dom; but what is most precious in it, and most characterizes it, is a prophetic quality that abides in its experiences. The poets are often spoken of as prophets, and in history the greatest are those most lonely peaks that seem to have taken the light of an unrisen dawn, like Virgil, whose humanity in the "Eneid" shines with a foregleam of the Christian temperament, or like Plato, whose philosophy in many a passage was a morning star that went before the greater light of Christian faith in the divine. But it is not such poets and such prophecy that I have in mind. I mean that in our own experiences in this artist-life with the poets, sculptors and musicians there abides the feeling that we shall have, as Tennyson says, "the wages of going on"-there is our clearest intimation of immortality. Wordsworth found such intimations in fragments of his boyhood and youth. I find them rather in fragments of manhood and maturer life. Life impresses me less as a birth initially out of the divine into mortal being than as birth into the divine at each step of the onward way. I am always fearful that in such statements, and in such a discourse as

this has been, I may seem to be speaking of exceptional things, of life that is only for the select and methods that are practicable only for the few and for men especially endowed with rare temperaments. Nothing could be further from my own belief. The artist-life of the soul is common to all, as soon as the soul begins to be and breathe, for it is in the world of art that the soul lives. The boy with Homer, the sage with Plato-it is all one: each is finding his soul, and living in it. The herb of grace grows everywhere.

I have never such firm conviction of the divine meaning that abides in our life as when I notice how the soul puts forth its flower in the humblest lives and in the most neglected places, what deeds of the spirit are simply done by the poor and almost as if they did not know it. It is true that human life is an animal existence, and the sphere of the useful is primary in it; the necessity for earning one's food, building one's lodging, caring for one's offspring, governs our days and years; but if I am in favor of social betterment and a more just economic order in the state to lessen the burden of common life and free it from

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an animal enslavement, it is not that I am thinking so much of what is called the welfare of the masses, in the sense of comfort. It is because I desire for them the leisure which would leave their souls room to grow. should be sorry to see material comfort, which is an animal good, become the ideal of the state, as now seems the tendency. We are all proud of America, and look on our farms and workshops, the abundance of work, the harvest of universal gain dispersed through multitudes reclaimed from centuries of poverty-we see and proclaim the greatness of the good; but I am ill-content with the spiritual harvest, with the absence of that which has been the glory of great nations in art and letters, with the indifference to that principle of human brotherhood in devotion to which our fathers found greatness and which is most luminous in art and letters; our enormous success in the economical and mechanical sphere leaves me unreconciled to our failure to enter the artistic sphere as a nation.

There is always, however, as you know, “a remnant." It is true that the conditions of our time almost enforce upon our citizens, es

pecially as they grow old and become absorbed in the work of the world, so abundant and compelling here it is true that these conditions almost enforce a narrowly practical life. But there is one period of life when this pressure is less felt, and when nature herself seems to open the gateways for this artist-life that I have been speaking of: it is youth. I hope some random sentence, perhaps, may have made it easier for some one of you who are young, to believe in that world, to follow its beckoning lights and to lead its life.

Criticism1

By w. C. BROWNELL

I. Field and Function

CRITICISM itself is much criticized-which logically establishes its title. No form of mental activity is commoner, and, where the practice of anything is all but universal, protest against it is as idle as apology for it should be superfluous. The essentially critical character of formularies alleging the inferiority to books of the books about books that Lamb preferred, finding the genesis of criticism in creative failure, and so on, should of itself demonstrate that whatever objection may be made to it in practice there can be none in theory. In which case the only sensible view is that its practice should be perfected rather than abandoned. However, it is probably only in-may one say?

1 From a volume entitled Criticism, published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1914. Of the four chapters in that volume, on "Field and Function," "Equipment," "Criterion," and "Method," the first and the last are here reprinted by permission of the publishers.