It is the business
of the competent individual as a type to force society to recognize the
meaning and the power of his own special purposes. It is the special
business of the critic to make an ever larger portion of the public
conscious of these expressions of individual purpose, of their relations
one to another, of their limitations, and of their promises. He not only
popularizes and explains for the benefit of a larger public the
substance and significance of admirable special performance, but he
should in a sense become the standard bearer of the whole movement.
The function of the critic hereafter will consist in part of carrying on
an incessant and relentless warfare on the prevailing American
intellectual insincerity. He can make little headway unless he is
sustained by a large volume of less expressly controversial individual
intellectual self-expression; but on the other hand, there are many
serious obstructions to any advancing intellectual movement, which he
should and must overthrow.
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