This is one of the most important passages in contemporary United States criticism,--doubly so because the men thus ranged against each other are both accomplished scholars and thus rise to symbols of the inevitable contest between the intellect that dominates the emotions and the intellect that has discovered wisdom in guidance rather than domination. Verissimo was no Lewisohn; he possessed many of that critic’s signal qualities, but in lesser degree. His language is not so instinct with human warmth, his culture not so wide nor so deep, his perceptions not so keen; but he belongs in company of such rare spirits. He is as unusual amidst the welter of verbose opinions that passes for criticism in Spanish and Portuguese America as is Lewisohn amidst our own colder but equally vapid and empty reviewers and as was Rodó in the milieu that but half understood him. Neither Rodó nor Verissimo, for that matter, had a firm grasp upon the budding intellectual life of these States; each died a trifle too early for the signs of hope that they would have been happy to discern. As it is, they possessed the somewhat stencilled view of the United States as the country of the golden calf; a view none too false, more’s the pity, but too “absolute” in the sense that we have just seen discussed. There is, for all the truth in Rodó’s famous _Ariel_, a certain half-concealed condescension that might not have appeared were that essay written today.[3] The younger Spanish Americans and Brazilians who have come north to study at our universities and to acquaint themselves with the newer phases of our culture, have been quick to respond to such spirits as Van Wyck Brooks, Henry L. Mencken, Ludwig Lewisohn, Joel Elias Spingarn. During the next decade, as these young men rise to power in their own intellectual world, their books will doubtless reveal a different attitude toward the attainments of their Northern neighbours,--unless--and there is always that unless,--political happenings should contort their views and our scant spiritual population should once again suffer, as so often in the past, for the misdoings of our diplomats. Verissimo, then, is the critic-artist. The drum-beat of dogma that pounds over the pages of Sylvio Romero is never heard in his lines. Though he holds that art is a social function--a form indispensable to the existence of society--he realizes its individual import, without carrying his belief to the point of that mystifying esoterism so beloved of certain latter-day poets and dramatists.