I have chosen elementary examples, but my
meaning should be sufficiently clear.
And the American critic--by which I mean you, O discriminating
reader, as well as the professional who puts pen to paper--is
equally in need of the art of definition. The books we read and
write are on different planes of absolute excellence or
unworthiness. There is--to take the novel--the story well
calculated to pass a pleasant hour but able to pass nothing else;
there is the story with a good idea in it and worth reading for
the idea only; there is the story worthless as art but usefully
catching some current phase of experience; and there is the fine
novel which will stand any test for insight, skill, and truth. Now
it is folly to apply a single standard to all these types of
story. It can be done, naturally, but it accomplishes nothing
except to eliminate all but the shining best. That is a task for
history. In the year in which we live--and it is sometimes
necessary to remind the austerer critic that we always live in the
present--there are a hundred books, of poetry, of essays, of
biography, of fiction, which are by no means of the first rank and
yet are highly important, if only as news of what the world, in
our present, is thinking and feeling.
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