But underneath there was no change. He had not the stuff of leadership. For what was this element of “unselective sympathy” in him which he called a “religion of democracy”? It was a fear of distinction, a fear of standing away from the mass, a fear of striving far enough ahead to be a leader. Was Sherman, I wonder, one of those numerous professors who are so anxious to be taken as in spirit “one of the boys” that they will compromise the dignity of their learning, that they will feel _defensive_ about the life of the mind? As a critic certainly he was on the defensive in presenting his values to the average audience. Of no marked force in himself, on him the registry of environment would be speedily and plainly made. In an academic environment he had fought the New York critics. He came as an editor to New York and the environment quickly persuaded him to blend with it.[67] When Sherman died, the professional literary world eulogised fulsomely the _émigré_ from the academy. That already tells us a great deal about this world. Let us see more distinctly what it was with which Sherman assimilated. II It was a tragi-comedy begun in high spirits and closing now in disillusion and pathos. Three representative players have been Mr. Joel Elias Spingarn, Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, and Mr. H. L. Mencken: a study of their rôles will instruct us in the mediocrity of contemporary American criticism. The influence of the first of these is a most curious phenomenon in our recent history. In type Mr. J. E. Spingarn is the leisured gentleman and scholar who adorns all too rarely our national society. His interests are wide: for a number of years he was in politics and he has distinguished himself by his generous efforts in behalf of the Negro: he has been an army officer and has, one fancies, a spark of the old-time gallantry of the military man. For us, however, he is the wealthy amateur of the arts and philosophy; but what, one may still ask, are his claims to critical leadership? Like Sherman, Mr. Spingarn spent a number of years teaching in an academic environment. He specialised in the history of literary criticism, producing the three-volume compilation, _Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century_ (1909) and the volume, _Literary Criticism in the Renaissance_ (1899), which pleased certain Italian thinkers and began that friendship with them later to be cemented by his championship of Croce. Neither of these works is more than the usual competent product of academic industry and research: Mr. Spingarn himself revolted against the type of sterile scholarship they represent. In 1910 he delivered his famous lecture, _The New Criticism_. He declaimed it at the climax of a spree, for he had intoxicated himself with the æsthetic theory of Benedetto Croce: he was in full cry against academic dry rot. Consequently his statements at the time were more extreme than those he would probably make on the same theme to-day.