he is full of ideas. Dr Van Doren has taken us through the subjects of all the contemporary novels and impressed us with their importance, pointing out the higher significance of Alice Adams in comparison with Mr Tarkington's earlier work and giving us to feel that there are countless subjects about which the American novelist can write. Professor Sherman is, we think, a spiritual collaborator of Professor Babbitt and we do not think of him as he is thought of in the outside world. He discusses philosophy for us and we understand his dualism; he finds philosophy in everyone, nearly, and exposes it brilliantly. We are inclined to believe with him that most of the philosophy is bad. Dr Canby is something of a dualist, too; at least he believes in discipline, both in life and art, and like Professor Sherman he prefers the books in which the undisciplined are not made heroic.
If I have left out any of our major critics it is due to our own obscurity, with one exception: Dr Paul Elmer More. I have left him out because he illustrates my point. The Shelburne Essays complete none of us have read, but we found from time to time that he stood with Babbitt and Sherman, and his great departure was not in his thinking, but in his form of expression. He is now writing philosophy, or the criticism of philosophy, as we think of such things. He is expressing his ideas in the form which, it seems to us, they fit best, and his example has made things clear to us. We suddenly realize that all the rest of them are critics not of literature, but of economics, sociology, psychoanalysis, morality—and so on. And we wonder whether Aristotle, who had a point of view and was certainly a moralist, is still considered a great critic, or do readers nowadays feel that his work is fairly thin since it tells us nothing of the economic life of Periclean Athens and seems to erect into laws his perceptions of aesthetic fact without telling us anything at all about his philosophy.
Perhaps we are unnecessarily confused. We are sure that somewhere, on occasions, must appear a technical criticism of a book of poetry or of a novel, but it is not exactly technical criticism we want. It is, I suppose, aesthetic criticism. We read Clive Bell and Roger Fry and find that they do not bother to tell us the story of the picture they describe—perhaps because pictures no longer have stories, but we do not mind. Our music criticism seems to deal with the ways and means used by the composer to call up emotion, and with
