Against this notion American criticism makes but feeble headway. We are, in fact, a nation of evangelists; every third American devotes himself to improving and lifting up his fellow-citizens, usually by force; the messianic delusion is our national disease. Thus the moral _Privatdozenten_ have the crowd on their side, and it is difficult to shake their authority; even the vicious are still in favor of crying vice down. “Here is a novel,” says the artist. “Why didn’t you write a tract?” roars the professor—and down the chute go novel and novelist. “This girl is pretty,” says the painter. “But she has left off her undershirt,” protests the headmaster—and off goes the poor dauber’s head. At its mildest, this balderdash takes the form of the late Hamilton Wright Mabie’s “White List of Books”; at its worst, it is comstockery, an idiotic and abominable thing. Genuine criticism is as impossible to such inordinately narrow and cocksure men as music is to a man who is tone-deaf. The critic, to interpret his artist, even to understand his artist, must be able to get into the mind of his artist; he must feel and comprehend the vast pressure of the creative passion; as Major Spingarn says, “æsthetic judgment and artistic creation are instinct with the same vital life.” This is why all the best criticism of the world has been written by men who have had within them, not only the reflective and analytical faculty of critics, but also the gusto of artists—Goethe, Carlyle, Lessing, Schlegel, Saint-Beuve, and, to drop a story or two, Hazlitt, Hermann Bahr, Georg Brandes and James Huneker. Huneker, tackling “Also sprach Zarathustra,” revealed its content in illuminating flashes. But tackled by Paul Elmer More, it became no more than a dull student’s exercise, ill-naturedly corrected....