THE PRESENT PROBLEMS OF BELLES-LETTRES 



BY BRANDER MATTHEWS 



[Brander Matthews, Senior Professor Department of English, Columbia University, 

 since 1903. b. February 21, 1852, New Orleans, Louisiana. A.M. Columbia, 

 1874; D.C.L. University of the South, 1899; Litt.D. Yale, 1901; LL.D. Co- 

 lumbia, 1904. Lecturer in English, Columbia University, 1891-92; Professor 

 of Literature, ibid. 1892-1900; Professor of Dramatic Literature, ibid. 190CMD3. 

 One of the organizers of Authors Club, New York, The Kinsmen, American 

 Copyright League, The Players, Columbia University Press, National Institute 

 of Arts and Letters, and also member of the Century Association, New York; 

 Athenaeum and Savile Clubs of London. Author of various novels, volumes of 

 short stories, and critical studies.] 



IT is a characteristic of the arts that their vocabulary must needs 

 be less exact than the terminology of the sciences, because the mate- 

 rial of the artist is ever the varying emotion of his fellow man. In the 

 language of the library and of the studio there can be no words like 

 horse-power and foot-ton, the content of which is precise and rigid. 

 Wit and humor, for example, classic and romantic, the fancy and the 

 imagination, these are pairs of words that a writer may employ 

 almost as he pleases, but always at his peril, since there is no cer- 

 tainty of their conveying to his hearers the exact meaning with which 

 he himself has charged them. It is in vain that the dictionary-maker 

 seeks to differentiate accurately the one from the other, for he cannot 

 hope to control the personal equation of every user' of the language. 

 Indeed, the dictionary-maker is often ready enough to confess his 

 difficulty, and to admit, for instance, that belles-lettres has a somewhat 

 indefinite application, synonymous sometimes with the humanities 

 in general, and sometimes with works of the imagination in poetry 

 and the drama, in fiction and in the essay. He tells us also that the 

 term includes chiefly the study and criticism of literature; and that 

 it concerns itself mainly with literature regarded as a fine art. 



Here in this Congress of the Arts and Sciences, Sections have been 

 set apart for the discussion of the literatures of each of the leading 

 languages, ancient and modern: and to the Section of Belles-Lettres 

 has been confided the consideration of literature as a whole, of 

 literature as an art, of literature pure and simple, distinguished 

 not only from linguistics, but also from literary history and literary 

 biography. of literature as it transcends the boundaries of any 

 single tongue and as it appears in its comparative and more cosmo- 

 politan aspects. 



