LITERATURE 



§ 

 It has been said that "Milton is the most literary 

 man in literature." I should say the greatest purely 

 literary man in English literature. Virgil matches 

 him in Latin literature. Who: matches him in 

 French? By a literary man, in the sense here re- 

 ferred to, I suppose we mean one whose primary 

 interests are in literature rather than in men and 

 things — the product of books, of the schools. 

 Shakespeare was not literary, nor Scott, nor 

 Wordsworth, nor Carlyle, nor Burns, nor Emerson. 

 Emerson's interest in poetry was great, was almost 

 supreme, and yet he was not literary in the sense 

 that Arnold was or that Lowell was. He again was 

 a poet and prophet combined, or a critic and a seer 

 combined; a preacher who hated preaching and the 

 church, a poet thrilled by the grandeur of the moral 

 law, an essayist whose central theme was God and 

 Nature, a critic who saw literary values through his 

 religious sense, a philosopher who thought in tropes 

 and symbols, a naturalist who translated his natural 

 history into the language of the spirit. 



§ 

 How prone we are to speak of style as something 

 apart from the man, and to compare it to a garment 

 that can be put off and on! whereas style is a quality 

 of mind, and either a man has it or he has it not. 

 It is as inseparable from the man himself as his 

 temperament or complexion. A writer has style if 

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