By collecting his literary criticism, or by permitting the Society which bears his name to collect it, Mr. Woodberry incurs the query whedier he is to be known among America's critics, and indeed the world's. The challenge of these large volumes [Literary Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century, Studies of a Literateur, Heart of Man and Other Papers, Appreciation of Literature and America in Literature, The Torch and Other Lectures and Addresses, and Literary Essays] is clear. They seek position beside the volumes of Emerson and Lowell, of Dryden and Johnson and Hazlitt and Macaulay and Pater, of Sainte-Beuve and Anatole France, of Lessing and Goethe. They are, of course, the work of a comprehensive critic. Are they at all the work of a transcendent one?

Since any critic is more important for his personality man for his principles, for his genius than for his faith, it is interesting in Mr. Woodberry's case to turn first to his miscellaneous matter—the articles and reviews which he contributed to the Atlantic and The Nation during the eighties and the nineties of the last century. It was then that he was finding his temper and establishing his range; there he was concerned with biography rather than dogma, description rather than judgment, the evaluation of individuals rather than the philosophy of art. The critic we find in those and in subsequent pieces of the same occasional sort is the critic he essentially is. And what kind is that? Nobly consistent and conscientious, but not great. We find a man of equable temper and no small presence of mind, thoroughly at home among the accepted names of accepted literature, most comfortable in the presence of idealist authors but charitable and patient everywhere, loving virtue, loving kindliness, loving competence, loving poetry. Austere without arrogance, he can find room for spirits so different from himself as Byron and Crabbe; he even can force a liking for the eighteenth century, though not on account of its cruel, dry satire so foreign to his un wrathful soul. In the end he loses by his evenness. The potent critics have not been tempered too steadily with refinement and caution, have not been always decorous and calm. They have had their rages for and against, and when they have had points to make they have made them obtrusively. In a word, they have not bothered about good manners. Perhaps Mr. Woodberry has been too much the New England gentleman ever to become the universal critic. His miscellaneous work, respectable as it is, leaves remarkably few impressions that are strong or bright. Certain beginning paragraphs of essays loiter in the memory for the care of their portraiture; but even those are extinguished as soon as one thinks of Lowell and Pater and Saint-Beuve.

Mr. Woodberry is said to have been a good teacher, and there is something of the teacher over all these pages. We get an introduction to literature rather than hear any mature last word spoken concerning it. It is not merely that many of the essays were composed as introductions to college texts or as lectures before college audiences; it is not merely that one of the books reprinted, The Appreciation of Literature, was intended for the very young. Throughout the elementary note is clear; we read within four walls. The air is not the large air of a complicated world that is on the whole unkind to literature and certainly is sustained by other foods. It is the confined air of a room in which history is preached to prove that mankind has lived from one great poet to the next. Mr. Woodberry believes what tender-minded pupils always can be encouraged to believe, that poets are prophets, that the world is good, and that the world is one. It is said that many of his keener students did not agree with his philosophy, but took it seriously. His keenest readers will decline to take it seriously.

Mr. Woodberry will fail of being a force in twentieth-century criticism either of literature or of life through his dislike of "the things that one feels shame in acknowledging to be true," through his determination "to realize life in the abstract as noble or beautiful or humane," and through his fear of any other phenomenon than "that symmetry of human reason which makes all nobler minds tend to think the same thoughts." He is provincial in his Christianity, effeminate in his idealism, deluded in his democracy. Who would quarrel with his one unchanging criterion and endlessly reiterated creed—that literature must be human? That says everything, and so means nothing. But what upright intelligence will not object to his bland identification of human with humane, of helpful with hopeful? He passes over Homer to call Virgil the greatest of poets because he has done the most good—that is, been the most interested in a cohering race, been most "constructive." And Shelley comes next because he has been most passionate in propaganda for Man—that is, man in a perfectionist world. These were forward-looking men, and so Mr. Woodberry loves them. But forward toward what? The best contemporary intelligences do not pretend to know, nor have the past ones known. The strongest men, and so the strongest critics, have not been afraid in the face of a multiple world. Mr. Woodberry, when the world begins to look as if it might fall to pieces, shudders and feels cold. His opposite shrugs or smiles and examines the parts. The great destroyers (but they may have been the great builders)—Lucian, Swift, Voltaire, Schopenhauer—he hardly so much as mentions; Nietzsche he has known more recently, but too late. Vast, unaccountable individuals who have appeared on earth without reason and gone without explanation—Rabelais, Melville, Whitman—he has no understanding of. For him the irresponsibles, the irritants, the imps—Ariosto, Sterne, Anatole France—do not exist. The solvent critics of today, men who separate rather than join, who shun no fact or idea because it stands alone, who are at ease in empty spaces, who war on truths that they may live with truth—Remy de Gourmont, for an instance—do not enlist him in their terrible number.

In Heart of Man Mr. Woodberry gravely reminds us that "the highest mind is incomplete without humor," but adds: "Great books are never frivolous; they leave the reader wiser and better." The suspicion this engenders that his is not one of the highest minds is well confirmed by the two thousand pages in which he neither makes nor relishes fun. The only humor is the unconscious humor of a certain passage, also in Heart of Man, in which he recalls a ride on Texan ponies with a friend. The animals, "beautiful in their wildness, had never known bit or spur," but before many miles he had produced his notebook and was reading aloud some paragraphs on Christianity which he had from time to time set down. We get the paragraphs, which fill twenty-three pages, and are told that they were broken off only when "There was no doubt about it; we were lost." This seems worth speaking of, lest it be charged against his works that they contain no smile.