House,"--and performers upon Hauptmann who could no more read
"Die Weber" than they could decipher a tablet of Tiglath-Pileser III.

Here and there, of course, a more competent critic of beautiful letters
flings out his banner--for example, John Macy, Ludwig Lewisohn, Andre
Tridon, Francis Hackett, Van Wyck Brooks, Burton Rascoe, E. A. Boyd,
Llewellyn Jones, Otto Heller, J. E. Spingarn, Lawrence Gilman, the late
J. Percival Pollard. Well-informed, intelligent, wide-eyed men--but only
four of them even Americans, and not one of them with a wide audience,
or any appreciable influence upon the main stream of American criticism.
Pollard's best work is buried in the perfumed pages of _Town Topics_;
his book on the Munich wits and dramatists[32] is almost unknown. Heller
and Lewisohn make their way slowly; a patriotic wariness, I daresay,
mixes itself up with their acceptance. Gilman disperses his talents; he
is quite as much musician as critic of the arts. As for Macy, I recently
found his "The Spirit of American Literature,"[33] by long odds the
soundest, wisest book on its subject, selling for fifty cents on a Fifth
avenue remainder counter.

How many remain? A few competent reviewers who are primarily something
else--Harvey, Aikin, Untermeyer and company. A few youngsters on the
newspapers, struggling against the business office. And then a leap to
the Victorians, the crepe-clad pundits, the bombastic word-mongers of
the campus school--H. W. Boynton, W. C. Brownell, Paul Elmer More,
William Lyon Phelps, Frederick Taber Cooper _et al._ Here, undoubtedly,
we have learning of a sort. More, it appears, once taught Sanskrit to
the adolescent suffragettes of Bryn Mawr--an enterprise as stimulating
(and as intelligible) as that of setting off fire-works in a blind
asylum. Phelps sits in a chair at Yale. Boynton is a master of arts in
English literature, whatever that may mean. Brownell is both L.H.D. and
Litt.D., thus surpassing Samuel Johnson by one point, and Hazlitt,
Coleridge and Malone by two. But the learning of these august
_umbilicarii_, for all its pretensions, is precisely the sterile,
foppish sort one looks for in second-rate college professors. The
appearance is there, but not the substance. One ingests a horse-doctor's
dose of words, but fails to acquire any illumination. Read More on
Nietzsche[34] if you want to find out just how stupid criticism can be,
and yet show the outward forms of sense. Read Phelps' "The A