productive enterprises, but also all functions of government. The American Industrial Workers of the World, now affiliated with Moscow, are a fair illustration of the Syndicalist movement.

Barring the Russian trade unions, most of the organizations represented in the "Red" Trade Union International are Syndicalist or semi-Syndicalist in character. Even the Russian unions themselves have a very strong Syndicalist element. And there is a constant struggle between the Communist and the Syndicalist elements in the ranks of the "Red" unions, both in the Russion national centre and in the International Council. In this regard, the "Yellow" unions have a distinct advantage. All of the unions affiliated with the Amsterdam International are agreed on the fundamental trade union theory, and even the American Federation, which differs from the International on the matter of tactics, is wholly in agreement with it as far as the basic theory is concerned.

There is no doubt that the "Red" Trade Union International has far fewer elements of stability and far less chance of permanence than its "Yellow" rival. Torn by internal differences and dissensions and directed by the same arrogant and despotic individuals who direct the Communist International, it is undoubtedly doomed to dissolution together with its sponsor, the Russian Communist régime. The Amsterdam Federation, on the other hand, has every chance of permanency. And much in the history of the world, particularly of Europe, will depend on whether or not the Federation will continue its present rapid trend towards political radicalism. If it succeeds in solidifying the national trade union centres and in building up an effective international machine, the Amsterdam Federation will have in its hands a greater power for international action than any other organization in the world. To what purposes will it use that power?

LEO PASVOLSKY.

DEFINING THE INDEFINABLE

BY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

I AM well aware that literature, or even such an inconsiderable part of literature as this gay book on my desk or the poem on the printed page, as a whole is indefinable. Every critic of literature from Aristotle down has let some of it slip between his fingers. If he describes the cunning form of a play or a story, then the passion in it, or the mood behind it, eludes him. If he defines the personality of the writer, the art which makes all the difference between feeling and expression escapes definition. No ten philosophers yet agree as to whether beauty is an absolute quality, or simply an attribute of form, whether a poem is beautiful because it suggests and approaches an archetype, or whether it is beautiful because it perfectly expresses its subject.

And yet when the ambition to explain and describe and define everything is humbly set aside, there remains a good honest job for the maker of definitions, and it is a job that can be done. I may not be able to tell what art is, but I can tell what it is not. I may fail to make a formula for literature, but I can try at least to tell what Thomas Hardy has chiefly accomplished, define Conrad's essential quality, point out the nature of romantic naturalism, and distinguish between sentiment and sentimentality. And if such things were ever worth doing they are worth doing now.

Only a prophet dares say that we are at the beginning of a great creative period in the United States, but any open-eyed observer can see that an era of American literary criticism is well under way. The war, which confused and afterward dulled our thinking, stirred innumerable critical impulses, which are coming to the surface, some like bubbles and others like boils, but some new creations of the American intellect. The new generation has shown itself acrimoniously critical. It slaps tradition and names its novels and poetry as Adam named the animals in the garden,

out of its own imagination. The war shook it loose from convention, and, like a boy sent away to college, its first impulse is to disown the Main Street that bore it. Youth of the 1890's admired its elders and imitated them unsuccessfully. Youth of the 1920's imitates France and Russia of the 1870's, and contemporary England. It may eventually do more than the 1890's did with America; in the meantime, while it flounders in the attempt to create, it is at least highly critical. Furthermore, the social unrest, beginning before the war and likely to outlast our time, has made us all more critical of literature. Mark Twain's Yankee at King Arthur's Court turned the milk of Tennyson's aristocratic Idylls sour. The deep drawn undercurrent of social thinking urges us toward a new consideration of all earlier writing, to see what may be its social significance. The "churl", the "hind", the "peasant", the "first servant" and "second countryman", who were the mere transitions of earlier stories, now are central in literature. They come with a challenge, and when we read Galsworthy, Wells, Sinclair, Dreiser, Hardy's The Dynasts, Bennett, we are conscious of criticizing life as we read. The pale cast of thought has sicklied modern pages. The more serious works of art are also literary criticism.

Again, there is the mingling of the peoples, greatest of course in America. Our aliens used to be subservient to the national tradition. They went about becoming rich Americans and regarded the Anglo-American culture as a natural phenomenon, like the climate, to which after a while they would accustom themselves. Their children were born in it. But now it is different. The Jews particularly, who keep an Oriental insistence upon logic even longer than a racial appearance, have passed the acquisitive stage and begin to throw off numerous intellectuals, as much at home in English as their fellow Americans, but critical of the American emotions and the American way of thinking, as only a brain formed by different traditions can be. Soon the Mediterranean races domiciled here will pass into literary expressiveness. It is as impossible that we should not have criticism of the national tradition expressed in our literature as that an international congress should agree upon questions of ethics or religion.

And of course the new internationalism, which is far more vigor

ous than appears on the surface, favors such criticism. The war brought America and Europe two thousand miles closer, and the habit of interest in what Europeans are thinking, once acquired, is not likely to be lost. No American writer of promise can hope now to escape comparison with the literatures of Western Europe, and comparison means a new impulse to criticism.

Fundamental, creative criticism-like Sainte-Beuve's, Matthew Arnold's, Walter Pater's, like Dryden's, Brunetière's, de Gourmont's, or Croce's-will presumably come. The conditions, both of publication and of audience, are ripe for it now in the United States. But there is a good deal of spade work in the study of literature to be done first, and still more education of the reading American mind. One reason why Lowell was not a great critic was because his scholarship was defective; or, to put it more fairly, because the scholarship of his contemporaries, with whose knowledge he might have buttressed his own, was incomplete. And if a twentieth century Sainte-Beuve should begin to write for general American readers, it is doubtful whether they would accept his premises. Says the intellectual, why should he write for the general public? I answer that if he writes for coteries only, if he is disdainful of the intelligent multitude, he will never understand them, and so will not comprehend the national literature which it is his function to stimulate, interpret, and guide.

The spade work of criticism is research, investigation into the facts of literature and into its social background. The scholar is sometimes, but not often, a critic. He finds out what happened, and often why it happened. He analyzes, but he does not usually make a synthesis. He writes history, but he cannot prophesy, and criticism is prophecy implied or direct. Few outside the universities realize the magnitude of American research into literature, even into American literature, which has been relatively neglected. A thousand spades have been at work for a generation. We are getting the facts, or we are learning how to get them.

But before we may expect great criticism we must educate our public, and ourselves, in that clear vision of what is and what is not which from Aristotle down has been the preliminary to criticism. A humble but a useful way to begin is by definition.

I use definition in no pedantic sense. pedantic sense. I mean, in general,

logical definition, where the class or genus of the thing to be described-whether best-selling novel or sentimental tendency-is first made clear, and then its differentia, its differences from the type analyzed, cut and assorted. But this process in literature cannot be as formal as logic. Good literature cannot be bound by formulas. Yet when a poem charged with hot emotion, or a story that strays into new margins of experience, is caught and held until one can compare it with others, see the curve on which it is moving, guess its origin and its aim, forever after it becomes easier to understand, more capable of being thought about and appreciated. And when the current of taste of some new generation that overflows conventions and washes forward, or backward, into regions long unlaved, is viewed as a current, its direction plotted, its force estimated, its quality compared, why that is definition, and some good will come of it.

Some general definition of that intellectual emotion which we call good reading is especially needed in America. Most of us, if we are native born, have been educated by a set of literary conventions arranged in convenient categories. That is more or less true of all literary education, but it is particularly true in the United States, where the formal teaching of English literature per se began, where, as nowhere else in the world, there was a great and growing population eager to become literate and with no literary traditions behind it. The student from a bookless home learned to think of his literature as primarily something to be studied; the teacher who had to teach thousands like him was forced to reduce living literature to dead categories in order that a little of it at least should be taught. Thousands of Americans, therefore, of our generation emerged from their training with a set of literary definitions which they assumed to be true and supposed to be culture. Only true definitions of what literature really is can break up such fossilized defining.

On the other hand, that large proportion of our best reading population which is not native in its traditions offers a different but equally important problem. How can the son of a Russian Jew, whose father lived in a Russian town, who himself has been brought up in clamorous New York, understand Thoreau, let us