Modern life is undoubtedly becoming more and more impersonal in the sense that it favors less and less the growth and preservation of great personalities, yet its utilitarian spirit, its tendency to specialization, its right of private judgment, and its religious doubts and unrest, find their outcome in individualism in literature. The disinterested critics and recorders are still among us, but power has departed from them. The age is too serious, the questions are too pressing. The man of genius is no longer at ease in Zion. If he rises at all above the masses, he must share the burden of thought and conscience of his times. This burden may hinder the free artistic play of his powers, as it probably has in most of the writers I have mentioned, yet it will greatly deepen the impression his words will make. The saying “Art for art’s sake” cannot be impeached, even by Tolstoi. When rightly understood, it is true. Art would live in the whole, and not in the part called morals or religion, or even beauty. But its exponents in our day have been, with few exceptions, of a feeble type, men of words and fancies like Swinburne or Poe. In Tennyson we have as pure a specimen of artistic genius as in Shakespeare, but a far less potent one. His power comes when he thrills and vibrates with some special thought or cry of his time. With the great swarms of our minor poets the complaint is, not that the type is not pure, but that the inspiration is feeble. They have more art than nature. It is the same with the novelists. Since Hawthorne and Thackeray the pure artistic gift has no longer been the endowment of great or profound personalities. George Eliot, Mrs. Ward, Tolstoi, all interested writers, all with aims foreign to pure art, are the names of power in our half of the century. Henry James is a much finer artist, but he has nothing like their hold upon the great common elements of human life. The disinterested writer gives us a higher, more unselfish pleasure than the type I am considering; we are compelled to rise more completely out of ourselves to meet him. I am only insisting that in our day he has little penetration, and that the men of power have been of the other class. I have placed Taine among the interested critics; he was interested in putting through certain ideas; he had a thesis to uphold; he will not value all truths equally, he will take what suits him. Like all men with preconceived ideas, his mind was more like a searchlight than like a lamp. This makes him stimulating as a critic, but not always satisfying.