to disregard entirely the other. We We have heard that our mothers and fathers spent some of their time in laughing at the extraordinary humor of such lines as 'I learn, on inquiry, that cows do not give sardines,' when lisped off by the elder Sothern, or in fascinated attention to the writhings of the comical Mr. Muldoon about the legs of a high chair, as well as in attending upon occasional performances of Booth or Barrett. And we call attention in turn to the fact that we derive some entertainment from The Blue Bird, and The Faun and Peter Pan as well as from Mme. Sherry, from Herod and Everyman as well as from The Girl in the Taxi, and that both the scenically glorious Shakespeare of Miss Marlowe and the scenically barren Shakespeare of Mr. Ben Greet have been applauded with some enthusiasm in recent years.

It is not merely the varying tastes of different publics which are met, but the varying moods of the individual. And to the young it seems a misfortune for you if you have not varying moods. Granted that the spectacle be clean,it seems to them a misfortune if you cannot get enjoyment out of many differing kinds of dramatic effort. You cannot yourself be close to all sorts of the wonderful ranging life of to-day; but you can get just a little closer to it through the theatre. And this is the point at which vaudeville, the best vaudeville, makes its appeal to us. Remember, not all of us by any means are devotees of the 'top-liners.' But don't despair of us if we are!

While we pause to observe that we did not invent the entertainment, we may nevertheless also insist that there is variety in vaudeville. You may thrill to an act of daring, or take your joy in that magnificent display of human physique which indicates not only skill but years of abstemiousness which would do credit to an anchorite. You VOL. 107 - NO. 4

may hear the sort of 'stunts' that good musicians do when they lay aside their professional manner and play with their art among their friends. Is n't it worth noticing that the house-filling popularity of the 'most beautiful woman in the world' is equaled by that of a serious, uncompromising study of real life such as Mr. J. M. Patterson's Dope or by that of such an artistic presentation of a social message as Mr. George Beban's The Sign of the Rose?

The element in it all which is terrifyingly new to our discouraged ancestors is that we who ought to be the children of light are enjoying every bit of it. Of course we are! and rightly! It mirrors back to us our environment. Just so the great Elizabethan drama lived through the dreary days of Anne even to our own time, most surely because it was Elizabethan. It was alive. It was written by live people about live people. It reproduced its own environment through all classical disguise. It was as good and as bad as itself. Our drama seems to us to do the same thing. Paid in Full, The Fourth Estate, The Man of the Hour, you know them and the many others like them, studies of our day, they may be called. They may be called studies of our environment. And in that respect they seem not only to be most unlike the drama of a generation ago but to reflect and to present therein a similar unlikeness in ourselves.

VI

The complete lack of recognition of the public point of view is to us one of the most amazing disclosures as we pursue our researches into the history of the era just preceding us. More menacing, it seems to us, than individual greed, than poor little aldermen taking a job for brother-in-law in consideration of a 'right' vote on a gas franchise; more menacing than poor little legis

lators 'holding-up' the rich gun-club's game-preserve bill till a few dollars trickle into their silly little pockets; more menacing than any number of examples of individual 'graft,' is the widespread existence of that social attitude which saw in politics only a 'cess-pool'; which placed the rewards of private business above those of public service; which would make our government the handmaid of special privilege in short, the social attitude into which we were born.

Here acres of state land quietly handed over to a steel mill, there a city's lake front given over to a railroad; here a stream - of all the wonderful universe, one would think, most sacred gift to all,—poisoned its length, there the very air noxious with unnecessary vapors; forests and mines which should have been the bread of the future children of America made the wine of the women of the Riviera, these are the conditions, into which we were born. These are the conditions for which the noble Romans of another generation are responsible. Having made these conditions they tremble to think how we are going to face them.

Our forbears, preoccupied with ideals of individual beauty, seem to us to have failed to realize their environment. We resent an individual virtue which exists in the midst of social wrong. Therefore we resent that interpretation of our conduct which calls us individualistic. For it seems to us that never before has a sense of social ethics been so widespread.

There are various signs you may read if you doubt that statement. Try for example the one-time heard argument that because a man is good to his family he will probably make a good United States Senator; you will arouse the rude and violent laughter of to-day.

One illustration may be found in a recent incident in the newspaper busi

ness. A letter of Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman, written during the war to his wife, and printed last fall for the first time, told of having received a check from the manufacturer of a certain cannon, and says that he 'will boom this cannon in the future.' In its editorial comment, the Chicago Tribune pointed out how far the ideals of the newspaper profession had progressed since the sixties, that a man of Mr. Stedman's undoubted honesty and character could, without a thought, do what no self-respecting reporter could do to-day-and retain his self-respect.

VII

The talk of 'temperament' and 'selfexpression' was much more characteristic of those who were young at the feet of Whitman than it is of those who are young at the feet of Mr. Dooley. The test of effect upon individual character was then the only test by which to try even social conduct. For like an unperfumed rose, that penitential spirit which led to countless mystical expressions in the middle ages, grew up again unlovely in the individualistic interpretations of earlier America. It survives among us in that attitude of mind which demands a certain drawing-room posture partly because it is uncomfortable, not because it is beautiful; which prescribes certain studies because they are disciplinary, not because they teach anything worth knowing; which finds something intrinsically valuable in cleaning lamps, even though the room may be better lighted by pressing a button; which cannot believe that you really want to make the world better unless you have a private individual tear to shed at each of its miseries.

For a mediæval saint to wash the feet of twelve poor old men was a sanctified act because it cleansed not the

feet of the old men, but the soul of the saint. If.Saint-of-To-day were to be assigned that task his entire thought would be the better preparation of those twelve old men for their next necessary walk, with a mental reservation in favor of so constituting society that it would never be necessary for some one else to do it for them.

We are glad that the time is gone which in the words of Simon Patten 'endeavored to extract nobility of character out of domestic maladjustments.' We are going to use for social service the leisure created by business organization and by mechanical invention. We are perfectly willing that you call this a 'sense of duty,' - this newly awakened social conscience. In fact we don't care in the least what name you call it by. You may come as a Socialist, a single-taxer, a neighborhoodimprover, an art-leaguer, a charity-organizer. You need not have a passion of Christ-like pity,' you may merely think it is better business policy. It does n't, to the youngsters, make very much difference by what name you choose to be called, - any more than it made any difference in what order you entered a drawing-room, or whether you studied mathematics or bacteriology, - provided, PROVIDED you get to making life more livable for most people. We demand a sort of race-patriotism.

Patriotism to the human race will include the old patriotism and the old religion in one. No age of religion ever recoiled more from blood, ever came closer to a conception of ultimate peace, than this age. No age has produced greater martyrs to religion than this age has dedicated to humanity.

And you think that the broadening notion of service has not its glories of individual character, that the new has not its martyrs like the old? I like to think of the woman who has given up wealth and lives meanly, willingly enduring not only material discomforts but to be misjudged, insulted and abused, in order to give to those social causes in which she believes not only her money but the influence of her extraordinary personality. I might mention her name. But she has many names. She is in every city.

I like to think of Lazear, — thirtyfour years old, happily married, widely loved, at the gate of his profession, scientist and soldier, embracing death gloriously, hurrying to meet it, that he might rip but by a little thread this veil of ignorance which so enshrouds mankind. To us he seems hardly less glorious because his life was given not for the sake of single creed nor for the hope of future unspeakable reward, but simply that other men might know one fact, one fact about one disease simply that other men might even in a small degree come closer to a right relationship to their environment.

I

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?'uncritical circles,' notoriously as skeptical about logic as about criticism, that it encounters this fundamental censure. 'Nobody here,' said Lord Morley recently, addressing the English Association, 'will undervalue criticism or fall into the gross blunder of regarding it as a mere parasite of creative work.' And, indeed, I should be conscious of slighting just proportion and intellectual decorum in laying any particular stress on the aspersions of the sciolists of the studios, such as, for example, the late Mr. Whistler, and of literary adventurers, such as, for another instance, the late Lord Beaconsfield.

As a matter of fact these two rather celebrated disparagers of criticism were greatly indebted to the critical faculty,

very marked in each of them. It is now becoming quite generally appreciated, I imagine, I imagine, thanks to criticism, — that Degas's admonition to Whistler about his conduct cheapening his talent, which every one will remember, was based on a slight misconception. Whistler's achievements in painting, however incontestable their merits, would certainly have enjoyed less of the vogue he so greatly prized had his prescription that work should be 'received in silence' been followed in his own case by himself. And it was certainly the critical rather than the creative element in Disraeli's more serious substance that gave it the interest it had for his contemporaries, and has now altogether lost.

More worth while recalling than Disraeli's inconsistency, however, is the fact that in plagiarizing he distorted Coleridge's remark, substituting ‘critics' for 'reviewers' as those who had failed in creative fields. The substitution is venial in so far as in the England of that day the critics were the reviewers. But this is what is especially noteworthy in considering the whole subject: namely, that in England, as with ourselves, the art of criticism is so largely the business of reviewing as to make the two, in popular estimation at least, interconvertible terms. They order the matter differently in France. Every one must have been struck at first by the comparative slightness of the reviewing in French journalism. One's impression at first is that they take the business much less seriously

than one would expect in a country with such an active interest in art and letters. The papers, even the reviews, concern themselves with the current product chiefly in the 'notice' or the compte rendu, which aims merely to inform the reader as to the contents of the book or the contributions to the exposition, whatever it may be, with but a meagre addition of comment either courteous or curt. The current art criticism even of Gautier, even of Diderot for that matter, is largely descriptive. In the literary revues what we should call the reviewing is apt to be consigned to a few back pages of running chronique, or a supplementary leaflet.

Of course one explanation is that the French public reads and sees for itself too generally to need or savor extensive treatment of the essentially undifferentiated. The practice of reviewing scrupulously all the output of the novel factories, exemplified by such periodicals as even the admirable Athenæum, would seem singular to it. But with us, even when the literature reviewed is eminent and serious, it is estimated by the anonymous expert, who at most, and indeed at his best, confines himself to the matter in hand and delivers a kind of bench decision in a circumscribed case. And in France this is left to subsequent books or more general articles, with the result of releasing the critic for more personal work of larger scope. Hence, there are a score of French critics of personal quality for one English or American. Even current criticism becomes a province of literature instead of being a department of routine. Our own current criticism, anonymous or other, is, I need not say, largely of this routine character, when it has character, varied by the specific expert decision in a very few quarters, and only occasionally by a magazine article de fond

of a real synthetic value. This last I should myself like to see the Academy, whose function must be mainly critical, encourage by every means open to it, by way of giving more standing to our criticism, which is what I think it needs first of all.

For the antipathy to criticism I imagine springs largely from confounding it with the reviewing - which I do not desire to depreciate, but to distinguish from criticism of a more positive and personal order and a more permanent appeal. The tradition of English reviewing is almost august, and it is natural that Coleridge should have spoken of reviewers as a class, and that Mr. Birrell should have them exclusively in mind in defining the traits of the ideal critic. And we ourselves are not without journals which review with obvious resources of scholarship and skill, and deliver judgments with the tone, if not always with the effect, of finality. But of course, taking the country as a whole, reviewing is the least serious concern of the journalism that seems to take so many things lightly. And it is this reviewing that I fancy the authors and artists have in mind when they disparage criticism. The critics of reviewing, however, deem it insufficiently expert, and I dare say this is often just. But the objection to it which is apparently not considered, but which I should think even more considerable, is its tendency to monopolize the critical field and establish this very ideal of specific expertness, which its practice so frequently fails to realize, as the ideal of criticism in general. This involves, I think, a restricted view of the true critic's field, and an erroneous view of his function. Virtually it confines his own field to that of the practice he criticizes; and his function to that of estimating any practice with reference to its technical standards. In a word, expert criticism