ROMPERS AVAST

The critic is no longer the white haired sage whose years and experience have fitted him for the task of judging the merit of literary endeavors, but the child of twelve whose rompers take the ink spots as her brilliant pen splashes on its critical way. Elizabeth Benson of New Jersey at the age of twelve has seen in criticism her life work and has only waited until she has reached the ripe age of twelve before beginning seriously to judge the merits of her elders. However, there are those who still believe a background of a dozen years in this world of life and letters rather tenuous and not half so formidable as that which Aristotle, Longinus, Boileau, St. Beuve, Dryden, Goethe, Coleridge, Saintsbury, Paul Elmer More, Mark Van Doren and a few others have possessed.

This child who is credited with saying of James Cabell that "Jurgen is his most artistic conception", that "his name is destined to live, to become a classic", this infant who believes American literature a dreary waste and that the "classics" are so much tripe a this pig-tailed mistress of an art most difficult to attain, most demanding, both in skill and experience, justifies the existence of those who, though narrow and crabbed and dogmatic, stick to their guns and send the truths of Aristotelian sanity against the hordes of philanderers in the fields of the liberal arts.