This “ideal of good life” leads our leader-writer far—away up into the clouds. Among the activities of the human spirit art takes “the place of sovereignty.” It “is the manifestation of the ideal in human life.” This attitude, of course, will not be altogether unfamiliar to students of æsthetics. Something not unlike it has been heard before from the “mystic” æstheticians of a century ago. It leaves me unconvinced. I cannot but think that that philosophy makes out a better case which assigns to art, as intuition-expression, not the “place of sovereignty” but the place of foundation in the human spirit; for which it is not flower nor fruit, but root. You see, Croce, like “cheerfulness” in Boswell’s story of the other philosopher, will come “breaking in.” COTERIE CRITICISM A young critic was recently so obliging as to send me the proof of an article in the hope that I might find something in it to interest me. I did, but not, I imagine, what was expected. The article discussed a modern author of European reputation, and incidentally compared his mind and his style with that of Mr. X., Mrs. Y., and Miss Z. These three, it appeared, were contemporary English novelists, and—here was the interesting thing to me in our young critic’s article—I had never heard of one of them. They were evidently “intellectuals”—the whole tenor of the article showed that—the idols of some young and naturally solemn critical “school,” familiar classics, I dare say, in Chelsea studios and Girton or Newnham rooms. One often wonders what these serious young people are reading, and here, it seemed, was a valuable light. They must be reading, at all events, Mr. X., and Mrs. Y., and Miss Z. Otherwise, our young critic would never have referred to them with such gravity and with so confident an assumption that his particular set of readers would know all about them. And yet the collocation of these three names, these coterie classics, with that of the great European author, famous throughout the whole world of polite letters, struck one as infinitely grotesque. It showed so naïve a confusion of literary “values,” so queer a sense of proportion and congruity. It was, in short, coterie criticism.