borne it in travail and patient sorrow: for the most part we have bought beauty outright and dandled it proudly on our knee.
In the face, then, of this painful shortage of native material on which a critic may judiciously engage his teeth, it is not astonishing that most of our current criticism should be chiefly a garrulous expression of starvation. 'Without national maturity you cannot have art, and without art you cannot have an adequate appreciation or criticism of art. That we possess any critics at all is, indeed, more a matter for amazement than that the majority of our critics are cadaverous in phrase and lean in understanding. For, on the one hand, they are confronted by the bleak and rocky Charybdis of creative aridity; and, on the other, they are buffeted and tossed about, as in a storm, by the Scylla of popular puritanical opinion.
This whirlpool of popular opinion is, in truth, a more vicious and dangerous phenomenon than even those barren cliffs beyond which the American critic must swim before reaching the shores of his Sicily; for it is formed of a watery emotionalism whipped high and furious by the winds of puritanical doctrine. And though a critic may, with no very serious difficulty, steer clear of such barren promontories as, say, the novels of Robert Chambers or Elinor he will find himself being sucked down, if he is not a careful navigator, in the maelstrom made for his destruction by the preachers of art-for-morality's-sake, of art-for-Anthony-Comstock's-sake, of art-for-everyone's-and-everything's-sake except the artist and his art.
Now, the belief that art should teach a fine moral lesson has, of course, a certain excuse for existence. As long as men believe that it is preferable to tell the truth rather than to lie, as long as men visit condemnation on thieves and encomiums on public benefactors—as long, in brief, as some modes of conduct are considered right and others wrong, so long are the pages of literature a fit and proper place for the dramatization of ethical ideas. The error of the doctrine of art-for-morality's-sake lies not in asking literature to bespeak the cause of righteousness; it lies in demanding that literature bespeak the cause of nothing else. And the error of contemporary criticism lies, likewise, in stimulating this one-sided demand for soothing syrups and teething-rings and failing to cry out always for the whole apothecary shop.
Let us take an example. You are, let us say, a high-minded citizen of the United States, intent on national security and the sanc-
