If literature in our country has suffered from our passion for information, I believe it has also been damaged in our day by a bad philosophy of esthetics which has encouraged the writer to think much of himself and little of his audience. Literature is an art of expression, we say in the old phrase, and it expresses life. But whose life? The writer’s, of course, replies the philosophy I happen not to like. No; if a book ever becomes famous, it is because it expresses the experience of the reader. The writer’s personality will pervade it, but we must be able to recognize ourselves in it before we can admit that it portrays life truly. The function of criticism, as I understand it, is to discover, in the past experience of the race, what books have won a secure place in men’s affections, and to find out if possible why men have been permanently fond of them. A great critic would be a scientist, observing the behavior of the reader in the presence of certain stories or poems, and recording the kind of effect produced by various arrangements of character and plot, or by different employments of language. Such a critic was Aristotle in the _Poetics_. The art of literature has never had an observer more accurate or more penetrating, and those who return constantly to his wise pages will understand why I have quoted him so often, and often have drawn upon him for aid when I have not used his name. I must record my gratitude to two living philosophers also, towers of strength to those of us who love books as works of art—George Santayana and Frederick J. E. Woodbridge. The first has taught me through his books—are any books more beautiful than his written in English today? The second has enriched me with his daily companionship and with those spoken words, grave or gay but always wise, which his friends and disciples learn to save up for remembrance. And I have offered this book in my dedication to our one poet-critic in America who has spent his genius in the service of literature as art, and as art alone. I do not know whether what I have written will be altogether acceptable to him, and if I put his honored name in the forefront of my pages, it is not to shield me from deserved criticism. But writing on this theme, I must bear witness to his leadership among all in this country who in my lifetime have known how to prize the immortal things in great books—imagination, ideal humanity, beauty, and the kind of truth that is beauty. In a day when literary criticism has been contentious and personal, more like a political campaign in a tough ward than anything that Spenser or Sidney or Shelley would recognize as a pilgrimage to wisdom, Mr. Woodberry has written nothing ungenerous or harsh of new arrivals less scholarly, less gifted, less accomplished and less chivalrous than himself. He has Let the younger and unskilled go by To win his honour and to make his name.