More's Shelburne Essays

CRITICISM in our country at present is mainly either erudite or temperamental. The former kind can scarcely avoid the appearance, at least, of jejuneness; the latter incurs the risk of being mere appreciation, over-emphatic or otherwise remote from universality. There has been very remarkable work of both orders in the last few years. Neither kind, however, fills the large field of the professed literary critic. The special scholar who gives adequate literary form to a work of investigation and interpretation comes into this wider field only incidentally. So does the poet or novelist who indulges himself in a free expression of opinion about some piece of literature which has produced in him a peculiar reaction.

These excursions into the field of criticism on the part of men who are distinguished for learning and men whose principal activity is in the region of imaginative creation do not, however, suffice. There is a place still for the official critic, the writer whose function is that which Sainte-Beuve only late in life and with a certain degree of half-pleased resignation acknowledged his to be. Probably Lowell came as near being a great official critic as any one in America has been hitherto, though even he will appear to have been a critic only secondarily and incidentally, if we compare him with Sainte-Beuve. There is no question here of great constructive criticism, or, more properly, of prophecy coupled with the energy to make prophecy come true, which belonged to Lessing and Wordsworth. It is a question of interpretative criticism; and of this we have had in former generations no succession of masters to be compared with the dynasty who have ruled in France.

Several advantages and exemptions go to the making of such a critic. He must be learned. His literary knowledge must be, of course, exact and wide, including several, at least, of modern literatures, the main currents of mediæval literature, and, indispensably, classical literature. And he must, in his experience, have courted more than one muse. Every art and science, every branch of philosophy, upon which he has ever expended enthusiasm, will be a gain. There will be scars innumerable of old flames burnt into his heart. He will be capable of interpreting literature from the standpoint of one or more systems, though he may actually and for himself have realized the insufficiency or the excess of every system. System indeed, or complete accord with a philosophy of whatsoever kind, he will probably have eschewed. His partisanships will be rather memories than sources of expectation. Ordinarily, too, the official critic might reasonably be expected to stand free from any assumptions based upon his personal affiliations. He must remain at all costs morally detached. He will be more effective the less he insists. What he writes must wear the grace of perfect ease, of that spontaneous and familiar confidence which savors of unconcern. He is privileged to rise above his own learning and is not so subject to condemnation for minor inaccuracies and inconsistencies as is the professed specialist. Indeed, consistency, in so far as it may imply insensibility to novel facts or to fresh emotional impressions, is not, in fairness, to be demanded of an exclusively critical writer.

It may seem pedantic to begin a notice of Mr. Paul Elmer More’s Shelburne Essays¹ by referring to standards so definite and exacting. But perhaps it will be admitted that this course is justified, first because Mr. More will readily appear, from the scope of his productions, to be qualified for consideration as a professed literary critic, and secondly, because the readers of these thirty-three essays will inevitably, for a while and until aided by reflection, be disposed to deny him the qualities of grace and detachment.

With but one or two exceptions the Shelburne Essays appeared originally in periodicals between 1899 and 1905. Many of them were conceived and in part elaborated during years when their author dwelt in solitude at Shelburne, in the White Mountains. The amount of purely self-determined reading which must have preceded their production bears witness to a degree of leisure which it would be hardly possible for an active intelligence to enjoy in the midst of ordinary pursuits. With amazing fertility, Mr. More continues to print once a month, in the New York Evening Post, articles of the same general quality. Some of his subjects in the three volumes that have thus far appeared were evidently chosen with complete freedom, in the days of retirement, and because he had a message to deliver; others were accepted because they came to him as a watcher of the stream of current publications, who seizes now and again upon a remarkable book. The range is wide. We have here remarks on English literature from Shakespeare to Kipling, including not only British and American work, but the revival of Irish epic: we have a somewhat technical discussion of the science of English verse, philosophical dissertations on the Greek oracles and the Greek idea of Nemesis, a study of Japanese religions, an essay on Sainte-Beuve, and a review of Tolstoi’s theory of art.

It is soon apparent that Mr. More deals competently with all or nearly all of his topics; he writes on the basis of an uncommonly broad and serious general preparation, and after supplying himself specifically with the knowledge appropriate to each task. There was evidently in every instance a reason of affinity or antipathy which guided him in his choice; the essays are not, after all, a heterogeneous collection. And from this determining personal interest there accrues to all Mr. More’s work an earnestness which lifts it out of the reach of certain dangers incident to ordinary reviewing. It never appears insincere. There is perhaps in these three volumes not a single line which bids for favor or popularity. His work is never trivial. There are few condescensions or concessions of any sort. The address is to no special audience, yet Mr. More assumes that his readers are worthy of his best. He makes a considerable demand upon our attention at times, for some of his arguments are elaborate and his point of view is often unusual. With a more intricate and pretentious style, and with a few passes of intellectual legerdemain, Mr. More could easily have made an appeal to the love of mystery and the flattering sense of being admitted to a recondite philosophy, for which the ears of a large public are always open. In many of the essays he does not even attempt to exercise a legitimate charm of style, and is content to expound his views clearly, on the principle that good wine needs no bush. In moments of increased seriousness the style is indeed not heightened, but lapses into a tone of insistence.

This trait is significant. It is an indication of what appears to be Mr. More’s characteristic excess. When he originally printed these essays, in periodicals, the minds of readers who followed him assiduously had time to relax; we felt no sense of monotony, but rather a grateful admiration of his versatile powers. Now, however, when the full array is marshaled before us, we cannot help observing that rank upon rank wears the same uniform and follows in the same direction. The tread at times is heavy; its regularity is a little oppressive; and there is something vexatious in seeing these brilliant squadrons wheel at the same point in one fatal direction. Yet when we discover what this objective is, when we look back through the three volumes and re-read the passages which by their frequent iteration wearied us perhaps and made us think Mr. More was narrow in his conception of art, we shall confess that no generalization about human life could really be wider and more richly suggestive than his dominant idea, which reaches perfect expression in the last essay of all.

“Faith,” he here says, “is that faculty of the will, mysterious in its source and inexplicable in its operation, which turns the desire of a man away from contemplating the fitful changes of the world toward an ideal, an empty dream it may be, or a shadow or a mere name, of peace in absolute changelessness.” And art is nothing other than a mode of “contemplating the fitful changes of the world.” He quotes with approval Joubert’s mot that l’illusion et la sagesse are the essence of art, sagesse being interpreted to mean disillusion, or the deeper wisdom that remains when the puppets have been withdrawn, the purification we experience when our heated imaginations, after due exercise, repose in the pale, remorseless light and the lonely silence of a truth too austere for art to express.

Art, he teaches, deals chiefly with the most shadowy deceptions with which humanity appeases itself, — with the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. Musicians, painters, and poets do but deck with flowers the devoted victim of perpetual change, do but beguile us to admire “this ever-shifting mirage of our worldly life.” We may admit nonchalantly enough that art finds her favorite pigments in the iris of our dreams, but Mr. More asks us to lay aside our jaunty assurance and follow him on a journey which may make us blench. What if art herself be an illusion ? To Plato she was suspect. Augustine stopped his ears to her voice as to a siren’s call. Philosophers and ascetics, Greeks and Hindus, and almost the whole of ancient and mediæval Christianity have felt the cold touch of this doubt. It is no mere passing mood with Mr. More, but an indwelling, regulating master-thought, which dominates and in the end formalizes his conceptions of every subject, — the thought, almost the dogma, that art is but the dream of a dream. In many ways and places, here by implication, here again in a subtle argument, and here again in a flash of frank abandon, but never at all with petulance or with bravado,he manifests his conviction — or shall I say his suspicion — that beauty is impermanent and art deceptive.

“The haunting dread,” he confesses, “will thrust itself on the mind, that in accepting, though it be but as a symbol, the beauty of the world, we remain the dupes of a smiling illusion. And something of this dread seems to rise to the surface now and again in the works of those who have penetrated most deeply into art and life.”

For confirmation of this view he refers us to Oriental poetry and bids us hear the undertone of lament in Greek poetry and in Shakespeare. It is one of Mr. More’s advantages that Hindu literature forms a portion of his background; but it is natural for us to be more easily convinced by citations from Sophocles and Shakespeare than by Vedic hymns. And it is true that Sophocles brought “the eternal note of sadness in.” Flux and illusion, the dying cadence of a dream, deception, nothingness, — what else does the chorus sing in Œdipus: —

And again: —

That to Shakespeare the tangle of passions was “woven on a web of illusion,” Mr. More infers from “ the great moments when the curtain of disillusion falls.” And no doubt there is a mood of Shakespeare when he turns with satiety and disappointment from the pageants of his imagination to some profounder truth, or, as Mr. More would have us believe, to bottomless despair. The most poignant of all Shakespeare’s cries of disillusion is when Macbeth, in the ghastly awakening after the debauch of his superb imagination, rends the veil that masks both life and art, with the words: —

No doubt this is one of Shakespeare’s tragic moods; and both Sophocles and Æschylus touch this nadir too. But Æschylus, through the Chorus of Agamemnon, and surely in no shallow vein, protests against the doctrine of despair which was current even in his age. And though I would not imply that Mr. More makes an unfair use of the groans wrung from Shakespeare in a tragic mood, it should be remembered that to Shakespeare the tragic world was not the whole of life; and furthermore we can make a distinction between two ways in which he solves his tragic problems. There is, no doubt, the tragic blame for which he offers no palliation, the tragic crime which can never “trammel up the consequence,” the sowing of seed merely evil, for which no mortal eye can foresee any other harvest than ten-fold wrong. What is left but broken loyalty and disheartening fear, when Macbeth has fought his course ? But, on the other hand, from Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Lear, and even Othello, we rise with a sense of clearing air, a sense that the clouds have lifted. Something hard breaks within us, and there is surcease of pain. It is not that guilt is an illusion; Shakespeare offers us no sentimental sop. But he gives us a glimpse of the larger frame of things in which each tragedy is held, a world into which he projects a hope of atonements and reconciliations unimaginable. If Romeo and Juliet perish, love still exists and has been vindicated by their death for love. If Lear holds the lifeless form of Cordelia in his dying arms, he has yet gained more than his kingdom and poor dignities in the knowledge that she loved him. Othello’s is a bitterer case, and palliation of his fury is impossible; yet why do they stand side by side in our memories, not as victim and assassin, but inseparably united, “the gentle Lady married to the Moor?” There is in this type of Shakespearean tragedy—and it is the main type — a nobility in the heroes and heroines which nothing can debase, and sometimes after the most terrific catastrophes the final word is calm It is the:

of Horatio; and it is Antony’s praise of Brutus:—

What abides in our spirits after reading Romeo and Juliet or Lear or even Othello, and still more distinctly after finishing a Greek trilogy with Antigone or the Eumenides, is not a sense of disillusion, a feeling that the world of phenomena affords no point which can be grasped and clung to; it is, on the contrary, a conviction, transcendent and inexplicable often enough, but none the less important, that even this welter of change keeps time to some normal rhythm, — an assurance of rest for one whom the storm of life

Of Dante, perhaps no less than of Sophocles and Shakespeare, it may be said that he “penetrated deeply into art and life;” yet I cannot think of any passage in the Divine Comedy that really strikes the jarring note of disenchantment. There are many lines in Dante on the perishability of human joy and the brevity of life; but nowhere else than in these very lines does poetry afford a more vivid, penetrating sense of reality. What disturbs the ascetic part of Dante’s nature is precisely the inalienable and unchangeable qualities of things; he is not haunted by any doubt whether things are. Matter and form, phenomenon and conscious observer, past, present, and future, earth and the nine heavens, and finally God himself have for Dante intense and at times unwelcome and disquieting actuality. He, the greatest of all visionaries, is never a showman of phantoms. Of him Mr. More’s statement is decidedly not true, namely that “no poet ever causes the hearts of his hearers to expand with the larger joy who does not lift the veil occasionally and destroy the illusion he is himself creating.” It is almost impossible to take the Divine Comedy too seriously. It is so magnificently artificial that we may fail to observe that Dante himself, with calm assurance and unvarying earnestness, represents his journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise as having really happened.

Mr. More’s skepticism in regard to art is fundamental and systematic. It is not a playful fancy with him, and no one who has read the Shelburne Essays would think of charging him with using this fascinating philosophy as a device for making a systematic approach to his varied subject-matter, though it serves this purpose well, especially in the analysis of decadent literature, such as the poems of Mr. Arthur Symons and of Mr. Swinburne, and of certain sonnets of Shakespeare. It is of great use to him, also, when he comes to explain how “ the jaunty optimism of Emerson” imposed on a strong-minded generation of Americans, not because it coincided with their experience, but because it was expressed with steadfast cheerfulness, not unaccompanied by something which only Mr. More’s reminiscent piety keeps him from mentioning outright, namely, a touch of charlatanry.

Whether it appear only a mannerism, as perhaps it may to casual readers, and be therefore annoying to them, — or whether it be seriously appreciated, in which case it will awaken disquietude, — a sense of illusion in life and art is expressed throughout these essays. With what appears to be the intuition of fellow-feeling, Mr. More gropes among the heartstrings of Tolstoi, who has reached assurance of negation in questions where Mr. More only doubts. It is curious that here only, in the case of Tolstoi, Mr. More loses poise, making statements in the heat of his aversion which it is almost certain he will, in cooler moments, wish he had expunged. “It needs no more than a glance,” he says, “at the rigid, glaring eyes of the old man to feel that the soul within him feeds on bitter and uncharitable thoughts, and it needs but a little familiarity with his later work in fiction to learn that the ground of his spirit is bitterness and denunciation and despair. It is natural that a writer of Tolstoi’s gloomy convictions should deny the validity of beauty and should call the Greeks ignorant savages because they believed in beauty. His own later work shows an utter absence of the sense of beauty and joy.”

Using again the leverage of his illusiontheory, he lifts into view with admirable ease two peculiarites of Carlyle, which he names, with memorable aptness and distinctness, “the outer sense of illusion, joined to an aggravated self-consciousness.” “ To the Hindus’ belief in the illusion of life and in the mystic dominion of Works, he [Carlyle] added an emotional consciousness foreign to their temper. This was an exaggerated and highly irritable sense of his individual personality.” Here at least Mr. More’s doctrine has borne good fruit, in this illuminating criticism of Carlyle.

By means of it he has also added to our stock of preconceptions — for in most cases we possess no other information — on Celtic literature and the Celtic spirit. What little most of us know on this subject we have accepted from Matthew Arnold, as he accepted his charming and all too harmonious view from Renan; and we have rested content with a smattering of jargon about “natural magic,” only proving, whenever we attempted more consecutive analysis or any practical application of Renan’s and Arnold’s theory, how much in their picture is composed of the incommunicable quality of style. To imitate them was like taking a lovely medusa out of the water or crushing a dewy cobweb in one’s hand. Mr. More tells us that besides the natural magic by which the Celtic imagination is enabled to feel at one with certain moods of sky and heath, there is the quick impatience and suspicion of the Celts, inviting them to comment poetically on the evanescence of beauty. This again is good critical service.

It may be doubted whether he has helped us to a true conception of Elizabethan sonnets and particularly of Shakespeare’s. It is really too difficult to perceive anything Oriental in the Elizabethans. And skepticism as to the power of any man to find the right lock in Shakespeare’s heart for the mysterious key of the sonnets is as good a touchstone in its way as Mr. More’s illusion-theory.

In one of his playful passages — if indeed I be not over-fond in imagining it playful — Mr. More attributes to Nature herself the ghostly character which for him is worn by art. And why not, if art, as Dante fabled, is the child of nature ? “ Nature is feminine,” says Mr. More, “and loves to shroud herself in illusions, as the Hindus taught in their books. For they called her Mâyâ, the very person and power of deception, whose sway over the beholder must end as soon as her mystery is penetrated.” If, as Mr. More concludes, “it was the Hindu mysticism” of Carlyle “that rendered his doctrine utterly unavailing in the end to influence the current of public opinion,” it is not difficult to understand why insistence on this enfeebling speculation should render the Shelburne Essays less effective than they would be if they were free from the burden of dogma. For, after all, literature chiefly lives because it imparts a sense of reality and joy, a sense that life is worth while, and furthermore, that the poet’s presentment is a reproduction of the truth, and as such is itself vital. When Thackeray tells us his men and women are but puppets and says, “Here I sit, pulling the strings,” we never quite believe him, and he did not intend that we should. Did we believe him, we should close the book.

It is in passages where he suffers from the obsession of his theory, instead of enjoying its usufruct, that Mr. More appears, as I have said, to be lacking in the qualities of detachment and grace. Most of the topics which have to be considered by a general literary critic are, happily, not capable of being treated in this high tragic way. And the critic is doomed to fall short of the highest usefulness who forcibly applies an inappropriate method or proves to be the servant of a system.

In his lively enjoyment of Sterne, Cowper, and Crabbe, there is evidence of an approaching reaction, in Mr. More, against his Orientalism, which has been for a while so stimulating and in the end so depressing. One of the advantages of eighteenth-century literature is that it inspires a secure sense of the reality of life. It sets before us a well-ordered scheme. God, Nature, and Society move in their respective spheres with distinct outline. We may indeed protest that in the eighteenth century conception God holds himself aloof from Society and Society lives apart from Nature; but at least there is the solid comfort of knowing what we have to deal with. The Romanticists introduced confusion, and it is not hard to imagine the sinking sensation of a settled disciple of Pope and Dr. Johnson when he came to read “Manfred” or “ Alastor.” I partly sympathize with a person who cannot breathe the thin air of Shelley. Pseudo - orientalism played a large part in the fusing together of subject and object, God and nature, which is the least satisfactory practice of English and American Romanticism; and it is no wonder that Mr. More, who apparently knows Oriental literature as Emerson never did, should revolt against his vague fluidity and facile optimism. He finds relief—and this speaks well for his taste—in the firmer, though less passionate and high-colored thought of the older period.

It is easy to assert that Shelley wrote poetry and Crabbe did not. But it would be comprehensible and a mark of a certain refinement of taste if Mr. More should prefer Crabbe. He writes about him with unusual zest, in one of his lightest and pleasantest essays ; and though humor be still absent there is a substitute in his evident feeling of release. In like manner he turns from Emerson to Whittier, giving the impression that he enjoys the simple old-fashioned realist more than the apparently simple but actually complex mystic. For, as between them, it was not the Quaker who was the mystic. It is refreshing to read the passage, quoted with relish by Mr. More, in which Whittier criticises Baxter for his other-worldliness : “He had too little of humanity, he felt too little of the attraction of this world, and lived too exclusively in the spiritual and the unearthly.” As the shadows fall upon us in this life, is it better to yield to the repeated suggestion that life is a dream, and endeavor to fix our hearts upon a hope of some future reality ? Should we not rather sharpen our eyes to discern fresh colors and a better harmonized composition in the changed but still familiar landscape about us ? This was a form of spiritual courage in the eighteenth century ; it was fine and wise, and not mere shallowness, as some would have us think.

Mr. More is so free from cant and posture and undue self-consciousness that he lets himself obey frankly these impulses of reaction against his own general tendency. He relishes our literature of the eighteenth century, although it would be difficult to find a more positive and unspiritual phase of art in any age among the same people. And in this elasticity lies the most encouraging promise for his future career. There is something childlike and even winsome in the selfsurrendering joy of this austere scholar, and his impulsiveness it is, if anything, that will break out of the impasse in which, I say with diffidence, I think his spirit has come to a stand.

This open-mindedness will restore the grace which attracted us in that early essay on “The Solitude of Nathaniel Hawthorne.” Many readers of the Atlantic Monthly will recall the peculiar sense of personal charm communicated by a long passage in that article, which was first printed in this magazine in November, 1901. The passage began; “I remember, some time ago, when walking among the Alps, that I happened on a Sunday morning to stray into the little English church at Interlaken.” The whole essay is an unusual blending of scholarly analysis with an intimate confession of personal experience, the former supporting the latter. Sympathetic divination by itself might have left us unpersuaded. Analytic search for the mystery of Hawthorne through his romances would certainly have appeared inept.

In the Second Series of the Shelburne Essays Mr. More, having lost the secret of persuasive grace, discusses Charles Lamb. The result does credit to the critic’s independence, but betrays the fact that he has been wandering through dry places; for it would be difficult to form a wish less likely to be shared by those who appreciate that unique being, all fire, all air, all whimsy, and all gallantry and close-mouthed suffering, than this wish of Mr. More’s: “How refreshing it would be if a little oftener this muchenduring man would lay aside his pose and speak out straight from the heart, if he could find confidence to lose his wit in the tragic emotions that must have waked with him by day and slept with him by night.” Mr. More is grieved at Lamb’s “persistent refusal to face, in words at least, the graver issues of life.” Strange demand! Are there so many burning hearts who can consume their own smoke ? May we not cherish this illusion, if no other, that Charles Lamb was a happy man and a sincere man ? Among our many causes for gratitude to him, we have this above all, that he is not tragic, in words at least. Which of “the graver issues of life” are, then, more to be considered than how to be happy and make others happy, how to be gay without hollowness, how to attempt with success a little of that restorative service which nature, other than our poor human-nature, so freely and benignly dispenses ? We are much deceived by names, and it is only because we are all the “lackeys of fine phrases ” that we bestow on philosophers and preachers and philanthropists a more exalted regard as guides to right living than we give to any man, woman, or child who makes the heart leap up with innocent joy. But I am afraid I shall be thought to rank Charles Lamb with the organ-grinder at the street-corner, who fits so charmingly with the tender leaves of spring. To such lengths of opposition may one be driven by a dismal page of inappropriate dogmatism unlighted by a twinkle.

It remains to be seen whether this page of the Shelburne Essays, which has its fellow here and there, is due to the excess of a philosophizing spirit in Mr. More or to something more radical, — the absence of humor. He has proved possession of almost every other quality desirable in a critic; but the light touch, the graceful sprezzatura, which he himself praises, the humorous disdain which includes one’s own pet theories among things which may be waved aside upon occasion — has he this quality, which in several wellknown cases makes all the difference between a talented reviewer and a delightful author ? He has at least something else which is not so very unlike it — an unaffected and sweet simplicity.

Somewhat too systematic for a great official critic, he has thus far, perhaps, been; let us, however, do justice to the integrity and coherency of his work. A writer is conditioned by his background. It is comparatively easy for a critic with a background of merely contemporary culture to form a consistent philosophy, or for one whose reading has been chiefly English. Considering the extent of Mr. More’s studies, it will seem remarkable that he should entertain a harmonious view of life or art at all. When to this wide sweep of scholarly experience are applied the habit of seeking consistency and an instinct of frankness, we have a critic who is fit for even harder problems than those involved in the æsthetic exposition of literature.

The test comes in that final estimate of directions, that guess as to the point where certain lines will meet, in making which the critic acts as a religious teacher. There is a whole side of literary criticism which runs up directly into religion. Sainte-Beuve, in his own despite and partly just because he yielded only upon inner compulsion to this law of his nature as critic, is probably the fullest interpreter of the religious tendencies of France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Mr. More comes late enough to know better than to decline his inevitable task. Every thoughtful reader of the Shelburne Essays must perceive that in them a nice adjustment of religious values is attempted, and an effort, not merely unconscious, is made, to answer the question, What is the religion of Europe and America today ? Surely this question forces itself so pertinently upon no one else as upon the literary critic, under whose eyes pass the records of contemporary experience carefully selected and elaborately analyzed and synthesized. Surely no one else is better qualified to draw conclusions on this subject. But the validity of such conclusions increases in proportion to the breadth of the critic’s view. Part of Sainte-Beuve’s shrinking from this task was, as has been remarked, due to unwillingness to commit himself; he was sick at heart with the changes of opinion he had undergone; he was, however, incompletely equipped for it, and we see him endeavoring to make up the deficiency by studying English writers who represent particularly the extremes of religious thought under Protestant influence — Gibbon and Cowper, for example. But, after all, religion continued to present itself to him as it presents itself to most men of Latin race — in its relation, namely, to the contrast between the sensuous paganism and the ascetic Catholicism of Southern Europe: enjoyment of nature versus renunciation of nature.

It is of inestimable advantage to Mr. More, as an observer of the religious meaning of current literature, that his background includes Greek philosophy and the theosophic systems of India. He writes as a man who has at one time dwelt at home among the religious instincts and standards both of India and of ancient Greece, and yet as one who has emerged from both atmospheres. He has emerged too from New England transcendentalism, and without forfeiting his sensibility to religious impressions. It would not be surprising if he should surrender himself next — and from the point he now appears to have reached he could do it consistently — to the mediæval Catholic conviction that the visible universe exists merely to give to human souls an opportunity for renunciation in favor of a spiritual existence. The scope and fineness of Mr, More’s religious perceptions at present will be disclosed to one who reads consecutively his essays on Lafcadio Hearn and on J. Henry Shorthouse. I do not remember to have seen anywhere a more suggestive remark on the Oxford Movement than Mr. More’s observation that “this ecclesiastical battle, if paltry in abstract thought, was rich in human character and in a certain obstinate perception of the validity of traditional forms; it was at bottom a contest over the position of the Church in the intricate hierarchy of society, and pure religion was the least important factor under consideration.” A mind which can roll at ease on the ground-swell of Buddhism and then dabble complacently and to some purpose in the shallows of the High Church controversy may be said to have scope at least.

Background, method, sensibility, and scope, — these primary qualifications of a general or official critic Mr. More certainly possesses. To him, if to any American in our generation, we may look for the exercise of a function which is important in proportion to the abundance of good contemporary writing. The intellectual centres in America are numerous and scattered. They are found in unexpected quarters. In none of them do the flames of common effort and mutual support burn high enough to lighten the darkness of isolation. In all of them are solitary minds, lacking the support, the comfort, the rebukes, the ridicule, the give and take of other minds, and either unconscious of this need or crying in vain to have it satisfied. There are wanting standards of taste and especially an accepted historical perspective which shall recall us at every moment to conscious connection with one another and with the men and women of past ages.

For three centuries France has never been without such standards and perspective. They have been kept distinct and prominent by Boileau, Voltaire, and Sainte-Beuve. In England, notwithstanding the national spirit of individualism, Drvden, Addison, Pope, Johnson, and Arnold have, much less successfully, to be sure, but still in a degree hitherto unmatched in America, kept alive the tradition of unity. Mr. More’s essay on Sainte-Beuve, which is the most complete and substantial of his works, proves that he appreciates what criticism may be made to accomplish.

An official critic in America to-day and as far ahead as we can foresee, will have a more complex duty than Sainte-Beuve’s. We have so few recognized superiorities; the complacent optimism of our people is so incorrigible; the genius of our literary aspirants is so erratic, diffuse, and recalcitrant; timidity and incompetence have so long sheltered themselves under the flabby amiability of our professed organs of literary review, — that the task

of Mr. More, or whoever else shall undertake to discipline us, will be one of unparalleled usefulness and stupendous difficulty. But, rightly understood, nothing should be more welcome than such ministrations; for discipline is the cement of society, and without, it we must suffer the consequences of isolation. And what are these but languor and sterility ?