Just what are the native qualities of Mr. Bennett, the literary expert, and how he developed them, or they him, even the casual reader will be interested to know. Speaking of himself at twenty-three, when he knew little literature but was beginning to seem literary, he mentions his chief endowments. "Three qualities I did possess, and on these three qualities I have traded ever since. First, an omnivorous and tenacious memory (now, alas, effete!)—the kind of memory that remembers how much London spends per day in cab fares just as easily as the order of Shakespeare's plays or the stock anecdotes of Shelley and Byron. Second, a naturally sound taste in literature. [One envies that self-confidence which thus makes all disputing about tastes unnecessary!] And third, the invaluable, despicable, disingenuous journalistic faculty of seeming to know much more than one does know."

His

Mr. Bennett lays no claim to the artistic temperament; rather, he has always been a man of affairs, one of the affairs being now and again to convince the public that it wanted what it thought it didn't want. first absorption was in water-coloring which with him never became art; his next in newspaper writing. He was not a child prodigy such as we hear of nowadays: at eleven he wrote some verses and a prose story that he has not thought worthy of reprinting. But a revealing experience of his childhood should not be passed over. "I was six or so when 'The Ugly Duckling' aroused in me the melancholy of life, gave me to see the deep sadness which pervades all romance, beauty, and adventure. I laughed heartily at the old hen-bird's wise remark that the world extended past the next field and much farther; I could perceive the humour of that. But when the ugly duckling at last flew away on his strong pinions, and when he met the swans and was accepted as an equal, then I felt sorrowful, agreeably sorrowful. It seemed to me that nothing could undo, atone for, the grief and humiliations of the false duckling's early youth. I brooded over the injustice of his misfortunes for days, and the swans who welcomed him struck me as proud, cold, and supercilious in their politeness. I have never read 'The Ugly Duckling' since those days. It survives in my memory as a long and complex narrative, crowded with vague and mysterious allusions, and wet with the tears of things. No novel-it was a prodigious novel for me-has since more deliciously disturbed me, not even On the Eve or Lost Illusions." (The Truth About an Author, pp. 10-11.)

Mr. Bennett does not remember much of the reading of his youth. "At twenty-one I know I had read almost nothing of Scott, Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontés, and George Eliot. An adolescence devoted to water-colours has therefore made it forever impossible for me to emulate, in my functions of critic, the allusive Langism of Mr. Andrew Lang; but on the other hand, it has conferred on me the rare advantages of being in a position to approach the classics with a mind entirely unprejudiced by early recollections. Thus I read David Copperfield for the first time at thirty, after I had written a book or two and some hundreds of articles myself. The one author whom as a youth I 'devoured' was Ouida, creator of the incomparable Strathmore, the Strathmore upon whose wrath the sun unfortunately went down. I loved Ouida much for the impassioned nobility of her style, but more for the scenes of gilded vice into which she introduced me. She it was who inspired me with that taste for liaisons under pink lampshades which I shall always have, but which, owing to a puritanical ancestry and upbringing, I shall never be able to satisfy." (Ibid. p. 20.)

After these romantic beginnings, Mr. Bennett must paint the following self-portrait: "I who now reside permanently on that curious fourthdimensional planet which we call the literary world; I, who follow the incredible parasitic trade of talking about what people have done, who am a sort of public weighing-machine upon which bookish wares must halt before passing from the factory to the consumer; I, who habitually think in articles, who exist by phrases; I, who seize life at the pen's point and callously wrest from it the material which I torture into confections styled essays, short stories, novels, and plays; who perceive in passion chiefly a theme, and in tragedy chiefly a 'situation'; who am so morbidly avaricious of beauty that I insist on finding it where even it is not; I, in short, who have been victimized to the last degrgee by a literary temperament, and glory in my victimhood, am going to trace as well as I can the phenomena of the development of that idiosyncrasy from its inception to such maturity as it has attained.” (Ibid. p. 5.)—Editor.

Professor Brander Matthews has more than once insisted that criticism and book reviewing are two distinct things, the former devoted to evaluation of the fixed stars of the past, the latter concerned with the more or less nebulous or meteoric visitors of the present day. He cites with approval the opinion that book reviewers cannot distinguish or appreciate diamonds in the rough or gold in bars, being dealers, and knowing only that money which is legal tender-literature that has been stamped by time. ""Their criticism has a pair of scales, but it has no crucible and no touchstone.' There we have a clear statement of the difference between true criticism and mere book reviewing the book reviewing which has to deal with diamonds in the rough and gold in bars, and which can never be sure that the diamonds are not paste and that the gold bars are not 'gold bricks'."

"Criticism, I should like permission to say again, is a department of literature, and book reviewing is (and must be) a department of journalism. The great critics are so esteemed partly because they perceived this distinction, and the good book reviewers are good because they also perceive it. The task of the book reviewer, even if it is humble, is honorable; and it is his privilege to point out to the readers of the periodical to which he contributes what seem to him at the moment the merits and the demerits of such contemporary books as he may think important enough or significant enough to deserve careful consideration. It is for the benefit of these readers that he always writes-never for the benefit of the authors. And I have never known an author who derived any benefit from any book review. Certainly Flaubert did not from Sainte-Beuve's review of Salammbo."-See N. Y. Times Book Review, July 23, 1922, p. 28.

CRITICISM: PAST AND PRESENT

By ROBERT MORSS LOVETT

The history of criticism begins with the history of art. When the first artist drew his first horse in red chalk on the walls of his cave, the first critic was at his elbow, And as the other cave dwellers gathered to see and wonder, he doubtless diverted their attention from the artist and his work to himself by raising the pregnant question, "What is criticism, and what is its function at the present time?"

Four factors in criticism

I do not know how he answered that question, but I know that it must have been in one of four ways. There are involved in creative or representative art three factors: there is the artist or creator; there is the material or conception to which he gives form; and there is the public to which he addresses his product. Of course I recognize that in certain cases the first factor and the last are the same the artist creates for himself alone. Now the resulting work of art will vary according to which of these three factors the artist emphasizes. If he is thinking chiefly of himself he will work in one way; if his loyalty is to his form or material, in quite a different way; and if his leading aim is to capture his public, in a third. So with the critic, He recognizes the three factors in production, and adds to them a fourth, namely himself: and he will answer his question as to the function of criticism according to which of the four he has most insistently in mind.

The historical and

It may be, though it is unlikely, that the first critic was inspired chiefly by devotion to the artist, whom we may call Ab. Standing by Ab's side in the dim cave he first tried to see what Ab had been about and then explain it to the multitude. He envisaged the function of criticism as that of understand

interpretative critic

This article, reprinted by courtesy of the author and of The New Republic, was one of a symposium appearing in the Literary Supplement of The New Republic of October 26, 1921. Mr. Lovett has been a professor of English in the University of Chicago, and an editor of The Dial and The New Republic. He is a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

ing what the artist had attempted, and of appraising his performance in the light of this understanding. His task was that of interpretation of the masterpiece through the personality of the artist. After the death of Ab, the function of his interpretative critic would be still more important. To scoffers who denied that the object was a horse at all, he would explain that the artist grew up on the plains, where he thought, talked and ate horse, that he loved horsemanship and had remarkable success in picking winners, in short that given the artist's personality and environment-the man and the moment-he could have meant by his marks on the wall nothing but a horse. Thus the critic a few generations after the event became a productive scholar, like Professor Kittredge. Or to other denying spirits who declared that, horse though it might be, it was not the work of Ab but of a follower and pupil, the critic would defend his attribution by pointing out the peculiar trick which Ab had in pointing his horses' ears, and which his pupils forgot to copy. Thus the critic became a connoisseur and professional art critic like Signor Morelli or Mr. BerenThe chief virtues of this type of criticism are honesty, intelligence, sympathy-and its highest function is interpretation. Its reductio ad absurdum occurs when the critic becomes the judge, and uses his knowledge of Ab's character unfairly against him, declaring, like Ruskin, "Ab was a bad man and therefore he couldn't draw a good horse."

son.

The aesthetic and judicial critic

But let us suppose that the first critic had his mind focussed upon the result of Ab's striving, that he forgot the artist in the work of art. Then his problem was to appraise Ab's technique, to point out wherein and why it failed to do justice to the conception. If he insisted on comparing Ab's drawing to a real horse he was a naturalistic critic; if to the eternal and universal concept of horse he was an idealist. He was naturally a superior person and therefore unpleasant, and he gave an unpleasant connotation to the term criticism. When he looked at Ab it was as a pedagogue regards a pupil, training him to produce better results. When he considered the public it was as a lecturer, explaining why the work in question did or did not

appeal to the best minds. This line of reasoning might lead him into an examination of the principles of beauty and taste according to laws of psychology, when he would become a philosopher in aesthetics. But he also was under the constant temptation to assume judicial functions. He became the judge before whom Ab was brought to be tried on technical or aesthetic grounds, and who, like Francis Jeffrey, always remembered that the judge is condemned when the guilty are acquitted. But Ab might have had the satisfaction of knowing that to future generations of aesthetic judges he would become a law in himself. To them his first horse would be a standard of achievement, a classic, for the first rule of classical criticism. is "To copy nature is to copy Ab."

The

ethical

But let us make the further supposition that the first critic had his mind fixed chiefly on the spectators who crowded the cave to see Ab's masterpiece. critic What should he say to them? Tell them of Ab's early life, and his fondness for horses and horsey associations? Most unedifying. Point out how truly and sympathetically Ab had seen and reproduced the object of his affection? But what would that do for their business prosperity or their eternal salvation? No, an ethical lesson or judgment was to be extracted from Ab's masterpiece. And thus the critic became the preacher. He reminded his audience that "the horse is a vain thing for safety." He became a moralist, anxiously inquiring of the work of art "What will it do to the beholder? Will it leave him better or worse fitted for life here or hereafter?" He became the social philosopher, seeing in Ab's horse an attack on human standards of living; or the patriot finding in the patient docility of the beast a seditious reference to a virtue on the part of the enemy. He also became the judge. Finding that the public reacted perversely to his warnings he questioned whether it could be trusted to see the drawing at all; and if the temperamental Ab got himself enmeshed in a scandal the critic became the censor and barred Ab's work from the walls of the cave.