4 LITERARY VALUES 



This personal element, this flavor of character, is the 

 salt of literature. Without it, the page is savorless, 



II 



It is curious what an uncertain and seemingly 

 capricious thing literary value is. How often it re- 

 fuses to appear when diligently sought for, labored 

 for, prayed for ; and then comes without call to 

 some simple soul that never gave it a thought. 

 Learning cannot compass it, rhetoric cannot compass 

 it, study cannot compass it. Mere wealth of lan- 

 guage is entirely inadequate. It is like religion : 

 often those who have it most have it least, and those 

 who have it least have it most. In the works of 

 the great composers — Gibhon, De Quincey, Macau- 

 lay — it is a conscious, deliberate product. Then, 

 in other works, the very absence of the literary mo- 

 tive and interest gives an aesthetic pleasure. 



One is surprised to read the remark of the " Sat- 

 urday Review " on the published letters of Whit- 

 man, — letters that have no extrinsic literary value 

 whatever, not one word of style, — namely, that 

 few books are so well calculated to " purge the 

 soiil of nonsense ; " and the remark of the fastidious 

 Henry James on the same subject, that, with all 

 their enormities of the common, the letters are pos- 

 itively delightful. Here, again, the source of our 

 interest is undoubtedly in the personal revelation, — 

 the type of man we see through the letters, and not in 

 any wit or wisdom lodged in the letters themselves. 



One reader seeks religious or moral values alone 



