If he
defines the personality of the writer, the art which makes all the
difference between feeling and expression escapes definition. No
ten philosophers yet agree as to whether beauty is an absolute
quality, or simply an attribute of form, whether a poem is
beautiful because it suggests and approaches an archetype, or
whether it is beautiful because it perfectly expresses its
subject.
And yet when the ambition to explain and describe and define
everything is humbly set aside there remains a good honest job for
the maker of definitions, and it is a job that can be done. I may
not be able to tell what art is, but I can tell what it isn't. I
may fail to make a formula for literature, but I can try at least
to tell what Thomas Hardy has chiefly accomplished, define
Conrad's essential quality, point out the nature of romantic
naturalism, and distinguish between sentiment and sentimentality.
And if such things were ever worth doing they are worth doing now.
Only a prophet dares say that we are at the beginning of a great
creative period in the United States, but any open-eyed observer
can see that an era of American literary criticism is well under
way.
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