6 LITEEAET VALUES 



eral in our Civil War, mainly because of the greater 

 simplicity, seriousness, and directness of the person- 

 ality they reveal. There is no more vanity and 

 make-believe in the book than there was in the man. 

 Any touch of the elemental, of the veracity and sin- 

 gleness of the natural forces, gives value to a man's 

 utterances, and Lincoln and Grant were undoubtedly 

 the two most elemental men brought out by the 

 war. The literary value of the Bible, doubtless, 

 arises largely from its elemental character. The 

 utterances of simple, unlettered men — farmers, sail- 

 ors, soldiers — often have great force and impres- 

 siveness from the same cause ; there are in them 

 the virtue and seriousness of real things. One great 

 danger of schools, colleges, libraries, is that they 

 tend to kill or to overlay this elemental quality in 

 a man — to make the poet speak from his culture 

 instead of from his heart. " To speak in literature 

 with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the 

 movement of animals and the unimpeachableness 

 of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by 

 the roadside, is the flawless triumph of art ; " and 

 who so likely to do this as the simple, unbookish 

 man ? Hence Sainte-Beuve says the peasant always 

 has style. 



In fiction the literary value resides in several dif- 

 ferent things, as the characterization, the action, the 

 plot, and the style ; sometimes more in one, some- 

 times more in another. In Scott, for instance, it is 

 found in the characters and the action ; the style is 

 commonplace. In George Eliot, the action, the dra- 



