the conscience
of the novelist and of the dramatist; and it will train them to a
sterner veracity in dealing with human character. It will inhibit that
pitiful tendency toward a falsification of the facts of life, which
asserts the reform of a character in the twinkling of an eye just before
the final fall of the curtain. It will lead to a renunciation of the
feeble and summary psychology which permits a man of indurated habits of
weakness or of wickedness to transform himself by a single and sudden
effort of will. And, on the other hand, it may tempt certain students of
life, subtler than their fellow-craftsmen and more inquisitive, to dwell
unduly on the mere machinery of human motive and to aim not at a rich
portrayal of the actions of men and women, but at an arid analysis of
the mechanism of their impulses. More than one novelist of the twentieth
century has already yielded to this tendency. No doubt, this is only the
negative defect accompanying a positive quality,--yet it indicates an
imperfect appreciation of the artist's duty. "In every art," so Taine
reminded us, "it is necessary to linger long over the true in order to
attain the beautiful. The eye, fixing itself on an object, begins by
noting details with an excess of precision and fulness; it is only
later, when the inventory is complete, that the mind, master of its
wealth, rises higher, in order to take or to neglect what suits it."

The attitude of the literary critic will be modified by the constant use
of the scientific method, quite as much as the attitude of the literary
creator. He will seek to relate a work of art, whether it is an epic or
a tragedy, a novel or a play, to its environment, weighing all the
circumstances of its creation. He will strive to estimate it as it is,
of course, but also as a contribution to the evolution of its species
made by a given people at a given period. He will endeavor to keep
himself free from lip-service and from ancestor-worship, holding himself
derelict to his duty if he should fail to admit frankly that in every
masterpiece of the past, however transcendent its merits, there must
needs be much that is temporary admixt with more that is
permanent,--many things which pleased its author's countrymen in his own
time and which do not appeal to us, even tho we can perceive also what
is eternal and universal, even tho we read into every masterpiece much
that the author's contemporaries had not our eyes to perceive. All