88 LITEEART VALUES 



you take from the salt its savor. Dare we say that 

 the most precious thing in literature is the indi- 

 vidual and the specific ? Is not a platitude a plat- 

 itude because it lacks just these things ? The 

 vague and the general may be had in any quantity, 

 at any time. The distinct and the characteristic 

 are always rare. How many featureless novels, 

 featureless poems, featureless discourses, how much 

 savorless criticism of one kind and another, every 

 community produces ! Now and then we catch a 

 distinct personal note, a new, penetrating voice, and 

 this we remember and follow in criticism as readily 

 as in poetry or fiction. Have we not here the se- 

 cret of the greater interest we take in signed criti- 

 cism over unsigned ? 



The pure, disinterested, impersonal reason is a 

 fine thing to contemplate. Who would flout it or 

 deny it ? One might as well throw stones at the 

 sun. But as the pure white light of the sun is 

 broken up into a thousand hues and shades as it 

 comes back to us from the living world, so the light 

 of reason comes to us from literature in a thou- 

 sand blended tints and colors, or as modified by the 

 varying moods and temperaments of the individual 

 writers. Whether or not we want or have a right 

 to expect this pure white light in criticism, what 

 we get is the light as it is reduced or colored by 

 the critic's personality, — the media of his time, 

 his race, his personal equation. It must render ac- 

 curately the objects, form and feature ; but the hue, 

 the atmosphere, the sentiment of it all, the highest 



