24 LITERARY VALUES 



" The last to parley with the setting sun," 

 in Whitman's sentence, 



" Oh, waves, I have fingered every shore with you," 

 in Emerson's description of an Indian-summer day, 

 " the day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad 

 hills and warm, wide fields " — in these and such 

 as these we see the imaginative use of words. 



Most of the Dantean and Homeric and Shake- 

 spearean scholarship is the mere dust of time that 

 has accumulated upon these names. In the course 

 of years it will accumulate upon Tennyson, and 

 then we shall have Tennysonian scholars and learned 

 dissertations upon some insignificant detail of his 

 work. Think of the Shakespeareana with which liter- 

 ature is burdened ! It is mostly mere shop litter 

 and dust. In certain moods I think one may be 

 pardoned for feeling that Shakespeare is fast becom- 

 ing a curse to the human race. Of mere talk about 

 him, it seems, there is to be no end. He has been 

 the host of more literary parasites probably than 

 any other name in history. He is edited and re- 

 edited as if a cubit could be added to his stature by 

 marginal notes and comments. On the contrary, 

 the result is, for the most part, like a mere growth 

 of underbrush that obscures the forest trees. The 

 reader's attention is being constantly diverted from 

 the main matter — he is being whipped in the face 

 by insignificant twigs. Criticism may prune away 

 what obscures a great author, but what shall we 

 say when it obstructs the view of him by a multi- 

 tude of unimportant questions ? 



