his work and the
creation of a public following, but he should have a more definite and
resolute conviction of the importance of his own job. It is the business
of the competent individual as a type to force society to recognize the
meaning and the power of his own special purposes. It is the special
business of the critic to make an ever larger portion of the public
conscious of these expressions of individual purpose, of their relations
one to another, of their limitations, and of their promises. He not only
popularizes and explains for the benefit of a larger public the
substance and significance of admirable special performance, but he
should in a sense become the standard bearer of the whole movement.

The function of the critic hereafter will consist in part of carrying on
an incessant and relentless warfare on the prevailing American
intellectual insincerity. He can make little headway unless he is
sustained by a large volume of less expressly controversial individual
intellectual self-expression; but on the other hand, there are many
serious obstructions to any advancing intellectual movement, which he
should and must overthrow. In so doing he has every reason to be more
unscrupulous and aggressive even than his brethren-in-arms. He must stab
away at the gelatinous mass of popular indifference, sentimentality, and
complacency, even though he seems quite unable to penetrate to the quick
and draw blood. For the time the possibility of immediate constructive
achievement in his own special field is comparatively small, and he is
the less responsible for the production of any substantial effect, or
the building up of any following except a handful of free lances like
himself. He need only assure himself of his own competence with his own
peculiar tools, his own good-humored sincerity, and his
disinterestedness in the pursuit of his legitimate purposes, in order to
feel fully justified in pushing his strokes home. In all serious
warfare, people have to be really wounded for some good purpose; and in
this particular fight there may be some chance that not only a good
cause, but the very victim of the blow, may possibly be benefited by its
delivery. The stabbing of a mass of public opinion into some
consciousness of its active torpor, particularly when many particles of
the mass are actively torpid because of admirable patriotic
intentions,--that is a job which needs sharp weapons, intense personal
devotion, and a posit