right to set up those criteria of artistic integrity so sorely needed by writers who were wholly absorbed in the battle of the work-a-day world. The Yiddish writer, knowing few of the comforts that come with the support of a leisured middle-class, has always been in the midst of that daily battle for a livelihood.
"To be sincere and faithful in art is as difficult as to be sincere and faithful in other activities of life," is a view with which Rogoff admonished these writers. Whereupon he pointed out that the artist's mission is "to see life as it is and to depict it in its own colors,"—the comic together with the grim; the idealistic and the noble, together with the sordid; the hopeful as well as the despairing; the tender and poetic as validly as the brutal. In other words, Rogoff was spokesman of the idea that the artist dare not take sides in the business of life since he has business in his own domain, with demands and standards, with purposes and ideals that are sufficiently exacting to call for the very best in the artist.
Varied as are the subjects of these essays, this one point of view informs them all the vigorous insistence on the integrity of the writer. There must be "no compromise," says Rogoff, "but (only) a firm
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