plains in his preface to Critical Woodcuts that, after all, his business in writing his weekly article is to be a commentator on the passing show. The best of all ways for a journal to achieve a high critical standard is to have the same critic week by week write out his opinions on literature. This is what Stuart Sherman does in The Herald Tribune, and Critical Woodcuts is a reprint of his critical articles. It is hard to believe that a collection of weekly articles by any other contemporary critic could stand up against these without suffering.

Of course, the defects of Critical Woodcuts stand out clearly enough: Stuart Sherman has but little sense of artistry; it is often a defect of Anglo-Saxon, as opposed to Continental, criticism, that critics have either no sense of artistry, or merely a sense of artistry and no sense of life; he has, perhaps, but little understanding of poetry; he confounds vigor and clarity too often with distinction. But, in the last analysis, he knows the first and most important thing about a book-Is it alive? And very few people know that. The literary reviews are full of appreciative notices of books that are not only dead to start with because they come out of dead souls, but are deadening to their readers. He may not bother greatly in his literary causerie about how long the writers he deals with are going to live, but all of them are alive with at least the life of the rosel'espace d'un matin. In addition, he has that sort of vital scholarship which, without being finicky, is rich enough and extensive enough for the practice of

criticism. I am old-fashioned enough to believe that in the practice of that no one can be a good critic of literature in English without a certain training in Greek and Roman literature, particularly in Latin, the language of clarity and criticism, and without that sort of knowledge of English literature which embraces the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as well as Oscar Wilde, and Piers Plowman and Gammer Gurton's Needle as well as The Waste Land and Ulysses. Few of the critics writing in America have this sort of scholarship, and it is very distinctively Stuart Sherman's.

T

WENTY-FIVE years have passed since Theodore Dreiser wrote, and in a manner published, a first novel called Sister Carrie. The qualifying phrase is necessary, for, as is well known, the publishers took alarm when they reflected that Carrie had been a very bad girl and had not been adequately punished for it, at least in this world, and so, after sending out a few review copies, they withdrew the book. Here, then, was an ambitious youngster he was only twenty-nine— with bitterness in his heart and hopes of fame deferred, driven to earn his bread by hack writing and hack editing. Had America broken another butterfly on the wheel? Certainly, the Younger Generation of the intelligentsia, had they known of it, would have cast their nursing bottles upon the floor and reiterated their intention to go and live in Paris when they grew up.

Since then Dreiser has been the recipient of countless other uppercuts, solar plexus jabs, rabbit punches, and left hooks to the jaw. No other American writer, except, maybe, Whitman, has received so many thumps upon his obstinate head, so 1 From The American Mercury, January, 1926.

many kicks upon his stubborn shins. He has endured the snobbery of campus critics, the prudishness of publishers' maiden-aunt readers, and the earnest resentment of multitudes of honest, God-fearing, law-abiding, right-thinking men and women. He has been impaled upon the Comstocks' grotesque lance; he has been ejected by indignant moralists from the Hall of Fame. He has even been apologized for by his friends, who have complained sadly about his style. In brief, few roses have strewed his path, and those few have been plucked late in the

season.

Yet his head is not only unbowed-it is not even bloody. Far from being extinguished by that environment which proved so damaging to Mark Twain and Henry James, he has thriven upon it. He has not found it necessary to compromise or to listen to what is called reason, but has gone on being grandly and solemnly himself. Today he stands up like some ancient oak or craggy mountain, austere, unyielding, and unmoved-at once a sort of a poet and a sort of grizzly bear, with a skin as tough as an elephant's and a heart as soft as butter. He is a romantic, a realist, and a mystic all in one; a man pretending no faith in the good intentions or sanity of the universe, or any feeling of responsibility to a Moral Order, or any belief in rewards and punishments, yet one moved by an innner compulsion as real and strange as that which sent John Brown to Harper's Ferry; a man ferociously critical of his country and his countrymen, yet one with an under

standing, pitying, and forgiving love for it and them that makes the orthodox patriot seem almost like an apologist.

How did he contrive, not merely to live, but even to reach fruition, in this America that received him so badly? Not easily, one may be sure, and not without some desperate quarter-hours. He entered upon life, and continued for a long time, as sensitive and defenseless as an oyster without a shell. He was, and still is, a sentimentalist-even a kind of Sentimental Tommy. It is only necessary to glance into A Hoosier Holiday or A Book About Myself to be convinced of that. He "reveres James Whitcomb Riley with a whole heart," "feels a little lump in his throat at 'Auld Lang Syne' and 'Dixie,'” mends his grief at parting from a sweetheart by turning it into a poem, and writes the chorus of his brother's maudlin song, "On the Banks of the Wabash." Pity runs like a golden thread through every paragraph he has written, though it is not, it seems, an emotion he respects. There is still encased in him, to this hour, the wandering, wide-eyed child who was reared in that pious German household in Warsaw, Indiana. He might be a newspaper man for a hundred years, make love to a thousand women, walk a million miles of vicious streets, and yet never be thoroughly sophisticated. Freshness and ingenuousness are still in his view of life; he never gets tired of it; he is always finding out things that he never knew before, and they fascinate him even while they disgust him.