MERE LITERATURE 189 



beautiful. Works are everywhere produced that 

 are artistically serious, but morally trifling and in- 

 sincere ; faultless in form, but tame and barren in 

 spirit. We could not say this of the works of 

 Troude or Euskin, Huxley or Tyndall ; we cannot 

 say it of the works of Matthew Arnold, because he 

 had a higher purpose than to produce mere literary 

 effects ; but we can say it of most of the produc- 

 tions of the younger British essayists and poets. In 

 some of them, there is a mere lust of verbal forms 

 and rhythmic lilt. In reading their poems, I soon 

 find myself fairly gasping for breath ; I seem to be 

 trying to breathe in a vacuum, — an effect which 

 one does not experience at all in reading Tenny- 

 son, or Browning, or Arnold. One is apt to have 

 serious qualms in reading the prose of Walter Pa- 

 ter, the lust of mere style so pervades his work. 

 Faultless workmanship, one says ; and yet the best 

 qualities of style — freshness, naturalness, simplicity 

 — are not here. What in Victor Hugo goes far 

 towards atoning for all his sins against art, against 

 sanity and proportion, are his terrible moral earnest- 

 ness and his psychic power. Whatever we may think 

 of his work, we are not likely to call it " mere liter- 

 ature." That masterly ubiquitous sporting and toy- 

 ing with the elements of life which we find in Shake- 

 speare we shall probably never again see in letters. 

 The stress and burden of later times do not favor 

 it. The great soul is now too earnest, too self-con- 

 scious; life is too serious. Only light men now 

 essay it. With so much criticism, so much know- 



