irreducible facts, and his function was, like the scientist’s, that of recording them as compendiously as possible and without prejudice.  The unconscious programme was, indeed, impossible of fulfilment.  All facts may be of equal interest to the scientist, but they are not to the literary critic.  He chose those which interested him most for the exercise of his talent for demonstration.  But that choice was, as a general rule, the only specifically critical act which he performed, and, since it was usually unmotived, it was difficult to attach even to that more than a ‘scientific’ importance.  Reasoned judgments of value were rigorously eschewed, and even though we may presume that the modern critic is at times vexed by the problem why (or whether) one work of art is better than another, when each seems perfectly expressive of the artist’s intention, the preoccupation is seldom betrayed in the language of his appreciation.  Tacitly and insensibly we have reached a point at which all works of art are equally good if they are equally expressive.  What every artist seeks to express is his own unique consciousness.  As between things unique there is no possibility of subordination or comparison.

That does not seem to us an unduly severe diagnosis of modern criticism, although it needs perhaps to be balanced by an acknowledgment that the impulse towards the penetration of an artist’s consciousness is in itself salutary, as a valuable adjunct to the methods of criticism, provided that it is definitely subordinated to the final critical judgment, before which uniqueness is an impossible plea.  Such a diagnosis will no doubt be welcomed by those who belong to an older generation than that to which it is applied.  But they should not rejoice prematurely.  We require of them an answer to the question whether they were really in better case—­whether they were not the fathers whose sins are visited upon the children.  Professor Babbitt, at least, has no doubt of their responsibility.  From his angle of approach we might rake their ranks with a cross-fire of questions such as these:  When you invoked the sanction of criticism were you more than merely destructive?  When you riddled religion with your scientific objections, did you not forget that religion is something more, far more than a nexus of historical facts or a cosmogony?  When you questioned everything in the name of truth and science, why did you not dream of asking whether those creations of men’s minds were capax imperii in man’s universe?  What right had you to suppose that a man disarmed of tradition is stronger for his nakedness?  Why did you not examine in the name of that same truth and science the moral nature of man, and see whether it was fit to bear the burden of intolerable knowledge which you put upon it?  Why did you, the truth-seekers and the scientists, indulge yourselves in the most romantic dream of a natural man who followed instinctively the greatest good of the greatest number, which you