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. The war, which confused and afterward dulled our thinking, stirred innumerable critical impulses, which are coming to the surface, some like bubbles and others like boils, but some as new creations of the American intellect. The new generation has shown itself acrimoniously critical. It slaps tradition and names its novels and poetry as Adam named the animals in the garden, out of its own imagination. The war shook it loose from convention, and like a boy sent away to college, its first impulse is to disown the Main Street that bore it. Youth of the 90's admired its elders and imitated them unsuccessfully. Youth of the nineteen twenties imitates France and Russia of the 70's, and contemporary England. It may eventually do more than the 90's did with America; in the meantime, while it flounders in the attempt to create, it is at least highly critical. Furthermore, the social unrest, beginning before the war and likely to outlast our time, has made us all more critical of literature. Mark Twain's "Yankee in King Arthur's Court" turned the milk of Tennyson's aristocratic "Idylls" sour. The deep drawn undercurrent of socialistic thinking urges us toward a new consideration of all earlier writing, to see what may be its social significance. The "churl," the "hind," the "peasant," the "first servant" and "second countryman," who were the mere transitions of earlier stories now are central in literature. They come with a challenge, and when we read Galsworthy, Wells, Sinclair, Dreiser, Hardy's "The Dynasts," Bennett--we are conscious of criticizing life as we read. The pale cast of thought has sicklied modern pages. The more serious works of art are also literary criticism. Again, there is the mingling of the peoples, greatest of course in America. Our aliens used to be subservient to the national tradition. They went about becoming rich Americans and regarded the Anglo-American culture as a natural phenomenon, like the climate, to which after a while they would accustom themselves. Their children were born in it. But now it is different. The Jews particularly, who keep an Oriental insistence upon logic even longer than a racial appearance, have