Warner's paper is so sound and so suggestive that we feel justified in reproducing a somewhat lengthy extract.
"There seems to be a general impression that in a new country like the United States, where everything grows freely, almost spontaneously, as by a new creative impulse, literature had better be left to develop itself without criticism, as practically it has been left—every tree to get as high as it can without reference to shape or character. I say, as practically it has been left. For while there has been some good criticism in this country of other literatures, an application of sound scholarship and wide comparison, there has been very little of this applied to American literature. There has been some fault-finding, some ridicule, a good deal of the slashing personality and the expression of individual prejudice and like or dislike, which characterized so much of the British review criticism of the beginning of this century—much of it utterly conventional and blind judgment—but almost no attempt to ascertain the essence and purport of our achievement and to arraign it at the bar of comparative excellence, both as to form and substance. I do not deny that there has been some ingenious and even just exploiting of our literature, with note of its defects and its excellences, but it will be scarcely claimed for even this that it is cosmopolitan. How little of the application of universal principles to specific productions! We thought it bad taste when Matthew Arnold put his finger on Emerson as he would put his finger on Socrates or on Milton. His judgment may have been wrong, or it may have. been right; matter of individual taste we would have been indifferent to; it seemed as if it were the universality of the test from which our national vanity shrank. We have our own standards; if we choose, a dollar is sixty-five cents, and we resent the commercial assertion that a dollar is one hundred cents.
"It seems to me that the thing the American literature needs just now, and needs more than any other literature in the world, is criticism. In the essay by Matthew Arnold to which I have referred, and in which, as you remember, he defines criticism to be 'a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world,' he would have had smooth sailing if he had not attempted to apply his principles of criticism to the current English literature. And this application made the essay largely an exposition of the British Philistine. The Philistine is, in his origin and character, a very respectable person, whether he is found in Parliament, or in Exeter Hall, or in a newspaper office; he is incased in tradition. The epithet, borrowed from the German, would not have stung as it did if Arnold had not further defined the person to be, what Ruskin found him also in England and Wagner in Germany, one inaccessible to new ideas.
"Now, we have not in the United States the Philistine, or Philistinism, at least not much of it, and for the reason that we have no tradition. We have thrown away, or tried to throw away, tradition. We are growing in the habit of being sufficient unto ourselves. We have not Philistinism, but we have something else. There has been no name for it yet invented. Some say it is satisfaction in superficiality, and they point to the common school and to Chautauqua; the French say that it is satisfaction in mediocrity. At any rate it is a satisfaction that has a large element of boastfulness in it, and boastfulness based upon a lack of enlightenment, in literature especially a want of discrimination, of fine discernment of quality. It is a habit of looking at literature as we look at other things ; literature in national life never stands alone if we condone crookedness in politics and in business under the name of smartness, we apply the same sort of test, that is the test of success, to literature. It is the test of the late Mr. Barnum. There is in it a disregard of moral as well as of artistic values and standards. You see it in the press, in sermons even, the effort to attract attention, the lack of moderation, the striving to be sensational in poetry, in the novel, to shock, to advertise the performance. Everything is on a strain. No, this is not Philistinism. I am sure, also, that it is not the final expression of the American spirit, that which will represent its life or its literature. I trust it is a transient disease, which we may perhaps call by a transient name,—Barnumism."
Another paper of importance, sent by Mr. Hamilton W. Mabie (who was unfortunately absent), had for its subject "Criticism as an Educational Force." Speaking of the change that has of late years come over the spirit of criticism, Mr. Mabie writes:
"It was not until criticism passed into the hands of men of insight and creative power that it discovered its chief function to be that of comprehension, and its principal service that of interpretation. Not that it has surrendered its function of judging according to the highest standards, but that it has discovered that the forms of excellence change from time to time, and that the question with regard to a work of art is not whether it conforms to types of excellence already familiar, but whether it is an ultimate expression of beauty or power. In every case the artist creates the type and the critic proves his competency by recognizing it; so that while the critic holds the artist to rigid standards of veracity and craftsmanship it is the artist who lays down the law to the critic. As an applied art, based on induction and constructing its canons apart from the material which literature furnishes, criticism was notable mainly for its fallability. As an art based on deduction, and framing its laws in accordance with the methods and principles illustrated in the best literature, it has advanced from a secondary to a leading place among the literary forms now most widely employed and most widely influential."
Mr. H. D. Traill, of Oxford, sent to the Congress a paper upon "The Relations of Literature and Journalism," from which we quote the opening paragraph:
"There never was a more promising subject for people who are fond of a good discursive debate, not likely to be brought to an abrupt and disappointing close by a sudden agreement between the disputants, than the subject of the relations between Literature and Journalism. A discussion of it combines almost every possible attraction—ambiguity of terms, indefiniteness of area, uncertainty of aim—everything in short that the heart of the most ardent controversialist could desire. I have been privileged to hear many such discussions and to take part in some of them, and on no occasion can I remember to have met with any debater so pedantic as to ask for a definition either of Literature or Journalism, at any stage of the argument. A sound
