the kinds of emotion; sometimes the standing of the emotion, in an orderly or beautiful life, is suggested. But when it comes to anything printed it seems that everything is relevant except the art of the thing itself. We heard the other day, and were not surprised to hear, that Joyce isn't so important because he isn't nearly so good a psychoanalyst as Freud. Ulysses we shall probably never see in these parts, but our local librarian is making quite a search for Freud's novels, so that we can have the best. Or are we confused?
Professor Sherman has helped us a great deal in this confusion by presenting in that book of his which has lately been reissued, a literary criticism which is almost exactly what we have been looking for—the essay on Henry James. Is there a better one? And on comparing it with the others in the book, which are almost as exactly what we are not looking for, we find the reason. In the one on Wells, for example, we find "The difference widens as soon as one considers the uses to which Wells and Arnold propose to put the enlarged powers of the state." It is a criticism of Wells' Utopia. Or again it is the vulgar barbarism of Dreiser, much more than his naturalistic method. Or George Moore's animalism. And when he arrives at James Mr Sherman, still looking for the ruling passion in an idea, hits upon exactly the right idea, that James "adored beauty and absolutely nothing else in the world" and he proceeds from that to show how this exclusive consecration to beauty made James' work, the style and the structure and everything, what it was. That is to say that in James there is no absorption in politics and economics; there is an idealism sympathetic to Mr Sherman, and this happy accident makes his essay a work of aesthetic criticism. To make it clearer, compare the usual run of essays about James, dealing with the fact that he wrote up the international situation. Don't those who write about him bother to read what he himself said on the subject?
For many of us the use of literature as a means to an economic end has become tiresome. We do want to know the relevance of a book to life, of course; but we want our critics to tell us just how well the "criticism of life" is managed in a novel, for instance, and then to go on and make our enjoyment greater by referring us to the artistic harmonies which the novel may possess, to let us share a little the rapture of the creator. We would like our critics to thin out a little, if necessary. Let them tell us how Chekhov apprehends life,
