is more or less perfect, the artist’s comprehension will be greater or less.  The critic has not merely the right, but the duty, to judge between Homer and Shakespeare, between Dante and Milton, between Cezanne and Michelangelo, Beethoven and Mozart.  If the foundations of his criticism are truly aesthetic, he is compelled to believe and to show that among would-be artists some are true artists and some are not, and that among true artists some are greater than others.  That what has generally passed under the name of aesthetic criticism assumes as an axiom that every true work of art is unique and incomparable is merely the paradox which betrays the unworthiness of such criticism to bear the name it has arrogated to itself.  The function of true criticism is to establish a definite hierarchy among the great artists of the past, as well as to test the production of the present; by the combination of these activities it asserts the organic unity of all art.  It cannot honestly be said that our present criticism is adequate to either task.

[APRIL, 1920.

The Religion of Rousseau

These are times when men have need of the great solitaries; for each man now in his moment is a prey to the conviction that the world and his deepest aspirations are incommensurable.  He is shaken by a presentiment that the lovely bodies of men are being spent and flaming human minds put out in a conflict for something which never can be won in the clash of material arms, and he is distraught by a vision of humanity as a child pitifully wandering in a dark wood where the wind faintly echoes the strange word ‘Peace.’  Therefore he too wanders pitifully like that child, seeking peace, and men are become the symbols of mankind.  The tragic paradox of human life which slumbers in the soul in years of peace is awakened again.  When we would be solitary and cannot, we are made sensible of the depth and validity of the impulse which moved the solitaries of the past.

The paradox is apparent now on every hand.  It appears in the death of the author of La Formation Religieuse de J.J.  Rousseau.[1] One of the most distinguished of the younger generation of French scholar-critics, M. Masson met a soldier’s death before the book to which he had devoted ten years of his life was published.  He had prepared it for the press in the leisure hours of the trenches.  There he had communed with the unquiet spirit of the man who once thrilled the heart of Europe by stammering forgotten secrets, and whispered to an age flushed and confident with material triumphs that the battle had been won in vain.  Rousseau, rightly understood is no consoling companion for a soldier.  What if after all, the true end of man be those hours of plenary beatitude he spent lying at the bottom of the boat on the Lake of Bienne?  What if the old truth is valid still, that man is born free but is everywhere in chains?  Let us hope that the dead author was not too keenly conscious of the paradox which claimed him for sacrifice.  His death would have been bitter.