rise before us! What memories, what feelings they excite!

"I see the European headsman :

He stands masked, clothed in red, with huge legs and strong naked arms,

And leans on a ponderous axe.

(Whom have you slaughtered lately, European headman ? Whose is that blood upon you, so wet and sticky?)"

While I cite these passages as examples of associative power, I am aware that Whitman's poem has a loftier scope than mere pathos. The "drift of it is something grand," as he would say; its tendency at least is upwards-towards some sort of ideal, if not the highest.

After what has been said, I can with less need of explanation state more definitely what I believe to be the true nature and function of literature, and our duty as students of literature.

In the first place, as regards its nature, literature, in our sense of the word, shall not mean all books.

It shall mean rather those writings which convey to us not facts alone, but their true meanings also: not impressions and feelings merely, but their message: not appearances solely, but ideas.

Fact-truth alone constitutes the proper domain of science, under which term we may include history: and, roughly speaking, any writing, so far as it treats a subject merely scientifically, that is with sole regard to fact-truth, is not literature. I do not, of course, mean to limit the word literature to imagina

tive productions, and to exclude all historical and scientific writings, which are sometimes of high literary value; still less should we limit the term to books in which abstract ideas are formally presented. Nor do I say that fact-truth may not be largely present in imaginative literature. Indeed, every realistic description, every natural or historical fact, used by a poet is of this nature, and constitutes a legitimate material. But what we should demand in true literature is that the writer should use these materials so as to reveal to us the inner meaning of the facts that he presents; and this is especially the case in the highest class of literature, namely poetry. I would therefore limit the expression, not solely to imaginative writings, but to writings which so present appearances to us that we learn somewhat at least from them of that message which it is the end of all appearance to

convey.

Further, this characteristic of true literature will inevitably display itself in the language of the writer. In scientific writings the only object is to transmit facts as distinctly as possible. The more definite and clear-cut is the language, the more limited to one conception is each word, the less of metaphor, of fancy, and of imagination is admitted, so much the nearer is our object attained.

But the personal element, the bodying forth of one's inner belief, in true literature necessitates a personal character in the style of the writer. Let

us hear what one of the clearest of thinkers, himself a great master of our present English tongue, says. "While many," says Cardinal Newman, "use language as they find it, the man of genius uses it indeed, but subjects it withal to his own purposes, and moulds it according to his own peculiarities. The throng and succession of ideas, thoughts, feelings, imaginations, and aspirations which pass within him; the abstractions, juxtapositions, the comparisons, the discriminations, the conceptions, which are so original in him; his views of external things his judgments upon life, manners, and history; the exercises of his wit, of his humour, of his depth, of his sagacity, he images forth all these innumerable and incessant creations, the very pulsation and throbbing of his intellect, he gives utterance to them all in a corresponding language, which is as multiform as this inward action itself, and analogous to it-the faithful expression of his own personality attending on his own inward world of thought, as its very shadow so that we might as well say that one man's shadow is another's, as that the style of a really gifted man can belong to any but himself. It follows him about as a shadow. His thought and feeling are personal, and so his language is personal." "Style," says the same writer, "is a thinking out into language." We can as soon separate light and illumination, life and motion, the convex from the concave, as separate language from thought.

This leads us to a most important definition. In false literature (by which I do not mean scientific works and such as are not literature, but writings which falsely pretend to be literature) the language is not the natural outcome of an idea. Either there

is no central idea at all, but it is all language,—and I think we have so-called poets nowadays who supply us with this, or else some poor feebly glimmering idea, instead of being revealed to us by the writer, is hidden and smothered by a tangled foreign overgrowth of language springing from chance-sown thoughts, with all its weedy luxuriance of ornament, variation, and melodious inanity.

From this evil weed we must distinguish the true growth, which may perhaps be even more luxuriant, but which springs from the one central idea. In what writer, for instance, do we find a richer luxuriance of thought and language than in Shakespeare? And yet, in the midst of all this exuberance, where thought is intertwined with thought, where fancy is ever, as it were, breaking forth into a profusion of unexpected blossoms, where the wealth of imagery seems almost endless, we feel that there is a living unity present, the whole thing is an entirety. The great stem is there, rooted fast in the ground, and well capable of sustaining its mass of foliage. Do we not feel the same to be true also in music? What more inane and hateful than the ordinary "firework" variations by which one is so often tortured? What more true,

more lovely, and yet more exuberant than Beethoven's or Schubert's variations ?

The power of elaboration is indeed by no means the least considerable power possessed by the artist. None but the true artist can accomplish it, for on his mind has been photographed, so to speak, the idea, and this can never be altered, although its latent details, its densities and transparencies, its half and full shades, may be developed. He, too, knows how to stay the development when there is a fear of clouding the picture.

All the greatest artists possess this power. divine poem made him "lean" for many years.

Dante's

The

"Mona Lisa" of Leonardo occupied him, if I remember right, some eight years. Goethe speaks of such elaboration, and sharply defines the false from the true: "The mode of altering and improving, where by continued invention the imperfect is developed into the perfect, is the right one; but the remaking and carrying further what is already complete, that I cannot commend." As in Michael Angelo's block of marble—the perfect statue lies imbedded there: all our work must be an attempt to unveil it from its formless matrix.

With two short remarks I shall leave this subject. First, if style be as the shadow of a man, we must not make it our aim to acquire a certain writer's style. The shadow must be ours; as Browning says (though in a different sense)—