We may call this the Literature of Information as distinguished from the Literature of Imagination. The distinction is not sharp; a book leans to one side or the other of the line, but it does not fall clear of the line. A work of imagination, a poem, a novel, or an essay, may contain abundant information, may be loaded with facts; on the other hand, the greatest of those who have discovered and expounded facts, Darwin, Gibbon, Huxley, have had literary power and imagination. But most great works of imagination deal with universal experiences, they treat human nature and common humanity’s thought and feelings about the world. As Hazlitt says, nature and feeling are the same in all periods. So the common man understands the “Iliad,” and the story of Joseph and his brothers, and “The Scarlet Letter” and “Silas Marner.” In Macaulay’s “Essay on Milton” is a very misleading piece of philosophizing on the “progress of poesy.” It is a pity, when there are so many better essays--Macaulay wrote twenty better ones--that this should be selected for reading in the schools as part of the requirements for college entrance. Macaulay sees that the “Iliad” is as great a poem as the world has known. He also sees that science in his own time is progressing by leaps and bounds, that, in his own vigorous words, “any intelligent man may now, by resolutely applying himself for a few years to mathematics, learn more than the great Newton knew after half a century of study and meditation.” He accordingly reasons, or rather makes the long jump, that whereas science progresses, poetry declines with the advance of civilization, and the wonder is that Milton should have written so great a poem in a “civilized” age. Macaulay was young when he wrote the essay; he seldom muddled ideas as badly as that. Poetry, if we view the history of the world in five-century periods, neither advances nor declines. It fluctuates from century to century, but it keeps a general permanent level. Now and again appears a new poet to add to the number of poems, but poetry does _not_ change. Neither does the individual poem. The “Iliad” is precisely what it was two thousand years ago, and two thousand years from now it will be neither diminished nor augmented. Creative art, dealing with universal ideas and feelings and needing only a well-developed language to work in, can produce a masterpiece in any one of forty countries any time the genius is born capable of doing the work. This statement is too simple to exhaust a large subject. The point is that once man has reached a certain point of culture, has come to have a language and a religion and a national tradition, more civilization or less, more science or less, neither helps nor hinders his art. The arrival of a great poet can be counted on every two or three centuries. It is because poetry and other forms of imaginative literature are independent of time and progress that the reader’s