Scholarship, so conceived, is the basis of criticism. When a few years ago I published a volume which bore the subtitle of “Essays on the Unity of Genius and Taste,” the pedants and the professors were in the ascendant, and it seemed necessary to emphasize the side of criticism which was then in danger, the side that is closest to the art of the creator. But the professors have been temporarily routed by the dilettanti, the amateurs, and the journalists, who treat a work of the imagination as if they were describing fireworks or a bull-fight (to use a phrase of Zola’s about Gautier); and so it is necessary now to insist on the discipline and illumination of scholarship,--in other Words, to write an “Essay on the Divergence of Criticism and Creation.” American criticism, like that of England, but to an even greater extent, suffers from a want of philosophic insight and precision. It has neither inherited nor created a tradition of æsthetic thought. For it every critical problem is a separate problem, a problem in a philosophic vacuum, and so open for discussion to any astute mind with a taste for letters. Realism, classicism, romanticism, imagism, impressionism, expressionism, and other terms or movements as they spring up, seem ultimate realities instead of matters of very subordinate concern to any philosophy of art,--mere practical programmes which bear somewhat the same relation to æsthetic truth that the platform of the Republican Party bears to Aristotle’s “Politics” or Marx’s “Capital.” As a result, critics are constantly carrying on a guerilla warfare of their own in favour of some vague literary shibboleth or sociological abstraction, and discovering anew the virtues or vices of individuality, modernity, Puritanism, the romantic spirit or the spirit of the Middle West, the traditions of the pioneer, and so on ad infinitum. This holds true of every school of American criticism, “conservative” or “radical”; for all of them a disconnected body of literary theories takes the place of a real philosophy of art. “Find an idea and then write about it” sums up the American conception of criticism. Now, while the critic must approach a work of literature without preconceived notion of what that individual work should attempt, he cannot criticize it without some understanding of what all literature attempts. The critic without an æsthetic is a mariner without chart, compass, or knowledge of navigation; for the question is not where the ship should go or what cargo it should carry, but whether it is going to arrive at any port at all without sinking.