealt with sensual passion in the temper of Bossuet, with excerpts from whom the notebooks of the novelist were full; and that to judge a serious work of art without reference to its total intention and effect is not merely unjust but grossly absurd.

Each attempt to apply the law in such cases results inevitably in an extension of the legal prosecution and defense into an acrimonious, yet not uninstructive and often diverting, public debate between authors in general and the officers and friends of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Whatever the result of the legal proceedings may be, the cause of 'outraged virtue' is lost the moment that it is carried into the newspapers, where, as Mark Twain might have said, it is as much out of place 'as a Presbyterian in hell-fire.' The cause is lost through the manifested ineptitude, ignorance, and incompetency of those who espouse it. In these cases

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 if I may be pardoned for employing a vulgar and violent expression—in these cases, a good man, whenever he opens his mouth, puts his foot into it. A country clergyman writes in that he has not read the book in question, but he knows that our modern authors are a 'bad lot,' and he wishes the prosecutor 'more power to his elbow.' An irate judge declares that he and his daughter have read the book, and he only wishes that he could 'get it before the public'! An Outraged Parent says that he would like to read it; and in this wish he is joined by the association of Y. M. C. A. secretaries, the Associated Mothers' Clubs, the Boy Scouts, and the Camp Fire Girls. Members of any or all of these associations are prepared to affirm, after a careful perusal of the objectionable book, that it is not fit for them to read.

By this time, what began as a serious matter of public morals would degenerate into farce, and the case would be lost in the court of common sense, even if the defense did not utter a word. But the defense never lets the prosecution off so easily. The defense is endowed with tongues which it knows how to use effectively, if not always scrupulously. The persuasively articulate part of the public, all the wits of the press, editors and authors of every shade of merit and respectability, habitually unite in condemnation of the law and in derision of those who have attempted to enforce it. It is to be noted that they also, for the most part, think it unnecessary to have read the book in order to protest

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 against the prosecution of its author. They protest 'on general principles'—on a considerable variety of general principles, which I shall summarize.

They protest from a general belief in the 'freedom of the press,' and from a feeling that a free press is on the whole more vital to the public than any law curbing it can be. They protest from a general belief in the 'freedom of art.' A few of them argue that art should be free because all true art is moral. More of them argue that art should be free because it is neither moral nor immoral but unmoral, and its influence aesthetic and, therefore, no concern of the legislator or moralist. They contend that the suppressive statutes were framed against pornography, not against art; and they assert that it is easy to distinguish art from pornography. In conclusion, they characterize the prosecution as illiterate, blackmailing, filthy-minded, impertinent and meddlesome.

After such an encounter, Militant Morality retires from the scene like a badly punished game cock, with all the young cockerels of the press bursting forth into derisive crowing. If the legal prosecution also has failed, the book receives an almost official certificate of innocence; and it may be cried up as a pure, decent, beautiful, and significant work of art. If the prosecution has been successful, the book may be suppressed till every schoolboy's curiosity has been whetted to know why; then it may be released and devoured by thousands of readers enlisted mainly by the publicity work of the Society for the

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 Suppression of Vice. The law as applied to books issued by regular publishers through the regular channels is, I think, futile and mischievous.

In spite of this belief, the case against the law and against the Society is usually presented so unfairly and with such malice and with such defective arguments that there is little satisfaction in joining the popular demonstration against them. I remember hearing not long ago a conservative Russian nobleman lecturing on the present situation in his native country with a sobriety of speech and a balance of judgment to which, in this matter, our American newspapers have not accustomed us. At the outset of his discussion of the Bolshevist régime, he told us that, in his study of public affairs, he invariably proceeded upon the principle that every movement which commands the enthusiastic adhesion of great numbers of people must have something in it which deserves respectful attention.

If this principle appeals to us, we shall not join the wits of the press in dismissing with derisive laughter the Outraged Parents, the Associated Mothers' Clubs, the Y. M. C. A., the Catholic Club, the bishops and lesser clergymen, the Lord's Day Alliance, the Boy Scouts, the Camp Fire Girls, and the various religious organizations which have rallied behind the execrated banner of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. We shall strenuously

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 object to the characterization of a cause which such organizations espouse as a blackmailing and filthy-minded enterprise. We shall even admit the possibility that they have a genuine grievance. And, having made that admission, we shall be less concerned to minimize it than to suggest a wiser method of getting it redressed. If we approach the subject in this temper, without recrimination and indiscriminate mud-slinging, we may conceivably persuade them, as well as our own side.

I, for one, believe that they have a grievance. But like most enthusiastic crusading masses, the reformers injure their cause and expose themselves to bitter disappointment and to retarding reactionary movements by asking and expecting too much—by asking and expecting the impossible. They have created the impression that they are actuated by a desire 'to make the world safe for children and adolescents.' It can't be done. It is what an enthusiastic reformer would call a beautiful and inspiring thought; and there is something attractive to the best that is in us even in the most extravagant aspirations toward an ideal good. Yet it is as hopeless to make a morally safe world by wiping out all the germs of moral infection as it is to make a physically safe world by wiping out all the germs of smallpox, typhoid, and influenza.

Since it can't be done, the hope of doing it is, to sober consideration, not really beautiful and truly inspiring, but fantastic and dangerous. It deflects and absorbs to no purpose attention which

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 might and should be directed toward that which can be done. We may stamp out centres of infection here and there; but operating on the world with a view to making it safe is a task beyond human instrumentalities (and the Dean of St. Paul's believes that God himself has given it up). The world is an old rake, a hoary incurable, and will always be breaking out in one place or another. That which experience proves can be done with some effect toward protecting the young from moral as well as physical diseases is to vaccinate against them—to put inside children and adolescents some thing capable of resisting and combating the morbid elements which, though the influence of the 'world' be avoided and excluded, still malignly germinate in the cloister, in the cell, in the dusky isolation of the heart.

The law which the reformers seek to enforce against authors is an attempt to make the world safe by exterminating one out of billions of possible sources of infection. If it could be enforced, it would be as effective as 'swatting' a fly in an African jungle, except that a well-swatted fly does 'stay dead.' Those who defend it, I suspect, conceive that this law is the same sort of law as the Volstead Act; and that, they are convinced, is going to be in the interest of public welfare. Those who oppose the law designed to suppress indecent literature are also, I think, generally under the impression that it is the same sort of law as the Volstead Act, and that it should, for essentially the same rea-

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 son, be abolished. In a vital respect it is not of the same sort. It differs from the Volstead Act in a fashion which may permit a man of sense to applaud the one and yet to condemn the other.

The point is this: the legal definition of 'intoxicating liquor' is, though perhaps unscientific and absurd, perfectly fixed and objective. Whether a variety of liquor is intoxicating under the law can be accurately determined by scientific methods. Since this is true, there is nothing essentially impracticable in the task given to officers when they are ordered to confiscate and destroy 'intoxicating liquor.' But the legal definition of indecent literature is not fixed and objective; it is fluent and highly subjective. It differs from decade to decade, from year to year, from nation to nation, from town to town, from class to class, from age to age, from one person to the next. And there is this salient difference in the application of the two definitions: the presence of alcohol is sought in the liquor, but the presence of indecency is not sought in the book. It is sought in the mind of the reader of the book.

That is, indeed, the ultimate place in which to seek it, for there is nothing decent or indecent but thinking makes it so. It is notorious that even a renowned piece of sculptured marble which produces in one person a kind of religious tranquillity and philosophic contemplation, with a sense of the eternity of form and the transience of passion, may at the same instant excite in another beholder such shamefastness that he will cry out for fig leaves,

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 or such unruly emotions as, unchecked, may disrupt society.

Or, to take another case: I myself recently pictured, with what I thought were chaste strokes and in what I thought was a pure aesthetic mood, our jeune fille. But I could not conjecture the effect that it was destined to produce in the minds of the young, the innocent, the inexperienced: I find that Mr. H. L. Mencken speaks of this picture as 'lascivious.' What responsibility such facts impose upon the artist!

It is, furthermore, a puzzling paradox in the moral world that, as one progresses toward decency, one discovers that the number of objects which the sense of decency has to operate upon diminishes rather than multiplies, while to a person who has lost his sense of decency the universe bristles with indecent suggestion.

In recognition of these facts, jurymen who are to determine the quality of a disputable book are instructed in no scientific method, not even in a rule of thumb. No: they are instructed to conjecture whether a book is indecent by first conjecturing how it will affect young minds which are, conjecturally, open to the conjecturable influences of such a book. But jurymen and officers of the law, bold and enterprising as some of the latter are, cannot penetrate into minds to collect the evidence requisite for conviction under the law; and it is merely absurd to send them there.

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Yet it is entirely possible to condemn the law in its application to authors without for a moment denying the reality of the problem with which it is intended to cope. It is also quite possible to condemn the law without accepting more than a fraction of the case which the guild of authors have attempted to establish in their own behalf. In my opinion, the authors have taken up positions quite as untenable as those occupied by the reformers—positions from which, in the interest both of literature and of public morals, it is important that they should be dislodged.

It has perhaps never been true in Europe, it is no longer true in America, that it is 'easy to distinguish art from pornography.' It was true in America as long as our literature was mainly written by scholars and gentlemen with an adequate sense of the powers of their profession and of their responsibility to society for the exercise of it. It was true in America as long as our literature was written by members of a class to whom the life of the senses was an interest quite inferior and subordinate to the life of the mind and the imagination. It was true as long as artists did not concern themselves with pornography. And till this present generation, pornographic writing would have appeared to our chief American authors, with hardly an exception, as an interest perhaps of other lands, other times, other types of culture, but as an interest from them

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 and their land and their type of culture inconceivably remote.

Pornography is defined as a 'treatise on prostitutes,' or as 'obscene or licentious writing.'

When our literature passed from the hands of scholars and gentlemen into the hands of our barbarian artists of what Emerson called the 'Jacksonian rabble,' it lost much of the high seriousness, the decorum, and the impeccable decency characteristic of the New England school. It eventually enlisted the pens of numerous writers who repudiate responsibility to society, and who are far more interested in the life of the senses than in the life of the mind and the imagination. Among these have appeared several authors to whom the sexual life is the all-absorbing centre of interest, and who have devoted no inconsiderable skill to familiarizing us with the life of the prostitute, and to domesticating her, with her amateur sisters, in our literature.

Now, the life of these interesting creatures, who are beginning, as it were, to swarm about our firesides and to 'homestead' the vacant territory of our imaginations, may or may not be written in an obscene or licentious fashion. If these words are ever applicable to literature, they are plainly, in my opinion, applicable to some of the most praised and prosecuted books of recent years. But the question whether they are applicable does not depend in the least upon the artistic skill with which the books are written. It depends upon the effect which they are designed to produce. Art, strictly speaking, is

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 nothing but the means employed to produce a desired effect, and is not to be confused with beauty, which is the effect upon fine minds of fine art employed by fine artists. The difference between a filthy story told by a coal-heaver and a filthy story told by an artist is only the difference between expert pornography and inexpert pornography, when, as is often the case, the effect sought is the same. There is undeniably a streak of salacity in human nature, and some very eminent men of letters have from time to time, in the intervals of more noble occupation, permitted themselves to express it.

Certain critics and authors who are quite willing to have the coal-heaver's filthy story debarred from the mails, because it can be understood by coal-heavers, protest against debarring the filthy story of the artist, because only the highly sophisticated can understand it. I object to the discrimination, on democratic principles! I avow that it affects me, an 'equalitarian' of a sort, like a proposal to forbid the coal-heaver beer, because he can get drunk on it, but to allow the comfortable bond-holder champagne—not because he cannot get drunk on it, but because the coal-heaver cannot afford to get drunk on it. The 'morality' implicit in the discrimination reminds one of Falstaff's penitent resolution never to get drunk again except among gentlemen and such as fear God, and not among drunken knaves. In the presence of such moral subtleties, I become an old-fashioned angry upholder of the 'rights of man.' I declare that, if the sophisticated possess

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 a right to have their delight in the salacious gratified by a piece of expert pornography, then my poor coal-heaver has a right to have his delight in the salacious gratified by a piece of inexpert pornography.

But the warier critics avoid this ticklish position. They prefer a quicksand of a more plausible surface. Those who argue for the 'freedom of art' on high aesthetic grounds contend that the moral influence of works of art is vastly exaggerated. The influence of works of art, they declare, is artistic. Æsthetic experience, they assert, is unique in kind.

When one discusses the matter in this fashion, one is soon lost in a metaphysical mist; so let us return to our coal-heaver. What they contend is, that the effect of the coal-heaver's inartistic filthy story may be degrading, because it operates in the moral consciousness and may have practical consequences; but that the effect of the author's artistic filthy story may be disregarded, because it operates in the aesthetic consciousness and has no practical consequences.

Has anyone remarked how at variance this aesthetic theory is with the theory upon which a great part of the French, Russian, and English fiction of the last seventy-five years has been constructed? 'What is man?' ask the novelists from Flaubert and Zola and Bourget to Thomas Hardy and Gissing and George Moore. 'A hoop rolled by a whimsical boy,' 'clay on the potter's wheel,' 'a figure of wax under the modeler's thumb.' With

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Samuel Butler

Biographies

 * Samuel Butler (1915), a biography by Gilbert Cannan
 * Samuel Butler (1916), a biography by John Frederick Harris
 * Samuel Butler (1924), a biography by C. E. M. Joad
 * Samuel Butler (1921), a biography by Henry Festing Jones
 * Samuel Butler: Records and Memorials (1903), a biography published anonymously

Essays

 * "Samuel Butler" (1924), an essay by Stuart Pratt Sherman

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 such images, they have expressed their constant sense that he is the 'victim of circumstances,' the 'product of environment'; and more than one of them—for examples, Flaubert in Madame Bovary and Bourget in Le Disciple—have tellingly expressed their belief that literature is a decisive element of the environment, a potent factor in the circumstances.

The distinction between the moral and the aesthetic consciousness, so vehemently insisted upon by many contemporary critics,—with a suspicion that the 'freedom of art' depends upon maintaining it,—has, so far as I can discover, but slender support from modern psychology, and it is constantly belied by common experience. We find no independent bureaus in man for dealing separately with moral and æsthetic facts. The entire psychophysical organism receives them as a unit. Every image presented to the mind makes its record in the brain, and tends to produce an appropriate 'motor response.'

We are all by inheritance mimetic monkeys; we tend, like the untutored members of the A. E. F. in France, to imitate everything that we see and hear. There is tension of the vocal organs, even in silent reading; and our chests vibrate to the sounds of a symphony. The face of an impressionable coach involuntarily mirrors the actor speaking his lines at a rehearsal. Children, after reading the Gospels, play at crucifying their playmates.

As we grow older, we learn to check the overt

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 expression of these spontaneous responses of the nervous organism; but what we call an 'æsthetic response' appears to be only a practical response checked at a certain, or rather at a quite uncertain, point. The spontaneous response is still frequently recorded in dreams. A man to whom every kind of cruelty is abhorrent, having speculated in a waking hour with a kind of curious horror upon the kind of person who could have obeyed that injunction: 'Let him that is without sin among you cast the first stone,' dreams in the following night that he and another are engaged in casting stones upon some person in a pit; and wakes himself by the intensity of his aversion from the spontaneous and merely mimetic cruelty of his imagination.

In our waking hours, the check on the imagination, which prevents it from stimulating the nerves to a visible 'motor response,' is sometimes in this form: 'This is not real—I am in a theatre.' Often it takes the form of a moral consideration: 'I shall make a fool of myself.' 'What would people think of me?' The indeterminate moving line between practical conduct and so-called æsthetic experience depends upon moral and kindred 'inhibitions'; so that we may almost assert that our æsthetic experience is determined and, in a sense, created by our moral discipline.

But common experience proves that, in impressionable persons, the activity of nerves and imagination stimulated by works of art has the possessive and unopposable force of a dream, and controls the

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 physical organism, sometimes with quite inæsthetic consequences. Samuel Pepys records that the ravishing music, at a performance of 'The Virgin Martyr,' 'did wrap up my soul,' in pure æsthetic delight, and 'made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife.' The following passage from Wordsworth's Excursion is pure enough art, and should therefore be 'without consequences,' as the Croceans would say, 'in the practical sphere':—

But Crabb Robinson tells us that reading this passage brought on a fit of illness in William Blake—a 'stomach complaint which nearly killed him.' Wordsworth was a contemporary of Blake's; and I myself have been similarly affected by the works of some of my own contemporaries. One of the works of art which have most excited the suppressive agents puts me to sleep; but all the others which have come to my notice affect me somewhat like a glass of warm water and mustard. These violent effects may, however, also be produced by pieces of 'fossil literature' taken out of what Mr. Untermeyer calls 'the lifeless and literary storehouse' of the past. I have seen a sufficiently unemotional man, of fifty and upwards, driven from the theatre in blinding tears by the presentation of a dramatic work nearly twenty-five hundred years old—The

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 Trojan Women. And Professor Hatfield has recently argued, in the Publications of the Modern Language Association, that Scott's novel, Anne of Geierstein, had practical consequences in certain features of that very practical body, the Ku Klux Klan.

The Greek dramatists let their audience know that much rough and lustful business goes on in this world. The reason why they did not actually present on the stage Clytemnestra with her axe braining Agamemnon in his bath was, I suppose, that with their customary clearness of insight into human nature they perceived that æsthetic experience is seldom or never pure. The effect of that violent stimulus to the nerves and imagination would be incalculable. Some spectator with the image working in his brain might mimic that dreadful action in a waking dream. There is little reason for assuming that the moral check which prevents æsthetic experience from overflowing into practical conduct is more highly developed in us than it was in the Athenians. Our reading public is not so free from Barbarians and Helots that we can afford wholly to disregard the psychological facts which appear to have convinced the most 'æsthetic' of peoples that the publishers of works of art are among the chief makers of public morals.

On the contrary, we have still, and are likely to have for a long time to come, an immense reading public of extraordinary naïveté. I think it is a fact at the present time that the average American of considerable general intelligence and edu-

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 cation still, in the simplicity of his heart, looks upon authors as a superior class, with a quasipriestly function and responsibility. By the average man I mean, in this connection, the man or woman who habitually reads the 'best sellers' and the periodicals with a circulation of a million or so.

Incredible as it may seem to the 'blasé literati,' this average man ordinarily reads a book or magazine with the idea that it will shed some light on the problems of his inner or outer life, that it will instruct his emotions, and show him what to approve, and how to act. If the author's apparent likes and dislikes with reference to things in general harmonize pretty well with his own, he feels fortified and encouraged, and declares that it is a 'good book.'

He makes little distinction between an expository article and a work of fiction. He is so direct and simple in his responses that, if he praises a novel, he usually means that he likes the sort of people and the sort of society that the author has pictured. Ironical and satirical implications, unless they are terribly obvious, escape him. When, not long ago, I mentioned in print 'Mr. Hergesheimer's admirable Cytherea, ' —thinking of the mordant expression he had given to the feverish boredom which now affects a certain stratum of our 'citizenry,'—a really very well-read lady, nourished on 'good old English fiction,' flew at me in wrath, exclaiming: 'How dared you call that sort of society "admirable"?' It is astonishing how general such reactions are. On

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 another occasion, when I permitted myself in public to praise Mr. Bennett's picture of. The Five Towns, it was one of our distinguished women writers of fiction who, wishing to destroy me, asked the public to consider what my judgment was worth after praise of such disgusting towns.

In these circumstances,—and these are the circumstances of American authorship,—literature is a part and a tremendously impressive part of the environment of the mind. Its influence, though incalculable, is not in the slightest danger of being exaggerated. Its influence is immense. It is daily increasing. It is rapidly becoming 'the effective voice of the social government.' Just in proportion to its effectiveness as art, it takes possession of the emotions and the imagination of men, and thus controls the dynamic part of the public mind.

Now, to modify the controllable part of environment in the interest of public welfare is one of the noblest enterprises of statecraft. To attempt it is not an 'impertinence,' when it is attempted by men who understand the materials they are working with: it is a duty. Speculative writers, from Plato to Tolstoy, clearly perceiving the intimate connection between literature and public welfare, have, in jest or in earnest, proposed it as the duty of statecraft to control, with a rigor far beyond the wildest

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 dreams of the late Mr. Comstock, the publication and circulation of books.

I have argued that they and our own Platos and Tolstoys, propose the impossible when they propose the control of imaginative literature by legislative enactment. They have resorted to an improper and an ineffective instrument.

Must we then wholly abandon the attempt to modify this potent element of our environment, as quite uncontrollable? Other instruments of control have been suggested. Mr. Bennett thinks that if suppressive societies were suppressed, and if prosecutions were left to the police, then—authors would be reasonably safe! But what about the Public? A revival of the informal censorship once managed by publishers themselves might be proposed; possibly that informal censorship is still faintly in operation; yet the old-style publishers are giving way before authors of the new style; in the last analysis, few publishers are 'in business for the fun of it'; and the supreme question asked of the average submitted manuscript must be: 'Will it sell?' A body which exists for 'the furtherance of literature and the Fine Arts,' the American Academy, might be asked to designate a committee of men of letters to pass official judgment upon questionable books; and if that body desired to diminish its popularity, this would perhaps be an effective step in that direction.

I am sure that I shall be charged with coming to

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 a very feeble conclusion, perhaps to an impotent and hopeless conclusion, when I express my belief that the only proper instrument for undertaking the modification of the temper and character of our literature is an independent and dispassionate criticism. But if anyone declares that this instrument is more inadequate than the law, I shall retort, as Mr. Chesterton retorts to those who declare that Christianity has failed: 'It has never been tried.' Of course, the statement is not quite true, yet it is true enough to bear consideration. It is true that independent and dispassionate criticism of the so-called 'unprintable' books, criticism in the common interest of publishers, authors, and readers is now almost non-existent. Instead, we have violent partisan combats between champions of litera ture who express their contempt for public morals, and champions of public morals who express their contempt for literature.

The confusion of these conflicts, in which no principle is established, will never end until a conception of public welfare that includes the interests of both literature and morality is restored and reintroduced as a mediative and conciliatory agency between the contending parties. Criticism's need of fixing that conception is as elementary as navigation's need of the North Star.

The next elementary step is to establish on firm grounds the intricate inter-relationship of so-called æsthetic and so-called moral experience—to estab-

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 lish what one is tempted to call the essential unity of experience in the psycophysical organism. This is not a task for the police. It is not a task for suppressive societies.

After that difficulty has been disposed of, criticism, thinking of public morals, may propose to itself some such questions as these: Granting that literature has a profound influence upon conduct, are you prepared to say, with reference to any considerable number of definite cases, precisely what the nature of that influence is? Have you made, for example, any accurate discrimination between the effects produced in the psychophysical organism by the various sorts of literature in which the sex life and sexual emotion are more or less freely displayed? Are you sure that 'shocking' books are always harmful to public morals, or do public morals occasionally require to be shocked? Is it conceivable that candor, so 'brutal' that it employs words which are 'obscene,' and relates facts which are 'disgusting,' may be prophylactic—may provide, indeed, that vaccine against moral infection which reformers are seeking? Is it clear, for example, that it is less evilly inciting to young minds to refer to a prostitute as a 'daughter of joy,' as delicate euphemists refer to her, than to speak of her as a 'whore,' as Shakespeare speaks of her?

After endeavoring for a time in these matters to see 'the thing as in itself it really is,' criticism,

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 thinking directly of the interests of literature, and only indirectly of public morals, may propose to itself some such questions as these: Assuming that the exhibition of sex and the treatment of illicit passion are innocuous to public morals, is it in the interest of literature for authors to enter into rivalry with one another for honors in the field of pornographic art? Is it wise to create a situation in which no novel will sell which does not pungently depict illicit passion? Is there not a danger that American authors who now specialize in this subject will, as they grow older, find themselves obliged, like certain of their European colleagues, to present a 'salacious' scene at the end of every chapter, in order to hold the attention of over-stimulated and jaded readers? Is it not true that, if you turn too high a light upon passages of this sort, you kill the interest of everything else in your book, so that readers will pass over your beautiful writing with such blurred and dull vision as men turn on the loveliest landscape, after staring with naked eyes at the sun? If you habitually present what you call 'sex' as sensual passion or as disgusting animalism, are you not imprisoning yourself in an hallucination and speaking infamously of that power, which Spenser, contemplating it from another point of view, spoke of as

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 All these questions, I suspect, are a little over the head of the New York policeman. They are problems for an independent and dispassionate criticism. Unless we are prepared to answer them, we are not yet properly prepared to say what books are 'unprintable.'

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Though the table of contents in Mr. Brownell's American Prose Masters indicates that the book contains but six masters, a reflective reader soon perceives that it contains a seventh, to whom the rest are indebted for no small part of the interest which they seem to possess in their own right. It is the fate of most celebrities, soon after their vogue is over, to be ushered respectfully into an honorable but dusky chamber which has more the air of a museum than of a living room. The warm appreciation of a living classic cools swiftly, in the presence of his marble effigy, to cold commemoration. Teachers and young pupils stroll listlessly through the dusky hall of fame, and, pausing for a moment before some "pallid bust," remark with perfunctory reverence, "This is Cooper," or "That is Emerson." Then they pass on—without stirring the accumulating dust of oblivion. But now and then a master, visiting the "museum," pauses before the same figures and begins to speak understandingly, with special knowledge, with acute discrimination of innumerable neglected values. It is as

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 if the place were suddenly flooded with light. The shadowy shapes regain their sharpness of contour and recover their jutting boldness of feature and their animated expression. They seem once more to have something to say to us; and we gather responsively around, rejoicing to feel the power of great writers, and rejoicing, too, perhaps, in an illusory sense of our own perceptiveness.

"Oh, yes," we exclaim, "Cooper is clearly one of our distinguished assets—we mustn't forget Cooper. Prolix, to be sure; but then diffuseness is an element in his illusion. He hadn't Scott's rich background, but the alliance of romance with reality in his tales, his general and personal interest in the life he depicted, make his account of it solider art, give his romance even more substance and meaning than Scott's historiography. And then consider his actual 'contributions.' His Indians were unprecedented, and they remain unsurpassed for vigor and fidelity. Balzac praised his painting of woods and sea to the skies. Thackeray picked half a dozen of his characters as the equals of Scott's men, and he called La Longue Carabine 'one of the great prize men of fiction.' Add to all this his solid merits as publicist and patriotic critic. Between 1825 and 1850, you remember, New England, always the apex, had become also the incubus of our civilization, and called loudly for the note-taking of a chiel from beyond its borders. Cooper performed that service. To him we owe it that not only American authorship but American literature

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 has been from his day of national rather than sectional character."

As is obvious, I have just reread Mr. Brownell's "Cooper," with a in hand; and I am astonished to discover how many points he has given me to reflect upon, how many paths he has suggested for excursions. I am grateful to him now for revealing the relation between prolixity and illusion; in a world where prolixity is a predominant quality, that revelation alone is worth an essay. I am tormented with a desire to reread not merely the Leatherstocking Tales, but also the Waverley Novels, and to compare my middle-aged with my juvenile impressions of Scott's men and Cooper's men. I should like to go thoroughly into that interesting matter of Cooper's early and long vogue in France and his influence upon Balzac. I wish a complete account of the Indian in American fiction and a similar survey of American tales of the sea. I have a lively desire to investigate the origin and development of the anti-New England conscience before 1850. But—to make a conclusion rather than an end to the desires wakened by Mr. Brownell's method of dealing with American classics, I have never read in this book without saying to myself rather sternly: "It is high time that young Americans should begin the serious study of their own literature; and here is a guide who shows us how the task should be undertaken."

Since the English language became for the ma-

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 jority of English-speaking people the main avenue to the culture of the world, the literature of England has received the attention that it deserves. From childhood to old age we read English books. Furthermore, from the primary grades through the graduate school students examine English texts grammatically, historically, and critically—with some part of the seriousness which the ancient classics once commanded. American "classical" literature, however, remains for most of us a mere recreation when it does not become a fading recollection of our youth. In childhood we memorize bits of Longfellow and Lowell; we read Cooper and Poe and Hawthorne at the age when we are playing Indians. Perhaps in early adolescence we are helped by some aspiring high-school teacher through an essay of Emerson. But when we go to college, we put away our American classics as we put away our algebra and our Cæsar. Whatever taste and judgment in literary matters we attain are formed by English rather than American masters. We may carry into later life a certain affection for the native books that pleased our nonage; but we seldom subject them to critical scrutiny or test them with our disciplined powers of appreciation.

There was, of course, a period within the memory of our grandfathers when it was possible to exhaust the resources of an American library; and there are among our countrymen to-day persons of considerable cultivation who fancy that all the native books which are worthy of their atten-

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 tion could still be put on a five-foot shelf. This notion is becoming a little archaic. In the course, of the last hundred years our literature has outgrown its youth and poverty. It is abundant, and it is becoming mature to the verge of sophistication. It has acquired a history, it has developed critical tendencies, it has participated in successive movements, it has produced schools and has evolved styles, it has discovered wide ranges of new material, it has made significant innovations in form, it has even put forth dialectal branches from a sturdily rooted vernacular stock. It has been subject to many influences, but it has also been widely influential. It exhibits all the resources and powers of a national literature. At no very distant period in the future its bulk and diversity will be so immense that Americans will either be obliged to give it the central place in their programme of reading or they will be obliged to remain ignorant of their own national culture and its chief instrument. At the present time it is a conservative estimate to say that nine-tenths of our university teachers are more competent to discuss the literature of England than the literature of America; and the actual quantity—not to speak of the quality—of instruction provided in the higher study of our own literature is relatively insignificant.

This is obviously not a happy state of affairs for native letters; yet this condition is the natural consequence of careless acquiescence in the contention that American must always be a part of English

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 literature. It is perhaps wiser to accept this contention than to listen to those revolutionaries who wish to cut themselves off without a shilling of their inheritance, and who sternly bid our English ancestors never darken our doors again. But our national literature will never hold its due place nor perform its proper work in our consciousness till we reverse the orthodox contention and declare instead that the older English literature must forever be a part of American literature. It will always be too soon to substitute our own authors for Chaucer or Spenser or Shakespeare or Milton. They belong to the common past of all the great branches of the English-speaking peoples. They are an essential and glorious part of our common literary history, just as ante-Reformation theologians are a part of both Roman and Anglican ecclesiastical history.

Shakespeare and Milton are as important to us as they are to Englishmen. Yet as between Jeremy Taylor and Cotton Mather, for example, it begins to be clear that one is of high importance to the English and of relatively little importance to us. As we advance into the eighteenth century, the shifting of values becomes even more noticeable. We need not discriminate between Gulliver's Travels and Franklin's Autobiography, for both are classics of the world's literature, and we cannot afford to neglect either of them. But it is not too soon to declare that the collected writings of Franklin belong to the culture of an educated American, while the collected writings of Swift have pretty certainly

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 a less valid claim on his attention than the collected writings of Voltaire. It is not too soon to declare that, if a choice must be made, the American student should choose to be familiar with the Federalist rather than the Letters of Junius, with Irving rather than Leigh Hunt, with Emerson rather than Carlyle, with Thoreau rather than Richard Jefferies, with Whitman rather than William Morris, with Mark Twain rather than Oscar Wilde, with Henry James rather than George Moore, and with. Theodore Roosevelt rather than Queen Victoria.

In every case that I have mentioned the preference of a native writer would also, I believe, be the preference of a greater personality; and, in such cases, the arguments in favor of an American choice are conclusive. It is only by using our native literature, by keeping it current, by making it saturate the national consciousness—it is only so that we can make our lengthening history serve and enrich and inform us, and give to our culture the momentum of a vital tradition. But suppose the choice to be between an English author of the first rank in his kind and an American author of the second or third rank in the same kind. Is it not an unsound "cultural" policy to select for study the inferior author? Most eminent American teachers appear to think so. Believers in intellectual free trade, they have long ridiculed the notion of "protected industries" in the field of letters, and have united with English critics in deriding "Cooper, the American Scott,"

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 "Bryant, the American Wordsworth," "Miller, the American Byron." Insensibly they have slipped into the assumption that for every American author there must necessarily be a superior English counterpart. In their determination to show no soft indulgence to native writers, to avoid all chauvinistic infatuations, they have "leaned over backwards"—till at the present time our own authors are complaining, not without grounds, that, in the educational field at least, the English has become the "protected" branch of authorship among us.

But to return to our question:—Is it not an unsound policy to select for study an inferior author, merely because he is American? A Yankee answer to this question would be: Is it not an unsound policy to assume that an author, merely because he is American, must be inferior? And now for an answer which I have tried to make straightforward. I cannot make it entirely simple and at the same time adequate, for it requires careful qualification. It is generally an unsound policy to select for uncritical assimilation an American author who is the inferior of an available and equivalent author, whether he be English, Italian, or Greek, or beside whatever national banner he may stand beneath the flag of the republic of letters. If the best authors were always available, and if they always supplied our needs, there would be small reason for reading any other than the best. But as a matter of fact, the best Greek and Italian authors, say, are, to most American students, only imperfectly available; and foreign

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 authors, even the best modern authors of England—accessible though these are and closely related—are imperfect equivalents for the native authors that we need, to express for us the individual adventures and the social sense of men and women who live under our own national conditions. "Best," after all, even in the field of art, is a term which cannot be defined without some reference to what art is so fond of denying to itself—its purpose. When an American reader wishes an intimate picture of American society there can be no best book but an American book. There is always this strong special reason for knowing the literary expression of our national life, even though it be immature, unsatisfactory, and inferior of that of other nations.

The danger involved in assigning to American literature a much larger place in our culture than it now holds is obviously that in seeking to know ourselves and our own place in the world we may grotesquely overvalue our own things. This is a danger which is to be encountered, I believe, not carelessly yet unhesitatingly. It may be safely encountered only if it is met with an adequately equipped open-eyed criticism. Hence the grave importance of criticism at the present juncture in America. To embrace our native literature for better or for worse implies knowing it and valuing it for its virtues, whatever they are; but it need not in the least require us to shut our eyes to its shortcomings. On the contrary, we shall find, as our addiction to American letters increases, that we

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 shall grow more and more exacting; we shall "discover," as Mr. Brownell says, "new requirements in the ideal"—to which I would add: if we have an ideal. There are, indeed, at the present time many indications that our proverbial American hypersensitiveness to adverse comment on our institutions, our society, and our literature is at length beginning to yield ground before a new spirit of somewhat drastic self-examination and self-censure. In its popular manifestations this new spirit is as yet mainly iconoclastic, uncertain of its standards, and chiefly admirable, perhaps, in its readiness to give and receive hard knocks in the contest for solid footing. It is not in any sense an ancestor-worshiping spirit. Its temper is so depreciatory and its general attitude toward the past so contemptuously irreverent that all danger of overvaluing our hereditary possessions seems for the time being quite to have disappeared. It is a spirit of potentiality which may under wise guidance become a spirit of power.

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In the critical movement which seeks to perfect American literature and make it an adequate expression and mold of American character, there are two curiously antagonistic parties, one of which flies the banner of culture and the other the banner of nature. One party holds that we shall never achieve adequate national expression until we have received the inspiration and mastered the technic of traditional art. The other party holds that we shall never achieve any national expression unless we follow our instincts and fearlessly utilize our fresh experience. Both are right, but each tends to stand apart belligerently upon its own rightness. The leaders of one party sulk, like Achilles, in the universities; the leaders of the other party rail, like Thersites, in the newspapers. "Academics!" cry the journalists. "Barbarians!" cry the professors. The antagonism is acute, and the consequences of this division are a tendency toward sterility in the Party of Culture, and a tendency toward ignorance and rawness in the Party of Nature.

What the situation calls for is a mediator who understands and values that which both parties

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 desire, and who can unite their complimentary virtues in a common purpose. Mr. Brownell has every important qualification for this imperative task of American criticism—except one. In spite of the fact that he is not a professor but was once a journalist—which should disarm the suspicions of every barbaric heart; and in spite of the fact that he has been a lifelong friend and professional counsellor of authors and artists, he appears to lack the confidence of the Party of Nature. This, I think it can be demonstrated, he deserves no less than the confidence of the Party of Culture, which he has long enjoyed. The evidence may be examined in detail in the six distinguished volumes which he has contributed to American critical literature, as follows: French Traits, 1889; French Art, 1892; Victorian Prose Masters, 1901; American Prose Masters, 1909; Criticism, 1914; and Standards, 1917.

We have other literary critics who have written as learnedly, more voluminously, and perhaps on a wider range of topics; and we have other critics who have brought their personalities to play upon their public with more of what is often accepted without scrutiny as "inspirational power." But I doubt whether any other is more abundantly supplied with those general ideas in which the permanent value of critical writing largely resides; and I am not acquainted with any other who has quite so pertinently, intelligently, and intelligibly applied his general ideas to the real cultural problems of our time—I mean the definition of culture's own

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 standards, the creation of a cultural ideal, the description of culture's business in a modern democracy. In these six books, if anywhere, American criticism is ripe. Here one finds extensive and varied learning, unintermitting intelligence, fastidious taste, an exacting artistic conscience, and high technical expertness, engaged in the service of reality and modernity. If I were asked where in American letters a student can obtain, with least admixture of the irrelevant, that discipline of taste and that general sense of initiation which an earlier generation sought in the works of Ruskin, Arnold, and Pater, I should say in the works of Mr. Brownell.

Our first great apostle of modern culture was Emerson. He performed for our grandfathers in America the service which Goethe performed for Germany, Mme. de Staël for France, Coleridge and Carlyle in their fashion for England, till they were "gathered to the bosom of political and social reaction." He initiated them into the modern spirit. He liberated their minds from conventional and shackling forms of thought. He set their original powers to work upon a native and national culture. In many respects he remains our greatest critic, our most fecundating and creative mind in the field of letters. But Emerson established his point of view and developed his methods before the main results of intellectual effort in the nineteenth century were fully accessible. He has suffered a decline in influence attributable to the presence in his work of the

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 disjecta membra of an old-fashioned metaphysical philosophy and attributable still more to his want of a modern critical method and matter to work upon. In 1870 Charles Eliot Norton, an American dedicated to "the study of perfection" who had enjoyed intimate relations with the leaders of culture in England and in Europe, lamented that Emerson was losing his grip and that no one was rising to take his place. "No best man with us," he declared, "has done more to influence the nation than Emerson—but the country has in a sense outgrown him. He was the friend and helper of its youth; but for the difficulties and struggles of its manhood we need the wisdom of the reflective and rational understanding, not that of the intuitions." (My italics.)

It is clear to any reader of Norton's Letters that he would have liked to see Lowell succeed Emerson as leader of the American intelligentsia; but it is also clear, I think, that Lowell in some respects disappointed him. Even when on the occasion of Lowell's death Norton strives to give the fullest possible emphasis to the nation's loss, there is a latent note of dissatisfaction in his tribute: "He has done more than any man of our generation to maintain the level of good sense and right feeling in public affairs." One expects an intellectual leader of the first rank to do more than merely maintain "the level of good sense and right feeling in public affairs." The suggestion is that Lowell failed to rise above an admirable mediocrity; that, industrious reader though he was, he lacked the energy, the

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 courage, and even the sincerity of mind requisite for an elevation of the level. What did he do for the level of private thinking? Even poor Clough, according to Norton, had an intellectual integrity which Lowell lacked. "He was too intellectually sincere to hold the old beliefs in spite of himself, as Lowell tries to do." A docile man of the world himself, Norton remarks that when Lowell appeared in Paris he "managed to make the Quais and the Rue de Rivoli mere continuations of Brattle Street. I wish he had come abroad ten years ago." A genial and lovable man Lowell was and a fine example of American manhood; yet in the eyes of one of the friends who loved him best he was something too much of the flattered don, of the self-indulgent antiquarian, and of the plausible afterdinner speaker ever to feel the necessity of bringing himself and his culture thoroughly abreast of the modern world. This verdict, reluctantly arrived at, and collectible from Norton's letters, was publicly reaffirmed by Mr. Greenslet in his Life of Lowell, 1905, and again in a brilliantly authoritative fashion by Mr. Brownell himself in American Prose Masters.

The place in the history of American culture formerly occupied by Emerson might have been taken in succession by Lowell, had he ever brought his fine talents, as Mr. Hoover would say, "up to the emery-wheel of competition," had he strenuously kept himself in touch with "the best knowledge, the best ideas of his time." As a matter of

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 fact, Norton, with little of his friend's popularizing power, was a more progressive link between Emerson's time and ours than was Lowell, because his culture was less musty and his intellectual integrity was more earnest. When his mind had gripped what it took for truth, it did not let go out of what it took for good nature. Those whom he could reach in personal contact or by his amazingly faithful and sympathetic correspondence Norton sustained.

But in general, with the decline of Emerson, American seekers for light were obliged to find their account in Arnold, Sainte-Beuve, Taine, Ruskin, and Pater. They had to go abroad. Lowell, to be sure, had praised old books and nature and patriotism with delightful cleverness and charm. "He liked whatever was sure and wholesome," says Mr. Brownell with a touch of malice, "and eulogized it on all occasions with the zest of a discoverer." But for our conceptions of the historical method; for applications of evolutionary theory to the study of belles-lettres; for the doctrine of the "milieu" and the "Zeitgeist"; for our notions of the importance in culture of painting and the plastic arts; for those quickening watchwords—"conscience in intellectual matters," "study of perfection," "urbanity," "amenity," "sweet reasonableness," "grand style," "Hellenism," "curiosity," "free play of mind," and the rest; and for copious illustration of criticism considered as, in itself, a fine art, we turned, we were obliged to turn, to England and to France.

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 Since the appearance of Mr. Brownell's books, it is no longer necessary to turn to England and France for initiation into modern criticism. He does not begin where Lowell left off; his first book, French Traits, published in the year following Arnold's death, begins where Arnold left off. It probably never occurred to him, as it has occurred to some of the leaders of the Party of Nature, that a certain novelty of position might be achieved by denying all the axioms on which the criticism of the nineteenth century is founded. He took it for granted that the only novelty worth striving for would lie in the path of a critic who came fully abreast of his great predecessors, and then went forward in the general direction which they had indicated. Sporadic reversion to the primitive, romantic truancies to barbarism, never allured him. He took it for granted that the "humanization of man in society" is the established grand social object of the arts and letters, just as modern men of science take for granted evolution and gravitation. "The business of intelligent criticism," says Mr. Brownell, "is to be in touch with everything."

Accordingly, one finds his books saturated with everything relevant that preceded them. "I emphasize "everything relevant"; for the extensive and accurate scholarship which he has at his command he never employs like a pedant or like an antiquarian, but always like an artist. He loathes the irrelevant. He has Greek poetry and criticism at his service; English, French, and Italian history;

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 the evolution of painting and plastic art; European social life and manners, and an acquaintance with American, English, and French literatures adequate, I should say, to qualify him for a professorial chair in any one of the three literatures. Yet his wide and various learning is always actually in service; it illuminates his "special field," the special field of all vital criticism, namely, the contemporary scene; it comes to a focus, as all sound and enduring art must, and perpetually does—no matter what the date of its origin—in the present hour.

Let us take for illustration French Traits, An Essay in Comparative Criticism. Mr. Brownell knows everything that foreigners have said about France. He also knows France. He has not studied it like Emerson, who said that Americans go to Europe to be Americanized; nor like Lowell, who made the Quais and the Rue de Rivoli "mere continuations of Brattle Street." He went to France, as Arnold went, as "a merchant of light," to discover its characteristic virtues and powers and superiorities and, so far as possible, to bring them home for the use of his own countrymen. Arnold's exploration of French culture was, however, mainly literary and educational, and his stimulating recommendation of French virtues was, except in the educational field, fragmentary. Mr. Brownell, after long and profound immersion in

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 his subject, arrives at a central conception of the French national genius which in his introductory pages he presents in the form of a thesis as follows:

The thesis thus announced Mr. Brownell sustains in a succession of extraordinarily penetrating chap-

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 ters on Morality, Intelligence, Sense and Sentiment, Manners, Women, The Art Instinct, The Provincial Spirit, and Democracy. One sees the cathedrals as the "grandiose links in the chain which unites the Revolution to the twelfth-century communal movement for equality." One follows the path that leads from Notre Dame de Paris to the Nouvel Opéra. One perceives the essential continuity of national effort from the Merovingian epoch to "the gayety, the bonhomie, the bright graciousness of a Parisian or provincial crowd." The book is consummately composed. One knows from point to point where one is and whither one is going. Perfect lucidity and firmness of design are united with great richness of detail; for the detail is always subordinated to the total intended effect.

If Mr. Brownell had limited his purpose strictly to displaying the relation between the traditional "instinct" of the French people and their characteristic qualities and defects, he would still have given us the most valuable American book about France that I know anything about—the book, that is which tells us most of that which is best worth knowing. But French Traits is also an "essay in comparative criticism." There are illuminating side flashes upon France from Germany, England, Italy, and Spain, but the national traits which are steadily present in Mr. Brownell's mind for comparison are the American traits. The parallel thesis which he develops by implication is, that America embodies

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 the individualistic instinct, and that the characteristic qualities and defects of her art and letters and morals and manners are consequences of the individualistic instinct. The book comes to its burning focus in the penultimate chapter on "Democracy" and in the final chapter on "New York after Paris," in which he deals with the defects of our civilization with a cutting candor which some of our young people imagine was unknown before 1920. Let us take, for example, this paragraph on our Babbittian activities:

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 With this picture of bustling American ennui, which the fiction of recent years has now made so familiar to us, Mr. Brownell's picture of French gayety of heart and intellectual vivacity is in rather painful contrast. Many of our contemporary social doctors diagnose our malady as "too much democracy," and prescribe with various sugarings of the pill an aristocratic reaction, an injection of the superman philosophy, or a revival of the Arnoldian doctrine of "the saving remnant." Now the "saving remnant" is the one Arnoldine doctrine which, in its social and political applications, Mr. Brownell rejects. "We have a 'remnant' of our own," he declares in his essay on Arnold, "whose activities instead of exalting our esteem of 'remnants' tends to make us suspicious of them." "The attractiveness of the doctrine," he remarks with malign acuteness in Standards, "must be measured by the character of the remnant itself—in our case certainly hardly worth the sacrifice of the rest of the nation to achieve." In both these passages there is more than a tincture of irony; for Mr. Brownell is himself a philosophical democrat, and his own measure of national success is simply presented in this sentence from the chapter on "Democracy" in French Traits: "There is by general admission more happiness enjoyed by more people in France than in any other European country."

The happiness enjoyed by the mass of the French people Mr. Brownell attributes to the genuineness of their democracy. The real substance of well-being

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 he finds more evenly distributed among them than among us. "The people, from top to bottom, are far more perfectly humanized than elsewhere. Equality has been such a practical education for them that even the ignorant have attained that intelligence which is the end of formal education in greater measure than the corresponding classes of the most highly educated portions of Prussia itself."

The correction, for us, which this state of affairs suggests to Mr. Brownell is a return to our own religion and philosophy of democracy and a fresh effort to fulfil its promises. "It is perfectly certain," he declares, "that but for Jefferson's French philosophy, called then as now demagogic Quixotism, we should have had as short-lived a democratic republic as Hamilton prophesied and endeavored to compass. Our next epoch made a nation of us, and crystallized the spirit of nationality in democratic forms. But nothing is more significant of the discredit into which democracy as our ideal has fallen among us than the way in which this formative period of the nation's growth has been obscured by the struggle with slavery which immediately followed it. . . . Democratic philosophy nearly perished. It ceased to be propagated among 'the best people,' as they are called. It lost its hold on the mass of intelligence, on the newspapers, on the college graduates, on all those who had not an especial capacity for keeping their heads."

Let the curious person take this chapter on

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 "Democracy," add to it the incidental discussion of the subject in the essay on "Emerson," and then compare the stimulus to thought that he receives from it with the stimulus that he finds in Lowell's "Democracy" or in Arnold's "Democracy," and he will feel for himself, I believe, the decisive superiority of Mr. Brownell's treatment. How little "academic" this chapter is, or indeed for that matter, how little "academic" is the spirit of the entire book—how steadily and with a central sweep of its wisdom it drives at practice, I can best suggest, perhaps, by a final quotation:

Mr. Brownell's second book, French Art, 1892, may be regarded, like French Traits, as establishing a new and difficult standard for the American critic. Its significance for us may perhaps be in-

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 creased if one recalls the fact that the first chair of the history of art in America was established for Charles Eliot Norton in 1875 (seven years after Ruskin's election to the newly founded Slade professorship at Oxford), previous to which time the study of the arts had, in Norton's words, "been relegated to professional artists or to mere dilettanti, and the idea that a complete and satisfactory education could not be obtained without some knowledge of their character and history, and without such culture of the æsthetic faculties as the study of them might afford, appeared strange and inacceptable to many even of the most—enlightened thinkers on the subject of the education of youth." The number of American literary critics capable of writing a critical, historical survey of French or English or American art is not yet excessively numerous. But in France to-day, Mr. Brownell tells us in Criticism, 1914, "no literary critic with a tithe of Sainte-Beuve's authority would be likely to incur the genuine compassion expressed for Sainte-Beuve, when he ventured to talk about art, by the Goncourts in their candid Diary."

French Art traces the evolution of French painting from Claude and Poussin to Degas; and in similar fashion the evolution of French sculpture from Claux Sluters to Rodin—to whom, significantly, the book is dedicated. Neither intimate acquaintance with the galleries of Europe nor technical expertness is prerequisite to the intelligent and appreciative reading of this book. Art, as Mr.

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 Brownell presents it, is only one of the languages or modes of expression at the disposal of the cultivated spirit which animates the various epochs of history. One who has penetrated to this general spirit through one language readily learns to "translate."

In a sense French Art reaffirms the thesis of French Traits—systematically elaborating the earlier chapter on "The Art Instinct." "More than that of any other modern people," begins the argument, "French art is a national expression"; and the rest of the book is the demonstration of that initial propositonproposition [sic]. Incidentally or concurrently it is one of the most illuminating discussions ever written of the powers and virtues of a great tradition. Finally, it is a beautiful illustration throughout of intelligence energetically and scrupulously, and I think successfully, applied to understanding and judging a great variety of works to which frequently the critic feels but slight emotional response.

Of French art in general Mr. Brownell is very far from being an unqualified admirer. In the æsthetic field, the French appear to him to be characterized by disciplined taste and high technical competence, rather than by high imaginative inspiration. "We may say, from Poussin to Puvis de Chavannes, from Clouet to Meissonier, taste—a refined and cultivated sense of what is sound, estimable, competent, reserved, satisfactory, up to the mark, and above all, elegant and distinguished—has

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 been at once the arbiter and the stimulus of excellence in French painting."

Among our younger critics at the present time it is little the custom to expend any effort on understanding what one does not admire. The current fashion is to ignore what fails immediately to please or else to mispresent it—with malice or ignorance or with both malice and ignorance. A critic who departs from this fashion and does candid justice to an adversary is at once under suspicion of having espoused his adversary's cause. Discrimination is become the Unpardonable Sin. Mr. Brownell's justice has accordingly confused many people with regard to his own position. He is, for example, nowadays commonly spoken of as a "classicist" or as "mere traditionalist," an upholder of "the academic"—of course in the bad sense. What is the evidence? Nothing but this: he has written with unquestionable insight of classical art and the disciplinary power of tradition. Hear him on the value of tradition and acquaintance with antecedent artists:

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 "Away with him!" exclaim our hasty leaders of the Party of Nature. "How can any one who pretends to see such virtues in tradition be anything but a traditionalist?" A question, to which the answer is: No one can—unless he possess critical poise. If he does possess critical poise, however, he is capable of observing with Mr. Brownell: "The peril of the pursuit of perfection is inanity, the peril of nature-worship is eccentricity. Opposite temperaments will always differ as to the comparative value of the two." As for tradition, furthermore: "Everything depends upon the way in which one makes use of his patrimony. There is an eternal opposition between using it in a routine and mechanical way, drawing the interest on it, so to speak, from time to time on the one hand, and on the other reinvesting it according to the dictates of one's own feeling and faculty. This latter is what every great artist has done. . . . It is what Rodin has done with what the forerunners of Greece and Italy devised him. It is exactly what the Institute sculpture does not do." A mere academician would scent something like heresy here.

Among the obiter dicta on the critic's duty scattered throughout this book none is more devoutly to be commended to contemporary attention than this: "It is a sure mark of narrowness and defective powers of perception to fail to discover the point of view of what one disesteems."

As a matter of fact, the so-called classical art of the French impresses Mr. Brownell as splendidly

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 null; it leaves him cold; it affects him as inane. He does not relish, though he recognizes, the virtues of the classical period till he discovers them transformed, disguised, but still a controlling force for form and measure, beneath the passion and color and romantic "suggestiveness" of Géricault, Delacroix, and Millet. But he is no sworn romanticist either. The temper of his mind is intensely modern, and modern, I venture to say, with a kind of passionate loyalty, which, for its own part, has done with dispellable illusions, which craves only reality. "The entire energy of the era is concentrated," he declares, "upon what is to be discerned in, argued from, and inspired by the tangible, the real, the substantial"; and in that realistic striving of the era he has desired to be a part. He dedicates his book to Rodin, surely not because he loves the smooth academic perfection symbolized, for example, in Mr. Kenyon Cox's "Tradition," but because he responds to "life, personality, originality, vigor, intensity, variety—the best in modern art." It is the false, as he says somewhere, and not the real which is antithetical to the ideal; and his own ideal in art is, I believe, clearly an imaginative realism.

A critic who works with any seriousness and consistency inevitably provides us with the materials for constructing his own ideal artist, his ideal man of letters. In the two books which we have exam-

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 ined we have seen Mr. Brownell bringing the history of French society to a focus in modern democracy and the history of French art to a focus in modern realism. Turning now to his more strictly literary studies, we find him bringing them sharply to bear upon the age in which he has lived. Though an index to his works might serve as a directory to "the best that has been thought and said in the world," he has collected the light from all the luminaries of his intellectual heavens and centered it upon the authors included in his two companion volumes, Victorian Prose Masters and American Prose Masters; and these authors were all of the nineteenth century. They are not, of course, all the men and women of the age who have touched us deeply; but they afford, on the whole, an adequate representation of the literary forces in England and America which have made us what we are. They are sufficient, at any rate, to enable us to indicate clearly the principal features of Mr. Brownell's ideal man of letters. Alike from his reasoned commendations and his reasoned condemnations, one perceives that his ideal man of letters is distinguished by the following traits: truth of substance, intelligent and frequent use of his reason, breadth of culture, the spiritual refinement of his democracy, a high and imaginative seriousness, a sense for form, and a style urbane and adequate to its purposes.

When Mr. Brownell finds a majority of these features present in a single author, as in Thack-

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 eray and Arnold in England and Emerson in America, his presentation of the character is finely appreciative and attains a communicable glow of admiration. But one observes that he applies pretty consistently all his tests to all the cases that appear in his court; and the ordeal is a severe one. If the candidate for glory fails on two or three of the cardinal points, as Henry James and George Meredith do, he receives a sharply discriminating verdict. But if he fails on a majority of them, as Poe does, no seductions of style nor brilliance of ratiocinative power can save him; he leaves the court with only the rags of his honors. It would be profitable to examine closely the structure and the detail of these essays; for the structure stands examination, and inspection of the detail can only discover the scrupulosity of its finish, We must content ourselves with a few crucial instances.

Of all the writers of prose fiction Thackeray is manifestly the favorite. The essential soundness and sweetness of his character counts for him. The "effortless ease and simplicity" of his style counts for him. But what counts most decisively for him is this:

He was above all else a lover of truth. The love of truth was with him, indeed, less a sentiment than a passion. It absorbed his mind and inspired its activity. To the moral temperament thus attested falsehood of all kinds seemed the one thing in the universe worth the evocation of militant energy. The exposure of sham enlisted all his artistic faculty.

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 He pursued it with the most searching subtlety ever devoted to a definite aim in all his books. The villain of all his stories is the hypocrite.

I suppose a critic of the strict æsthetic camp would say that Thackeray loved truth because he was an artist. Mr. Brownell, for whom there is neither beauty nor goodness without truth, appears to say that he was an artist because he loved truth and had a fresh vision of it; and that seems to my own sense less like standing the facts on their heads. Keeping the facts right side up does not hinder Mr. Brownell from perceiving the mere æsthetic usefulness of truth as "artistic material":

If one bears in mind Mr. Brownell's almost unqualified admiration for Thackeray's truth of substance and for his effortless ease and simplicity of style, and if one also recalls the other features of his ideal man of letters, it will be evident that his

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 verdicts on the other writers of prose fiction are notably consistent and in accordance with reason. George Eliot receives her qualified diploma with special mention for truth and high seriousness: "No other novelist gives one such a poignant, sometimes such an insupportable sense that life is immensely serious, and no other, in consequence, is surer of being read, and read indefinitely, by serious readers." Cooper, as we have seen, receives a certificate for "truth of substance." Hawthorne, on the other hand, is drastically, and, I think, a bit harshly, reduced as a classic of American letters on the ground of his romantic insubstantiality and his fatalistic confidence in an indolent "genius," resulting in an inadequate culture. Poe is likewise reduced on the same charge and with the additional charge of moral vacuity.

The two novelists whose gravely dubious awards best attest Mr. Brownell's critical integrity are George Meredith and Henry James—both dedicated to truth, as it was given them to see the truth; both highly active intelligences; both distinguished representatives of the Party of Culture, and both eminently refined and adequately serious. Mr. Brownell himself has so many qualities in common with them, he impresses me as so much of a Jamesian and Meredithian character that I could well have understood and indeed have condoned a little more leniency toward them. I explain the ultimate hardening of his heart in their regard primarily by the fact that he is by conviction, if not by instinct, a Thackerayan,

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 and that when he called into mind the effortless ease and simplicity of Thackeray, he took compassion on the younger generation, and prayed that they might be delivered from any further developments of the Meredithian or the later Jacobean manner.

Among the critics and apostles of culture, Arnold is easily the first in his estimation—the most frequently quoted, and the most pervasively present as an invisible influence. The completeness, the roundness, and the essential rightness of his entire conception of the "good life" count for Mr. Brownell, as they count for the rest of us. We do not get far away from him in respect to fundamentals without finding ourselves going wrong. But, significantly, that which in Mr. Brownell's eyes "singularizes Arnold, personally, among the writers of his time and for his public is that, in a more marked and definite way than is to be said of any of them he developed his nature as well as directed his work in accordance with the definite ideal of reason." The high value which he attaches to the exercise of the intellectual faculty appears also in his judgment of Emerson, whose "ideal of reason" was perhaps somewhat less "definite" than Arnold's. Says Mr. Brownell, "Emerson's moral greatness—most conspicuous of all facts about him, as I think it is—receives its essentially individual stamp, aside from its perfection, from its indissoluble marriage with intellect."

For American students of culture the most in

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 teresting trait in Mr. Brownell's ideal man of letters is what I have called the spiritual refinement of his democracy. This conception may be studied profitably in the two complementary essays on Emerson and Carlyle. Carlyle was a great artist malgre lui, but by his paucity of ideas, his violence of temper, his prejudices, his eccentricity of style, his indifference to all the shades of truth—constituting virtually an indifference to truth, and by his reactionary rage against reason, science, and democracy—by all these traits Carlyle represents pretty nearly the antithesis of Mr. Brownell's ideal modern man of letters. Carlyle detested that return of the eighteenth century to reason and nature and that genuine intellectual radicalism which in England, France, and America laid the foundations of our political and social philosophy and liberated the most enlightened spirit of contemporary letters:

Of hero-worship at the expense of respect for institutions, which all the "strong men" and their advocates, from Frederick and Carlyle to Roosevelt and his biographers, tend to foster and inculcate,

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