aspiring (to some, at least) where it was formerly dogmatically nationalistic. Science has usurped the place of religion in the ethos of the modern world, and the discoveries of scientific criticism have shaken the fundamental conceptions of every department of knowledge.

We stand today in the center of a vast disintegration. In America the situation is complicated by the peculiar problems of our own culture. Our forces and problems must be organized before the artist can do his work. Perhaps the reason why the creative spirit has never (in literature) experienced a full flowering in America, and is at present enervated in Europe, is that the artist exhausts his creative energy in a squandrous and unavailing struggle before this synthesis can be reached. Perhaps because our general skepticism no longer allows us to take literature seriously, and because most of us are lacking in the courage for long endurance. But ferment is at work. Feeble and sporadic as is our creative spirit in its manifestations, our critical spirit is prodigiously fecund. It is unquestionably more sensitive, more searching, more revealing, more democratic, in an abused word, more creative, than it has been at any time in the memory of our generation. Thus the criticism of today, in its diverse ways, is striving to localize the point of synthesis in which alone superior creation can be achieved and man may possess his soul. Criticism, says Matthew Arnold, "tends to make an intellectual situation of which the

creative power can profitably avail itself." It is precisely this that contemporary criticism, in its uncertain and prodigal way, is actually accomplishing.

But it is the native vigor of the critical spirit, rather than its actual performances or apparent direction, which gives us hope for this desideratum. It is at this point that Croce's theory of intuition as a concept becomes valuable. For at first view it would appear that criticism in America is generally inept and trivial, that journalism has wreaked too grievous havoc on it, and that wholesale distributors, consulting circulation experts, and querulous advertisers have in turn ruined journalism. It seems at first view unlikely that a set of more consummate ignoramuses have ever assembled for the professional practice of literature, until we look beyond our own shores and descry on every hand their fellows in sublimity-amiable and eager, to be sure, but ignoramuses none the less. In America pure scholarship-knowledge of comparative literatures, history, philosophy, and the theoretical scienceshas seemingly twittered its last breath beneath an almost unparalleled neglect. In the view of our nation-builders' ideal of utility, it has become distinctly disadvantageous, in the terms of mundane success, even to possess such knowledge; and to be actually learned is an affront to democracy which expiates itself with heavy penalties of isolation and neglect.

The generality of our critics are certainly untainted by such culpability; they appear to know ex

traordinarily little. The present tendency of journalism, which provides too few vehicles for serious essays, discourages their composition, and prefers light and topical reviews which do no more than trace the contours of a single book, forces the acquiescence of the younger men who depend on their writing for their livelihood. Our universities, with their inexhaustible genius for laying desolation on the scanty knowledge they dispense, complete the cycle of forces which in America enshrine the commonplace. One wonders what has become of the ancient passion for learning in this age when the average boy on the street knows more facts than Plato, yet grows up to toil at an office desk, read The New York Evening Journal, and buy a radio. The lofty aspiration of Israel's high-priests for the urim and thummim of existence is not really extinct. But none of us knows enough to be deeply moved by it, and our knowledge is not even sufficient to help us formulate our quest. It is not in the spirit of our age to cherish or accomplish learning in a universal sense. We have communized knowledge and isolated its departments in a way which has entirely obliterated the creative inner significance of the whole subtly merging stream of human experience. We have resorted to that ineffably short-sighted refuge of small and lazy minds," specialization. But universality and a proportioned synthetic conception of knowledge are prerequisites of superior creative accomplishment, and also of superior creative criticism, which partakes of exactly the same nature. We have forgotten this. We

have forgotten that either everything is important or nothing at all is important, since life is immanent in no single thing, but indeed in the intermingling of all things. And the tragedy of it is that we do not know enough to know how much we have missed.

Another prerequisite of creative criticism, the absence of which in America is still more difficult to explain, is that of a definite esthetic conception. It would appear that long disuse of the reflective faculties has incapacitated us for esthetic thinking, so that a radically different (and usually unassimilated) standard exists for every critic who pretends to one, while the praise or blame of most of our reviewers signifies merely that he has found a particular book interesting or tiresome, as the case may be. A promising approach to an American esthetic conception was made by Emerson with his expressionistic conception of beauty as "its own excuse for being" and "an ultimate end," and by Poe with his definition of poetry as "the rhythmical creation of beauty." An approach to a critical platform was made by Poe when he wrote that "true criticism is the reflection of the thing criticized upon the spirit of the critic," a doctrine which has been very ably elaborated by Mr. J. E. Spingarn. The late James G. Huneker, a critic whose activity and superb sensitiveness answers the feeble alibi of the difficulties of journalism, perfectly exemplifies this school. Mr. Mencken, whose unproclaimed but admirably regulated scholarship is not less praiseworthy than the

vigor and heresy of his intelligence, has done a valiant work in discountenancing what Huneker terms "the naughty boy theory and practice of criticism" and in introducing a novel ideal of honesty.

Rock-bound esthetic requirements may be more pernicious in their effects on a growing literature than their lack, it is true, but a little sound esthetic thinking at this point would do us no harm. It might help us to a clearer conception of why we like what we like, and it might serve to eradicate some of the balderdash of our intellectual critics and the familiar triviality of our popular reviewers. In recent years, since the advent of the American realisticsatirical novel and especially since Mr. Van Wyck Brooks designated the social background of American literature in his all-too-meager early writings, we have endeavored to plumb the complicated mazes of American social character, American history and biography, and the nature of the prodigy which we call the American tradition. Herein we strike bedrock. Here is something vital, something living, something personal, something evocative, in a deep and stirring sense. By searching these mysteries, we release them. By exposing the causes why so youthful and so rich a nation as America should have been so tardy in expressing itself artistically, we break the seal of our muteness. This national identification, this accurate and candid national comprehension, both somewhat perilous in an older culture, is preeminently necessary in one still so diffuse and