and objective. The old pessimism and fatalism still persist, however. Thus we read, at the end of the recent Highways of Happiness: "Those who have drunk too deep of the evil sweets of the Valley of Pleasure and have lingered overlong in the City of Folly may never, though they should at last find it, rest content in the Valley of Peace, but a fever is in their blood forever that drives them back to their old wilderness, however weary they may be thereof and wise concerning its nothingness." One cannot escape the impression that while much of Mr. Le Gallienne's prose is brilliant, the best hardly rises to the high level of the very best of his poetry.

As a critic, as was to be expected, Richard Le Gallienne has been æsthetic and appreciative rather than philosophical. He places great emphasis on personal estimates and little on definite principles. As early as in Narcissus he laid down his rule of faith: "Criticism is a good thing, but poetry is a better. Indeed, criticism properly is not; it is but a process to an end. We could really do without it much better than we imagine; for, after all, the question is not so much how we live, but do we live? Who would not a hundred times rather be a fruitful Parsee than a barren philosophe?" "No reading," we are advised, "does us any good that is not a pleasure to us." The definition of poetry follows the æsthetic tradition: "Poetry is that impassioned arrangement of words, whether in verse or prose, which embodies the exaltation, the beauty, the rhythm, and the pathetic truth of life." Moreover, "the first thing to realize about poetry is that the metre is the meaning,—even more than the words." In a review of a distinguished poet we are likely to find such words as the following on Swinburne: "Who am I, or any reader, that we should point out the specks in these windfalls from the Hesperides? Surely it befits us better to shut our eyes and open our mouths, and take gratefully. what it pleases the gods to give us." Now any such criticism as this is of course the height of the unscientific. At the same time it is not without its distinct merits. It aims to praise rather than to blame; it inspires by a sympathetic attitude; it is in many instances definitely creative.

"The shortest way to the distinguishing excellence of any

writer," said Mr. Le Gallienne in beginning his book on Meredith, "is through his hostile critics; for it is always the quality they most diligently attack." No statement could better apply to his own work. Criticized for its extravagance, its conceits, and its sentimentality, out of these very qualities it has produced one of the strongest creative forces in English or American literature at the present time; and it is interesting to record that after years and years of delayed acceptance this superb poet and lover of the beautiful has at last come into his own.

BENJAMIN BRAWLEY.

Morehouse College, Atlanta, Ga.

SOME ASPECTS OF THE CRITICISM OF

PAUL ELMER MORE

Paul Elmer More's critical series, the Shelburne Essays, have for the past twelve years appeared in book form at fairly regular intervals. The first volume was published in 1904, and the latest, the ninth, appeared in October of 1915. Among students of literature this work has already, I believe, acquired sufficient esteem to warrant its classification with the most serious and significant criticism that has been produced in America. Before attempting an exposition of this criticism it may be well to give a brief survey of the life of Mr. More.

I

Paul Elmer More was born in St. Louis in 1864. After graduating from Washington University in 1887, he received the bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1892 and the master's in 1893. He was assistant in Sanskrit at Harvard in 1894-'95, and associate in Sanskrit and classical literature at Bryn Mawr from 1895 to 1897. From 1901 to 1903 he was literary editor of the Independent. In 1903 he became editor of the New York Evening Post, and in 1909 editor-in-chief of the Nation, from which position he recently resigned, retaining, however, his relation to the paper as contributor and advisory editor. Mr. More has two brothers who have earned the distinction of being described in the Who's Who as educators and scientists.

In the essay on Thoreau in the first volume of the Shelburne Essays there is afforded a glimpse into Mr. More's mode of preparation for his critical labors. When a young man he lived for two years in a house in the valley of the Androscoggin near the village of Shelburne, spending the time in reading and meditation, and laying the foundation for what, besides his natural endowment and academic training, appears to be his peculiar strength as a critic-his wide and thoughtful reading. His formal education carried him into the domain of classical and oriental literature; in the field of English literature his reading has been excep

tionally varied; in the world of philosophic thought he is at home from Plato to Bergson; and he exhibits a critical acquaintance with the philosophic aspects of modern natural science, and with the current tendencies of economics, sociology, and politics. Mr. More's equipment for the work of criticism consists in general in a first-hand acquaintance with much of the world's best literature, and a familiarity with the main intellectual and æsthetic currents of history. Interpretation, the preliminary to serious criticism, is to him not the detailed inductive study of the works of an author, but the classification of the works in their relation to these larger movements. Thus he explains Carlyle as a union of the Hindoo mystic and the Hebrew prophet, and he interprets the writings of Lafcadio Hearn as a synthesis of Hindoo philosophy, Japanese æstheticism, and occidental science. And from the study of the world's literature and philosophy and from fruitful meditation he has developed a philosophy and a vision of his own, which he applies to literature ond other writings as the measuring-rod of judicial criticism.

II

Of the classifications of criticism there are various methods, but all critical works can be conveniently grouped into one or more of three distinct classes: historical and scientific criticism, appreciation and impressionism, and judicial criticism. In the preface to the eighth series of the Shelburne Essays Mr. More has explained why his criticism is predominantly judicial. "There is a kind of criticism that limits itself to looking at the thing in itself, or at the parts of a thing as they successively strike the mind. This is properly the way of Sympathy. But there is a place also for another kind of criticism, which is not so much directed to the individual thing as to its relations with other things, and to its place as cause or effect in a whole group of tendencies. No criticism, to be sure, can follow one or the other of these methods exclusively... The highest criticism would contrive to balance these methods in such manner that neither the occasional merits of a work nor its general influence would be unduly subordinated. Yet there are times when the gen

eral drift of ideas is so dominant that a critic may at least be

pardoned if, with his eye on the larger relations, he does not bring out quite so clearly as he might the distinguishing marks of the writer or book with which he is immediately dealing. And if to his mind this general trend appears to be toward the desolation of what he holds very dear, you will at least understand how he can come to slight the sounder aspects of any work which, as a whole, belongs to the dangerous influences of the age."

Mr. More's criticism is not, as a rule, historical or scientific, although for this fact he has not given any such complete explanation as for the fact that it is not appreciation; yet various passages as well as the spirit of his work show that for this fact there is the same manner of explanation. Scientific criticism, by collecting and weighing all possible data, aims at reaching a less subjective and more accurate view than that which is attained by any other method. It properly includes biography and historical investigation, and aims at ascertainable facts to the exclusion of mere opinions. It is a well-known fact that this method has accomplished during the past thirty years much for which students of literature should be grateful; but it is a question whether it has not of recent years been overdone, and whether it does not involve assumptions that will hardly bear examination. The scientific study of literature arose as one phase of the modern scientific movement, which, beginning with biology and the physical sciences, has permeated all departments of intellectual life. The fundamental assumption of this whole movement is the law of causality, which means that any fact or occurrence is the mathematical product of its antecedents. In the words of Huxley: "The admission of the occurrence of any event which is not the logical consequence of the immediately antecedent events, according to these definite, ascertained or unascertained rules which we call the laws of nature,' would be an act of self-destruction on the part of science." The application of this theory or attitude to the study of literature affords a definite method of critical procedure. A work of literature is the product of a certain individual working over certain documents or sources. Hence, the importance that is attached to source studies. The individual himself is a composite of certain forces-his race, his ancestry, his