The men who come to life not with standards, but with a vast and varied genius of understanding are, of course, all the while having their say. And work of this sort is done with distinction and skill by Joseph Wood Krutch in his volume of biographical criticism, Five Masters. He writes of Boccaccio, Cervantes, Richardson, Stendhal, and Proust. The fleshy aspects of the experience and writing of Boccaccio he describes and interprets with skill and understanding. But he moves rather like a blind man in the dark whenever he comes to speak of his deeper ethical or spiritual experiences. In their presence he has only the rubber-stamp phrases of depreciation with which the spiritual is described by those who always look upon it from without and never from within. Probably the best work done in the volume is found in the section on Cervantes. And here, indeed, we do meet with the world of standards…. Here Mr. Krutch is bringing in principles (which in our own time have been vigorously advocated by critical humanists) because they help to explain the achievement of Cervantes. But he by no means sails under these high authorities himself. When he comes to Stendhal and Proust, he accepts them upon their own terms and does not judge them by any humanistic standards. He is never more subtle than in following the strange processes of the mind and art of Marcel Proust. You feel that he is allowing this exotic and brilliant mystic of the senses to speak for himself. If Mr. Krutch cannot compass the imaginative sympathy which would understand the life of ethical spirituality from within, he is quite capable of that weird feat of intellectual sympathy which makes the very psychological (should one say psychopathic?) experience of Marcel Proust his own. No doubt the sort of understanding which Mr. Krutch brings to his work represents a definite achievement, even if we find it odd that it is easier for him to comprehend Proust's artistic interest in homosexuality than the influence of ethical religion upon the later years of Boccaccio. But at its best the criticism of understanding does not become quite first class unless it rises to the level of the criticism of judgment. "Ours is a lost cause, and there is no place for us in the natural universe," Mr. Krutch has told us in that famous book, The Modern Temper…. You need to have this sentence in mind when you read Mr. Krutch's utterance as a literary critic. If standards themselves are an illusion, you may expect the critic to be a mirror. You can scarcely expect him to be a judge. (pp. 156-59)