140 IITEEAEY VALUES 



real to himself and to his reader. He can depict 

 the passion of love, of anger, of remorse, though he 

 may never have felt them. Many persons have 

 written one good novel, hut not a second, hecause 

 in the first they exhausted their experience ; to 

 transcend that is denied them. True art will have 

 many messages and many morals, as life and nature 

 have, but we must draw them out for ourselves. 

 They do not lead, they follow ; they do not make 

 the argument, they are made by it. Let us repeat 

 and re-repeat. Art makes us free of the whole, — 

 not art for craft's sake, but art as implying the en- 

 tire sphere of man's spontaneous aesthetic activity. 

 Beauty is indeed its own excuse for being. Litera- 

 ture is an end in and of itself, as much as music 

 is or religion is. Or are we religious only upon 

 pay ? What message has a bird, a flower, a summer 

 day, frost, rain, wind, snow ? There are sermons in 

 stones — when we put them there. What message 

 has Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Virgil, or any true 

 poet ? The message we have the power to draw 

 from him, and no two of us will draw the same. 

 Art is a circle ; it is complete within itself ; it re- 

 turns forever upon itself. There is no great poetry 

 without great ideas, and yet the ideas must exist as 

 impulse, will, emotion, and not lie upon the surface 

 as formulas. The enemies of art are reflection, 

 special ideas, conscious intellectual processes, be- 

 cause these things isolate us and shut us off from 

 the life of the whole, — from that which we reach 

 through our sentiments and emotions. The aesthetic 



