let us return to the original charge made against him that he is constitutionally incapable of understanding genius. What rapport can there ever be between the artist, with his impossible table manners and his still more impossible emotionalism, and the impeccable, close-lipped, self-contained apostle of good form? We have deliberately chosen the two extremes, and yet we do not believe that even between these two understanding is hopelessly inconceivable. It may well be that the gentleman shudders on his first plunge into Bohemia. The first time that Andrew Lang met Stevenson he took an instinctive dislike to him. One glance told him that Stevenson was an affected aesthete, but eventually they became the best of friends. Supposing they had never met after the first unfavorable encounter, Lang might still have reveled in Treasure Island. Why should it be taken for granted that the gentleman cannot appreciate a work of art without admiring the character of the artist?

As long as we are embarking upon the troubled waters of art and morality, we may as well make for a storm-center at once. Is it possible for the gentleman to approach the subject of Oscar Wilde dispassionately? Here, if anywhere, his standards of decency might be expected to deaden his literary sympathy, but again we suspect the difficulty of being more apparent than real. Nothing can obscure the shimmering brilliancy of Lady Windermere's Fan, and nothing can atone for the degenerate taint in Oscar Wilde. It is not the gentleman who finds it

necessary to rummage old newspaper files for accounts of the trial on the plea that he is making a comprehensive study of Wilde's plays. The gentleman takes the best and ignores the worst without pretending that the worst can in some way be palliated on the vague score of genius.

And now let us forget the gentleman, or rather let us consider him not as a strayed reveler from the ancien régime, but as the incarnation of rarefied common-sense. Though genius chafes at his criticism, is he not usually right after all? There are certain avenues to literature which your man of commonsense will not tolerate. One of them is the approach via illegitimate children. Just at present literary criticism is suffering from what the French call fureur de l'inédit. By all means let us have the documents on Wordsworth's French daughter, but preserve us from those sentimentalists who look for her influence in every line of his poetry. Instead of assuming that scraps of unpublished matter are necessarily interesting, it is well to remember that the assumption lies just the other way. The homage paid to unpublished documents is one of the diseases of modern scholarship. This year being the hundredth anniversary of Byron's death, it is perhaps worth suggesting a nice piece of entirely useless research. There has so far been no authoritative list of the women he seduced in Venice during the year 18161817. Such information can be of no conceivable interest to anybody, but if ever discovered it will probably be hailed in some quarters as a distinct contribution to Byroniana.

No doubt common-sense can be reduced to absurdity, like any other virtue. We have tried to vindicate it from the attacks of its opponents because, at the moment, the champions of the bizarre are more than usually loud-mouthed. God forbid that we should live in a society so standardized that eccentricity dare not show its head. There will always be a need in a democracy for splendid saints and splendid sinners. Whatever the form of government, mankind keeps its interest in "the dangerous edge of things." It is well that eccentrics should flout the dictates of common-sense, but they must not invoke the very deity they have defied. Garibaldi would have raised few recruits if he had based his appeal on the promise of a bonus when the Austrians were defeated. "Let those," he said, "who wish to continue the war against the stranger come with me. I offer neither pay nor quarters nor provisions; I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles, and death."

The man who can sound that note without being theatrical is not often met with in any age or in any country. When he appears men will follow him, whatever their walk in life. So it is with literature. Genius always leaves havoc in its wake. The value of sound literary criticism lies in its ability to recognize impostors. It does not tolerate national prejudices, it is not concerned with capital or labor. Above all, it abhors that miserable class-consciousness that seeks to confine genius to one stratum of society.

THE ALL-STAR LITERARY VAUDEVILLE1

T

By EDMUND WILSON

HE WRITER of this article is a journalist whose professional activities have been chiefly concerned with the American literary movement of the last fifteen years. He has written reviews of the productions of that movement and worked on magazines which were identified with it; he has lived constantly in its atmosphere. And he feels sympathy with all its manifestations, even with those of which, artistically, he disapproves. It is to him a source of deep gratification that literature has been "sold" to the American public and, on principle, in the face of alien attack, he will stand by even the least intelligent, the least disinterested, of its salesmen: he has served in that army himself. But it has recently occurred to him that, to consult frankly his own taste, he really feels only the mildest interest in most of the contemporary literary goods which now find so wide a market, and that he is disaffected to the point of disgust by the publicity service which has grown up in connection with them. He has come to realize that it is scarcely possible nowadays to tell the reviews from the advertising: both tend to convey the impression that masterpieces are being manufactured as regularly and as durably as 1 From The New Republic, June, 1926. This article was originally published anonymously.

new models of motor-cars. In the early days of the present era, the reviews of Mencken, Hackett, Dell, and Untermeyer set an example of honesty and boldness. Today, these critics, having got the kind of literature they want, are apparently perfectly content; and most of the reviews are written by people who have not attempted to go further. The present writers on American literature all have interests in one phase or another of it: either the authors know each other personally or they owe each other debts of gratitude or they are bound together by their loyalty to some common cause. And almost all forget critical standards in their devotion to the great common causes-those of an American national literature in independence of English literature, and of contemporary American ideas as against the ideas of the last generation. Even Stuart P. Sherman, once so savage in the opposite camp, has become as benevolent as Carl Van Doren and now occupies what has perhaps become, from the popular point of view, the central desk of authority, to which each of the performers in the all-star circus, from Ben Hecht to Ring Lardner, steps up to receive his accolade. The present writer has, therefore, for his own satisfaction, for the appeasement of his own critical conscience, attempted to draw up a candid statement of his convictions in regard to his contemporaries, not merely in disparagement of those whom he thinks overrated but in justice to those whom he considers admirable. If he succeeds in irritating one editor or reviewer, in an atmosphere