American criticism, as I think Mr. Bliss Perry remarked a few years ago, has been singularly unsociable, reserved, and poor in personality. The academic critic delivers his discourse to his audience of ten or a hundred thousand people in the style of a surpliced clergyman reading a presidential proclamation in a great cathedral. Consequently he is not much impressed by them nor they by him. How to get the audience and the speaker in touch with one another is a question that needs to be treated; for the solitude which many of our most serious men of letters inhabit, their remoteness from stimulating living companionship, is like that of the inter-stellar spaces explored by the astronomer's telescope. Lately some of the young people have attempted a solution, which is not, I think, wholly satisfactory. In order to provoke some one to notice them, to speak to them, if only to expose and flagellate them, they have banded themselves, like the Grub Street wits of old, into a league against
