introduction or first impression, make the rest out himself. Fortunately, there is more to Moby Dick than its transcendental meaning. There is more than its variety of details. In its own enormous way, it marches. "Call me Ishmael," the narrator says in the first sentence, thus cutting himself off from the ordinary, friendly world. He goes to New Bedford, takes up with a cannibal harpooner, joins the crew of the Pequod, and is at sea before he realizes the purposes of Ahab. They become evident to him but slowly. In the interval, while the ship makes its way to its fields of action, Ishmael has time to expound the technique of his calling, and to describe the characters who are practicing it with him. Even on the Pacific the Pequod cannot go directly to its mark. It must move through dull delays, while the illusion of its single, unavoidable aim gathers strength. Its path crosses that of many another vessel, and they hail one another and exchange the news of the ocean till there has been woven of their crossings and communications a solid fabric of knowledge concerning all that goes on there. Finally, when it comes to the struggle with Moby Dick, the mad captain and his fated crew have built up such anticipations that this seems to be the focus of the universe, whether the struggle be actual or symbolical. As Ahab has drawn his crew after him, so the Pequod seems to be drawing, in the allegory, all the other ships afloat. The spirit of all whalers, the spirit of all sailors, yes, the spirit of all dauntless men, seems matched against

the spirit of resisting, malicious nature personified in Moby Dick. At the crash, nature proves eternal as well as unassailable, and the fable comes to an end in the vortex of a drowning world. And with an art hardly to be noted elsewhere in the entire work, Melville instantly ends his story. "Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago." Had he been everywhere willing or able to let his materials in this fashion speak for themselves, Moby Dick would need no introduction.

CAN CRITICS BE GENTLEMEN?

N

By ARNOLD WHITRIDGE

or long ago a reviewer for one of the weekly papers criticized an author for being too much of a gentleman. His book, a collection of literary essays, was interesting enough, but it suffered from a certain lack of sympathy. The author, to use the reviewer's own words, "was a gentleman first and a literary critic second." The article went on to expatiate upon the fundamental incompatibility of the two species and finally concluded by warning the "gentleman" that he must either mend his ways or resign all aspirations to literary distinction.

The tone of the reviewer was so confident that for a moment we hardly ventured to question his reasoning. Indeed, if he had not protested so much we would willingly have let him have his way. Perhaps it was the extra ounce of conviction that aroused our suspicions instead of stunning us into acquiescence. It occurred to us that, after all, the Temple of the Muses should be open to all worshipers, without regard to race, creed, or color. By what right was this arbitrary sign, "Gentlemen Not Admitted," blazoned above the door? Was it an inevitable symbol of the times? Nobody likes a 1 From The Forum, November, 1925.

perpetual loser, and for the last hundred years the gentleman has been losing all along the line. Democracy, if it has not actually hustled him out of politics, has made him step lively to keep up with the crowd. Not content with this success, it appears that democracy is now bent on hounding him out of the broad domain of literature, whose gallant walks have refreshed his spirit for so many hundred years.

It is not the purpose of this essay to play the cynic or to lament a lost cause. No doubt it is true, as Talleyrand says, that those who did not live before 1789 can never know what society really means, but in any case, what we have lost was an exotic flower that must inevitably have withered in a new environment. Without speculating further on the delicate perfection of the good old days, let us examine the gentleman and try to determine his inherent limitations as far as the appreciation and understanding of literature is concerned. Obviously we must consider the gentleman at his best. The most hardened Tory would not maintain that a foxhunting squire was ipso facto a judge of literature. Nor is the possession of evening clothes an infallible guide to critical acumen. Tennyson once grumbled that Browning would die in a dress suit, and if the unmitigated atmosphere of the drawing-room is injurious to the poet, it is not likely to be healthy for the critic. The point would hardly be worth making were it not that a taste for society and the racetrack is so often mistaken for the essential attributes

of a gentleman. Such qualities, of course, are entirely irrelevant. Let us grapple with the issue as it is, not as it appears to the prejudiced and the classconscious. Does the gentlemanly instinct of reticence, taste, decorum, whatever we choose to call it, tend to falsify the literary judgment?

"Literature," says Cardinal Newman in one of his glorious passages, "does not argue, it declaims and insinuates; it is multiform and versatile: it persuades instead of convincing, it seduces, it carries captive; it appeals to the sense of honor, or to the imagination, or to the stimulus of curiosity; it makes its way by means of gaiety, satire, romance, the beautiful, the pleasurable." What can the gentleman oppose to such all-compelling variety? We admit at once-nothing. He who undertakes to condemn whatever may not conform to his private code of morality must be prepared to jettison an invaluable cargo of masterpieces. A sinless literature in a sinful world is on the face of it inconceivable. To the best of our knowledge it is the fanatic, a very different creature from the gentleman, who judges literature by purely ethical standards. To withhold Rabelais from the public libraries because a few small boys delight in extracting his pornographic plums would be as fatuous as it is to legislate against alcoholic liquors because a few men choose to make beasts of themselves. Literature and law are alike in that they cannot cater to the abnormal man.

It is the peculiar merit of the gentleman that, far