174 president's address — section I. 



by comparatively few. Imagine a literary article and a 

 scientific article of the same standard of excellence and 

 consequent importance to the community ; the former has a 

 market value, the latter has not. Societies are needed to 

 foster papers of the latter type, and such societies do yeoman 

 service when they receive and print scientific papers, which 

 " caviare to the general " are of the utmost importance to the 

 specialist. Men of science will not, I am sure, feel hurt if I 

 say that science cannot take care of itself. It needs labora- 

 tories, apparatus, academies, societies, endowments. But 

 literature can take care of itself ; and if the fiat be about to 

 issue that Section I. must die, its President can but utter the 

 title of one of Longfellow's most beautiful poems — the poem 

 that the old poet read before his surviving class-mates on the 

 50th anniversary of their graduation, the title itself, as an 

 American critic remarks, a stroke of genius — " Morituri 

 salutamus." Nor do I say this beseechingly to you, as one 

 might ask that the axe should not descend, but rather, may 

 I be forgiven if I say it jauntily, airily, after the manner of 

 the gentleman mentioned by Herodotus, who danced away 

 his marriage, and to all expostulation made reply, " Hippo- 

 kleides don't care." For the very truth is that literature is 

 able to make its proud boast that it can and will take care 

 of itself. 



Did you ever ask yourself the question — What is 

 literature ? Sometimes people talk as if all books were 

 literature, which would then indeed be a most incongruous, 

 agglomerate mass. Many books and much writing have no 

 more right to be called by the attractive, the almost sacred, 

 name of literature than an advertisement, a catalogue, or a 

 directory. Dictionaries may be helps to the literary; they 

 are not literature. Of handbooks and grammars the same 

 may be said. I have essayed gently to explain that many, 

 even most, scientific treatises are not entitled to be included. 

 Many histories and biographies must be ruled outside. We 

 seem to be excluding many books and classes of books of 

 which it may be said that they are books and not books, but 

 the residuum is large. Literature is that class of books in 

 the writing of which attention has been paid to the form 

 and shape — books that have the charm and ornament of 

 style. Such books are poetry, essays, works of fiction, and 

 those books of instruction, history, science, or travels in the 

 production of which the pleasure of the reader, as well as his 

 edification, has been considered. In Darhest Africa is not a 



