Criticism ordinarily asks about literature one of three questions: “Is it good?” “Is it true?” “Is it beautiful?” Each of these questions, of course, permits the widest range in the critic. He may be so simple as to think a given work is not good when it fails to emphasize some truism or when it violates the sort of poetic justice which children in the nursery are mistaught to expect; he may be so complex as to demand from literature the subtlest casuistries concerning moral problems; he may be so perverse as to wince at the first symptom of any plain contrast between good and evil. If it be the true which exercises him, he may sink so low as to be worried over this or that surface error in his author—such as an anachronism or a blunder in botany or mechanics; he may rise so high as to discuss on an equal plane with a great authority the difficult questions what the nature of truth may be or whether there is after all any such thing as truth. Or, holding beauty uppermost in his mind, he may at the one extreme peck at a masterpiece because it departs from some traditional form or at the other extreme may view it under the light of an eternity of beauty and feel satisfied if he can perceive and identify the masterpiece’s peculiar reflection. Yet wide as these ranges are, they can all be reduced to the three questions and they mark what may be called the three dimensions of criticism. There is, however, a fourth dimension—to continue the analogy—which comes into the account when a critic asks about literature: “Is it alive?” In a sense this query includes all the others and in a sense it transcends them. Odysseus is not good: he is adulterous and crafty; Faust is not good: he sells his soul for the sake of forbidden power; Gargantua is not good: he buffets and tumbles the decencies in all directions; Henry V is not good: he wastes his youth and wages unjust war; Huckleberry Finn is not good: he is a thief and a liar. The heroes, the demigods, the gods themselves occasionally step aside from the paths into which men counsel one another; there are at least as many great stories about gorgeous courtesans as about faithful wives. It is not the “goodness” of all such literature but the vividness that gives it its perennial impact. Better a lively rogue than a deadly saint.