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 positive indifference to consequences.

Yet if the American national Promise is ever to be fulfilled, a more congenial and a more interesting task will also await the critic—­meaning by the word “critic” the voice of the specific intellectual interest, the lover of wisdom, the seeker of the truth.  Every important human enterprise has its meaning, even though the conduct of the affair demands more than anything else a hard and inextinguishable faith.  Such a faith will imply a creed; and its realizations will go astray unless the faithful are made conscious of the meaning of their performances