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knows what he is about, cultivates jealously his own
propensities: each narrows the field to his own
temperament and then digs as deeply as he can:
each, unless he happens also to be a critic, is tempted
to say that the subject matter which appeals to him
is tjie best and even the only subject matter for the
art he practices. We cannot quarrel with him.
But the answer to the first question is the reverse
of this. The critic works after the fact. The catholic
spirit, which has surveyed the staggering diversity of
literature vertically through the ages and horizontally
across the nations, which has noted the quality of
surprize which attaches to esthetic production, which
is in touch with the astonishing experiments of modern
writers, which has experienced good states of mind
from absolutely contradictory subject matter, can make
only one answer. The range of subject matter suitable
for literature is unlimited. In art as in love, so de
Gourmont said, everything is possible. To put restric
tions on the range of subject matter is to be guilty
of provincialism both of time and of place.
Being human, the critic has his prejudices, of course.
I, for example, am more interested by the psychological
hesitations of the characters in a Henry James novel
than I am by the slow thinking of the hill-folk in
Knut Hamsum's Growth of the Soil. But that does not
prevent the perception that Hamsum has fitted his
diction to his dynamic realities, set his effects into
relief and balance, and otherwise forced his rude ma-
rerials into a significant esthetic organization. From
that I can extract enjoyment although in a more
moderate degree than if I had been of a temperament
more responsive to his subject matter. The primary
task of a critic is to make allowances for his preju
dices, to examine the relation between a writer and
his dynamic reality (subject matter), and to ascertain
the quality of the state of mind induced by the pre
cipitate of this relationship. Catholicity may be a vice
for a poet or fiction writer: it is always a virtue for
the critic.
One poem of this number, In A Café by the pre
cocious Will Bray, serves admirably to knot this dis
cussion into an example. Although the Bible refers