n the last
resort moral. The sense that they should be more moral than morality
affords no excuse for accepting them when they are less so. Literature
should be a kingdom where a sterner morality, a more strenuous liberty
prevails--where the artist may dispense if he will with the ethics of
the society in which he lives, but only on condition of revealing a
deeper insight into the moral law to whose allegiance man, in so far as
he is man and not a beast, inevitably tends. Never, we suppose, was an
age in which art stood in greater need of the true law of decorum than
this. Its philosophy has played it false. It has passed from the
nebulous Hegelian adulation of the accomplished fact (though one would
have thought that to a generation with even a vague memory of
Aristotle's _Poetics_, the mere title, _The Philosophy of History_ would
have been an evident danger signal) to an adulation of science and of
instinct. From one side comes the cry, 'Man _is_ a beast'; from the
other, 'Trust your instincts.' The sole manifest employment of reason is
to overthrow itself. Yet it should be, in conjunction with the
imagination, the vital principle of control.

Professor Babbitt would have us back to Aristotle, or back to our
senses, which is roughly the same thing. At all events, it is certain
that in Aristotle the present generation would find the beginnings of a
remedy for that fatal confusion of categories which has overcome the
world. It is the confusion between existence and value. That strange
malady of the mind by which in the nineteenth century material progress
was supposed to create, _ipso facto_, a concomitant moral progress, and
which so plunged the world into catastrophe, has its counterpart in a
literature of objective realism. One of the most admired of
contemporary works of fiction opens with an infant's memory of a
mackintosh sheet, pleasantly warmed with its own water; another, of
almost equal popularity among the cultivated, abounds with such
reminiscences of the heroine as the paste of bread with which she filled
her decaying teeth while she ate her breakfast. Yet the young writers
who abuse their talents so unspeakably have right on their side when
they refuse to listen to the condemnation pronounced by an older
generation. What right, indeed, have these to condemn the logical
outcome of an anarchic individualism which they themselves so jealously
cherished? They may not like the bastard progeny of the various
m