Had Poe been greater or broader he would have felt them, so would Longfellow. Neither went deep enough to touch the formative currents of our social or religious or national life. In the past the great artist has always been at ease in Zion; in our day only the lesser artists are at ease, unless we except Whitman, man of unshaken faith, who is absolutely optimistic, and whose joy and serenity come from the breadth of his vision and the depth and universality of his sympathies. XI “MERE LITERATURE” Is there any justification for the phrase “mere literature” which one often hears nowadays? There is no doubt a serious sneer in it, as Professor Woodrow Wilson, in a recent “Atlantic” essay, avers; but I think the sneer is not aimed so much at literature in itself as at certain phases of literature. Lowell has been quoted as saying that “mere scholarship is as useless as the collecting of old postage stamps;” yet at vital scholarship--scholarship that is wielded as a weapon, and that results in power--Lowell would be the last man to sneer. In all times of high literary culture and criticism, a great deal is produced that may well be called mere literature,--the result of assiduous training and stimulation of the literary faculties,--just as a great deal of art is produced that may be called mere art. Literature that is the result of the friction upon the mind of other literatures, might, with some justice, be called mere literature. That which is the result of the contact of the mind with reality is, or ought to be, of another order. Or we may say “mere literature” as we say “mere gentleman.” Now gentlemanly qualities--refinement, good breeding, etc.--are not to be sneered at, unless they stand alone, with no man behind them; and literary qualities--style, learning, fancy, etc.--are not to be sneered at unless _they_ stand alone, which is not infrequently the case. We should not apply the phrase “mere gentleman” to Washington, or Lincoln, or Wellington, though these men may have been the most thorough of gentlemen; neither should we apply the phrase “mere literature” to the works of Bacon, or Shakespeare, or Carlyle, or Dante, or Plato. The Bible is literature, but it is not mere literature. We apply the latter term to writings that have little to recommend them save their technical and artistic excellence, like the mass of current poetry and fiction. The men who have nothing to say and say it extremely well produce mere literature.