A good novel is a self-contained, complete world with its own laws and inhabitants. The inhabitants and laws of different novels resemble each other in some degree or we should not be able to understand them. Great books, and great men, have common qualities, and yet it is true, in large measure, that they are memorable for their _difference_ from other books and men. This suggests why histories of literature and analytical studies of the forms of literature are so often artificial and lifeless. The critic is fond of grouping books and authors together, of finding points of resemblance, of marking genius with brands and labels. In some histories of Elizabethan drama, Shakespeare is neatly placed in the center of a rising and declining “school of playwrights.” He is laid out like the best specimen of a collection in a glass case. Shakespeare was a playwright; no doubt he was a “practical” one. But the important thing about him is that he was the greatest of poets, and he is not at ease in any school or class of literary workmen. He is inexplicably, gigantically different from all other Elizabethan dramatists, and if he is to be grouped at all, his fellows are the few greatest poets of the world, not his contemporaries in the art, or the business, of playmaking, the best of whom do not reach to his shoulder. All the supreme creative geniuses are difficult to classify. They work in conventional art forms, the drama, the epic, in which scores of lesser poets have worked; but the greatest art emerges above the form. When rules of art and sharp characterizations of schools of art fit snugly on the shoulders of a writer, that alone is sufficient to prove that he is not a writer of the highest power. [Illustration: SCOTT]