536 BELLES-LETTRES 



at the bare sight of a specialist near their Chaunticleer's yard; it leads 

 them to be vainglorious in ignorant disdain. Such critics forget 

 that to be merely entertaining is to be hastily dismissed; they for- 

 get that, while a superficial knowledge of many things is a strong 

 armor to a man with a profound knowledge of some one of them, 

 he who wears it without individual power may soon be as ridiculously 

 overthrown as the threatening clay-giant Mokkurkalfi whom Thor 

 befooled and, at a single blow of his mighty hammer, tumbled down 

 on the dismal plain. Again, some young poets are persuaded by the 

 phrase to write only to please a select company of congenial spirits, 

 particularly to win applause by the display of cleverness which only 

 the initiated can enjoy, and thus are deluded to their own harm. 



"Art for art's sake,'' otherwise considered, advises the critic 

 to regard the works of which he treats no more as a show-case of 

 rhetorical devices, or as a specimen of metrical structure, than as 

 a corpus vile for linguistic dissection, or as an illustrative manual of 

 historical and social conditions. He is admonished by it that a great 

 poem is more than words and phrases and facts and examples, 

 curiously conjoined to test his sensitiveness or erudition; that on 

 the contrary it is a living thing in whose creation was motive, in whose 

 soul is aspiration, in whose heart is feeling, in whose mind is under- 

 standing. a living being with a peculiar character which is its 

 force. 



"Art for art's sake" advises the poet to write with purely ideal 

 aim, with eye single to untarnished truth, intent on showing forth 

 the faith that is in him without fawning or fear. By it he is admon- 

 ished to exalt in his composition whatsoever things are honest, just. 

 pure, lovely, and of good report, and to scorn any compromise with 

 imperfection. It keeps before him the highest standard of a book, 

 that it shall be a thing of beauty and a joy forever. 



We are agreed that our present concern is only with imaginative 

 literature. This, you remember. L)e Quincey distinguishes from 

 unimaginative literature, as the "literature of power" opposed 

 to that of knowledge; and Pater makes clearer the contrast by this 

 addition: "In the former of which the composer gives us not fact, 

 but his peculiar sense of fact, whether past or present, or prospective, 

 it may be. as often in oratory." Accepting Do Quincey's definition, 

 lot u= proceed to examine certain of the relations in which literature 

 may exert power. 



Had I time I mi.trht dwell on the intimate relation? of "belles- 

 lettres" with the "beaux-arts." and po ; nt out superficially how many 

 beautiful paintings, sculptures, and embroideries, how many monu- 

 ments of architecture, were inspired by literary conceptions; or. 

 rice rervn. how often various products of fine art suggested genuine 

 works of literature. More profoundly. I mijrht endeavor to formulate 



