of inhibitions as the causes of ills, they agreed at once that thought was a sublimation of sex energy and somehow not quite a legitimate function of man, they wiseacred in jargon about that bastard soul, the unconscious. Ah, my highly suggestible writers, it is easy come, easy go with your ideas: within a decade you will be sneering at psycho-analysis as now you sneer at Christian Science. Mr. Van Wyck Brooks in his social studies and biographical interpretations came to use psycho-analysis with tact: he is not the sort of critic whose errors will be glaring. A sensitive man but shy of æsthetic ideas: a sociological critic of letters in control of a persuasive and considerate prose style: a sentimental naturalist, to use the terminology of Mr. Irving Babbitt, but far from extreme in his humanitarian socialism and, despite his psycho-analytic superstitions, temperate in his faith in emotional expansiveness. Who would dispute Mr. Brooks’s central idea, namely, that an acquisitive society provides unfavourable conditions for the development of the artistic life? Of course it does. It badly nourishes its men of genius, and Mr. Brooks became almost obsessed with literary failure or what he conceived to be literary failure, as witness his books on Symonds, Mark Twain, and Henry James. He was continually calling the attention of the new writers to the conditions in the history of America which had hampered and throttled their predecessors: he showed how frontier life had made the machinery of existence, the actual getting of a living, paramount and from this necessity had originated the contempt for the arts of enjoying existence, and how this split had perpetuated itself in the divorce between the world of practice (“lowbrow”) and the world of theory (“highbrow”): but he failed at the very crux of his pleading. For struggling and unappreciated writers are too ready to believe that the hostile environment is responsible for their shortcomings. They are likely to wilt into self-pity and to feel victimised. That is precisely the effect that Mr. Brooks’s writings produced, even though he casually said: “If our literature is to grow it can only be through the development of a sense of ‘free will’ on the part of our writers themselves. To be, to feel oneself, a ‘victim’ is in itself not to be an artist, for it is the nature of the artist to live, not in the world of which he is an effect, but in the world of which he is the cause, the world of his own creation.” But Mr. Brooks has not grown eloquent on this theme. He seems rather to have the sweet wistfulness and yearning of one pledged to a lost cause. This mood of wistfulness and yearning, this image of oneself as an outcast, lonely and eager, has not revived and will never, it seems to me, revive the spirit of the American writer.