s--that it
produces neither a man who intelligently feels nor a man who thoroughly
knows. Criticism, in America, is a function of this half-educated and
conceited class; it is not a popular art, but an esoteric one; even in
its crassest journalistic manifestations it presumes to a certain
academic remoteness from the concerns and carnalities of everyday. In
every aspect it shows the defects of its practitioners. The American
critic of beautiful letters, in his common incarnation, is no more than
a talented sophomore, or, at best, a somewhat absurd professor. He
suffers from a palpable lack of solid preparation; he has no background
of moving and illuminating experience behind him; his soul has not
sufficiently adventured among masterpieces, nor among men. Imagine a
Taine or a Sainte-Beuve or a Macaulay--man of the world, veteran of
philosophies, "lord of life"--and you imagine his complete antithesis.
Even on the side of mere professional knowledge, the primary material of
his craft, he always appears incompletely outfitted. The grand sweep and
direction of the literary currents elude him; he is eternally on the
surface, chasing bits of driftwood. The literature he knows is the
fossil literature taught in colleges--worse, in high schools. It must be
dead before he is aware of it. And in particular he appears ignorant of
what is going forward in other lands. An exotic idea, to penetrate his
consciousness, must first become stale, and even then he is apt to purge
it of all its remaining validity and significance before adopting it.

This has been true since the earliest days. Emerson himself, though a
man of unusual discernment and a diligent drinker from German spigots,
nevertheless remained a _dilettante_ in both aesthetics and metaphysics
to the end of his days, and the incompleteness of his equipment never
showed more plainly than in his criticism of books. Lowell, if anything,
was even worse; his aesthetic theory, first and last, was nebulous and
superficial, and all that remains of his pleasant essays today is their
somewhat smoky pleasantness. He was a Charles Dudley Warner in nobler
trappings, but still, at bottom, a Charles Dudley Warner. As for Poe,
though he was by nature a far more original and penetrating critic than
either Emerson or Lowell, he was enormously ignorant of good books, and
moreover, he could never quite throw off a congenital vulgarity of
taste, so painfully visible in the strutting of his style