20 LITEEAET VALUES 



literary and inventive powers, and in no way in- 

 volve his character, temperament, or personality. 

 The more it was written, the more it savored of de- 

 liberate plan and purpose, — in other words, the less 

 it was the product of fate, race, or of anything local, 

 individual, inevitable, — the more it pleased him. 

 Art, and not nature, was his aspiration. And this 

 view has more currency in Europe than in this 

 country. In some extreme cases it becomes what 

 one may fairly call the art disease. Baudelaire, for 

 instance, as quoted by Tolstoi, expressed a prefer- 

 ence for a painted woman's face over one showing 

 its natural color, " and for metal trees and a theatri- 

 cal imitation of water, rather than real trees and 

 real water." Thus does an overweening passion for 

 art degenerate into a love for the artificial for its 

 own sake. In the cultivation of letters there seems 

 always to be a danger that we shall come to value 

 things, not for their own sake, but for the literary 

 effects that may be wrought out of them. The 

 great artist, I take it, is primarily in love with life 

 and things, and not with art. On these terms alone 

 is his work fresh and stimulating and filled with 

 good arterial blood. 



VI 



Teaching literature is like teaching religion. 

 You can give only the dry bones of the matter in 

 either case. But the dry bones of theology are not 

 religion, and the dry bones of rhetoric are not liter- 

 ature. The flesh-and-blood reality is alone of value, 



