eighteenth century was unable to distinguish between the original and the aboriginal. If Mr. Theodore Dreiser, author of The Genius, had set forth his views of originality in Germany about 1775 (die Geniezeit), they would have been wrong, but they would at least have had the semblance of novelty. As it is, it is hard for a person even moderately versed in literary history to read these views without yawning. Nothing is more tiresome than stale eccentricity. Is this country always to be the dumping ground of Europe? Americans who wish to display real virility and initiative will scarcely be content to fall in at the end of the procession, especially when the procession is moving, as in this case, towards the edge of a precipice. They will see that we must begin by creating standards, if our other attempts at creation are to have any meaning, and they will not underestimate the difficulty of the task. Primitivism leads to affirmations that are repugnant to the most elementary common-sense -for example, to Mr. Spingarn's affirmation that the "art of a child is art quite as much as that of Michelangelo." But it is not enough to

oppose to such aberrations mere common-sense or reason or judgment. The strength of the primitivist is that he recognizes in his own way the truth proclaimed by Napoleon-—that imagination governs the world. Those who believe in the need of a humanistic reaction at present should be careful not to renew the neoclassical error. Thus Dryden attributes the immortality of the Eneid to its being "a wellweighed, judicious poem. Whereas poems which are produced by the vigor of imagination only have a gloss upon them at the first which time wears off, the works of judgment are like the diamond: the more they are polished the more luster they receive." But what is preeminent in Virgil, what gives the immortalizing touch to his work, is not the judgment he displays, but the quality of his imagination. It is no doubt inevitable, in speaking and writing, to divide man up into faculties and contrast judgment with imagination. At the same time one should recollect that this division of man into more or less water-tight compartments has about it nothing positive and experimental. What is positive and experimental, let me re

peat, is that in creation of the first order, creation that has high seriousness in the Aristotelian sense, the imagination does not wander aimlessly, but is at work in the service of a supersensuous truth that it is not given to man to seize directly; and that the result is "the illusion of a higher reality." Creation of this order, one may report from actual observation, is something more than the intense expression of some expansive ego, whether individual or national; it has a restrained and humanized intensity-intensity on a background of calm. Our whole modern experiment, not only in art and literature, but in life, is threatened with breakdown, because of our failure to work out new standards with the aid of this type of imagination. And this breakdown of the modern experiment is due to its not having lived up to its own program. Those who have put aside the discipline of outer authority have professed to do so because of their thirst for immediacy, of their wish to face unflinchingly the facts of nature and of human nature. Yet the veto power in human nature is nothing abstract, nothing that one needs to take on hearsay, but a matter of immediate perception. It is this

fact, the weightiest of all, that the corrupters of the literary conscience and of the conscience in general have failed to face in making of the imagination the irresponsible accomplice of the unchained emotions.

Criticism of Criticism of Criticism1

By H. L MENCKEN

EVERY now and then, a sense of the futility of their daily endeavors falling suddenly upon them, the critics of Christendom turn to a somewhat sour and depressing consideration of the nature and objects of their own craft. That is to say, they turn to criticizing criticism. What is it in plain words? What is its aim, exactly stated in legal terms? What good can it do? fect upon the artist and the work of art?

How far can it go? What is its normal ef

Such a spell of self-searching has been in progress for several years past, and the critics of various countries have contributed theories of more or less lucidity and plausibility to the discussion. Their views of their own art, it appears, are quite as divergent as their views

1 Originally published in the New York Evening Mail, July 1, 1918; reprinted with considerable revision in 1919 in Prejudices, First Series, and here reprinted by special arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., authorized publishers.