f up to the truth, almost always tells it as if
he were listening to it, as if he were being borne up by it, as by some
great delight, even while he speaks to us. It is the power of the
artist's truth when he writes like this that it shall haunt his reader
as it has haunted him. He lives with it and is haunted by it day after
day whether he wants to be or not, and when a human being is obliged to
live with a burning truth inside of him every day of his life, he will
find a how for it, he will find some way of saying it, of getting it
outside of him, of doing it, if only for the common and obvious reason
that it burns the heart out of a man who does not. If the truth is
really in a man--a truth to be done,--he finds out how to do it as a
matter of self-preservation.

The average man no doubt will continue now as always to consider
Carlyle's "Editors are not here to say 'How'" ungracious and
tantalisingly elusive. He demands of every writer not only that he shall
write the truth for every man but that he shall--practically--read it
for him--that is, tell him how to read it--the best part of reading it.
It is by this explaining the truth too much, by making it small enough
for small people that so many lies have been made out of it. The gist of
the matter seems to be that if the spirit of the truth does not inspire
a man to some more eager way of finding out how to do a truth than
asking some other man how to do it, it must be some other spirit. The
way out for the explotterating or weak man does not consist in the
scientist's or the commentator's how, or the artist's how, or in any
other strain of helping the ground to hold one up. It consists in the
power of letting one's self go.

To say nothing of appreciation of power, criticism of power is
impossible, without letting one's self go. Criticism which is not the
faithful remembering and reporting of an unconscious mood is not worthy
of being called criticism at all. A critic cannot find even the faults
of a book who does not let himself go in it, and there is not a man
living who can expect to write a criticism of a book until he has given
himself a chance to have an experience with it, to write his criticism
with. The larger part of the professional criticism of the ages that are
past has proved worthless to us, because the typical professional critic
has generally been a man who professes not to let himself go and who is
proud of it. If it were not for the occasional