The first need of American criticism to-day is education in æsthetic thinking. It needs above all the cleansing and stimulating power of an intellectual bath. Only the drenching discipline that comes from intellectual mastery of the problems of æsthetic thought can train us for the duty of interpreting the American literature of the future. The anarchy of impressionism is a natural reaction against the mechanical theories and jejune text-books of the professors, but it is a temporary haven and not a home. The haphazard empiricism of English criticism and the faded moralism of our own will serve us no more. We must desert these muddy waters, and seek purer and deeper streams. In a country where philosophers urge men to cease thinking, it may be the task of the critic to revivify and reorganize thought. Only in this way can we gain what America lacks, the brain-illumined soul. The second need of American criticism can be summed up in the word scholarship--that discipline of knowledge which will give us at one and the same time a wider international outlook and a deeper national insight. One will spring from the other, for the timid Colonial spirit finds no place in the heart of the citizen of the world; and respect for native talent, born of a surer knowledge, will prevent us alike from overrating its merits and from holding it too cheap. Half-knowledge is either too timid or too cocksure; and only out of this spiritual discipline can come a true independence of judgment and taste. For taste is after all both the point of departure and the goal; and the third and greatest need of American criticism is a deeper sensibility, a more complete submission to the imaginative will of the artist, before attempting to rise above it into the realm of judgment. If there is anything that American life can be said to give least of all, it is training in taste. There is a deadness of artistic feeling, which is sometimes replaced or disguised by a fervour of sociological obsession, but this is no substitute for the faculty of imaginative sympathy which is at the heart of all criticism. When the social historian is born, the critic dies; for taste, or æsthetic enjoyment, is the only gateway to the critic’s judgment, and over it is a flaming signpost, “Critic, abandon all hope when this gate is shut.” “To ravish Beauty with dividing powers Is to let exquisite essences escape.” Only out of the fusion of these three elements of taste, intellect, and knowledge can American criticism gain what in one of its manifestations is called “personality” and in another “style.” Only in this way can it win in the battle against the benumbing chaos and the benumbing monotony of American art and life.