Following the course of Sherman, we entered the professional literary world and explored its criticism, coming finally to Mr. T. S. Eliot, whose latest departure turns our eyes outwards again to the academic world, to Professor Babbitt and humanism, or to the worlds of religion or philosophy. It appears to me that our purely literary critics have at one point or another all failed fundamentally: they are all leaders by default only and not by essence. Either they are bound to move towards the position of Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch, who realises that “all the bases upon which modern despair rests were laid joyously by people who were quite sure that they were serving humanity, and all the chains by which we are now bound so much more firmly to earth than we want to be were forged amidst shouts of triumph,” or they are spying some loophole which on inspection seems not to exist. But in either case, and this is a hopeful sign, they are all converging toward a common realisation that King Whirl must, if possible, be deposed. The goal is seen: the reconstructed human spirit. But without adequate leadership how may we start to approach it? Well, it is easy to exaggerate the power of literary criticism. If certain things in our culture have gone dead, criticism cannot revive them. The essential “about-ness” of the critical activity limits it to the guidance, stimulation, and judging of things in which there is still some life. But assuming that a funeral ceremony such as Mr. Krutch has conducted is still premature,--and it is premature so long as any doubt exists of final decay,--we may then try to conceive of what a genuine leader in critical thought would be like, and by this ideal measure ourselves. Objectivity in judgment would be one of the principal marks of the leader. That requires a sufficient scale of values to stand outside not only the frame of one’s century but outside the frames of all centuries. It means the ascertainment of _primary_ laws in our field, which may be possible as it has been possible in physics to say that a few laws are true regardless of what frame of time and space one may be in. Objectively considered, literature may be found to have been in decline, not just for a century and a half or just for six hundred years but almost from its classical sources and from the Scriptures of ancient lands. Is this depressing? It is not depressing to contemplate a magnificent mountain from its base. On the contrary, a real view of the heights of Parnassus and Olympus may inspire an uncommon elevation of aim--a second mark of the critical leader; it seems to me unnecessary to argue that the critics we have looked at do not realise how high man has ascended in the past or can conceivably ascend now. Their ideas of human greatness are small. Really, _are_ we practitioners of literary criticism distinguished by any grandeur in breadth and elevation of thought? No one can believe it.