up to your better nature was a pose; and Louis made us all laugh by saying earnestly, 'in short, everybody who tries to do right is a hypocrite'!"
To continue for a moment with our example: I do not contend that the picture of a pallid, rakehelly, tuberculous, shambling, disreputable Stevenson is false, so far as it goes. There is quite a bit of evidence and an abundance of gossip to the effect that there was such a Stevenson. What we old fogies contend is merely that this Stevenson was collected by a man with one eye. We contend also that there is nothing in the collection that seems more real or more valuable than what we discovered with an eye on the other side of our heads. The best-equipped heads have two eyes; but if some curious religious impulse urges the critic to pluck out one eye, we old fogies think it betrays a perverted judgment always to pluck out the right eye.
When only the left eye is preserved, criticism functions with the monotonous inevitability of predestination in some such fashion as this.
Hamlet exclaims in one place that man is a remarkable piece of work: "how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! . . . in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a God." But on another occasion Hamlet says: "I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things it were better my mother had not borne me. . . . What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven, we are arrant knaves all; believe
